Peter Thabit Jones, "The Fathomless Tides of the Heart: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, American Poet and Artist"

Carolyn Mary Kleefeld and Peter Thabit Jones

Peter Thabit Jones has authored sixteen books. He has participated in festivals and conferences in America and Europe and is an annual writer-in-residence in Big Sur, California. A recipient of many awards, including the Eric Gregory Award for Poetry (The Society of Authors, London) and the Homer: European Medal of Poetry and Art, two of his dramas for the stage have premiered in America. His opera libretti for Luxembourg composer Albena Petrovic Vratchanska have premiered at the Philarmonie Luxembourg, the National Opera House Stara Zagora, Bulgaria, and Theatre National Du Luxembourg. The Land of Dreams, a new opera, will premiere at the Sofia Opera and Ballet Theatre, Bulgaria, in in June this year. His biography of Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, The Fathomless Tides of the Heart, is published in 2023 by The Seventh Quarry Press. Further information about Peter's work is on his website here. 

About Fathomless Tides of the Heart: Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, American Poet and Artist: A Biography, by Peter Thabit Jones

Carolyn Mary Kleefeld’s story is one from a talented young girl to the poet and artist she is today. It is a journey against overwhelming social pressures to fit in to a privileged life, a journey of a young Beverly Hills socialite to a reclusive lifestyle in Big Sur. Carolyn is a woman answering a creative calling from childhood, and is someone who has deservedly and impressively achieved publication, recognition and admiration for her poems and paintings around the world. 

It’s a fascinating biography and it references iconic figures of the literary world, Hollywood, and the counter-culture of the Sixties, including Jane Fonda, Rod Steiger, Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg, Dr. Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly, Jacques Cousteau and Laura Huxley, the wife of Aldous Huxley.

“It is no small matter to write the development of a poet, artist, and thinker of Carolyn Mary Kleefeld’s stature, yet Peter Thabit Jones’s biography rises to the challenge, offering insight not only into her voice and vision, but into the dynamics of creativity itself – its tensions, complexities, mysteries.” —Arthur Williamson.  

You can see more information about the book on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the biography.

From The Fathomless Tides of the Heart, by Peter Thabit Jones

Carolyn’s home in Big Sur to is situated on an isolated steep cliff, which slants its long way down to the mesmerizing swell of the Pacific Ocean. The property, 500 feet above the sea, has a 300-degree view from every angle. Her “dragon’s crown,” as she lovingly calls her part of the mountain, depending on nature’s mood, offers the silence of paradise and the aggressive and wild music of the sea and ferocious winds. Fog can descend at any time and like the chilled breath of a god, submerge all in its cloud of damp and eerie smoke. In the summer, when the fog does lift, it can get as hot as a desert rock and one goes about one’s day in a sluggish and uncomfortable manner. During the winter and even earlier, the anger of the winds is amplified and accelerated and they bully the whole place relentlessly. As Carolyn would write in her poem "The Squall," published in her book Vagabond Dawns: 

The icy grip of winter

wounds the hallowed air.

And the wind wails like a baby 

Abandoned in the squall ...

The wind, though, can brutally claim any month of the year. This is Carolyn’s observation from a June journal entry, focused in its exact sense-impressions, “The garden is quivering. The storm moves its pulse, trembling, rushing in the squall. My soul is in this compelled rush—a sense of quickened current—to the unknown. The air is icy and blowing carelessly all that is in the beast, the wake of the tempest. The seas are like a receptive, needy beast—await[ing] heaven’s blood humbly, vast, and eternal. The moonstone veils drape the mountain range, softening in this touch. The tiniest daisy bares its petals to the rippling, bristling blasts." 

Jenna Clake, "Disturbance"

 

Jenna Clake, photo by Jamie Logue

Jenna Clake’s debut collection of poetry, Fortune Cookie, won the Melita Hume prize in 2016, and was published in 2017 by Eyewear. It received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2018 and was shortlisted for a Somerset Maugham Award in the same year. She was shortlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Women Poets' Prize. Her poetry criticism has appeared in Poetry London, The Poetry School, and The Poetry Review. Her second collection Museum of Ice Cream was published by Bloodaxe and featured as one of The Telegraph's best new poetry books in 2021. Her debut novel is Disturbance, published by Trapeze in 2023. She lectures in Creative Writing at Teesside University.

