Rills/Rills/Rills

Recently, I went on a workshop that worked both as a creative writing exercise and as an introduction to the Cornish miner poet John Harris. It was an interesting day that took in the green skirts of an area dedicated to the mining industry.

We visited the ruins of St Ia where sycamores had replaced roof beams and a fire-pit and deckchair marked the small nave and altar, ivy had dappled the outside walls with its own unique language play, a tale of reclamation:

We then wandered the woods, seeking a more minimal response to the area that inspired Harris's flowery late Romantic prose. I lay on a quilt of pine-needles, light falling through striated branches of evergreen growing tall and then leafy. I thought about transpiration while my @Sunbeatsco partner in poetry crime wrote a concrete response to the moment:

Anna Cathenka, 'Ha Ha'. @annacathenka 

Later on, after passionately defending minimalism and sound poetry to a group of bewildered first year creative writing students, I wrote a minimalist response in the style of Robert Lax:

Twigs
beads
flowers
meads

tangled
rustling
sweeping

winds
havoc
red
dust

(words taken from John Harris's Monro)




It's important that we read and study authors such as Harris. Writing becomes immediate, something that is not set above us but part of our evolution and necessary response to our experiences of the world.

Harris's poetry provoked different responses. I found his situation as a miner and the few snatched moments of ecstatic elegy to the natural world easy to appreciate, and felt empathy with the conditions from which he fought hard to elevate himself and his family. Certainly from an academic viewpoint there is a wealth of critical and theoretical work to be done on Harris's writing. It was good to see English students interacting with the poetry and the history.

I found it interesting that Harris's poetry was famed for his peasant's voice. Several contemporary reviews praised his simplicity, but he was devoted to Romanticism and often adopted the dominant voice of the Romantic, which was the voice of the high born conqueror. That is, the language of the people who created the dangerous and tough conditions in which Harris and his fellow miners worked and lived. Instead of the cracked and exploited earth of mid-Cornwall, we have rills of all-manner of things, plump milk maids and the solitary peasant genius noting it all down, ecstatically praising the merits of woods and groves. This strangely foreign, German pastoral imagery reads like wilted Goethe set among the tin mines of the Camborne area.

Nerve Damage

I have a poem in the recently published anthology Nerve Damage; an collection of poetic responses to Joel-Peter Witkin's image The Poet edited by Rupert Loydell.

I'm delighted to feature alongside poets such as Carrie Etter, David Grubb, Martin Stannard and Robert Sheppard as well as everyone else. A really interesting spoon-eyed mix of people.

You can buy the anthology by sending a cheque for £5 (or $10 if in US) payble to 'R.M. Loydell' at Stride, 4B Tremayne Close, Devoran, Cornwall, TR3 6QE, England.

to the Bees

BIRDS, a poem

materials: elderberries on metal manhole cover canvas

Penryn Campus, October 2015

The Flannelled Flâneur #1

My voyage began in the afternoon...

 

dressed     for bed

a stroll to the desk

              and back

           to the desk
              and back

now to the window

litter the garden

leave the cat

curled hot

water bottle
 

and the clock
turned back
for day light
saving
follow

 

the wisp
into dusk

along field

partition 

down the valley
 

past the willows
ash and oak

                first  "shhh"

          shhh comes before
           the pheasant takes
                     off and flies
                              away
and over fence

and the breeze
of land agents
and haunted
houses above
the copse

the leaf face
jagged

and the whistle

 

of Tregeagle
emerging from

undergrowth

his tongue
in knots
of bindweed
his owner
calling him

 

 

 

through thicket
to where
the children
would swim

before
the world

was changed
in a single

viewing

 

the

pool half-found

in the
half-light...

http://flanneledflaneur.blogspot.co.uk/

The Wardrobe

Over the last six months I’ve been setting up an online project called The Wardrobe. It’s a pop-up magazine consisting of six online issues and, eventually, a printed anthology.
I’m really happy to announce that at the beginning of the month we published the first online issue of The Wardrobe. The first issue features poetry from Sarah James, Sara Nesbitt Gibbons and Anna Cathenka and a creative essay by Milla Prince.

Here's my editorial for the first issue:

Our first steps into The Wardrobe, the furs fondling our shoulders, and then the open plains. Here we must build our own fortresses. We hide and then find ourselves in clothes, using them to cover our nakedness. Gradually, over millennia we have emerged from the shadow of the forest, a wooden casket and we cover our nakedness, and that of the land, with clothes. Fallen leaves, remnants of the past flooding our identity.
In this first issue of The Wardrobe, insecurities jostle with mythical musings. Only in sickness, melancholy and the closeness of companionship do we allow our vulnerability to be expressed in flesh rather than the carefully constructed seams and panels of clothes. Whether it’s the jumble of the youth hostel washroom, the undressing of a lover, the nurture of a parent or grandparent or the protective seal of a red riding hood, clothes tell stories.

