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.

Viking Ship Museum

Burial Mound

There has been a ship on the rim of the horizon all morning. The crowds have gathered; some moan, others stand silent. As the sun starts to drop towards the waterline, a group of men row out towards the bobbing wreck. There is disquiet among the spectators, the ship is in rags, wraith-like against the dying light. It will soon cross over.

Creative response to the Viking Ship Museum

Bygdøy Peninsular, Tuesday 28th October 2014

Last week I visited Oslo. It’s my third visit to Norway’s capital since a close friend took up residence there. One of the ways I justified taking time out of my university reading week was by visiting the Viking Ship Museum. Since reading the Prose Edda I have been absorbed by the sagas and the people who wrote them, so we trekked out to the pretty Bygdøy peninsular thumbing the Oslo Fjord. The ships are housed in a cruciform building. As you walk inside, you're taken aback by the immediacy and the enormity of the Oseberg burial ship. It looms over you as you buy your ticket.

The cross shape acts as four antechambers containing the three Viking burial ships (Oseberg, Gokstad and Tune) and much of the content discovered inside them.

Oseberg Ship 

The Oseberg ship is housed in the nave of the building and has an ornate bow and stern and images of sea-serpents carved into the main body. The Gokstad ship and the remains of the two larger vessels live in the north transept, the Tune ship and three smaller craft in the chancel, and the sledges, various textiles and other artefacts in the south transept. There are long galleries for people to see inside all three ships. The space has an acoustic, that invokes the song-like metre of the Norwegian language. 

The museum has preserved sledges, ornate bridals, boots, buckets for blueberries, troughs for rye flour and cooking equipment that were buried with the occupants of the ships. The peacock feathers and the boots were the most surprising and intriguing of the archaeological finds. 

The museum made no secret of the fact that many of the archaeological finds discovered in the Oseberg dig are endangered due to the original conservation method of using hot alum. They are finely varnished on the outside and rotting on the inside. There's an article on the Viking Ship Museum website if you're interested called Can the Oseberg Viking finds be Saved? It would be sad to see these last material links to Viking culture disintegrate. 

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first five photographs by Ka Man Mak

A Shell to the Ear

I recently had the opportunity to go to the North Cornwall Book Festival as part of a group of journalists. There are a lot of book festivals springing up at the moment, this one is only in it's second year and subsequently has an intimate feel to it. I wrote my article in the children's play room, amid a chaos of toys and books. Throughout the day the family and their literary guests rambled in and out of the kitchen opposite the makeshift news room.  

I had the job of filing a report on a poetry reading by Lavinia Greenlaw. Greenlaw's book about William Morris's Icelandic journals is a much-loved volume called Questions of Travel. 

If you would like to read my contribution you can find it on the SWJFalmouth, North Cornwall Book Festival blog; Like Lime Through Feathers.

Norroway Over The Foam

Recently, I stumbled across this queer little travel account of Norway from the Peeps at Many Lands series. I found it in the second hand bookshop hidden away in the Lanhydrock stable block. I was attracted by the Norway connection and pulled it out not expecting much. However, I was charmed by the cover, so I flicked through and discovered that there were lots of illustrated plates among some entertainingly colonial prose by A.F. Mockler-Ferryman. The landscapes are more skilfully drawn but there’s something strangely crude and engrossing in the pictures of people.

 They're by Nico Jungman who was a popular Anglo-Dutch painter at the turn of the 19^th/20^th Century. He was also involved in another book called Norway, a longer work written by his wife Beatrice and illustrated by himself. There’s a wonderful image of Jungman painting in the first chapter. This paragraph encapsulates a brilliant reflection of adoration and irony for her artist husband. 

"In Trondhjem it rained all day and all night, and the inhabitants cheerfully told us that it was always so. Nico, however, painted in the rain, enveloped in mackintoshes and encompassed by umbrellas, and was much disgusted to find that he attracted no attention at all. Accustomed as I am to be an object of inquisitive interest to the inhabitants of small Dutch towns, I was rather relieved to be taken so absolutely for granted in Norway, in spots unfrequented even by ardent fishermen."*

I’d love to find a copy. Both books are available at Project Gutenberg with all the illustrations.

These are a handful of my favourite Jungman illustrations. They’re strange works, relying heavily on the contemporary trend of Volks art.  I think the writing and the art offer an interesting insight into the outsider dilemma that people documenting foreign lands face. How do you avoid cliché and generalisation when looking, so briefly, into the snow globe?  