About Disturbance

As the sun sets on a feverishly hot July evening, a young woman spies on her teenage neighbour, transfixed by what looks like an occult ritual intended to banish an ex-boyfriend. Alone in a new town and desperate to expel the claustrophobic memories of her own ex that have followed, the narrator decides to try to hex herself free from her past.

She falls in with the neighbour and her witchy friend, exploring nascent supernatural powers as the boundaries of reality shift in and out of focus. But when the creaks and hums of her apartment escalate into something more violent, she realizes that she may have brought her boyfriend's presence - whether psychological or paranormal - back to haunt her.

With astonishing emotional depth and clarity, Disturbance explores the fallout of abuse. Propulsive and wry, this razor-sharp debut twists witchcraft and horror into a powerful narrative of one woman's struggle to return to herself. This lyrical novel explores all the ways that relationships and trauma can haunt our lives, and the lingering physical and psychological effects of abuse. 

From Disturbance, by Jenna Clake

The girl rolled the stone to Chelsea, and the ritual began. The evening’s heat was suddenly inflamed, as though it had been summoned; there was a smell of rain, almost sulphuric and bitter. Chelsea leaned forward and cupped the stone in her hand. The girls fell silent, and the smell of rot wafted past me, as though something had crawled to die under my floorboards. My stomach turned, and I held my breath. My fingers tingled, like I’d leant on my hand for too long. 

Chelsea took the stone to her cheek, and started rolling it over her face. The other girl watched her closely, moving her lips rapidly, as if chanting. Chelsea rolled the stone over her face several times, slowly at first, and then with more momentum every time she reached her forehead. Through the darkness, the moon cast white light onto Chelsea and her friend, like it was coming through a magnifying glass. The building had been quiet since the girl had turned off her music. Even the fridge had stopped whining. The road had been empty from the moment Chelsea’s friend had arrived. It was as if they and I were the only people in the world; they had cast a spell and everyone else had been put into a trance.

Chelsea returned the stone to her palm. She looked at it for a while, communing with it. The rotten smell passed, and something more pleasant was summoned, a scent unseasonably springlike: fresh earth, crocuses, daubs of early daisies, the first day it feels safe to sit on grass. Chelsea dug into the ground with her bare hands, and pushed the stone into the soil, and then replaced the grass on top. A chill ran over my arms, the heat unexpectedly broken, as though a breeze had swept through the flat.

The girls tilted their heads upwards to look at the moon, absorbing its light, so their outlines appeared sharper, as if they’d been sculpted. They might have spoken again – their lips moved quickly, not quite in sync. Then, as they dropped their heads, sound flooded back: a siren blared at the end of the road; the Walkers began to tune their guitars; the front gate squeaked; a car tore down the street; my fridge was now louder than before, and building to a screech. The noise echoed around my bedroom, like something calling from far away. I stayed where I was, wondering if the girls would hear it, and know that I’d been watching them. I felt both inside and outside my body, like I had copied myself and pasted a version slightly over my outline.

The girls shuffled forward on their knees to hug each other. As they held on, the shriek from the fridge slowed, and returned to normal. I swallowed, noticing my mouth was dry. When they finally broke apart, Chelsea was smiling. She looked at peace, like every thought had been drained out of her. I wanted to be down there with them, where that feeling – that magic – was possible.

Helen Ivory, "Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems"

Helen Ivory is a poet, and collage artist who also makes shadow-boxes. Her fifth Bloodaxe collection is  The Anatomical Venus (2019). She edits the webzine Ink, Sweat and Tears and teaches Creative Writing online for the UEA/NCW. A book of mixed media poems Hear What the Moon Told Me is published by KFS, and chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City by SurVision. She also has work translated into Polish, Ukrainian, Spanish, Greek and Croatian as part of Versopolis. Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems (2023) is published in the US by MadHat Press. She was awarded Arts Council of England to research and write her next collection for Bloodaxe, Constructing a Witch (2024), which fixes on the monstering and scapegoating of women. Her website is here.  

