Ken Edwards

    The gorillas were the main attraction of course. Elaine and I had long been obsessed with these wonderful animals. Near where we live, at the related wildlife parks Howletts (near Canterbury) and Port Lympne (between Rye and Folkestone) several gorilla families are kept in captivity, in good conditions. We visit them regularly. They are Western Lowland Gorillas, as are the vast majority of captive gorillas. Between 100,000-300,000 remain in the wild, mostly in Congo and surrounding countries. The shaggier Mountain Gorilla is much rarer, and classified as endangered. It is estimated there are about 1,000 – up from a nadir of around 250 when poaching was taking its toll in the 1960s and 70s. You will never see them in captivity – they don’t thrive there. They inhabit two upland sites: one at the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, below the five extinct volcanoes of the Virunga Massif (the Rwanda side is now the Volcanoes National Park); and the other i...

  Something happened. There, where it happened before. What was it, when, where? In media res . In the wind. There as it blows. The wind makes our head cold and confuses us. There is almost constant wind here, where we sit or stand or lie, and it is chiefly blowing from the direction of the south-west, that is the prevailing direction, though sometimes (as a change) easterly, and one has to endure it, or make provision against it, or go with it, as is appropriate at any particular instant; for sometimes it’s mild, it softens the cheeks, glorious to relate, and sometimes it’s horrid, but that’s how it goes. It goes and it happens. That is, it sings. It sings as it sounds. A high-pitched sound in our ears, or that may merely be the tinnitus. And we sit or stand or lie in our quarters, which are partially sheltered, it has to be said, which will do. We are in media res , which is Latin for in the middle of it all, or in the middle of nowhere. We are discovered here, or we are...

  When I mentioned that Rapallo would be one of the destinations of Elaine's and my rail trip to Italy, more than one of my poet friends mentioned Ezra Pound. "Poundland!" remarked one. Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast, was of course the abode of the American poet from 1925 until 1945, when he was repatriated to the US and arraigned for treason because of his collaboration with the Italian Fascist government during the Second World War. He returned to Rapallo following his lengthy incarceration in a mental institution in Washington DC, and again lived there until his death in 1972. In the years before the war, Pound in Rapallo was the centre of a distinguished group of writers, composers and artists who came and went, including his wife the painter Dorothy Shakespear, WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Georges Antheil, Richard Aldington, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and many others. He started composing The Cantos there. He gave regular talks to visitors. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale...

   Writing is a solitary occupation. You spend hours, days, weeks, months, years on your own, sitting on your arse, churning stuff out, editing and re-churning, re-editing and re-re-churning, in the hope that one day the results of your efforts will be shared with at least one and hopefully more readers.  Writing for theatre at least holds out the possibility of working with other people – having the joy and frustrations of sharing the creative process. I've never done that. However, one of the reasons I am involved in music as well as writing is having access to that shared experience as part of the primary creative activity. There is the possibility of that magical feeling that something is happening and you are playing a part in it but it doesn't come entirely from you. Collaborating with four others on the project that became THE SPIRIT IN THE DUST has been extraordinary. It started out with Elaine wanting to work again with the Japanese dancer Yumino Seki, whom we'd ...

  [CONTAINS SPOILERS!] The novel that came to be called Secret Orbit had a long gestation which would be too tedious to detail. For years I’d had a perhaps not very original perhaps pretentious notion of writing my own Divine (secular) Comedy: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. All three parts were to be set in different versions of London. Secret Orbit was once the title of another associated project, but eventually came to be allocated (initially as a working title) to the part of the trilogy that represented Hell. Of course, Hell is always the most fun to write. The title stuck, and the novel got written. Like the other half-written novels in the sequence, it is structured in 33 chapters, mirroring the cantos of Dante’s original (there are actually coded references to the mirrored canto in each chapter, though I’ve forgotten what some of them are). The framing device is a description of the stages of decomposition of the unnamed protagonist’s body as he lies in his London...