*Norway, Beatrice Jungman, 1905, Project Gutenberg 

Jim Causley’s Cyprus Well at Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival

The presence of a folk singer at a poetry festival might raise a conservative eyebrow or two but for me it was a good and happy moment, one well worth making the journey onto the moor. I was especially pleased, as a Folkster, to finally see Jim Causley live. There was a happy atmosphere among the small but comfortable crowd. It was the last evening of the Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival and Causley played material from his new album Cyprus Well. The album is a selection of Charles Causley poems set to music by Jim Causley, a distant relative of the poet.

The album’s premise and process was described with charm, and you felt an eager participant in the music. Jim Causley’s introductions to the songs were generous and allowed unfamiliar names or phrases to become accessible to people who may not have known the poems or the poet’s life. He regaled us with what it was like to live and collaborate in Charles Causley’s house in Launceston, Cyprus Well, where the album was recorded on Causley’s un-tuned piano. The image of the folk musicians inhabiting Cyprus Well, which has been empty for ten years, is a beguiling one. In particular, I enjoyed the idea of singer Julie Murphy capturing Launceston church bells and surrounding bird song on her phone. This sound effect opens the song ‘Angel Hill’ and is an interesting added layer of understanding.

Many of Charles Causley’s poems were written in ballad form and are perfect for being converted into folk songs. Their upbeat rhythms and recurring choruses give a bouncy jollity to ambiguous lyrics. There are several examples of this in folk music; ruined maids abandoned by roguish lovers (Ramble Away) and men waiting for the hangman (Prickleye Bush)  are usually accompanied by upbeat rhythms and sing-along choruses. In the pop world, the likes of Belle and Sebastian and Beautiful South have a similarly bathetic style. You’ll be tapping along, oblivious, until you catch just a snippet of the story. 

Jim Causley’s musical settings bring a fresh insight to a poet who is both well-known and under-appreciated.  Jim Causley’s lower register has a depth and richness worthy of our surrounding moorland. He and his musical partner, Lukas Drinkwater, bantered and engaged with the audience. There’s a rare kindness present in the elder Causley and perpetuated by the younger. Eloquent and warm, Jim Causley was excellent company for the evening.

Try and catch Jim and Lukas sometime this year if you can, it’s something really special live.  

Images from Jim Causley's official website.

The Attic

I no longer feel at home in my parent's house. The curves of the new facade and balustrade are unfamiliar.  My old room at the top of the house seems closer, the ceilings lower; foreign boxes have started to creep across the lines. The space is halved and things left behind are now piled and ignored in the furthest corner. There’s a bed neatly made, waiting for guests, and my old chest; the drawers full of secrets, rejected then hoarded, netted penance dragged above the waterfall. The other corner is full of boxes of books and a rack of polythene-sealed coats.    

      I sit below the skylight, a kitten scratching the fraying fibres of my jumper. I push her away and pull out a pine drawer stuffed full of old notebooks, poems that rhyme, stories that don’t end or end too soon in a misty swoon. The drawer below reveals another relic; a red ponytail, curled up like a weasel on a bed of moth-eaten, canary-yellow dress. I touch the hair and wonder what made me keep such an item. The pressure of my fingertips begins to unbind the hair from its elastic band and they start to split like little electric copper wires. I close the drawer.
     Under the bed is a world of shoes and photographs; old shoes with bitten soles, curling laces and ripped fabric and albums of faces, landscapes, rabbit hutches hidden in paper and plastic cases. It’s dusty under the bed so I pull open the sky light and let the room fill with the sound of bird song and motorway ballad.
     Along the outside of my room are two antechambers. Behind the prefab walls are more things, older relics- sewing machines, cuddly toys, dinner services- waiting like an impatient mother-in-law to find a new purpose, a reprisal of their original form. Then the husk of a wasp nest, perfectly preserved in a chemical death.
     It seems fitting that not only is the room full of my cast-offs but also the strange un-keepings of several generations; familial clutter and inherited sentiment. Objects abandoned by death and emigration. The only thing of real value to me is the glossy painted Russian doll that reminds me of my grandmother. She has the same black hair and kindly smile.