About Wunderkammer: New and Selected Poems

From the Introduction, by Robert Archambeau

Ivory is an intensely visual poet, and her images could nestle up close to those of artists like Leonora Carrington, say, or Dorothea Tanning: Surrealist painters whose strongest work gives us domestic interiors where the realistic takes the impossible in uncanny matrimony. 

And then there are the nameless women in these poems—or, perhaps more properly, there is Woman, in archetypal form, standing at the center of Ivory’s work. Ivory introduces us to women who disappear in bad marriages; women who are in various ways fed on and consumed; women shut into houses, sometimes for many years; women who parade in new dresses in front of men they should not trust; women silenced in scold’s bridles; needlewomen; cooks; laundresses. But she also brings us into the presence of sorceresses, witches, communers with an ethereal other side—Baba Yagas before whom one trembles.

There’s a consistent feel to these poems, to such an extent that should you meet one wandering in the deserts of Arabia you’d call out, astonished: “Helen! Helen Ivory!” But what is that mood? It’s something we often find in Gothic fiction, where the uncanny rubs shoulders with the marvelous, where sanity and chastity quake a little at the surrounding depth of darkness. At moments—when Death lies beside us, our bedmate and lodger—the aesthetic term is weird: a mode when something is present where it ought not to be. But more often we find a sense of absence, of phenomena without explanation, of ghosts where there had once been substance. The term for this is eerie. Helen Ivory writes to take us there ...

From Wunderkammer, by Helen Ivory

A Little Spell in Six Lessons

after Ana Maria Pacheco

*

You must first mask
your human self,
then forget your tongue.
Learn to talk as birds
or cloven-hoofed things.

*

To lose yourself
is a very particular art.
If you want ever to be found
scatter breadcrumbs,
pray the birds are not hungry.

*

I will tell you a story
of the dark corners
that hold us in place,
of the chandelier of bones,
the wind whistling through teeth.

*

Your body is a sheet
of blank paper
and the birds have eaten
their fill of your path.
They have pecked out your eyes.

*

Now see afresh,
see what you’ve become!
Your words are butterflies
pinned to your tongue -
release them.

*

And what you hold 
is perhaps what you wished for
as you sang as a child
in your feathered chair 
when the world was asleep. 

Spirit of the Storm

Frederick Sandys study for wood engraving 1860

There comes a point in very woman’s life
when she transmutes into The Spirit of the Storm.
Why not grow snakes for hair,
conjure rain and lightning from your artful hands?

You’ve earnt this wrath, don’t squander it 
on slapdash chores and sundry empty tasks 
in the hollow of your living room - 
get out and find a fitting auditorium.

They’ve been opining it for years
it should come as no surprise 
when venom spouts forth from your breasts. 
Lo! you are supreme, the most debauched of all bad mothers!

Writing the Small Sublime

 By Tracey Foster

         Black ticks on bright blue
         swifts flung across the sky
         like boomerangs.

The need to write concise poetry began as an exercise during the MA Creative Writing course, as a way of training myself to rein in a tendency to overplay descriptions and imagery. I fully enjoyed the process and learnt how to hone meanings and condense a poem into simple constructs. Haiku has always been an area of poetry that fascinated me, the art of writing tiny stories in very few words. Simple sentences that work across a few lines, rhythm and rhyme packed into the small sublime.

