Poems for…the wall

A busy gathering place for students, staff and visitors from all over the world is not where you’d normally expect to find an exhibition of poster-poems.

But if all those poems were bilingual, with many different languages represented, written originally by poets often famous in their own countries ? That might be quite an eloquent statement, quite apart from what the words themselves were saying.

The collage of photographs here records a small exhibition of bilingual poem-posters that has recently been showing in a public setting managed by Bristol University. The exhibition went up under the stewardship of the university’s Bristol Poetry Institute.

Half way up the collage, towards the left, you can see a background photograph of all the poems together displayed on the wall. Four of them are printed on paperboard at A3 size, the rest on card at A4 size.

Although they are too small to be read here, it may be of interest to note that there are ten different languages represented in the group picture : Arabic, Dutch, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Punjabi, Tigrinyi.

I have slightly enlarged five of the languages for this collage : Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and two ages of Mandarin. One of the Mandarin pair  – by Gu Cheng  – was written approximately a thousand years after the other – by Li Bai. And the poem by Li Bai was almost certainly painted, not written.

And when Li Bai positioned his letters, he started at the top and from the right and his eye ran downwards and leftwards. By the time Gu Cheng was writing, a thousand years later, he saw his writing in the same way as the westerner does – horizontally and rightwards from a margin on the left.

And for those Westerners who don’t know, please note that the Arabic and the Hebrew you can see in the picture above here are both written and read from the right.

The poet David Hart once said of the “Poems for the wall” project : “we have the chance here to open people’s lives to each other.”

CNWL NHS Foundation Trust is one of the largest NHS Trusts in the UK. It provides healthcare services across a wide swathe of north west London and various areas beyond.

The Trust has just announced its adoption and funding of a pamphlet of poems and photographs now available free of charge across all its waiting rooms, for people to take away with them if they want.

Two thousand copies of the pamphlet have just come back from the printers, and have begun to be distributed.

The photographs it contains are striking – both poignant and strong.

The poems have been selected from the various collections put together for the “Poems for…the wall” project over the years, described and available on this web-site. They include a significant number of bilingual poems, written originally in a non-English mother-tongue. The pamphlet will thus acknowledge and bid welcome to the multi-ethnic nature of our society and of its healthcare waiting rooms. Individuals planning to vote UKIP next year will also presumablly continue to require CNWL services and will therefore have the chance to enjoy this booklet too.

In these times of crisis for the NHS, amid so many other crises, here is a development that seems to run counter to the prevailing tide and speaks for the fullness of what the NHS is about. It reminds us that the NHS is for everyone and is as much concerned with heart and soul as with body.

The pamphlet’s production represents, and is the culmination of, years of co-operation between the Trust and the “Poems for…the wall” project. A small mental health service called Portugal Prints should also be thanked for their good and careful design work..

The six poems being published here are all contemporary and have been carefully selected. Several of them have been published already. Two have not. The UK Foreign Office have played an important part in the whole process, though not in the selection.

How to view and download the poems

For the full collection of six poems, click here. Then scroll down through the six.

The poems are also available for individual downloading. Log in on the Home Page (registering first if you haven’t already done so) and then go to “Downloading the Poems” in the left hand margin.  Once there, open up the “Poems for… one world “ collection and you’ll find each of the Burmese poems near the top of the list of contents, under B for Burmese. Click on the pdf signs in order to open and download.

How the collection came about

The idea for including Burmese poems in the “One World” collection occurred in 2007. The length of time it has taken to reach fruition is due to several factors.

Personnel at all levels of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office have helped in this long process. In fact it could not have happened without them.

The relationship began in 2003, when I sent a letter to Denis MacShane, then Minister for Europe. I proposed to him that the “Poems for…” project, with its bilingual poems for display in public space such as class rooms and waiting rooms, could have an international application. Not just poems in English, or translations into English. The poems could be in all languages, talking to one another. Centred in Europe, this project could thus help to draw a continent together.

Not everyone responds to letters of this kind. But here was an exception and, soon afterwards, the Foreign Office supplied me with some funding to make a collection of ten bilingual poems, one for each of the 2004 EU Enlargement countries, for distribution round all those public walls, all those places where people gather. The poet Fiona Sampson helped me select the poems.

And soon after that, I was given permission to promote the project on the regular FCO staff bulletin. In response, various embassies expressed interest in receiving poem collections and one was the embassy in Rangoon. It was at this point that the idea of adding Burmese poems to the collection occurred.

But then repression in Burma escalated and poets who might have contributed were imprisoned or went to ground. There was pain and pause before some liberalisation began. Aung San Suu Kyi was released from her house arrest. Hillary Clinton dropped by. More recently, Barack Obama.

The Rangoon embassy put me in touch with a previous ambassador there, Vicky Bowman, now married to the Burmese artist Htein Lin and living in the UK. She in turn directed me to a book of Burmese poems now available.  Produced by Arc Publications and called “Bones will Crow,” the book was edited by the poets James Byrne and ko ko thett. It was launched in the UK in the Summer of 2012.

Most of the poems in our small collection have been selected from “Bones will Crow”, with thanks and deep respect.

But Vicky Bowman also suggested a short poem which she herself has translated. It is by a prominent politician in Burma, called Zargana, and was written in a Burmese prison.

I am excited by this collection, and by what it means, and deeply grateful for all the help I have received in putting it together, so that now it can be published free around the world.

Based in London, the Royal College of Nursing sends its monthly newsletter by surface mail to each of its 400,000 members. This month’s issue will be recommending the “Poems for… project.  So a large community of people will be put in touch with us.

The newsletter refers to a longer piece on the project that will go up on the Royal College’s website simultaneously. The piece is headed “The Art of Nursing.”

It links to a poem called “These are the Hands” by Michael Rosen. In 2008, while he was the UK’s Children’s Poet Laureate, Rosen was commissioned to write the poem in celebration of the NHS’s 60th birthday of that year. Soon afterwards, Michael Rosen gave his permission for us to publish it. And soon after that, we had it translated into four other languages and added all the different versions to the “Poems for…one World” collection, positioned in alphabetical order according to language. One of those languages is Punjabi, which can be written in Hindi (Ghurmukhi) script as well as Urdu (Perso-Arabic) script. I am grateful to Amarjit Chandan for helping us demonstrate both possibilities.

But here in pdf we have brought together all six of the poems that now share the same title as Rosen’s original – in 4 different scripts and 5 different languages. Beneath each one is a common title “Poems for…the art of nursing.” And here is what Michael Rosen had to say about it all : “This is amazing and wonderful. Many, many thanks. All power to your elbow…I think that this is a stimulating, exciting and important project. We all need to be able to talk to each other and we need to be able to talk to each other about things that matter. I wrote the NHS poem firstly because I was asked to but more importantly because I care deeply about the NHS. My parents fought for it, it brought my children into the world, it saw my mother and father out of it with care and dignity – and much more besides. The people who work for the NHS come from all over the world and the NHS cares for people whose origins are all over the world. It is a truly international, inter-communal, inter-cultural institution. How right then that what we say within the NHS can, when appropriate, talk multi-lingually. I am excited and delighted that my poem might appear in several languages. It shows that we can talk to each other just as we try to care for each other. I think the project needs all the help it can find.”

The conference brought together academics, medical professionals and poets and others working at the arts/health interface. Guest poet was Marilyn Hacker.

Here is the power-point presentation that I presented there.

And here is the paper which I read.