Actually, I don’t write poems for performance although because I have a theatre background my work is sometimes performative. In my verse novels I try to capture the voices of various characters, to inhabit them as an actor would a character for the stage. ‘Lara’ and ‘The Emperor’s Babe’ are told in the first person. In the former there are many voices, in the latter, mainly one.

I digress. The 4 poems I’m showing you here were, unusually for me, written for performance. In the summer of 2003 I had a writers’ residency with the City of London Festival. It’s historically (some 40+ years) a classical music festival but they were broadening its scope. My remit was to write some poems about the City of London (as in the Square Mile) which would then culminate in a performance with the pianist Joanna McGregor and the saxophonist Andy Shepherd and a multi-media artist (name?). In the event, we met a few times, threw some ideas around and then I went away and wrote some poems.

I’m going to publish some unpublished poems about place and this is the first one. This poem below was written when I lived just behind Portobello Rd (See previous post on Notting Hill v Hillingdon.) At that stage I was already into writing novels that fused fiction and poetry and rarely wrote free-standing poems. This one, however, was written during a week at the Arvon Foundation at Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire. Around 2002, I think. I was teaching a course and the students were mainly female and older. I remember feeling quite annoyed that the poems most of them wrote were so rural, so pastoral, as if cities and the 21st Century did not exist. Arvon’s four sites are set in the most beautiful landscapes, which unfortunately affects what people choose to write about.

My reaction to this proliferation of poems about flowers and rolling hills and babbling streams was to write a poem about where I lived. Once the poem was written, and read aloud to the group (I took great delight in this), I had no further use of it. It was a poem written for a specific purpose and moment and that moment passed. It is a portrait of a place, and it doesn’t get any deeper than that. This is why I’ve never published it.

My lovely desk is 9 feet long. It cost £150 from Ikea and is actually a dining table. As soon as I bought it I realised I needed two of them. One to keep completely clear and the other to cover with the papers of writing/office life. It takes up about half of my study.

Another best buy ever. My gorgeous 24 inch iMac. Long Live Apple! About 18 months old. Before then I had a very old, very noisy, very slow Toshiba laptop that was too heavy to be a laptop. I did write two of my books on it, however. When I bought this computer I realised how much I had suffered with the old one. I spend my life in front of the computer but I was working on an old crock. Doh! This is my desk in its ideal state but within minutes of working it’s covered with papers. A work-physio visited me when I had mild RSI to adjust my seating etc and she recommended this keyboard and mouse. It works.

Economic factors aside – would you rather live here where the houses are tall, old and grand?

Or here, where they’re not?

Here, where the houses are flamboyantly self-expressed?

Or here where they’re not?

How about a sheet of colourful metal under the Westway?

Or would you like to live where there are hundreds of deserted alleys in between gardens and parks
that are perfect for blissful cycling?

Would you prefer living somewhere where graffiti artists leave their mark and are not considered ‘hooligans’?

Or perhaps these sensible shoes rock your boat in the only shoe shop on the high street?

A drink in St. George’s Pub? (When I first moved here the outside was festooned in Union Jacks. For international visitors, our national flag and the St. Georges flag have been co-opted by Birtish fascists, the British National Party.)

Local demographic No 1. Would you fit in here?

Local demographic 2. Or here?

I think you can work out which photos are of Notting Hill, W11, and which are in the London Borough of Hillingdon.

Head Space/Geographical Place

I was born in Woolwich, which was an unspeakably boring place to grow up for this young girl. Perhaps if I’d been born somewhere more attractive, dynamic and interesting, like Camden, Brixton or Notting Hill, I wouldn’t have developed my imagination. In the boring world of my childhood I escaped into the world of my imagination through reading books and the local youth theatre. There was nothing else to do. No mobile phones. No Facebook. No internet. No computers. No money. No cafes. Only 3 television channels, all operational for a few hours in the evening only. Yes, it was the deep, ancient past for some of you. But the making of me. Because of all this, because I had time on my hands to think and dream and imagine, because I needed to combat boredom, I became a writer and traveller for whom place and space is at my very core.

Today I see how so many people, especially the youngsters, are entertained all the time. If they’re not texting or talking on the phone, playing phone games and listening to music on their ipods, they’re watching something on a screen, engaging in social network facilities, or playing computer games. You might think I generalize, but this is what I see around me. I remember when people used to sit on public transport and daydream. Where is the mental space to develop the imagination? Where is the mental quiet to read books?  Where is the empty space to write them?

How place features in my novels.

My verse novel LARA, based on my family history, traverses time and space, ranging from 19th century Brazil, Ireland and Germany to 1995 London, and in between every decade of the twentieth century London is covered.

In THE EMPEROR’S BABE, also a verse novel, I re-imagined Roman London of 1800 years ago through the eyes of a black woman called Zuleika. Employing liberal doses of anachronism, the ancient city also feels extremely modern.

SOUL TOURISTS, a novel with verse, begins in London but travels through Europe at the end of the 1980s. The two main characters, Jessie and Stanley, drive through France, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Iraq and Kuwait. En route hidden historis of Europe are brought to light.

BLONDE ROOTS, my last book and first prose novel, is set in an alternate universe where Europe is located where Africa lies and vice versa. The Ambossan country of the United Kingdom of Great Ambossa is located where the UK is. It’s a topsy turvy world in which Africans enslave Europeans.

Check out my work on my website:

http://www.bevaristo.net or my blog: http://www.bevaristowordpress.com

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and my posts too which will appear over the next few days.