That endless entity has long since been appropriated to a glass cabinet downstairs. The hope is that feeling and memory can be caught between glass panes but her embroidered scarf and pretty painted face conceal the impenetrable kernel within.

Punk God Rowing Towards God

The Punk God Rowing Toward Prayer

6^th floor Mordovia, I’m being moved, don’t know where.
All I see is hospital lights. The glare above.
Blood trickling down my left leg.
This isn’t what happens.
Somewhere between me and the lights are two guards,
one smoking, dropping ash that I cannot feel as it burns away my clothes.

“Dad? Dad?”
My grandmother appears with an icebox.
“This is God’s, love, he might need it back.”
I try to reach up for it. What would He need it for? I don’t ask. She’s always right.
Rasping, writhing, reaching up for the divine icebox.
“Fool.”
“Not good for PR this”
Fool.

I’m being moved, and I don’t know where.
I don’t know where and I don’t know who knows.
My legs are stained – blood - more is coming.
The hospital lights have intensified and Grandma’s gone.
The baby’s dissolving, they say; whatever you took worked.
I didn’t take anything.
It wasn’t there yesterday.

The dog gave us fire.  Some of us feed our families by the flame and others feed

our families to God.

6^th floor Mordovia, the screaming one has gone.
Lying on a hospital bed, drip leads,
icebox at the end of the bed.
I’m being moved and I don’t know where.

Lists of the persecuted, found all over the world. Monuments built.

But we keep on burning.

The prison hygiene room is overflowing with the flood water.
All have been moved to the sixth floor.
No feet to get wet!
They can’t cope with the disease.
Tight budgets.
A woman with her fingers sewn together and buttons for eyes
smiles down at me. Her over-locked fingers playing a tune, it’s hard to catch every note she strikes when there is no piano.

 “Prometheus’s hygiene isn’t up for question,
when he’s free, he’ll light the cod fish that
jump in his face with his teeth, spilling angry red blood.”

My love, my love, my love.

Song singing somewhere.

The hygiene room is closed, so none of us are hygienic.
We all stand in the 6^th floor corridor waiting to be fed.
If the floods keep rising we’ll have to move to the 8^th. There is no 7^th.
It got washed away.              

My legs are blood-stained in the hospital.
No one bothers to clean them.                       
Nausea strains against this swaddling coyote skin.
Why won’t they wash me?

            Give the fire back dog! Or I’ll tell God what you’ve done.

They don’t know what I mean.
They’ve hidden it.
The guard says, “There never was no baby!”
He’s dissolved. They took my freedom and now they’ve taken the baby!
“You just take that Icebox, lovey, and we’ll see what happens”

Grandma wearing her
Youth cap. “It’s the Fire-god month.” She sings, words drizzling from her bloated mouth.

The screaming one has gone again.
I’m in the trenches with the soldiers. The freezing soldiers,
wrapped in thinning issue blankets. They’re waiting for the Germans.
I can see how their livers are puckered with alcohol and frostbite.
I can see their burned-out boiled egg hearts, melting with the fire-snow.
One of them shouts at me, snow in his moustache.
“No women, no women!”

You can’t hide in the memorials, they can still see you from every which-way angle.

The prisoners are dancing in the corridors, their sewn-through fingers moving lithely, intertwined
with the hidden music. They’re wearing rabbit masks
and they’re happy. Happy, like when we picked through all the
mouldy potatoes and had to scratch the starch out from under our skin. Our rabbit faces
bleeding into our gruel.
                                                                                    The rabbit didn’t catch the fire, it set
                                                                                    its tail on fire.
                                                            That’s why its tip is frazzled.
          .                                That’s what Grandma said anyway, through a mouth full of pins.               

“Here, have this,” says the pin-mouthed demon, “It’s your baby.”
I cradle my leg and weep for joy.
The rabbit faces all gathering around and cooing.
“It’s your baby, it’s your baby.” They moon chant.
Little longing; my leg swathed in the amputee’s bloodied cloth.

The Guards push through the rabbit faces who complain in quiet whispers and disappear holding their noses, frightened, shamed, off to their flooded burrows.                        

Dad died with a rabbit face too.
His body all crinkled with fear and pain, all the life in him swollen and still.
Limp whiskers. God for God. Boiling labour.
They stripped him naked and threw him in the burrow.
Is that the way the baby died too?                                                                

The first three stanzas appeared in With 21, edited by Rupert Loydell