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

Inside the Cacophany

In an academic environment increasingly dependent on the goodwill of a reluctant government I couldn't help feeling it was apt to share this extract from Charles Bernstein's The Consequence of Innovation. The chapter is on the nature of poetics and is an interesting read. Even if it's not something you want to do a degree in,  liberal arts and humanities are likely to be something that you have at some point in your life actively engaged in. They allow us to explore beyond our material self, think critically and engage with the world and become part of a universal discourse. Successive governments haven't wanted the majority to be a part of that discourse so they have done their best to cripple arts funding and teaching. 

 “The greatest benefit of the university is not that it trains students for anything in particular, nor that it imbues in them a particular set of ideas, but that it is a place for open-ended research that can just as well lead nowhere as somewhere, that is wasteful and inefficient by short­ term socioeconomic standards but is practically a steal as a long-term research and development investment in democracy, freedom, and creativity – without which we won't have much of an economic future or the one we have won't be worth the flesh it's imprinted on... We cannot make education more efficient without making it more deficient.” ~ Charles Bernstein, The Consequence of Innovation p. 53

Graffiti on the wall of a bus stop in Penryn, Cornwall.

How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic:

An Arctic Alphapet

There I am, holed up in a frozen land, listening for the ice to creek and the wind to howl in that intimate and foreboding way, with only these cards for company. I spread them out before me and enjoy the feel of the Greenlandic words on the tip of my tongue and the feel of my English-driven brain turning them over and over trying to fit them with the translations. I smooth my finger over images of icebergs - vistas floating by; and I’ll find a home for the night in their glow.

In the morning I’ll wake and clutch them to me in their aqua blue envelope and look out across miles and miles of ice and feel they are my only true guide on this mapless journey. I, as journeyman, can look to these cards when I feel hopeless, snow blind, unskilled at my work and wandering lost in the imagined landscape and know that people with beautiful words had been here long before me, understood it more than me. 

This place, only half-remembered,     with its cold and its ice, searing into flesh. Some memory of it as origin; ice as beginning,                                          ape carved of glaciers,                     and now very likely ending too.  

This is creative response in the guise of a review. All images belong to Nancy Campbell and are from How to Say I Love You in Greenlandic:An Arctic Alphabet. 

You can buy a copy of Nancy Campbell’s beautiful book from Miel. If you’re going to buy one beautiful item then this should be it.

Sharing the Crocus

or Virginia’s Conceit

Virginia Woolf’s "The Patron and the Crocus" revolves around a central conceit. Woolf has one strong idea, that of the first crocus seen growing in Kensington Gardens and the proliferation of the experience of seeing that crocus. The essay in The Common Reader (a volume full of wonderful, neat and insightful essays by Woolf) uses the metaphorical conceit of the crocus to expand ideas concerning readership and guardianship of writing. She creates the character of an ideal patron to whom one writes of the crocus and its first emergence. By patron, she means someone to whom your writing is directed, as well as someone partially influencing the process.
     Woolf talks about the different types of patron sharing the crocus. I ought to explain that for Woolf the crocus is imperfect until shared. At this point, the crocus becomes art. That artifice can be applied simply by turning the experience into collective personal myth. 
      The first potential patron she introduces is the newspaper man. He’ll offer you money and fame – maybe he’s wearing spats or maybe he’s reclining in a big leather chair at a big mahogany desk smoking an even bigger cigar. He’s flash and generous but Woolf’s not convinced. She asks whether there is enough crocus to grace “every breakfast table from John o’Groats to the Land’s End” and we feel sure that he’s not our man when faced with her prediction of the frivolously obscure fate of “journalism”. 
     Woolf states “to know who to write for is to know how to write”. Right, we’d better find this chap then, Ginny! Ah, he’s illusive, changing “from age to age”. Typical. One might recognise him only by the twinkle in his eye, the crocus in his buttonhole or his saffron-stained fingers.
     Woolf is introducing us to the reader as patron of the arts. Of course, we’re familiar with the death of the author, birth of the reader concept. It’s first year undergraduate material but at the time of writing it was still breaking ground. Thus Woolf’s common reader is born. A person, such as Woolf perhaps, who is interested in good, long-lasting writing that will improve, inspire and please her. The crocus must be transposed rather than bunched into a posy. The latter is sure to wither whereas the former might thrive if the soil is warm and the roots are strong. 
     I like a good extended metaphor and Woolf is excellent at them. It feels pleasingly versatile, stretched like vellum holding the five pages of content together. For me, the answer to what is good writing can be fluidly argued through the idea of the crocus and it ties in with another of Woolf’s essays in the same volume, “The Modern Essay”, in which she argues that one of the best qualities of fiction and essay writing is that we should be able to return to the text and relive it the uncountable number of times our perspective and situation changes, just as a bulb renews itself so do we as readers.

 As an aside, I think this essay is a really good example of the high standards of writing that Woolf requests in “The Modern Essay”; a slick, intimate voicing of opinion on a timeless question.

First emerging buds. A tree peony uncovered in the border.