Isola di San Giulio, Lago d'Orta

Lago d’Orta is one of the smaller of the Italian lakes, scooped out by a retreating glacier beside the better known Lago Maggiore. The town of Orta San Giulio, perched at the end of its peninsula on the eastern shore, faces a tiny picturesque island. For the eleventh year, lake, town and island have hosted a festival of English poetry. The patron is the current Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, Poetessa della Corte Inglese, as the programme rather grandly puts it. Present too is Gillian Clarke, Poeta Nazionale Gallese – national poet of Wales. The organiser is Gabriel Griffin, who resides on the island, and who has assembled a motor-launch full of poets from all corners of the world. There ought to be a collective noun for poets: a posse, a pod, a pride of poets? The weekend includes readings, an impromptu jaunt around the Sacro Monte, a Franciscan complex of chapels overlooking the town, and the kind of elevated feasting that occurs whenever hungry poets get together. There could not be a more beautiful place in which to to assemble the muses.

Poetry in lights

On opening night, at the excellent Ristorante Imbarcadero, after the raspberry-drenched panna cotta, a notice from the local police catches my eye. It informs us of the slim possibility a satellite fragment might land in il nostro paese. We are advised to stay indoors between 21.25 and 22.03 and not to approach any strange flying objects – di non raccogogliere o manipolare eventuali frammenti rinvenuti… But the stars are out, the low-slung motorboats make their way to the island, and nothing falls from the heavens except the poetry of the occasion.

Hortus Conclusus: enclosed garden, from the Song of Solomon 4:12: "Hortus conclusus soror mea, sponsa, hortus conclusus, fons signatus..." (A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up.)

Nobel Laureate Samuel Beckett, Nabeul, Tunisia, 26 October 1969

I picked up two interesting photos in a small gallery in Arles this summer. The photo of Samuel Beckett is an original from the Agence France Presse, taken in a hotel in Nabeul, a small port north of Tunis, where Beckett was tracked down when it was announced that he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969. The typed attribution note attached to the photo, in French, goes on to say that Beckett had studiously avoided all contact with the press and only consented to speak in the company of his editor at Éditions de Minuit, Jerôme Lindon. Photographed Saturday evening at Beckett’s hotel in Nabeul, a town famous for its pottery, 26 October 1969.

Francis Bataille, Espagne 1967

This second photo is by a photographer who is new to me. Francis Bataille also goes by the name of Schklowski. He is an American who spent much of the Sixties and Seventies in Europe, whose work has been collected in the National Archives in France. Beyond that I don’t know very much about him. The split focus of the photo, the way light differs quite radically between the upper and lower half of the composition, the mix of old streetwise Europe and Groucho Marx Hollywood are what draw me to it.