© Massimo Berruti

Back in September 08 English PEN organised a residential week  in deep Devon at the Arvon Foundation's historic thatched cottage  at Totleigh Barton , stuck away in the rolling hills of Devon, over a  mile or two from the village of Sheepwash . Two Iranian poets, Ali Abdolrezaei and I were invited to this programme where 14  international poets gathered together from all over the world  e.g. Stacey Anderson from the US, Shireen Pandit from South  Africa, Aidyn Mehmet Ali from Cyprus,Paulina Egle Pukyte from  Lithuanian, Fatheih Saudi (Jodan), Sevim Gorgu (Turkey) hosted by  English Novelist Rebecca Ray and poet Neil Rollinson . Sarah  Hesketh and Andrea Pisac from the English Pen also attended.

The aim of this programme was to use the idyllic Devon countryside  to inspire new writing by Exiled Writers living in England, while  establishing cross cultural dialogue on English literature (be it poetry  or prose).

Every day came with its writing workshops , poetry and prose on  alternate days, led by Neil and Rebecca respectively, at  the barn . Ali  often made as much excuse as he could find to skip the  workshops claiming that writing in English makes his Persian muse  jealous. But when he wrote his first poem in Neil's session, every one  sat amazed at its bold middle and surreal ending . 

This followed around those days by my personally sponsored  drive to Sheepwash  and surrounding idylls  with dizzy , daisy  poses  by the  main protagonists  of the tour Sahra, Ali and Fatima, which well  fulfilled the aim of the week, pictorially. Also of the green   gazebo looking out to the garden  of little wonders  in the bench or  the Newton's chair, the quince tree, facets  of the old pond , the old  fences and gates , little escapes .

Every night after dinner we had a reading session. The first night  Neil read his poems to an eager, hushed audience partly mesmerised  part gazing at thin air, someone started by an oblique criticism and  Ali chimed in with his comment that Neil's poems are often  unnatural  in form, this started off a heated debate on the nature of  form. This  is where Rebecca came out against Ali's arrogance on the  primacy of  Persian poetry. Though everyone was impressed by Ali's  extensive examples from international poetry.

Exchanging experiences and views between Neil and Rebecca  on the  one hand and Ali  and I and sometimes Paulina , were lively, late into  the night. Ali who is always provocative, got on the wrong side of  R ebecca to begin with. But by the final days they were best of pals – Reb ecca empathising with the plight of Ali – a well established poet  of  his own country, having to start all over again in new territory. In these debates I often focused on the stuff of thought or semantics  expressed through the filters of gender and culture in the identity of  protagonists, spurring me on to weave them into pieces we wrote during poetry workshops.

On the Wednesday Simon Burt from English Pen came with Nadeem  Aslan who recently published his novel on Afghanestan. Simon  introduced Nadeem with great sense of honour, and Nadeem read  from his novel. There were references to the fame of Behzad the  Iranian painter in Afghanistan which Ali latched on to to drive home  the point about the contradictory place of the artist (writer, painter)  in the geopolitical profile of the subject matter.

Devon was a great poetic experience. I felt an atmospheric quiet that  simmered out a few good pieces including the English translation of  Terror which is published elsewhere on this site. Sometimes poetry  can bring together haphazard pieces of fact and fiction, such as  disparate cultures, by extending thought through signifiers in  metaphoric play. Sometimes translating is more difficult than  composing, as in the case of Terror, since the atmosphere of the piece  changed from one place to the next, and the language turns. So  translating it was as if I re-wrote the piece which took a lot of energy  not only in the writing but in delivering, which I did that last night of  the programme where we all read what we had produced during the  week for 20 minutes each. That Thursday night when Ali decided to  help himself to half a bottle of Evian filled with Vodka before the last  supper, I had to fill in for his empty slot at the reading, reading  Terror, while for my slot I read There was a sense of Vertigo about  Him a piece about the ghost of Disraeli speechifying at us - and other  pieces from Devon.

A few weeks later in October, this was my scribblings on the  highlights of the week:

Devon Cooking

I was driving with care valuable livestock to and fro Totleigh Barton

Deep blue cotton wool speckled along the skyline of rolling green  Devon

bright and light smiling on our faces on the lane or cow field gates to  the kitchen 

one night stir frying with Sahra and Ali for the pen select fourteen  like lasagne

Arvon  Devon  Bovine 

There are documentary mementos from Abol Ali duo and a global  selection of Poets (Led by Neil) Essayists (Mohamed  followed) and  Novelists starring Rebecca  Ray cathecting all fourteen of us to demo  the writing and the meeting of minds, the great difference of  differences were so far apart tucked away in bovine Devon having to  amalgam or clash and perish. We sat late in the night. sipping wine and  discussing the crisis at Wall Street and the mad cow disease  shamelessly.

The night Nadeem came and Simon the pleiedes and the caseopia  were dazzling over us

the magic painting of Behzad and the house with books nailed to the  ceilings and into the dome

Ali set the cat among the pigeons and the night ended in the barn  after a thatched roof dinner

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The latest news is reported in the News from English Pen of 3 Feb  2009 written by Stacey who was with us in Devon:

STACY ANDERSON: We are very pleased to be kicking off   the Readers & Writers Programme this year with a new strand  supporting creative writing in London's migrant and refugee  communities. This month, we held the first of an ongoing series of   meetings for the group of writers that we took to the Arvon  Foundation's course at Totleigh Barton in September. PEN has   partnered with Exiled Writers Ink to support the group's  presentation of a collaborative performance project sometime mid-year.

We gathered together at PEN's offices with Stacey, Jennifer Langer  and Fatieh, Paulina, Mohamad, Fatima, and discussed the Ali's idea  of doing a poetry carnival a la Bakhtin, to do a performance  enacting a discourse of many languages later in 2009. Watch this  space...

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