Mimi Khalvati

Mimi Khalvati
The Heart's Alphabet
Following the trajectory of four poetry collections, from In White Ink to The Chine, I would like to trace the impact of my experience of early migration on the nature of my work, and chart its mainstays and changes. Having been sent to boarding school in England as a young child, with the subsequent loss of my first language, and having lived most of my adult life in England, I will particularly focus on aspects of memory and language that inform my writing.
The lyric poem has offered me an ideal vehicle in that it demands no narrative, no sense of personal history, but offers instead a timeless space in which to express desire, longing, and to capture the present moment, beyond the bounds of bad memory. In my work I try to listen to the silence and to hear in it the heart's alphabet: what is it one knows that may be forgotten, or not yet discovered? What are the words one recites not by memory, but by heart? And how do they echo in one's own language?
I shall attempt to show how I position myself within the English poetic tradition, while bringing to it an underlying Iranian sensibility. Drawing on work written over the last 15 years, I shall also read key poems that may convey what I have to say better in verse than in prose.