Poems for…the wall

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.

You will find thirty different languages represented in the collection. These include : Mandarin, Japanese, Tamil, French, German, Italian, Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Estonian, Ewe, Igbo, Tigrinya, Somali, Afrikaans and /Xam.

The last six named are languages spoken in Africa south of the Sahara, either presently or in the past.

But this time there is also some variation on the collection’s main theme of creating free and open speech between language and language.

For instance, the new collection includes a poem called “These are the Hands” by Michael Rosen, the UK Children’s Poet Laureate between 2007 and 2009. He was commissioned to write the poem in celebration of the recent 60th birthday of the UK National Health Service.

Michael agreed that we could add the poem to our collection and offer it to everyone visiting our site.  And then he agreed that I could get it translated into various languages as well.  The point is obvious. People sit quietly together in NHS waiting rooms, sharing their common human precariousness and mortality, who back in their own places of origin might be trying to kill each other.

So in the new collection there are four versions of the poem, besides Michael’s English original – in Punjabi, Turkish, Greek and Somali. And soon I hope to add other languages too – such as Arabic and Hebrew.

A few days ago Michael saw the poems for the first time. Here is his response : “This is amazing and wonderful. Many, many thanks. All power to your elbow … 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.”

But there are other variations, hinging on the meaning of the word “frontier.” Frontiers are not just geographical, lingual, cultural. There are other bars besides those of language.

There is a frontier in me between life and death. I am afraid to cross that frontier.

There is a frontier in all of us – I suggest – between mental well-being and mental ill-being. We are almost as afraid to cross that frontier as the one that divides life and death, and our fear affects our behaviour, the closer to the frontier we find ourselves.

So in this new collection there are pairs of poems in English which seek to speak clearly across this other kind of frontier, in the cause of better human connection. 

– A pair of poems by someone who was dying of an aggressive terminal cancer, and kept recording it all in verse, almost to the last minute, and humorous to the last. 

– A pair of poems by someone also recently dead, who was seriously physically disabled himself and was campaigning to the last and with high effectiveness for disability rights. 

– A pair of poems about someone with Downs Syndrome (my sister). 

– A pair of poems by children. 

– And a pair of poems by people familiar with in-patient psychiatric units, having often been patients themselves.

Each one of these pairs could become a whole collection in its own right, if we can get the funding …

For poetry can be both powerful and intimate and therefore can play a part in strengthening community, binding people in. It can speak to people beneath the skin, it can penetrate armour, it can speak straight to you, where your average advertising copy or political speech merely works on or round you, diminishing you. 

In three months time, we shall combine the sixty new “One-World” poems with the earlier forty-five, making a total of one hundred and five (or thereabouts) poems for one world.

Thank you again, Stephen Watts, for the guidance, counsel and friendship you give, without which this collection could not have happened, just as the previous collection of forty five could not have happened.  Access to your dragon’s hoard of poetry books from all over the world is like entering an unutterably powerful electric field. I come out of there with all my hair on end.