Nature cure

Nearly two weeks out of London, and the countryside is beginning to have an effect on me.  I move more slowly, I notice birdsong and wildflowers more acutely, perhaps because there are fewer distractions imposed by other humans. It is restorative. But I could never give up London entirely. It is too quiet here, and once you have lived in a city for a long time you require a certain amount of noise and activity.  I will never be a country person, or for that matter, a pastoral poet. In a previous post, I came to the conclusion that I am an urban poet, perhaps by default, as I am uncomfortable with the idea of engaging with nature al la Alice Oswald or Ted Hughes. It is not who I am, not what I know. It seems easier to speak of the built environment, things created by humans for humans. The natural world is largely alien to me. Harriet Tarlo, the editor of the recent The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Nature Poetry has mentioned ‘the complexity of the relationship between writer, land and language.’ And Richard Mabey poses the question: ‘Isn’t a life of words the very antithesis of a life of nature?’

In Suffolk, the desire to describe every aspect of the landscape is overwhelming, because everything is visible at once. You can see a field in front of you, and the field beyond, and the field beyond that, stretching to the horizon. The sky is enormous and dramatic at all times, in all weathers. The curlew’s mournful cry, which I had never heard before I started coming here, is the sound I most equate with this part of the world.

So is there hope for me as a born-again pastoral poet? Possibly. Little sprigs of flowers and migrating birds are creeping into my poems. They will never completely replace the landscape of concrete and asphalt, but they mean something, they have a purpose. I am not entirely sure what it is yet, what metaphors they carry, apart from the obvious ones of beauty and tranquillity. I don’t really do “beauty” in my poems, not in the conventional sense, so I am waiting to see if new themes emerge from breathing in all this pure country air.

In the meantime, little pink frills of thrift and white spikes of saxifrage have appeared in the garden. At the very least, it must be Spring.

The image is a painting of Butley Creek by Kate Giles

http://thompsonsgallery.co.uk/kate-giles?gclid=CPra47-fq6gCFQRqfAodU0RaeQ

A nice bunch of daffs

 

They are a problem for poets, daffodils. Our group pondered this quandary while looking out the window at a “host” of them (that being the most appropriate collective noun) during the weekend workshop at Mendham Mill in Norfolk, an impossibly idyllic spot, and the birthplace of that painter of quintessentially mannered English landscapes, Sir Alfred Munnings (infamous for his attacks on modernism, particularly in his agreement with Winston Churchill that Picasso needed a good kick up the ass).

They are pretty, there is no doubt, especially this time of year when the sun is shining and they are growing in attractive clusters along the verges and by the river, but they are the flower equivalent of Hallmark cards, of sub-Renoir landscapes favoured by weekend painters and displayed in provincial galleries around the country, of Doris Day (although she’s probably more daisy than daff), of barefoot sing-alongs.

Apart from their appearance, they have a very silly-sounding name, perhaps to disassociate them from their botanical genus, Narcissus, which has those other obvious connotations of vanity and death. All flowers of the Narcissi variety are poisonous, and there was an incident a couple of years ago where a number of children fell ill after mistaking a daffodil bulb for an onion during a cookery class at a school in Martlesham (not far from where we were sitting looking at the daffs benignly swaying in the breeze along the Waveney). And florists are known to be afflicted with a condition known as “daffodil itch”. So really, they are nasty little buggers.

But obviously Wordsworth was unaffected by this knowledge, as he viewed them “Beside the lake, beneath the trees, / fluttering and dancing in the breeze. “ Ugh. No wonder we have not found a way to redeem them, to make them edgy and sexy like the rose, or gothically pensive, like the lily. We may never know if there is any truth to the story that Dorothy convinced William to change the first line, which is said to have originally read “I wandered lonely as a cow”, no doubt based on the irrefutable fact that cows are most often seen in herds, but chiefly because it is a shockingly bad line. As Dorothy often made shrewd editorial suggestions regarding her brother’s poems, it is not impossible. But even if she was partly responsible for what has become one of the most famous opening lines in English poetry, she could not improve the rest.

Why is it that the poem, like the flower itself, seems so “naff” to our modern ear? It was written in a time of grief, after the death of Wordsworth’s brother, John, and that knowledge certainly makes more poignant the revelation of the poet’s “vacant” and “pensive” moods.  Yes, there is no doubt they cheer us up, these bright and inoffensive blooms.  Perhaps his bliss seems too easily earned. Perhaps the rhymes, the words, feel too Victorian, too polite, in our post-confessional age.

At the same time, I rather envy Wordsworth this simple revelation, this moment which is able to lift his heart. The Romans used narcissus bulbs as a medicinal erodent; a poison, which, if treated correctly, could disperse poisons.  Maybe we’ve lost the ability to look on the daffodil as a balm to treat what ills us, and certainly we’ve lost the ability to write about it. So is there a way to redeem the daffodil – at the very least, to be able to write without cliché about the beauty of place, to celebrate spring ?

