2001

Mimi Khalvati (b. 1944) was born in Tehran and has lived most of her life in London. She has worked as an actor and director in both the UK and Iran, and is the founder of The Poetry School, which provides poetry tuition by established poets. Her first collection with Carcanet, In White Ink, came out in 1991; Child: new and selected poems was published in 2011; Afterwardness appeared in 2019. ‘[T]he lyric “I” is my front door – the place I go out from to meet the world. When I write in the first person I don’t feel as though I’m going to write about myself, I feel that’s the way language comes initially into my mouth,’ Khalvati explained in an interview with Maitreyabandhu; ‘if my work is “at home” anywhere, it would be within the English lyric tradition, starting with my first love of Wordsworth. But, like many writers living away from their home country, I am constantly remaking my home in the language.’¹

FROM MIMI KHALVATI

London

24 March 2001

Dear Michael,

I send you the typescript of The Chine. I do hope it’s OK because I’ve had to put it together under the most peculiar circumstances.

      I find it impossible to write something formal about it for the author questionnaire form, so please forgive me if I just note here my thinking about it.

      It falls into three sections: roughly, my childhood, my children, and love stuff. I had a quintessentially English childhood in Shanklin on the Isle of Wight. Shanklin is famous for its chine and Shanklin Chine ran through the school grounds.² My early years in Iran are a total blank, and people have often misread poems as being based on Persian childhood memories. I have none. Losing my first language meant losing memories encoded in that language I believe, and living thereafter with an appalling memory for facts, histories, narratives, including my own. I have been trying to reclaim some of this lost territory.

      This is my most autobiographical book, I think. Much of it written while my family fell apart – divorce, my daughter diagnosed with a congenital disease […], my son, as you know, still ill. I don’t know if and how this information should be conveyed or if it’s necessary to the reading of some of the poems.

      The book is also very formal. Everything with either rhyme, or metre, or both. Lots of blank verse, fixed forms – and some longer poems: the corona, one in ottava rima (with two rhymes) and the elephant sequence. There’s also quite a lot of dream material.

      Michael, I hope some of this is helpful. I really am sorry to be so tacky in presenting things like this – but I must get this off to you before the week starts and March ends. Please do let me know, as of course you will, of any changes you’d like, poems to omit (I have omitted several I had doubts about) and anything else.

      I have still not cleaned up odd lines here and there, particularly in the sonnet sequence, so please don’t consider this the final manuscript. I hope to incorporate your suggestions and give you the final thing as soon as I can after hearing from you.

      Thank you so much, Michael, I hope you think the book will do.

Much love,
Mimi

*

Much as I dislike poetry competitions, they can have two positive effects. They pay the judges quite generously, and just occasionally one turns up an outstanding poet either in posse or in esse. Mimi Khalvati was a relatively late starter and she broke rules. ‘For me, there is a surfeit of [...] particularity, too much concrete detail in poetry: a huge emphasis on the concrete and the particular that I wanted to redress. I have taken the risk of using abstracts and generalities and more conceptual things: calling a tree a tree, rather than an ash or an oak. It doesn’t go down well here,’ she declared in an interview with Vicki Bertram. This is an aspect of her poetic openness to the reader. She does not pursue ‘voice’ in the current sense but deliberately rejects eccentric speech. The poems, whether they are in conventional formal shapes or in free verse, with a wonderful unfolding syntax, are mimetic, spoken and eminently speakable, but they are written towards us, as it were, rather than towards herself. Any reader’s voice can, without distortion, without impersonation, ride on her cadences.

      English is her second or ‘foster’ language. She has lost the first almost entirely, it is an empty space in memory. ‘In losing your first language [...] you retain the memories that are body memories, sensations, like smell and taste. You can’t remember what town it was, how old you were, who was with you, where you lived: any of that stuff, but you can remember a sensation of a battle in your mind between bewilderment and trust.’

NOTES

1. Maitreyabandhu, ‘In Conversation with Mimi Khalvati’, PN Review 221 (January–February 2015).
2. The Chine was published in 2002. ‘Chine’ is a word used on the Isle of Wight and in Dorset to refer to deep, narrow ravines in which water flows down to the sea. In a letter to Fanny Brawne, Keats wrote: ‘The wondrous Chine here is a very great Lion: I wish I had as many guineas as there have been spyglasses in it’ (July 1819).

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      Homero Aridjis, Eyes to See Otherwise: selected poems 1960–2000, edited by Betty Ferber and George McWhirter

      Thomas Blackburn, Selected Poems, edited by Julia Blackburn

      Eavan Boland, Code

      Joseph Brodsky, Collected Poems in English, edited by Ann Kjellberg, translated by various hands

      Paul Celan, Fathomsuns & Benighted, translated by Ian Fairley

      Linda Chase, The Wedding Spy

      David Constantine, Hermione Lee and Bernard O’Donoghue

      (eds), Oxford Poets 2001: an anthology

      Brian Cox, Emeritus

      Allen Curnow, The Bells of St Babel’s: poems 1997–2001

      Greg Delanty, The Blind Stitch

      Rebecca Elson, A Responsibility to Awe, edited by Anne Berkeley, Angelo Di Cintio and Bernard O’Donoghue

      Louise Glück, The Seven Ages

      James Grant, Selected Poems

      Robert Gray, Grass Script: selected earlier poems

      Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, edited by Michel W. Pharand

      Robert Graves, Homer’s Daughter & the Anger of Achilles, edited by Neil Powell

      Victor Hugo, Selected Poetry, translated by Stephen Monte

      Elizabeth Jennings, Timely Issues

      David Kinloch, Un Tour d’Ecosse

      Thomas Kinsella, Collected Poems

      Hugh MacDiarmid, New Selected Letters, edited by Dorian Grieve,

      O.D. Edwards and Alan Riach

      Bill Manhire, Collected Poems

      Patrick Mackie, Excerpts from the Memoirs of a Fool

      Christopher Middleton, The Word Pavilion: new and selected poems

      Dom Moraes, In Cinnamon Shade

      Les Murray, Learning Human: New Selected Poems

      Jeremy Over, A Little Bit of Bread and No Cheese

      Frederic Raphael, Personal Terms: notebooks 1951–1969

      John Redmond, Thumb’s Width

      Laura Riding and Robert Graves, Essays From Epilogue 1935–1937, edited by Mark Jacobs

      Peter Robinson, About Time Too

      Burns Singer, Collected Poems, edited by James Keery

      Pedro Tamen, Honey and Poison: selected poems, translated by Richard Zimler

      Charles Tomlinson, American Essays