Fleet-footed

As much of the country hunkered down against storms that threatened to bring a month of rain in one day, us poets gathered to take a little stroll around London (inspired by the Formerly exhibition at the Poetry Café). Our meeting point was outside Chancery Lane tube, at the dragons marking the boundary of the City. We arrived armed with umbrellas and waterproofs, but at half past ten, our official starting time, the sun crept from between two large grey clouds, and we could see patches of blue sky in the middle distance. As I said to the group, we don’t want the weather to be too cheerful, because our walk would take in the dark and clammy corners of the area that lies between Clerkenwell and Bloomsbury, an area I have always thought of as the Fleet Valley.

Many years ago, around the time I lived in North Mews, a cobbled street running parallel with the Grays Inn Road, I picked up a book at a second-hand stall entitled The Lost Rivers of London by Nicholas Barton. The subtitle of the book was ‘A study of their effects upon London and Londoners, and the effects of London and Londoners upon them’. The subtitle was important, I discovered, as the book wasn’t so much a history of the rivers as an essential guidebook to a hidden underworld. It wasn’t until much later that I came across the phrase genius loci, which describes the spirit of a place which is made manifest through a sense of the histories of its previous inhabitants and its notable events. It explained the odd sensation I had when I lived in that neighbourhood of something I couldn’t quite place, unsettling and sinister. It was during my time in North Mews when I wrote this poem:

Fleet

It flows beneath my feet, its subterranean banks
unseen. I glide blissfully through my day,
all liquid, like a fish. I can’t understand
what gives this extra lift to my step, as if I’m floating,
and the cars drifting through Clerkenwell Green
are barges carrying sailors home from sea.

But an undercurrent sinks me at Islington:
I sense the bones of the old prison, the plague-dead
dumped straight from their beds, butchers’ scraps
staining the water blood red. The old dark brick
shifts, the city groans in its foundations
and spits me out like a sour grape into the street.

As we made our way through Leather Lane, up Saffron Hill, once the most notorious rookery in London (and the dirtiest and most wretched place that Dickens could think to situate Fagin and his den of thieves), across the Clerkenwell Road, and over Herbal Hill, I think we could all sense the river below us. Peter Ackroyd describes the Fleet as ‘London in essence’, plague-ridden and treacherous, but legendary, the tributary of all that was wild and radical in London. We found a plaque at the bottom of Herbal Hill, undated, but marking the moment the river officially became a sewer.

Outside the Coach and Horses, famed in its day for prize-fights with every conceivable weapon, cockfighting, bull-baiting and bear-baiting (which led to the death of the landlord in 1709), we stood in the middle of the road and peered down into a grate where we could hear the low swoosh of water, the only true vestige of the Fleet, still flowing fast below.

We were standing in the middle of the river, in what was once Hockley-in-the-Hole, an area of street crime and gangs, where women were attacked and stuffed in empty beer barrels and rolled down the hill. We passed under the bridge that carried Rosebery Avenue above our heads, to the inappropriately-named Mount Pleasant, and the huge, ugly Royal Mail Sorting Office that was once the site of Cold Bath Prison (to Coleridge, the site of Hell). We took in the moumental car park, the last undeveloped Second World War bomb site in central London, resplendent with weeds and garbage.

After that, we headed towards Dickens’ House, down Rugby Street (past number 18, where Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes consummated their relationship), over to pay a visit to Charlie Dutton in his gallery on Princeton Street, through Red Lion Square (past the house where Rossetti first painted Lizzie Siddal, and his new flatmate, William Morris, knocked up a few bits of furniture for their bedsit) and on to the Poetry Café for lunch and time to write some poems. But not before we stopped at the corner of Kingsway and Parker Street, the site of Charles Lamb’s lodgings in 1801. It was from there he wrote to Wordsworth:

Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, wagons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes - London itself a pantomime and a masquerade - all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fullness of joy at so much life.