The form of the Haiku was developed from a much older tradition in Japan of writing Renga poems that were a hundred stanzas long. Haiku appeared in the sixteenth century and became the much shorter relative, packing a story into a more condensed version, usually constructed over three lines in a 5,7,5 syllabic format. The writer focuses on nature and sets the season with key words like 'snow.’ This is called ‘kigo.’ The most famous examples of this are sakura (cherry blossoms) for spring,  fuji (wisteria) for summer, tsuki (moon) for fall, and samushi (cold) for winter. The first two lines set up the situation and the final line is often in contrast, sending the reader down a different lane. This is called ‘Kireji,’ a jump in narrative that gives the poem its raison d'être, the key message to the reader, often dark in tone or converse. This appealed to me as my writing often had an eerie undercurrent; and my feelings about the state of our native wildlife and a plea to help nature are things I am keen to tackle in my poetry.

          Scrap of grass littered
          with yellow pee-the-beds.
          Weeds to feed the bees.

The most renowned writer of Haiku is Matsuo Bashō, who explored Zen teachings and played with the format. He said: 'Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one - when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural - if the object and you are separate - then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit.' A good example of his work is:

         Breaking the silence
         Of an ancient pond,
         A frog jumped into water -
         A deep resonance. 

These works influenced many poets over the centuries, most notably the American poet Ezra Pound, who said, 'The image itself is speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.' He was inspired to rewrite his poem ‘In a Station of the Metro,’ from a thirty-line poem, down to just two lines (or three, if you count the title):

          The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
          Petals on a wet, black bough.

My research into this field of writing led me to discover other forms of compact poetry. A single Haiku written continuously on one line is called a Monoku. Tanka is a longer form using 5,7,5,7,7. The first three lines are called  kami-no-ku ('upper phrase') and the last two the shimo-no-ku ('lower phrase'). Senryu is a much shorter version, using 3,5,3 syllables, and restricts the writer even more. This can often lead to incomplete sentences, leaving the reader to mentally fill in the gaps.

           Evening star
           blue linen sky,
           drawing pin.

My creative process begins with a walk in the countryside in all weathers, as I did in lockdown whilst writing my submissions for the course in 2020. I always take a phone and jot down key phrases that come to mind, often just a sentence that will later develop into a poem. Most of my poems start from  an observation from the world outside. A Haiku is a very short poem,  but I still like to employ key constructs in my work. Alliteration, rhyme and metre are some of the devices I have employed. But I'm careful not to overdo it: the reader should be able to just fall into the imagery. I use my feelings to convey emotions, sight, sound, touch and smell and try to make the reader aware of them, but as if experiencing them from afar. 

          A murder of crows
          flies skyward as one black cloud,
          dropping snails like hail.

During April and National Poetry Month in 2023, I set myself the challenge to write a Haiku every day. This had two purposes: helping me to keep up my Creative Writing and to fit around my other life as a secondary school teacher. The challenge was easy to accomplish but harder to find an audience for. My previous poetry had been accepted for several online publications, but Haiku seems to be a niche for which it is harder to find relevant publishing outlets. There is a good Twitter community of writers who share work and encouragement and some online publications that will accept submissions. However, sharing your work online via social media will mean it won’t be accepted for publication elsewhere. The best advice I can give you is to keep trying and keep it simple. Good luck!

Here are some very useful websites to help you:

https://thegreatmargin.org/haiku/
https://haikujournal.org/what-is-haiku/
https://thehaikufoundation.org/new-to-haiku-how-to-edit-your-haiku/
https://www.thehaikufoundation.org/omeka/
https://www.modernhaiku.org/submissions.html

About the author
Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by CommaPress, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature and the Arts Council. Her latest poem is due to be published in the Literary Review 23. Tracey is on Twitter @traceyfoster77

Jordan Crandall, "Autodrive"

 

Jordan Crandall is Professor of Visual Arts at University of California, San Diego. He is the author of five books, including Drive, an anthology of his artworks, media installations, and theoretical writings published by Neue Galerie Graz and ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. In 2011 he was the recipient of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award for outstanding research in media art and digital culture. Autodrive is his first work of fiction.

