Catching my breath, part 1

So Term 2 is over.

You'll note that I didn't complain once in the past two months about landing on my neck. I confess that I had resolved not to speak of it anyway, but it's also the case that I paced myself in Acrobatics this term and came through in better shape. (Now if I could just stop wrenching my neck in Improv classes where the motions are more spontaneous and less controlled! I did that repeatedly in the past eight weeks but less and less so as the term came to a close.)

I'll be working a lot during the next 10 days--a student visa allows 20 hours of employment per week during terms, 40 hours between terms. As of about a week-and-a-half ago, I'm fortunate enough in the midst of this awful economy to have two part-time jobs, one of which pays twice what the other does. I know things are hard in the US right now, but Britain is really tanking, and the government is expecting violence this summer because of rising unemployment. Layoffs and lost jobs are combining with pockets of xenophobic and sometimes racist British-jobs-for-British-workers protests in industrial areas, especially in the north. Meaning: lay off the immigrant workers first. Or don't hire them in the first place.

I plan to get out of town at the end of next week for a few days into what I keep hearing is such a green and beautiful country. I can't wait to be a few hours away from London. I may head west to Devon--Exeter and Dartmoor National Park. In the meantime I hope to blog shorter and more frequently since I'll have my mornings free.

This blogging thing is still a bit odd for me. First of all, I never know who I'm writing for. For me, yes of course, but since anybody can wander in and hear my soliloquy, I don't put every thought and feeling in here. Still, it's a bit odd not knowing who, when, and even if anyone is passing through the room. Whatever. Now I really feel like I'm talking to myself!

As you (whoever you are) may recall, we dealt some with poetry during part of this term. One of the richnesses of a program like this is that it includes people from such a variety of countries. Each of us is encouraged to work in our mother tongue. And so when we were asked to bring in a poem from our home country, we had poems in English (of three types--English, American, and Australian), poems in Norwegian and Swedish, poems in Spanish and Portuguese and Euskara (from Basque country), in French and Italian, in German and Swiss German, in Croatian and Hebrew and Bembe. And I'm not sure I've even remembered them all.

So how do you appreciate a poem in a language you don't understand? The answer here is that you actually do have some understanding of it, through the sounds of the words. Because it's a poem, not a scientific treatise. And so, one morning found four or five of us huddled with a Croatian woman, hearing her read her poem once, twice, three times, and then moving to the sounds of it--first individually, then as a group. She wasn't to tell us what the poem was about, but we talked about what we heard and what images came to our minds from the rhythms of the lines and the sounds of the words. And of course from the way she read it, which clearly had some influence, though there was little or no acknowledgment of that, obvious though it may be. The poem's rhythm advanced and circled back, it pulsed, the sounds were often rounded. We ended up creating a narrative of a young woman in the circle of her family, breaking out of it and getting pulled back, the tension of youth and age, innovation and tradition, individuality and family. After we were finished, Sonja, the Croatian woman, said we were very close to the sense of the poem, which was written by a man who lived near the sea but who had never seen it because of the mountain range that separates his home from the coast. The Israeli woman in our class who worked with a group who knew no Hebrew said she saw things afterward in her poem (a poem written by her father) that she had never seen before. People are very generous here, but I do take their comments on this matter as genuine. I've been playing with writing poetry for a while now, and this experience makes it all the more fascinating. And daunting. If I needed an experience to make me even more appreciative of actors and poets (and painters and architects), my time here is reinforcing that.

This weekend I also returned to Kew Gardens. Twice. The purple and white crocuses (and some other small lavender-colored flower) are up by the thousands beneath the bare-limbed trees. It's a tonic for my soul to visit there.