The photographs were taken by Vici MacDonald, my collaborator on the Formerly project. The exhibition continues at the Poetry Café through August. The book can be ordered here: http://herculeseditions.wordpress.com/

It's raining poems

There have been many accounts on Facebook and on various blogs (including this lovely account from Katy Evans-Bush: http://baroqueinhackney.com/2012/06/27/the-reign-of-poems/) of the Rain of Poems that showered down on London on Tuesday night, making a welcome change from the month of the ordinary wet kind of rain that’s drowned out summer. It was, as many commentators have already said, a joyous and exuberant occasion that brought poets from all over the world together with the citizens of London. At twilight, a helicopter appeared in the skies above Jubilee Gardens, and dropped little packages containing hundreds of poems which fluttered down into the hands of waiting spectators. It was a grey evening (as most evenings have been recently), and so the poems were caught in a floodlight that caused the white paper they were printed on to glow ghostly silver (more like snow than rain). In all, 100,000 poems were released over a half-hour period. Because of the light winds, poems were scattered onto the surrounding bridges, the roofs of flats, as far as Fleet Street and the Strand across the river.

The creators of this project are Casagrande http://www.loscasagrande.org/, a Chilean art collective, whose practice is publishing-based and whose aim is to distribute poetry through a series of interventions and ‘art actions’ (as they say on their website) to the public. All their poetic actions and other activities are free to the audience receiving them; their slogan is ‘can’t be sold, can’t be bought’ (no se vende ni se compra). The Rain of Poems over London is part of a larger project of releasing poems over cities that have been bombed during military action. Their first ‘cargo of poems’ was dropped over Santiago in 2001, and since then they have performed the ‘Bombing of Poems’ over Berlin, Warsaw, Guernica and Dubrovnik. They have applied to re-enact the project over Dresden.

The poems that are dropped are by poets from the host nations, and they are printed in both English and Spanish. Because the London event also marks the beginning of Poetry Parnassus, the mammoth Olympic gathering of 200 poets (one from each nation participating in the 2012 London Games), they have also been represented. In the fight (yes, fight – it may be the only time in my life when I see people jostling and jumping to catch poems) to grab one of the falling bits of paper, I managed to scoop up four poems – from Andrés Anwandter of Chile, Oxmo Puccino of Mali, Tom Warner of the UK, and Katerina Iliopoulou of Greece. A completely random and accidental meeting of poets brought to me by chance and changing wind velocity.

Casagrande says that this performance ‘creates an alternative image of the past and is a gesture of remembrance as well as being a metaphor for the survival of cities and people.’ What I like about their project is the democracy of it. On one level, it is about remembrance and resilience, as they say, but on a more basic level, it is about the circulation of poetry to as wide an audience as possible, who simply have to be present (and possibly good at catching) to receive work which is distributed to them for free. It is a political statement in the stand against war, but also in its mode of publishing: I think of the broadsheets of the 17th century, which were used to circulate ideas. We have lost that culture of radical publishing (although bloggers and tweeters are bringing it back) in the spool of twenty-four-hour television news. This is the poem as art action, as object (the poems are beautifully designed and printed, on recycled paper and using biodegradable inks), as statement, as an emotional and spiritual connection of people. The performance is a beautiful and moving gesture, but also a spectacle. Shouldn’t all art and poetry bring together those elements?

Formerly the launch (and some thoughts on the olfactory properties of books)

A successful event at the Poetry Café always involves a little sweat. In this instance, raised partly through the preparation that went into Thursday’s combined private view, launch and performance, but also induced by the sheer number of people we tried to squeeze through the door and into the intimate space. Through the clever use of a very long cable, we managed to broadcast the reading (accompanied by a soundscape, created by my old pal Douglas Benford: http://www.myspace.com/sicutdb, which meshed sampled urban noises with various children’s toys) from basement performance space to café level above.

Not only has Formerly been launched, but also Hercules Editions, which has gone from being a discussion Vici and I have conducted over many months, to being a proper press – its physical manifestation in one little book. So I guess that makes us publishers (yes, with only one publication to date, but you have to begin somewhere). And I can’t help wondering what my father would have made of our little book, if he was still with us. There is a family story that he produced his first publication (a colour magazine, no less) on a hand-press when he was just 14 years old. He became a newspaper journalist after he graduated from college (there was a stint at The New York Times, where he rather inconceivably used to review ballet); he started publishing books when he was still in his twenties, and continued to do so throughout the whole of his life.

The library of my childhood home was a kind of sacred space, separated from the rest of the house by a glass-covered porch, so it felt somehow removed from the everyday business of eating and sleeping and playing. It had a particular smell: fusty, leathery, which I can still sniff out in certain antiquarian bookshops (particularly ones where the stock doesn’t shift quickly). My father used to smell books, and so I’ve inherited the habit from him. I get off on the whiff of decay from a yellowing Penguin paperback, its orange cover rusty with age, but my father was particularly partial to a fine Moroccan binding (which has a delicate aroma – sweet, like an unlit cigar).