If you’re interested in contributing then have a look at the first issue and the submission/about pages to get an idea of what we like. We're also on twitter @wardrobelit.

Trees Hold All The Stories

It’s about time I posted again. I’ve been working on a review the last few weeks but essay deadlines have made it difficult to work on it solidly. In the wake of submission dates, I was distracted by a post from one of my favourite bloggers, The Girl Who Married A Bear. It was about feminism and I just wanted to add some thoughts and to write about a poet I've recently been reading.
    I think one of the best ways to come to feminism is not to be afraid of it. In the conservative village I grew up in, my parents’ house seemed an enclave of radicalism. I was sheltered by their socially liberal ideas. For them, it didn't matter whether I wanted to craft with my grandmother, go to ballet classes or sit on the benches of the under ten football team. I could do all of these things. I was encouraged to read books and show an active interest in world events. I was equal in the eyes of my parents. The language of feminism was already deeply engrained in me. However, in my late teens I became averse to the word feminist. I found it difficult to equate how I felt about my own ideas of freedom and the violent determination of previous generations. The word seemed unnecessary. In the academic environment, feminism was widely seen as a truism. I have come to appreciate that the acceptance of ideas and the practise of them are not necessarily companions. Our culture is founded on patriarchy, it takes time to make the fundamental changes needed for equality. 
     I’ve become more attached to the word through a clearer understanding of the tradition and the fight. The flourishes of language that feminism can make possible is truly worthwhile. Another reason I felt I needed to contribute to the conversation was because I was truly astounded to discover that I was in a tiny minority of women in my seminar group who whole heartedly embraced the ideas of feminism. A great deal of the trouble was caused by confusion about what it actually meant to be a feminist. After some explanation, people were still divided and one student told me that feminism was simply “chicks being angry about their own inadequacy, looking for someone to blame.” Some of the girls shared the opinion that there was no need for feminism anymore. One girl, resigned, announced that women would never be equal and she didn’t see why she should be unhappy trying to make them so. I suppose this nihilism can be, to a degree, understood in the face of the imprisonment of the two Pussy Riot members and the current regressive attitudes from governments all over the world. I hope that something happens between now and the age of 26 for my classmates who stood against feminism.
     Feminism has become fragmented, like woman-ness. There is no sticking definition of what is woman, not even biological when we consider transgender. In this fragmented form, the pieces of what make us female can collide to create new hybrids of feminisms, which are constantly evolving.
     The poet Gloria Anzaldua is described as Chicana Lesbian Feminist Literature. Feminists can run the risk of becoming insular in their struggle, ignoring other plights. This was a charge directed at the Suffragette movement. Many at the time saw that these women were fighting for a very narrow stream of woman-kind, a cultural elite set apart by private education and private incomes. The sturdier and longer-lived suffrage movement, also fragmented, stood for universal suffrage.
     Anzaldua’s poetry is all of those things, but also something more. In her interview in the anthology of Innovative Women Writers she talks about extending oneself into the world and relates to the interviewer’s experience of talking to a tree and needing that dialogue to be open during times of creativity. Otherwise that creativity dries up. Anzaldua draws a brilliant balance between acknowledging that the tree is a pathway to the interviewer's creativity and discussing the possibility that the tree is in fact a different entity, she then goes on to wonder whether the tree is an extension of the woman's self and that the body of the tree and the mind of the writer are interconnected.
     Whether you believe any of that, you’ve got to admire the way she thinks, embracing all possibility and being willing to talk about it constructively.  There is a wonderful poem, called Interface, about an ethereal creature that wills herself into flesh:

What does it feel like, she asked
               to inhabit flesh,
wear blood like threads
              constantly running?*

The word feminist is important because it reminds us of the struggle and should deter us from taking regressive steps. Feminisms should be allowing us to express our gender freely, not confining us to one particular idea of woman. Freedom of mind and body are the basic rights we should be fighting for. For all.

I’m going to leave you with one of my favourite stanzas from the poem Del Otro Lado:

She looks at the Border Park fence
posts are stuck into her throat, her navel,
barbwire is shoved up her cunt.
Her body torn in two, half a woman on the other side
half a woman on this side, the right side
and she went to the North American university,
excelled in the Gringo’s tongue
learned to file in folders.
But she remembered the other half
strangled in Aztec villages, in Mayan villages, in Incan villages.*

I’ll probably write more about Anzaldua at a later stage. She’s really piqued my interest. I’m still learning but feminism and women writing is definitely going to be a recurrent theme.  

 

  

Ygdrasil watches over the valley

* Both extracts are from Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews ed. by Elizabeth A. Frist and Cynthia Hogue (USA: University of Iowa Press, 2006)