ONWARD

A new month always feels like a clean page, full of promise and possibility.  The start of February coincides with Imbolc and Candlemas and is all about new beginnings.  Halfway between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox, this traditional Celtic festival marks the beginning of spring and asks us to celebrate Brigid (‘the goddess whom poets adored’) with fire, food, candles and song.  The snowdrops are in bloom and no other flower embodies the sense of hope more than these flowers, usually the first to appear in our gardens and woodlands, lighting the way at the end of a long dark winter.  In our current situation, kept close to home, peering out at an uncertain future, we feel the need to welcome the light more than ever.

This cross-quarter day feels an auspicious beginning for the next phase of Writing the Climate, an extension to my Climate Residency with New Writing North and Newcastle University.  I am delighted (and relieved) to have been awarded an Arts Council Heritage Lottery Grant to help support another two years of work in the community and on my own writing.  Last year we initiated various heartwarming and fruitful projects, laying the foundations for more ways to connect around writing about the Climate Crisis and telling the truth about where we find ourselves.  This year, all being well, the postponed COP 26 meeting will be held in Glasgow in November, providing us all with an opportunity to raise awareness of the pressing need to keep climate adaptation and mitigation on the agenda, at the front of our hearts and minds.

Soon after my Residency began last January I was invited to read at a Festival in Casablanca.  Despite my intention not to fly that year, I found it very difficult to say no.  Like so many of us, I love to travel and longed to spend some time in that fabled city.  It was hard to live with my own torn feelings of ambivalence and guilt.  As it’s turned out, the pandemic has helped me keep my compact not to fly and has tainted its appeal in all sorts of ways.  Still, it’s strange to think there are some places I may never now see or return to in my lifetime.

I wrote about my flight shame – the Swedish term Flygskam, perhaps better translated as flight conscience – in one of the first poems I wrote while thinking about how to approach writing about Climate. Whether we choose to fly or not, most of us in the West are deeply implicated in damaging and escalating fossil-fuel related carbon emissions.

Flygskam

At the bottom of my itinerary it says 

FLIGHT(S) CALCULATED AVERAGE CO2 EMISSIONS 

IS 546.44 KG/PERSON.

I am that PERSON

and I don’t know what 546.44 KG AVERAGE CO2 EMISSIONS are.

I envisage them as a toxic cloud, speckled with charcoal dust,

sense the sky-wide weight of it on my back.

I carry the burden of Atlas, hero, victim, martyr.

If I touched it, it would be cold, 

smelling faintly of gas, as if I’d forgotten to turn the cooker off 

after boiling milk for my morning coffee.

The milk spills.  

The blue flame gutters and goes out.

The gas leaks.  

The coffee’s travelled from South America.  

I sit and drink it in my kitchen in Northumberland.

The gas is syphoned from a tank in my garden

I’m trying to disguise by growing a hedge of hawthorn 

and willow, the grass in front frilled with snowdrops.

Three times a year a tanker comes to fill it up.

The pipe makes a sound between humming and hissing,

a long black poisonous snake

slithering through the gate across the lawn.

A few weeks later I get a bill for more than I can afford.

It’s February.  The old stone house is freezing 

with the heating turned off.

I sip my coffee, read my flight itinerary and look it up:

546.44kg of CO2 is more than half of all the emissions

the worker on a coffee plantation in Colombia 

would produce in a year.

A white winged thing thrashes 

through the cloud in my chest,

struggles to fly free.

I’m still thinking about how to approach writing about climate.  I’m not sure I’ll ever come up with any definitive answers  – writing about climate is writing about the very fact of life itself – but the work is in the doing, the living, and watching it all unfold.  Active hope plays an important part – what poet Adrienne Rich called the ‘art of the possible’.  Tomorrow, for Imbolc, I’m leading a workshop for Hexham Book Festival – Writing into the Light – where we’ll be exploring how to make hope realistic but bright in our poetry.  There may still be a few places left if that’s something you like the sound of.