About Autodrive, by Jordan Crandall

Autodrive is a work of literary fiction that melds techno-scientific inquiry and storytelling, critical theory and comedy, speculative fiction and satire. It is a road novel of sorts, an odyssey along the highways at a time when a new form of superintelligence has emerged. This new form of artificial intelligence is not entirely distinct from the characters in the narrative — it is ingrained in the machines they already use, the vehicles they already take, the systems they are already part of, but cannot fully see. The human character who is typically at the center of the fictional world gives way to an eccentric cast of performers — an ensemble of people and machines.

You can see more information about Autodrive on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel. 

From Autodrive

City Center West 

There was an accident at the construction site on the north side of the Crosstown. One of the excavation machines knocked a truck off the overpass. It created a huge bottleneck along the frontage road. We had to inch along in bumper to bumper traffic for nearly an hour. 

People were patient at first, but then a few of the passengers started complaining in a way that caused everyone else to start complaining. A strange phenomenon happens in situations like that, suddenly everyone unloads, it releases a feeling of anguish but also excitement. 

Everyone was speaking loudly in order to be heard above the noise. But it was hard to hear anything, you could only pick up bits and pieces of what people were saying. There was talk of accidents, anomalies, irrepressible crowds. A hearse chasing a group of tourists. A delivery truck menacing a passenger van. A parking lot brawl that got out of hand. 

A traveler in the adjoining seat started talking to me. I found it hard to engage with him because he was wearing one of those facepieces that hide your expression. The only part that moves is a mouthlike orifice, a slot over the mouth for eating. Sometimes it snaps open and shut and you expect a voice to come out, but the voice does not come from there, it comes from an embedded speaker that has no relation to the mouth. 

There is a much greater chance of misunderstanding if your face is hidden, I told him. It is better to have a transparent shield, like an astronaut. A bubble is better. 

He started telling me about a mysterious car that was trailing him. A Compiler-type model that did nothing but follow him around. It would pull up to the house and sit there. Park outside the office and wait. He said he could feel it out there waiting for him even if he could not see it—one of those things you just know, like when you can feel someone staring at you without having to turn around to look. 

I asked him if he had any idea of who might be in the car. 

He had the sense that there was no one operating the car. That it was self-determined in some other way. 

What way, I asked him. 

Like the cars in those old road movies, he said. The ones that had no drivers but were self-operated somehow—powered by an unknown force. Limousines and hearses, towncars and trucks that appeared out of nowhere and chased people. Plowed into traffic, mowed down pedestrians, bumped off policemen, slammed into cars. Messengers of catastrophe, he called them. Self-aware, self-willed, superintelligent machines ready to strike, turn on the people they were created to serve. 

A superintelligent machine would not act that way, I told him. It would be more like a conglomerate, more like a corporation than a vehicle. If you want to worry about a malevolent AI, that is what you should be concerned about. Not a machine that is out to get you, but an organization that is. 

Nearly Summer Student News 2023

Lots of things have been happening in the Centre for New Writing and Creative Writing at Leicester in the last two months, including wonderful guest lectures and masterclasses by Val McDermid, Louis de Bernières and Barbara Cooke. Below is a selection of recent Creative Writing student news. Wishing everyone a great Summer!

Rosalind Adam, MA Creative Writing graduate, has a poem published in the new issue of Under the Radar Magazine. 

Asma Ali, MA Creative Writing student, has written a review of As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow, by Zoulfa Katouh for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Congratulations to PhD Creative Writing student Joe Bedford, whose story "The Christening" has been shortlisted for the prestigious ALCS Tom-Gallon Trust Award 2023. And of course congratulations to Joe on the publication and launch of his novel, A Bad Decade for Good People. You can read more about the novel here. 

Congratulations to MA Creative Writing student Laura Besley, whose story "Barren Land" was shortlisted for the Brilliant Flash Fiction Writing Contest 2023. You can read the story here. She has also been shortlisted for the inaugural Welkin Writing Prize. Her story, "One More Minute," has been published by 50-Word Stories here. Laura has reviewed Joe Bedford's new novel, A Bad Decade for Good People, on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Congratulations to Constantine, MA Creative Writing graduate, on the publication of his new picture book, Tiya and the Minotaur. You can read more about the book on Creative Writing at Leicester here. 