We still have the capability to feel these things, don’t we?

 http://mendham-writers.com/how-to-find-us/

http://www.poetry-archive.com/w/the_daffodils.html

The slow burn

Since my last post, I have already failed the task of writing a poem a day, and we are only a week into this month. What I have managed to produce is one draft and two fragments. Pitiful. So instead of attempting to write a poem, or posting any of my meagre efforts so far, I’ve decided to analyse why I’ve been unable to do so.

Poems for me are, for the most part, slow burning. I tend to examine things from every angle, to consider all possibilities. It doesn’t necessarily mean I arrive at firm conclusions. Some poems end up tailing off, chasing tangents, starting off on one idea and ending on something completely different. But that’s the beauty of poems. They do not have to prove an argument. They don’t have to be logical. Their meanings are not fixed.

A lot of the poems I like operate in that manner. They are mysterious and strange. I don’t necessarily understand what they mean, although I like to think I can draw certain conclusions, even if those conclusions come from a very personal interpretation. Meaning comes in layers, like a dance of the seven veils, only sometimes the final veil stays on.

A good analogy in painting would be Howard Hodgkin, whose work I’ve loved for many years for the same reason. Hodgkin says of his work, ‘I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.’ This suggests abstraction, but never pure abstraction, because you always catch a glimpse of a form or gesture or figure, but one which is fleeting, impossible to pin down. Sometimes the title is the only hint to what we’re really seeing.

The way Hodgkin paints is like the way I write poems. He creates a gradual build-up of successive layers and glazes of paint, which allows for corrections and second thoughts (kind of like a palimpsest of all your drafts of a poem viewed simultaneously). He works slowly, and sometimes doesn’t even begin to mark the canvas, until the subject has been with him, in his head, for many months.

So if I come out of April with one finished poem, which might very well incorporate the little daubs I’ve made already, and whatever is still to come, I’ll be perfectly happy. In the meantime, my tribute to Hodgkin, which originally appeared in Poetry Review, and will soon appear again in the new book.

Mud

after Howard Hodgkin

I see the scuffs and knots and bruises:
what a body takes.

The sea at night, tarmac road –
an obliteration, a mistake.

The Japanese master contemplates
the landscape from his mountain –

I clear the mud from my window,
wait for a revelation:

the antiseptic tinge of boredom,
silt of the airless room.

Now it’s quiet, the memory
of Spring behind us. Nights drawing in,

the tide is out, so when I walk
the edge of the shore my feet stick fast.

What a body needs:
the green warmth, someone to hold.

The cruellest month

and never more true, it seems, than now. So how to get through the next month, which starts with April Fools’ Day (although few of us have found much to laugh about) and ends with a Royal Wedding (the budget of which could have easily funded the many arts organisations that have essentially been put out of business by yesterday’s ACE cuts)?

The answer is to write a poem a day. Yes, April is NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Writing Month. I realise that writing a poem a day won’t change the state of the world, but if nothing else, it will keep us sane. And so, to get the ball rolling, a reminder of why it is we write poetry in the first place, courtesy of Aristotle. Perhaps his third object is the one we should pay close attention to in this bleak spring:

The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects – things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be.

Burning down the house

This is one of my favourite images, the work of the American photographer, Joel Sternfeld. I’ve known it for a long time, and have even written a poem about it, but the poem never quite lived up to the alchemic magic of the image. To know that the fire was not an accident – part of a training exercise by the local fire department on a house scheduled for demolition to make way for a new development – does not diminish its power (but does explain why the fireman in the foreground is calmly buying a pumpkin from the farm stand while the house goes up in flames).  I’d always secretly wondered if the picture had been staged, but apart from the fire department training exercise, the rest was seemingly a happy coincidence – the photographer driving through McLean, Virginia (as you do …) at just the right moment.

What does it for me is the perfect arrangement of visual elements. Maybe that’s why my poem didn’t work; it’s a poem already, beautifully measured. I like how the eye is made to follow the line of metal fence posts on the right, bisected by a line of small trees that runs alongside a path that divides field from house. This sets up the division of areas – if we’re thinking of poems, I’d say the picture is in tercets – the pumpkins in the field, and further back the farm stand, and further back the house. These areas are marked by a colour – orange, of course: the eye moves from the disarray of pumpkins on the ground, up to the orderly display on the stand (where the fireman almost becomes a pumpkin himself), and up to the flames engulfing the roof.

I always assumed the picture was taken around Halloween, but the date is 4^th December, 1978; the trees are not in stunning autumnal display, as they would be in October. These are winter trees – skeletal, bare. The grass is parched to brown. And that feels right – you wouldn’t want any other colours to compete with Sternfeld’s orange (like Titian’s blue). The orange of harvest, of “sweet cider” as the sign proclaims, of all-consuming fire. The whole thing is an allegory for what’s spent (be it passion, or summer, or a happy home), and what you’re left with is smashed pumpkins in a field, a desolate winter day, and a soon-to-be ruined house. The positive spin is the farm stand. I know the expression is “when you have lemons, make lemonade”, but maybe we could apply that to pumpkins and pie, or apples and cider. So I see the image as strangely hopeful; in the midst of winter, in the smoke of destruction, the fireman can still choose a prize pumpkin. There’s a glimmer of hope in the world …

This is in preparation for my online course, Poetry and the Visual, coming up in May: http://bit.ly/hh0z3s