Posts By: Janette Ayachi
Writers and Narcissism
I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I mustn’t say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers. – Sylvia Plath Poetry as Self-Love Are writers narcissists? Narcissists don’t really depend on anyone apart from themselves, they have an idealised self-sufficiency, beneath that an anger and…
Janette AyachiVoices in the Dark: A Memorisation Diary
This blog collects a series of diary fragments taken over a period while I was preparing to recite from memory a poetry set for this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival. The event – ‘Voices in the Dark’ – sees poets performing to a crowd in a pitch black room, without the usual notebooks and print-outs to…
Janette AyachiThe Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name: Oscar Wilde & Lord Alfred Douglas
You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty. – Oscar Wilde, De Profundis In 1891 Oscar Wilde met Lord Alfred Douglas in the architectural jewel-town of Rouen. Douglas was…
Janette Ayachi
Literature is intoxicating, poetry in particular
Writing is an addiction; the process leaks endorphins and writer’s block can cause terrible withdrawal symptoms. When writers date writers it is like dating your dealer, you are always in close proximity to your next fix. Communication becomes transportation, we go on ‘a trip’ lining up words for inhalation: the climaxes and comedowns, mania and…
Janette AyachiRebellious Love: Allen Ginsberg & Peter Orlovsky
When Allen Ginsberg first laid admiring eyes on Peter Orlovsky in 1954 in a flat in San Francisco, he was naked in a painting with tousled yellow hair and a beguiling gaze. He asked the artist who it was posing, and Orlovsky was called from the other room, transmogrified into reality, fully clothed. It was…
Janette AyachiLove and Suicide: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
The most notorious, politicized and doomed literary couple in history. Sylvia Plath was charmed into hunting out Ted Hughes after reading his poem ‘Hawk in The Rain’, and in 1956 she met his powerful and imposing presence at a party in Cambridge, ‘kiss me, and you will see how important I am’ she wrote in…
Janette AyachiTrue Love: Anais Nin & Henry Miller
“Life and literature combined, love the dynamo, you with your chameleon’s soul giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you…
Janette AyachiJealous Love: Natalie Barney & Renée Vivien
These wild women were Symbolist poets in literary Paris at the turn of the 20th century, culturally advantaged and intellectually determined. They were Women of The Left Bank who set up boutiques: publishing houses and artistic salons across the city forging a Sapphic Utopia with their grandiose gestures of a luxury-bohemian, women-centred lifestyle, a place…
Janette AyachiQuiet Love: Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville West
From this week I’m going to be briefly sketching some of my favourite writer romances of the last couple of centuries, starting with today’s coupling: Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville West. These two female authors living in the heart of Edwardian England became lovers in 1925 when they met over dinner. Sackville-West wrote after the meeting…
Janette AyachiTangled Up In Green: Literary Lovers and Their Temperaments
“Jealousy is a useless emotion” Kirsten Norrie MacGillivray, poet and musician But is it? Has jealousy not inspired great tortured literature, a cult of memorable love songs, riotous movements and aesthetic masterpieces? Is it not as useful as a knife – a weapon that has cut through crimes of passion bleeding through the sheets…
Janette Ayachi
Love Letters as Poetry
‘That I love you, and that when I awake in the morning I use my intelligence to discover more ways of appreciating you.’ Anais Nin to Henry Miller, A Literate Passion: 1952-1963. Love is the greatest of all emotions, a passion more meaningful than any other, and the most valuable human experience in our lifetimes….
Janette Ayachi
Writers Who Love Writers
A friend of mine once pointed out that as poets we are indefinitely not like everyone else. Perhaps others don’t stick their heads into things as we do, they don’t get caught up in their emotions – and suddenly in the middle of a busy bar feeling something close to what Stendhal felt in Florence…
Janette Ayachi