Time and the city (Middlesbrough)

Birthdays are always occasions to take stock of where a person is in life. On mine (one with a 9 at the end, which can only mean a milestone is a year away) I find myself in Middlesbrough, a city I seem to visit annually, at least over the last three years. Middlesbrough reminds me of Detroit – it wears its ruination like a moth-eaten evening gown. I remember last year arriving at the venue where I was about to do a reading; the sat nav informed me ‘you have arrived at your destination’ and before me was a scrubby bit of wasteland with a tethered horse. I was five minutes away from the main train station, in the centre of town, but ‘over the border’, the term for what I now know is the wilds of Middlesbrough (or as us Americans say, ‘the wrong side of the tracks’), once a dangerous and renegade part of town, but now attempting regeneration.

I started off at mima to see not only an amazing exhibition of later works by Louise Bourgeois, but also a group show of local artists entitled Chance Finds Us. The name, as you might imagine, references a ‘ritualised approach to making work’, to quote the curators Anna Vibeke Mou and Nick Kennedy (both of whom are included in the show), adopting chance operations as part of their practice. Many of the works are informed by travel. Rachael Clewlow’s diptych 133.52 Miles Walked, Key (Explorer 306/OL26) comprises one panel of densely-painted horizontal stripes, and another of spherical forms  which extend like a DNA model over a grid. The works are linked: both chart a series of colour-coded walks around Middlesbrough in which the artist records a new location every minute (a notebook covered in minute handwriting lists the destinations) carefully written out in the ruled lines alongside each stripe in one canvas – each stripe, a different location, is assigned a new colour – in the other, shown as a mapped grid of discs in corresponding colours.

The attention to detail is painstaking and obsessive – it plots a journey not by a map (which has its own specific coloured codes) but by a rainbow of possibilities – why go on this journey and not another? How might you chart the movements of one person over a given period of time?

As if to attempt to answer those questions, I participated on a walk of Middlesbrough’s cultural landmarks led by the local poet p.a. morbid. Morbid was brought up in the city, and brings not only his personal marking of the changes in topography to bear, but a growing assemblage of history and image, both official and unofficial, of the way the city has altered in the last 200 years. Again, the comparison to Detroit is apt – Middlesbrough grew rich on shipping, had a peak in its fortunes in Victorian times, and experienced a dramatic shift in fate from the end of the second world war.

What Morbid showed us on the walk was not what is – the things we could see around us – but what has been, what might be again. Story after story involved destruction – by accidental fire, by council ‘improvements’, by a misguided sense of what would be appropriate at the time. He was armed with a collection of black and white images of extraordinary and grand Victorian structures that stood on the sites of ugly 60s and 70s office blocks. The grand city could still be glimpsed in the old Town Hall (still standing but empty and derelict), the Customs House, the Empire Theatre. A lesson in what should be cherished and protected in case it is lost.

As we walked, the mima show was still in my mind, especially the work of Nick Kennedy. His piece for the exhibition, Timecaster, presents a gathering of clear-domed discs, each encasing a piece of white paper, an exposed clock mechanism, with a silver lead attached to its moving second hand. As the hand revolves, it leaves an intricate spirographic pattern on the sheet – over the course of the exhibition the marks will grow darker and darker as the second hand makes its sweep.

It occurs to me that what time does is darken our mark (certainly with each birthday). This can be seen as a negative: the darker the mark, the more it loses its intricacy, its definition, until we are left with just a solid mass of black. But you might also say this is positive: the darker the mark, the more indelible. The more we repeat our stories of place and what happened there, the more they become ingrained in us.

Adlestrop again . . .

The most famous non-place in all of poetry, a location that really does exist, but in its literary incarnation only as one of those ‘places where a thought might grow’, to quote Mahon. Last week saw the centenary of Thomas’s most famous poem, conceived in a moment of heat and ennui, in that most common of situations – while the train had come to a complete halt for no apparent reason. It happens to all of us, and quite a few of us take out our notebooks and spend the non-hours composing poems, but not usually as striking as this. Although there was a good old-fashioned debate on Facebook about why (and if) we should still read Adlestrop, why (and if) it’s still valid 100 years later, I stand by my belief that it is one of the great poems of the last century.

Why??? This little exercise, conducted in the spirit of fun, made me consider ‘why’ again. Four poets – Jenny King, Pru Kitching, Marilyn Francis and Meg Cox – decided to ‘workshop’ Adlestrop and have come up with this ‘reduced’ version. The poets in question are all experienced and published, and have attended many workshops over the years, so they are all aware of the usual pitfalls when writing poems: removing cliché, redundancy, archaic diction and exaggeration. This generally makes for a stronger, tighter, better piece.

