Image by Manon Bellet
Dear writers, readers and friends,
Welcome to 2017. This past year has been another wonderful one for Visual Verse. Thanks to you, our writers, we’ve grown in submissions and followers and the inbox is bursting every week. It is such a pleasure to see you continue to return each month and deliver new words. And it is such a pleasure to have a platform from which we can shine a spotlight on fantastic writers, published and unpublished. In 2016 we’ve been proud to feature a Goldsmith’s Prize winner, a Booker longlistee, debut writers and those who have collections forthcoming next year. Some of you have taken work inspired by Visual Verse to the next level – it’s found its way into poetry collections and into live performances as well as onto your own websites. We are thrilled by all of this and can’t wait to see what next year will bring.
One thing you may not realise, too, is how much your writing inspires the artists we feature here on Visual Verse. It is a unique experience for them to see how so many people, with wildly diverse perspectives and styles, respond to their work. This dialogue between artist and writer is the seed from which Visual Verse was grown and it is one of the things that makes us most proud.
So without further ado, we are delighted to bestow upon you our first visual prompt for 2017. This magnificent image comes from Manon Bellet (http://www.manonbellet.com/) , a French artist currently based in New Orleans, US. Bellet’s work looks at the intersections of nature conservation and art preservation, an unconventional pairing, and tries to challenge our perceptions of our environment. This image is from her series Sous Surface and is one of those images that presents something different each time you view it. What will you make of this one?
Our lead writers for January 2017 are a celebration of our connections beyond the geographical. We begin with the elegiac, romantic Emmanuelle Pagano translated from the French by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis. Pagano’s fragmentary musings on love and desire, Trysting (http://www.andotherstories.org/author/emmanuelle-pagano/) was published in 2016 by & Other Stories. She lives and works on the Ardèche plateau. She has written more than a dozen works of fiction, has won the EU Prize for Literature and her books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. She regularly collaborates with artists working in other disciplines such as dance, cinema, photography, illustration, fine art and music. A perfect start to our year. Translator Sophie Lewis (https://twitter.com/sophietimes) is a freelance editor and translator from French and Portuguese. Among the writers she has translated into English are Stendhal, Jules Verne, Violette Leduc, Emmanuelle Pagano, Marcel
Aymé, Andrée Maalouf, João Gilberto Noll, Pierre Gripari and Emilie de Turckheim. Jennifer Higgins (https://twitter.com/JennyTranslates) is an editor and translator from French and Italian. She has translated several works of fiction, including Emmanuelle Pagano’s Trysting, and has written a book about English translations of French poetry.
Our second lead is poet Rachel Plummer (http://www.rachelplummer.co.uk) who lives in Edinburgh with her partner and two young children. She has had poems in magazines including Mslexia, The Stinging Fly and Agenda. She is a recipient of the Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for poetry. She has had poems placed in numerous competitions, including the Flambard Prize, Penfro, and the Troubadour Prize.
For our third lead we bring you the robust writings of Agri Ismaïl, who is based in Sweden and Iraq. His work has appeared in The White Review, Guernica, Litro and 3:AM Magazine amongst other places, traversing and transcending all kinds of borders.
And last but not least, our up and coming spot goes to Cage Williams, a poet, writer and musician based in London. He studied literature at Goldsmiths College and he writes on subjects ranging from jazz and the New York School poets to Shakespeare. Find more writing by Cage Williams here (http://literateur.com/four-poems-by-cage-williams/) .
So we go on… boats against the current… pulling into the future. Let us create another year’s worth of beautiful art and words. The image is the starting point, the text is up to you.
Preti and Kristen
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