Creative imagination’s promise is that resilience is always available. We turn toward poems in loss or despair, toward their writing or their reading, because even poems that face darkness carry the beauty and resilience of original seeing. A good poem is possibility’s presence made visible. That restoration of faith in continuance is something we need. 

Jane Hirshfield, Interview in Columbia Journal, March 2020

In Paris in 1968 protesters held up placards saying 

Forget everything you’ve been taught.  Start by dreaming.

Imagination is not a luxury!

Be realistic, demand the impossible.

In the wintriest winter for many years, February begins with a real sense of possibility – as I write this the light is streaming in through the window and that always helps.  I feel very encouraged by a mood in the air that people have had enough, they know change is necessary and are ready for it.  The page is not exactly ‘clean’ but we can write over it and make a new stratigraphy, a palimpsest (like artist Edmund de Waal in his library of exile and on Radio 4’s Front Row).  

All our intentions and voices together will help create the tipping point, the critical mass we need to make the future more sustainable.  This is the spirit of Murmuration, the collective poem project I initiated as part of my Residency last year – so happy to see it highlighted by Maria Popova on her always illuminating Brainpickings site.  Kate Sweeney’s beautiful animated filmpoem has already had over four and a half thousand views on YouTube and that’s apart from those who’ve watched it via Durham Book Festival, and now on Maria’s ‘inventory of the meaningful life’ and shares on Facebook. There are many more than we can count. Poetry, like hope, is contagious – it flies long distances.  I’m looking forward to seeing what this year’s flocking brings.

Neither Lion nor Lamb

March

 

what light there is

filtered through the fan

of their feathers

 

the spine, pale and articulate,

of a fox or a hare

 

punctuated equilibrium –

how earth evolves

in sudden ruptures

 

the sputnik graphic

alarmingly crimson

 

someone gets there

before me – liberating

the abandoned bicycle

 

in the open field of the day

plovers calling

 

the room full

of winter

it’s never been as warm

 

neat white flowers

of the barren strawberry

 

if a thousand people

look at the moon

there are a thousand moons

 

what I tell the bees

is between me and the bees

 

everyone stockpiling

against worst-case-scenario pain:

paracetamol, ibuprofen, codeine

 

the colour of persimmons

a new charity shop jumper

 

bags packed

last minute change of plan

staying put

 

the swift narrow rowboat

Truant Muse in cursive script

 

half going one way, half another,

trying to give myself away

to inexactitude

 

stay in touch

she says, not touching

 

bringing home snowdrops

a small handful

of lingering hope

 

a woman in a mask comes

to measure my per cubic foot energy

 

wild garlic tart

as much for the soothe of making

as the savour of eating

 

Spring Equinox: I am a tilting cup

a tremulous star

 

warcabinetspeak

lockdown, self-isolation

linguistic distancing

 

never has a daffodil

looked more beautiful

 

the pilgrimage

of these days

becoming the path

 

two long-tailed tits

among the apple buds

 

my son comes home

we dance around each other

nothing is familiar

 

clapping the NHS

under a canopy of stars

 

a hedgehog emerges

from hibernation

leaves its traces

 

our prayer flags unfurl

as the chill wind blows

 

two pine logs and a plank

a new bench

for absent friends

 

in my sleep I steal back

yesterday’s lost hour

 

star of Bethlehem

hiding its pale light

among what the flood washed up

 

 

The first image is a gogotte – a natural rock formation from the Paris Basin, 33 – 28 million years old (Natural History Museum).  The second, ancient and new, frogspawn in our pond.

