Posted by Jude on 5 September, 2011 under work in progress | 
I haven’t blogged before and I’m not sure I’m going to like it. The whole point of poetry is that you craft the words, revisiting again and again, until they seem near perfect. Only then do you introduce them to other people…
Blogging is the opposite. It’s supposed to be like letting people into your mind. I’m not sure I want to do that???
The creative process is often as interesting as what has been created. So this is a documentation – to a degree – of the process. It is also the process itself. Creating and changing. It’s what happens to the work and what happens to the writer, all at once.
Posted by Jude on under emerging ideas |
I live near a large cemetery in the centre of my city. My toddler son loves running round in this urban patch of wild countryside. The tombstones are perfect for scrambling and hide-and-seek. I sometiems wonder whether it’s acceptable to let him play like this. He is too young at the moment for me to explain the need to respect the graves, though I will certainly do this when he’s older. But how do you respect them? By keeping to the path? Or is it actually more respectful to play on and around them?
If I had died and were remembered by a piece of stone, I think I’d want children to come and play on and around it. I would want them to enjoy themselves at the site of my life-memory and to learn later of the gravity of death, and how the best way to honour it is to live well. I would want them, when old enough to begin understanding, to keep the stone tended. Remove dead flowers, pull up weeks, pick up litter. Make anagrams of my name, perhaps choose it for their own children.
Posted by Jude on under emerging ideas |
Our relationship with Grandparents is in itself intriguing. Grandparents are a major part of our identity and history, yet by definition we only ever know them in the later stages of their lives, and as we emerge from our own earliest, memorable but un-memoried years.
What are your memories of your Grandparents? Were they the same person when you knew them as when they were young? How can we tell? What is the difference between your perception of your Grandparents and your parents’ perceptions of them?
Posted by Jude on under emerging ideas |
“You travel the world but you don’t know your own country”. This is one of the things I remember my Granny saying on more than one occasion to me and her other globe-trotting Grandchildren. It has always stayed with me. How well do I know my own country? And id I don’t know my own country, can I really know myself?
Discovering that my maternal Grandparents had left behind letters and diaries from the 30s and 40s (and that my Aunt had transcribed them all) made me want to discover more about them when they were closer to my age and stage in life. Then my Mum passed me an enormous polished walnut box of cine films my Grandfather had taken. Waht a treasure trove! I decided to go on a journy – both physical and metaphorical. I would explore the places in the British Isles which my Grandparents had explored seventy years before. I hoped to discover more about the country I belong to, and in the process, discober more about my Granmdparents, especially my Grandmother, and how her experience of life was similar or different to mine.
Ultimately this project will become my next show. It will inspire poems, songs, stories and other creeaytions I can’t yet predict.
I would love to get your input as I go on this journey. Please feel free to comment here, or to email me directly with your thoughts and memories.