But not on this occasion. Although in workshops you are often told not to repeat the title in the opening lines, it is important that Thomas keeps saying the name, so that it becomes an incantation, in all its plain English dowdiness. He not only repeats the place, but also ‘the name’, because naming is one of the things we do in poems, one of the things we do when we are trying to commit something to memory; the poet might recognise that this is a significant moment, even if he doesn’t quite understand wholly why. Why is Adlestrop, the name (simply the name, and not the place – remember, Thomas never gets off the train, this is all he even knows of the place), important? This is what the poem will show us.

So our workshoppers would have admonished Thomas to not repeat the place, ‘the name’. They want him to say ‘one hot afternoon’ instead of ‘one afternoon / Of heat’, not to say ‘It was late June’, assuming that ‘hot’ will do the work of saying ‘summer’. This is where the line breaks come into their own, the narrative unravels more slowly: we know what time of day it is, and then we know it is hot, and then, as if he needs to remind himself (the poem is in the past tense, after all), he tells us what time of year it is. High summer. Also, ‘one afternoon / Of heat’ feels hotter to me than ‘one hot afternoon’, and ‘heat’ suggests other kinds of heat, perhaps passion, perhaps what’s going on in the rest of the world (now there’s a hint …). And it gets picked up in a rhyme with ‘steam’ in the next stanza. And the rhythm is better. The workshoppers also want our poet to lose ‘Unwontedly’, which to my mind might be the most important word in the poem. Without it, we don’t know that the train isn’t supposed to stop at Adlestrop, but in its important position, at the beginning of the line, it also suggests that there is no choice. As passengers on the train, they are stuck. They will stop at Adlestrop, whether they want to or not. It is an odd word choice, it does stick out, but that’s because Thomas wants us to notice it. It carries a further message: you can’t always get what you want, to quote the Stones.

Our workshoppers have actually made a grammatical error in the first line of the second stanza, as it should be ‘his’ and not ‘their’. Why is this line so long? Because it’s a moment extended, as if boredom can be measured. They rightly want to pare down adjectives, but ‘bare’ is one of those words that to my mind doesn’t just mean empty: it’s exposed, vulnerable, stripped down to its absolute essence. It emphasises its emptiness. All the people are gone. The inevitable question is where are they? Apart from the passengers on the train, the landscape Thomas is travelling in is completely devoid of people.

Because then what he does, because he is Edward Thomas, and cared deeply about such things, is he lets nature run riot. What is on the platform in place of people are the beautiful weeds and wild flowers of the English countryside. This list – willowherb, meadowsweet, haycocks – complete with the excited ‘And’s, is important. Nature will always be there when all else is abandoned (I wonder what Thomas would have made of the ecopoetry of the beginning of this century?). But then he makes a strange turn our workshoppers don’t care for, and for years has had me puzzled as well. The diction, which has been straightforward and fairly plain until now, becomes very nineteenth century: ‘No whit less still and lonely fair / Than the high cloudlets in the sky’. Our workshoppers quite rightly jump on this as ‘poetic’ (the worst crime I think in a poem is to be ‘poetic’). Thomas knows this. Why? He’s getting our attention (like the guy who cleared his throat a few lines back). This is how poets the generation before him wrote about nature. How can he, a modern poet at the beginning of the twentieth century, write about nature? Perhaps he hasn’t entirely worked it out. Or perhaps the point he’s making is that this place is not romantic, and not matter how beautiful your language, it will still be an empty train platform. Perhaps he is also saying that nature is what elevates us in times of despair, so he heightens his rhetoric to do so. If you dig into the lines, he is still making the same point – despite the beauty of this wild place, it is lonely (how else to get that word in, apart from pretend you’re a poet of a different age?). He is also lifting us up, into the sky, so he can bring in that blackbird.

Our workshoppers would have liked Thomas to end there, on the blackbird. They want him to delete the final three lines: ‘Close by, and round him, mistier, / Farther and farther, all the birds / Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. ‘Can a sound be misty?’ They ask. Perhaps if it is being recalled in the haze of memory. ‘Exaggeration’, they claim. I agree. There is no way that Thomas would have heard this, the poem up until this point being a faithful account of what happened when the train stopped. If the poem stops here, then that’s all it is, a faithful account, but the final three lines are the epiphany. And here’s where the other fact comes in – the world is on the brink of war, and it’s as if Thomas and his fellow passengers are suspended in that moment, waiting to see what will come next. They are powerless to change destiny, as are we all. Thomas was held in a place stuck in time, and he knew the world was about to change beyond all recognition, not just because of the war, but because of progress, industry, the things a new century might bring that he couldn’t even imagine. He would never see those things of course, and it is true that with the hindsight of his death, not so long after writing this, it becomes a more moving poem.