Readers of Invective will remember that I began the year by launching Desire Paths, hand-set by Hein Elferink in the Netherlands in an edition of 10, with woodcuts by Linda Karshan, separately editioned by Mette Ulstrup for Neils Borch Jensen in Copenhagen. The woodcuts are on delicate rice paper that fold in between the sections of my poem like pressed leaves, the sheets folding neatly into a hand-made, linen-covered box. It is too big to sit on a shelf, it is not designed to be read (although I hope the poem has enough integrity to match the materials of its making) so much as admired. My father would have loved it.

Whereas our chapbook (our ‘Herculean’ production) is printed by Risograph on recycled paper. Risograph is the process used by schools to produce high-volume, inexpensive textbooks – if you open our book and stick your nose in, you get the scent of a 70s classroom (it almost feels as if the ink could rub off on your fingers). Vici calls it ‘cheap and dirty’, but that’s really what our book is about – the damp, forgotten corners of London. The form should always match the content, that’s what I tell my students, and so the slightly rubbed-away quality imposed by the Risograph (the words fading into the grain of the paper) echoes the disappearing places we are attempting to record.

My father would have liked our book as well, because he would have recognised it as a statement of intent. I am his daughter, who has inherited this weird obsession with the materiality of books (possibly why I don’t as yet have a Kindle), but I also understand, as he did, that the book is a commercial object which reflects its time. He published grand volumes in his day, but also modest paperbacks. I’d like to think our little book falls somewhere in the middle ground – it is produced simply, not too expensively, so it is democratic, an object of this recession-age, but still signed and numbered. And it smells good too.

Formerly can be ordered here: http://herculeseditions.wordpress.com/

Number 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth

A few people have asked myself and my co-founder, Vici MacDonald, why we decided to call our new press Hercules Editions. The simple answer is that we both live in Lambeth (although in the last four years I have strayed further South in the Borough, all the way to Stockwell), and that the presiding spirit of our part of the world is William Blake, who moved to Number 13 Hercules Buildings in 1791 (there’s a blue plaque on the side of the 50s council block that stands there now marking the location of his house).

Stanley Gardner writes of Blake’s Lambeth address:

Number 13 Hercules Buildings, Lambeth, was a comfortable two-story house with a garden front and back. The Blakes lived there, at least from the summer of 1791, until they moved to Felpham on the South Coast in September 1800. The first three years in Lambeth redirected Blake’s thinking on the follow-up to ‘Songs of Innocence’, and from here he launched his attack on the broader conspiracies of place and power, which perpetuated oppression and conflict.

The follow-up, as we know, was Songs of Experience, which contained some of Blake’s most famous poems, ‘The Sick Rose’, ‘The Tyger’ and ‘London’. What was it about the ‘exclusive gardens of Lambeth,’ as Gardner calls them, that produced this extraordinary work?

Gardner says:

Lambeth itself, convenient to Westminster Bridge, had long been a place of commercialised charity, tough factories and seedy pleasure. The land downstream from the bridge, between the river and the marsh, was lined with a half mile of timber yards, Lambeth Waterworks, barge makers and a patent shot manufactory. Across and around the marsh, on twenty-nine acres leased from the Prince Regent, were dye-houses, storehouses, cranes, brewhouses, stables, Mr Beaufoy’s vinegar manufactory, and among the ponds and water courses across the marsh, seventy dwelling houses. Sentinel over all, the new shot-tower was dropping into wartime production as Blake pulled together ‘Songs of Experience’.

It was the London of small industry and great poverty, a place of pleasure gardens and hard labour. The old Hercules Hall became the Female Orphan Asylum, and Blake would have been familiar with the charges of that institution when he was writing ‘The Little Girl Lost’. He was down the road from the Palace of Lambeth and the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, who himself was downwind from Vauxhall Gardens, the most notorious place to indulge in any imaginable sin.