Congratulations to Andrew Craven-Griffiths for completing his PhD in Creative Writing, entitled In the Future We Are Astronauts.

Congratulations to Tim Hannigan, PhD Creative Writing graduate, whose new book, The Granite Kingdom: A Cornish Journey, was published by Head of Zeus in May. 

Congratulations to Kathy Hoyle, PhD Creative Writing student, who was shortlisted for the Ellipsis Zine Flash Collection Competition 2023. She has also had her story, "Anechoic Chamber," published by Fictive Dream here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Amirah Mohiddin has continued her work as tutor in schools for The Brilliant Club, teaching a course she designed called "Our Future Storytellers: Reviving Old Traditional and Classic Stories in a Contemporary Form." You can read more about the course here. 

PhD Creative Writing student Jane Simmons has written a review of Kitchen Music, by Lesley Harrison, for Everybody's Reviewing here. 

MA Creative Writing graduate Lisa Williams has had her stories, "The New Term," "The End" and "Satisied" published on Friday Flash Fiction. She has also written reviews for Everybody's Reviewing here and here.  

Our Future Storytellers: A Creative and Critical Writing Course

By Amirah Mohiddin

 

Over the past two years, I’ve worked as a tutor on several placements with The Brilliant Club, an organisation devoted to supporting less advantaged students to access higher education. More specifically, I have taught on The Scholars Programme, a programme designed for PhD students to share their subject knowledge to a small group of students to help them develop key skills, gain knowledge and the confidence to pursue higher education. The programme is structured around seven tutorials taught online or within schools alongside an opening and graduation ceremony at university. 

My PhD practice-based research interrogates on female storytelling as a form of salvation and heroism in Arabic literature with the aim of reconstructing formidable and empowering storytellers in a Young Adult fantasy novel. I was given the wonderful opportunity to design a Creative Writing course inspired by my PhD project. I called it ‘Our Future Storytellers: Reviving Old, Traditional, Classic Stories in a contemporary Form’ due to my hopes that it will serve as a starting point for future writers. 

During my time at each placement, I teach a university-style course to KS4 students for several-weeks at a time combining workshop and seminar-style methods. The course challenges and encourages the students to analyse Arabic literature as a springboard and interrogate elements of craft to hone their own Creative Writing. Further to this, the students are encouraged to reflect on their inspirations and the elements of craft they have used in their writing. At the end of the course, the students often have workshopped several or one enduring piece of writing to then use towards their final assignments which are marked on a university scale. Assessment marking follows three principal criteria: Subject Knowledge, Critical Thinking and Written Communication. 

It’s been a real pleasure to see students motivated, growing confident in their writing, and deepening their awareness as they hone their craft as the course progresses. It is especially rewarding to see the spark of inspiration and passion that the students carry forward to their final assignments, constantly striving to improve their creative pieces and understand their critical pieces. So many students grow in confidence and gain pride over the course and it’s so moving for me to see this reflected in their final assignments. 

My time on The Scholars Programme with The Brilliant Club has been invaluable. I’ve developed many skills and my motivation towards my own creative practice has been bolstered and renewed watching my students grow and enjoy themselves along the way. I initially titled my course ‘Our Future Storytellers’ because of my hopes for my students to grow as writers. It has been incredibly affirming to see that aspiration become a reality as my students continue to thrive with their new-found confidence. 

About the author

Amirah Mohiddin is a writer, a third-year PhD student in Creative Writing and a tutor with The Brilliant Club teaching her self-designed Creative Writing course ‘Our Future Storytellers.’ Her PhD research focuses on female storytelling as a form of salvation and heroism in Arabic literature with the aim of reconstructing formidable and empowering storytellers in a YA fantasy novel. Her short stories have been published in magazines, ebooks and physical books, including Dancing Bear Books, Litro Magazine, Post-mortem Press, The New Luciad and Sanroo Publishing. You can read more about Amirah's PhD on Creative Writing at Leicester here.