Some of my students may be reading this and saying to themselves, hold on, you’re not practicing what you preach. And it’s true, in workshops I often give advice similar to the advice the four poets here are giving their absent workshop pal Thomas (who indeed, used to workshop his poems with Robert Frost, who could be a pretty tough critic). Their advice is not wrong, and applied to another poem, it would no doubt improve it. But it is also true that some poems just manage to break the ‘rules’ with impunity, and their poets get away with saying things that somehow in another setting just wouldn’t hold up. It is impossible to say how that works – it just does. Somehow the right words come together in the right arrangement and make something which is unbreakable. For me, that’s Adlestrop, perfect and strange, and still fresh, 100 years on.

Landscape with fake dictionary

I’ve been trying to work out what it is I love about Antwerp. On one level, it’s like a fantasy, with its dark Medieval spires, cobbled streets and Netherlandish gargoyles crouching in the doorways of patrician stone buildings. There is something about scale as well; I know I’ve written here before of the charm of smaller cities, ones where the centre fits onto a single map and you feel you might be able to get the measure of the place in a few days.

It’s also very beautiful. We first meet the eponymous hero of Sebald’s Austerlitz as he is sketching the waiting room in the grand Centraal Station, and what follows is an amazing history of its construction:

when Belgium, a little patch of yellowish grey barely visible on the map of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African continent with its colonial enterprises, when deals of huge proportions were done on the capital markets and raw-materials exchanges of Brussels, and the citizens of Belgium, full of boundless optimism, believed that their country, which had been subject so long to foreign rule and was divided and disunited in itself, was about to become a great new economic power. 

It’s where the novel begins, in that incredible vast bourgeois station, which lends drama and opulence to arrival. Something of that sense of spreading across continents remains too as you exit the station: the citizens of the dissolved empire are all around. The station is next door to the zoo – I can’t think of another major city where you would find such a juxtaposition, which strikes me somehow as very Belgian, or at least Flemish – the more I travel around Flanders, the more I get the Belgian sense of humour, which is a bit rude, a little surreal. I love the sound of Flemish, its guttural drama. So much less refined than French; a dirty joke would certainly sound better in Flemish (maybe that accounts for their bawdiness). Part of the beauty of Flemish for me is not understanding a word of it, allowing the sound to float over me like some discordant piece of music.

And so to Zeno X, and the new Mark Manders show. I discovered Manders’ work when he was representing the Netherlands at the 2013 Venice Biennale (he is Dutch, but has been based in Ghent for many years) and posted my impressions here at the time. Going to his show first, almost straight off the train, grounded me for the rest of the weekend. Manders’ project is about how we define ourselves in relation to our surroundings, so that many of the works are variations on the theme of self-portrait (the next day, I found myself thinking of Manders while staring at Van Eyke’s depictions of the great and the good of his day).

It’s an important consideration in a place like Belgium, where people move in and out of different languages – the most obvious shift being from Flemish to French. His work always seems to be in the process of being made, so nothing is ever quite finished, even once it appears within the pristine walls of the gallery. His piece, Landscape with Fake Dictionary, suggests this dilemma  of navigating a city where many different languages are being spoken, but you can’t understand any of them. It put me in mind of the ‘fake newspapers’ he created for his Biennale show – all real (English) words, but thrown together to create nonsense.

Fakes kept appearing after that, from Manders’ fellow Zeno X artist Kees Goudzwaard, and his trompe-l'œil paintings that appear to be held together by strips of tape – he constructs a model with tape and then meticulously paints strips that give the illusion of tape.

And then the many extraordinary still lives from the collection of the Royal Academy, which at the moment have found a temporary space in the seventeenth-century mansion of the former mayor, Nicholas Rockox. How exciting to find these paintings in the sort of setting they were made for – domestic and intimate. The curators have constructed cabinets of curiosities around the building, matching the painted still lives with assemblages of rocks and stones and glass.

A kind of fake – at the very least, highly theatrical but at home in a place that suits theatre, the evening light gilding the spire of Our Lady.

East meets gorllewin

The last time I visited Tŷ Newydd, the national writers’ centre in Wales, was about a dozen years ago. Since then, the house has had a renovation – there’s now a new extension comprising a sunny conservatory – but otherwise I found it unchanged. There are some places that remain preserved in the memory; even though it had been many years, it was as if the house welcomed me back.