Pennycress, Willowherb

Because it was a sunny day and I’d just missed my connection – watching powerless as my homebound train pulled out of the station without me (always painful, much worse than missing it by ten or even five minutes) – I walked on to the end of the platform where sun struck stone paving unimpeded by canopies or walls. A row of advertising boards, brash inducements to buy the latest ‘Number 1 Crime’ books, each with their own moody picture, intimating the gruesome and forensic, gradually petered out. I was happier looking at the stone underfoot, the grid of moulded rectangles harbouring sweet green creases of moss the further along I walked.

A tiny pennycress grew out of nothing, no visible earth, valiant among the coming and going of trains with their strident livery and their harried passengers, noses in novels, fingertips stroking screens, ears plugged against the outside world – I knew this because I’d just been one of them.

At the very end the platform sloped gently down until it met grey-blue clinker. I could see some plants with red leaves growing among it, sturdy against the sharp stones. Deep-veined, prolific, possibly a willowherb. I ambled slowly down the ramp scanning for any other plant life that might be thriving in this apparently inhospitable setting. The toothed leaves of an unfamiliar thistle wrapped themselves around a discarded bolt, rusty and large enough to be missed.

I eased the rucksack off my shoulders and placed it on the ground at my feet; knelt to look more closely and touch the veined leaves I’d seen from a distance, fiery in the sunlight that warmed my face and shoulders after such a very long winter, cramped and flowerless.

I dug in the pocket of the rucksack for my camera to take a picture in the afternoon light, all the lovelier for coming unannounced, unexpected. I crouched down again to focus close enough to catch these low-to-the-ground, unostentatious plants.

Come away from there, now, step away, step away.   Please return to the platform.

A loud voice, with worry in it, a man’s. I lifted my head to see a bearded young man in a lilac uniform carrying a walkie-talkie. He repeated his instructions as if it were a matter of life and death, staying at the top of the ramp some distance from me. Until proven innocent, clearly I was dangerous.

Come up now, come back to the platform.

Another man, shorter, navy blue jumper, stood beside the first, twitching slightly. If he’d had a gun, he’d have his finger on the trigger. I could tell how much it cost him to say nothing. The tremor in his shoulders gave him away.

I had a choice: to argue the toss and claim my freedom as a citizen, my fundamental right to look at plants in the sunshine while waiting for a train; or simply let it go and reassure them – for I could see they were anxious about something and were in dire need of reassurance – that I wasn’t a terrorist, or suicidal, or a flagrant destroyer of railway property.  Though what they were reading into my grey hair and best black coat was a puzzle to me, a disguise impenetrable even to myself.

I’m just taking some photographs.

Forced to confess, it sounded like a crime. To persuade them it was true, the only sin I was committing was photography, I lifted up my camera and the shorter man started bobbing from foot to foot. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had told me to drop it and raise my hands above my head. 15.34, a Wednesday and Central Station was suddenly an action thriller. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for these men, looking down at me, chests puffed out – so keen to do their duty, or be seen to do their duty, on high alert where there was nothing to be alert about. How exhausting it must be to wear a lilac uniform, carry a walkie-talkie and suspect middle-aged women of unspeakable crimes, a threat to the common good and trains running on time.

I made my way up the ramp slowly, with dignity I hoped: the only way I could express my deep disappointment at such misdirection of human energy, a senselessness that seemed to becoming more and more familiar, not just to me but everyone I speak to. Resistance burned at the core of me, political, existential. The willowherb remained unphotographed.  Had it come to this – that a person was no longer able to look at flowers growing in a railway station when the weather coaxed them in that direction? Would it have been different if I was a man writing down the number of a passing train?

The two men looked disappointed too.  Perhaps that I’d proved such easy meat and offered no further opportunity for their heroics. The drama had come and gone too quickly. I wanted them to be embarrassed but no one apologised to anyone else. Not I, nor the men, who turned on their heels and scurried back towards the main body of the station, disappearing in the coolness of the shade.

Flower, Flower, Flower

Just returned home from a wonderful trip to Glasgow where there seemed to be flowers everywhere we went…

at the Tramway’s beautiful hidden gardens

and the lovely Botanics

in Kibble Palace

to this – my new collection!  Hooray!  Spring is here!