I wouldn’t dream of comparing ourselves with Blake, but the project Vici and I undertook was all about London’s hidden histories, the tough & tattered cheek by jowl with grand mansions and leafy squares. Much of it is set in SE1, the quarter of town we know well. In addition, Blake was his own poet, his own illustrator, his own printer, his own book designer, and so we wanted to follow his early model of DIY publishing. Our product will be a bit rough and ready compared to Blake’s beautiful books, but we hope it is in keeping with the Lambeth we inhabit today.

Formerly, our first publication, will be hot off the press to coincide with the exhibition of photos and poems from the book at the Poetry Cafe from 18th June to 14th July.

Here’s our website: http://www.herculeseditions.com/

Legend Trip

I love when random meetings produce unexpected and rewarding results. I met Alison Gill on one of Paul Carey Kent’s art walks through London, and in the pub afterwards, we struck up a conversation. Alison told me about her work as a sculptor, and I told her about my poems. Fast forward to last month, when Alison contacted me, in the process of looking for speakers / artists from other genres to interact with her upcoming show at Charlie Dutton Gallery. Alison’s practice draws from references to psychoanalysis, folklore, gaming, literature, mathematics, etc, so it is a natural extension of the work to create a ‘salon’ that brings people into the exhibition to talk about associated or related themes. Meanwhile, I was between projects (readers of Invective might remember a post a few months back lamenting this fact), and about to go off on a retreat. So it was, as they say, serendipity.

Before my retreat, Alison and I met a couple of times to talk through her work and the themes behind the show, Legend Trip. I liked the concept of the ‘legend trip’, a term coined by folklorists and anthropologists for a journey to a specific location which has some deeper and often more sinister history (I thought immediately of one of my favourite poems, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ which is about those places in the world, often quite innocent, that have provided the landscape for atrocities). The centrepiece of the exhibition is a large sculpture called The Magick Door (Kissing Gate), in steel, rubber and porcelain. The work consists of two round metal frames; the inner one, draped with an elaborate mane of inner tubes (some with dangling porcelain fingers), can be pushed forward, so that the whole structure moves on its axis, and the viewer can pass through the sculpture, like its dual-aspect title suggests, as through a door or a kissing gate.

There are also a number of drawings set in landscapes that are hard to navigate; often heavily pattered or entangled, with stairs that lead nowhere, populated by figures who are sometimes masked, or whose faces are obscured. There are traces of recognisable urban / suburban culture; abandoned cars, boys in hooded garments, heaped rubbish (that might contain the inner tubes and bits of metal sourced for The Magick Door).

Right up my alley. Fired by the ideas generated by Alison’s work, I went off on my retreat and wrote four new poems. It is not often that I write so quickly, but the joy of collaborating is that you are given permission to start from an outside stimulus (something other than the usual stuff that circles around in your head). The new poems had their premier last night in the gallery, to a small audience of poets and artists. This is one of the poems, which I read standing in front of the piece that inspired it, The Magick Door (Kissing Gate). The poem is in syllabics, in a pattern of 13 / 11 / 13 – indivisible, uneven numbers (and 13, of course has many other connotations).

As I explained last night, an odd North American reference crept into the poem. Magic Fingers used to be found in every roadside motel room on the Eastern seaboard when I was growing up – for only a quarter, you could make the whole bed vibrate. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but somehow, the dangling porcelain fingers made me recall its unseen, mysterious touch.

Gatekeeper

I am your port of entry, the point of no return,
you yield to my kludgy touch,
the Magic Fingers you can’t switch off. I am a screen

for your sins, discreet, like a Venetian blind you shut
to kill the light. I am night,
starless, sharp with little cries; you navigate through touch.

I am the Goddess Kali of a thousand fingers,
I’ll stroke, stroke until a scream
rises from your gut, the beast unfurled, a masterpiece

of hurt. I am your Painted Lady, your Queen of Spain,
a wing in the rake of thorns;
I cling to you like grave clothes, the suit you’ll never shake.

I am the circus freak, the double act of one. Gone
through a gash, flash in the pan;
it doesn’t last, the searing lash of pain, slash of skin,

peek-a-boo of blood. I’m in the driver’s seat, the scent
of burning flesh, gasoline
quivering my nostrils; I’m full-throttle towards the wall.

I am the swallow in your throat, hollow in your heart,
deep rut of the furrowed field.
I slay without a sound, here inside my velvet box.

Legend Trip is at the Charlie Dutton Gallery until 16th June

http://www.charlieduttongallery.com/Alison%20Gill/Alison%20Gill.pdf