There is a famous and odd acoustic trick you can perform in the bay window of the library – if you stand in a particular spot, someone at the opposite end can hear you clearly. They say it’s the exact spot where Lloyd George, whose summer residence it was, died – which sounds like the kind of story that writers concoct of an evening, until you learn that Lloyd George did indeed die at Tŷ Newydd. His grave is in the village, on a bank overlooking the River Dwyfor; I’m not sure exactly where in the house it was that he died, but the library story is certainly convincing when you are sitting in the room experiencing that strange echo.

I was back at Tŷ Newydd for a weekend-long immersion into Haiku writing, taught by my friend, the poet and novelist Lynne Rees. Lynne has been writing haiku and haibun for many years now and has thought a lot about how the ancient eastern form can adapt to a contemporary western voice.

I was there not only to hang out with Lynne and revisit the Llŷn peninsula, but also to challenge a prejudice of mine. I have always considered (contemporary English) haiku a bit frivolous, not a serious poetic form, tied to a sort of wooly eastern spirituality. There are a lot of bad haiku out there, the kind that Lynne describes as having ‘a whiff of Zen’: meditations on cherry blossoms and weeping willows written by poets sitting in semis in Sheffield (I’m not being rude about Sheffield – it’s just the first example of an urban and therefore not-very-Zen-like setting that popped into my head). Lynne is possibly the most no nonsense person I know, and while she is sensitive and self-attuned, she is also extremely skeptical of the kind of easy spiritual statement that hasn’t been earned. So I felt if anyone was going to convince me, it would be Lynne.

We dodged the rain on Saturday morning for a ginko, an organised haiku walk that took us along the coast and back to Llanystumdwy along the river.  At certain intervals, Lynne gave us instructions / suggestions / prompts to create haiku on the spot. I was surprised to discover how difficult they are to write immediately: one thing I learned about haiku is that the best ones have an element of statement=revelation – which most good poems do – but in a haiku, this needs to be accomplished in microcosm. This movement is referred to in modern haiku as ‘link and shift’, so that a statement is made, then the next statement links to what has been said, but also makes a shift to something new. It’s what I think of as a turn, but in haiku it is accomplished over two or three lines. So during the ginko, I made some notes, trying to avoid the pitfall of easy revelation. But I didn’t write anything I could call a proper haiku.

Lynne showed us some good ones. This haiku by Caroline Gourlay really struck me:

I close my book –
a wave breaks its silence
against the rocks

Perhaps it appeals because the end rhyme of ‘book’ and ‘rocks’ (and ‘breaks’ in the middle) gives the poem a very satisfying sense of closing (like the book in the first line). I like the way ‘breaks’ has two meanings – the more familiar one to do with waves, but then the added idea of silence yielding to sound – link and shift in one word, to mark the moment the speaker comes back into the world after shutting the world of the book. It’s deceptively simple, but there’s a lot going on, the whole thing perfectly balanced over those three lines.

So, not throwaway. And quite tough to achieve. I’ll keep working at it …

The presiding spirit of the weekend was not in fact old Lloyd George, but Nigel Jenkins, who was due to teach the course with Lynne; he died at the end of January this year. I’d only met Nigel twice, but he made a great impression. He and Lynne edited the anthology Another Country: haiku poetry from Wales (http://www.gomer.co.uk/index.php/books-for-adults/poetry/another-country-haiku-poetry-from-wales.html) and I remember his reading at the launch in Aberystwyth, his extraordinary deep bass voice. I’ll end on a haiku of his I particularly like

colder, greyer …
the first ditherings
of snow

The reader is alive and well

It is always encouraging to know you’re being read (and appreciated)! Sometimes it seems impossible to imagine other people out there, reading words that earlier you committed to paper (or sent into the ether). The moment of writing is always solitary and private. I sometimes forget the stuff I put here goes out into the world via the magic of the internet: how extraordinary that this has been possible in our lifetime.

My thanks to Anthony Wilson, a fellow poet-blogger, who mentions Invective and some fabulous blogs that he follows here:

http://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2014/05/10/the-blogs-i-read-3/

And today I received in the post two pristine copies of a new book, This is Pollock by Catherine Ingram, in which my poem ‘Cedar Nights’ is quoted. The book is part of a series from Laurence King which combines art history, biography and comics, perfect for Pollock’s beat sensibilities. And lots of snippets of other writings: I’m in good company with Whitman, Thoreau and Beckett:

http://www.laurenceking.com/us/this-is-pollock/

(an illustration from the book by Peter Arkle)