When the Clocks Go Forward…

…The Whole Place Goes Up

 

Today with Spring here finally we ought to be living

outdoors with our friends.

Let’s go to those strangers in the field

and dance around them like bees from flower to flower,

Building in the beehive air

our true hexagonal homes.

Someone comes in from the outside saying,

‘Don’t play music just for yourselves.’

Now we’re tearing up the house like a drum,

collapsing walls with our pounding.

We hear a voice from the sky calling our lovers

and the odd lost people. We scatter lives.

We break what holds us, each one a blacksmith

heating iron and walking to the anvil.

We blow on the inner fire.

With each striking we change.

The whole place goes up, all stability gone to smoke.

Sometimes high, sometimes low, we begin anywhere,

we have no method.

We’re the bat swung by powerful arms.

Balls keep rolling from us, thousands of them underfoot.

 

Now we’re still. Silence also is wisdom, a flame

hiding in cotton wool.

 

Rumi

 

 

Back at the Lake

as if the world could be different  – an avenue of budding branches

the upturned boat a sarcophagus for the corpse of winter

siestaing swans – necks wrapped across their backs

water’s gentle glissando as a man takes his reflection for a walk

a child’s drawing of flowers – bright celandines

on the island a female goosander shows off her elegant profile

inside this lake a smaller lake – patch of blue sky

who will teach me how to hold these incongruities?

small insects motes of dust tickling my face

this is what nothing looks like – liquid fullness

last year’s willowherb scrawny and bedraggled

the boardwalk a wooden snake winding nowhere

behind my eyes penicillin blue pomegranate red

planes of light glancing off the lake’s stillness

 

 

 

Dear March –

Dear March – Come in –

How glad I am –

I hoped for you before –

Put down your Hat –

You must have walked –

How out of Breath you are –

Dear March, how are you, and the Rest –

Did you leave Nature well –

Oh March, Come right upstairs with me –

I have so much to tell –

 

I got your Letter, and the Birds –

The Maples never knew that you were coming –

I declare – how Red their Faces grew –

But March, forgive me –

And all those Hills you left for me to Hue –

There was no Purple suitable –

You took it all with you –

Who knocks? That April –

Lock the Door –

I will not be pursued –

He stayed away a Year to call

When I am occupied –

But trifles look so trivial

As soon as you have come

 

That blame is just as dear as Praise

And Praise as mere as Blame –

 

Emily Dickinson

After two days thinking about Poetry, Creativity and Environment at last weekend’s symposium in the School of English at Leeds University, the idea that my mind keeps returning to is one suggested by Zoë Skoulding – ecological writing (and thinking) should always engage with the possibility of imagining something different, a radically altered viewpoint.

Her own practice enacts that process by taking ‘a deliberately skewed perspective’ to both time and place, walking in urban spaces and re-imagining them as if all the accretions of man-made city life were not there, acknowledging historical disjunctions and the impossibility of ‘accuracy’. She read from her wonderful sequence Teint, which charts the Biévre, one of Paris’s underground water courses.

Harriet Tarlo also spoke about her ‘writing outside’, the notion of fieldwork, both alone and in collaboration with artist Judith Tucker – their different disciplines coming together like Bunting’s ‘lines of sound drawn in the air’. Going out in a state of attentive awareness in search of ‘particulars’ and then undertaking a process of ‘condensation’ and ‘selection’, preferring to bypass ‘the lyrical I’ in any resulting text. It was good to hear Harriet quote her mentor in Durham, Ric Caddell: ‘To live here is not to escape’.

I was particularly happy to meet Madeleine Lee, a Leeds alumna like myself. She is a poet and an economist and recently Writer in Residence at Singapore Botanic Gardens, where I spent a fascinating and fruitful week en route to Sydney in 2013. She noticed that people were tending to sleepwalk through the gardens and wanted to draw attention to the environmental implications of their colonial history through poems about native ‘economic plants’ like rubber, nutmeg, clove and other spices, traditionally grown along Orchard Road, now the main shopping avenue. Through her writing she has become an ‘accidental advocate’ of green spaces, the remaining 5% of tropical rainforest on the island of Singapore.

No one was particularly interested in either the didactic/rhetorical or the elegiac/mourning modes of writing about the natural world. Generally these poets are bearing witness to land, place, plants and creatures, dismantling assumptions, risking ambiguity and uncertainty, taking a modernist, experimental stance. A lucid, appreciative interpretation of Jorie Graham’s Prayer (by post-graduate researcher Julia Tanner) reflected the weighing up of moral and ethical predicaments with ‘something instinctive’ in order to transform and ‘re-singularise’ that ‘problematic’ ‘I’ everyone was tiptoeing around so nervously. Although it was heartening to see it for a change, I wondered if the mood and emphasis would have been different if the panel were all-male rather than all-female, or a mixture? Another poet with a strong Leeds connection, Jon Silkin (as you can see from the photo) was also with us in spirit – and in Emma Trott’s paper on his Flower Poems.

Yesterday I walked out of the School of English onto Clarendon Road after my classes, delighted to see the magnolia buds stretching to release their deep pinks and to hear a lone great tit playing the xylophone of its throat – notes going up, notes going down. Encountering poetry and creativity at its most vivid, spontaneous and inescapable out of doors.

 

 

New Shoots

For some reason the rabbits seem to be letting my spring bulbs alone this year.  I’d planted everything in pots for easy removal if necessary but, touch wood, no sign of damage so far.  It’s very heartening to see some colour up here after our long subdued winter.  And the sunshine these past few days has softened the blow of returning from Rome and missing its irrepressible light and crumbling grandeur – an unequivocal primavera.

Some bright new things to let you know about – a couple of readings and a new digital publication.

On Thursday 30th April at 1pm I will be reading from another wild at the Robinson Gay Gallery in Hexham for the Book Festival.  My collaborator, the artist Birtley Aris, will be there and Sue Dunne will be playing the Northumbrian pipes.  The Gallery will be showing some of Birtley’s original drawings for the book.

At Burnlaw Centre in Whitfield, near Allendale, on Friday 1st May, three of us will be reading from and talking about our new books connected with the land – Malcolm Green, Peter Please and myself.  It starts at 7.30pm and it is rumoured there will be copious quantities of tea and cake.

Mslexia magazine have just launched the first in a new series of e-books.  Poetic Forms is a revised and extended collection of a sequence of articles on the crafting of fixed forms commissioned back when the magazine started in the late 1990s.  A lot of people have told me how useful they’ve found these pieces and I have continued to use them in workshops and tutorials so I’d definitely recommend you download a copy if you’re at all interested.  A second e-book based on my First Principles series will be available next month.  You can find out more here.

Da Roma Con Amore

I began to attach myself by so much looking.  Here I was, centred.

Knowledge of Rome must be physical, sweated into the system, worked up into the brain through thinning shoe leather.  Substantiality comes through touch and smell, and taste, the tastes of different dusts.  When it comes to knowing, the senses are more honest than the intelligence.

Seeing is pleasure, but not knowledge.

From A Time in Rome by Elizabeth Bowen, 1959.

The S Word

 

The S Word

 

The cups and frills of tête-à-têtes

at my door only make me want

more. Deeper. Longer. Your eyes

full of looking. That sweetness

in the light piques my appetite;

a lick of salt, sap knocked back

in a shot glass. Didn’t we both clock

the pussy willow at the same time?

*

I wrap your scent around me

like a shawl, walk out into the stretch

of a lost afternoon, to the tune

of ipod-shuffled finches, Larkin’s

stutter. Your F sharp charm, here

and away, the wink of your eye.