of Vegetables and Villanelles

In his landmark book The Country and the City, critic Raymond Williams notes that people living in villages have always cultivated “a rented patch or strip, an extended garden, a few hives or fruit trees… not only for their produce, but for their direct and immediate satisfactions and for the felt reality of an area of control of one’s own immediate labour” (101). Williams is clearly talking about the allotments that have since proliferated in our towns and cities; those communal plots where we can still get our hands and our minds muddy and feel not only nourished by our produce, but also by the satisfaction of knowing that it was we who did it; an “area of control or our own immediate labour” as Williams would have it.

I last went up to my own allotment about a week ago. It was extremely cold and wet – that drifting mist of a rain we call “mizzle”, a delightful portmanteau word that exists somewhere between “mist” and “drizzle”. Needless to say I was the only person up there; at this time of year there’s not a lot left growing. I picked some sorry Brussels Sprouts for the Christmas table this coming weekend; a purple cabbage and a white for some Boxing Day coleslaw; the last of the green onions and a handful of kale. It’s really time to wait the Winter out now and, in the coming months, to start to get the garden ready for the growth of Spring. In the meantime, we’re steadily getting through the pickles, chutneys, jams and sauces that we made from the fruit and veg this Summer and Autumn.

Whilst I’m thinking about allotments and portmanteau words, it inevitably sets me to thinking about poetry: how poems and allotments share all sorts of metaphor, vocabulary and culture; how poems and preserves conserve the yield, “the great harvest”as Robert Frost put it in his poem ‘After Apple Picking’. Unlike Frost, however, I’m not tired of it; I want more.

Some time ago I edited an anthology of new poets, which I called The Allotment. The book itself didn’t do so well I admit although, notably, many of the poets I included have gone on to very good things, publishing award-winning collections of poetry, translations, and works of criticism: Abi Curtis, Rose Flint, Iain Galbraith, Luke Kennard, Sarah Law, Aoife Mannix, Sophie Mayer, George Messo, Jane Routh and Scott Thurston amongst them, to name but some of the contributors. I still very much stand by them. Part of my idea in the book was to draw the parallel between the allotment as “a small piece of land rented for cultivation” in the sense that Williams describes it, and the poem itself as a metaphoric “patch, tract, plot” as the dictionary also defines “allotment”. And where the poem is concerned, the other meaning of “allotment” is also apposite: “a ration, quota, or measure”. Poems embody many forms of measure, in the technical sense, but they also certainly measure out our lives just as they measure out Raymond Williams’s “immediate satisfactions”.

Which brings me to another landmark book, Jonathan Bate’s Song of the Earth, in which Bate makes a similar point but, for him, in relation to New York’s Central Park. Bate refers to the Park as “a representation of the state of nature: a representation which we may experience, a re-creational space in which we can walk and bathe and play” (64). Bate argues that “other works of art, mostly poems, may create for the mind the same kind of re-creational space that a park creates for the body” (64). I guess I’m musing about the same thing, only my metaphor is the vegetable garden. As with the hands-on allotment, where generations of us have momentarily escaped the realities of modern urban living by getting our hands and feet muddy, the “patches, tracts, plots” of poems are spaces within which cultivation and growth, by necessity, figure strongly. And as I tuck into my Brussels Sprouts and Marrow Chutney this Christmas, I can hear Robert Frost somewhere in the back of my mind, or W.B. Yeats tending his ‘nine bean rows’ at the Lake Isle of Innisfree. So whether its Sonnets or Sweetcorn, Vegetables or Villanelles, now we’ve passed the Winter Solstice, I’m hungering for the growth – the satisfying reality – of the garden plot of the new year.

Thisness and Thusness:  Thing Theory

In the writing classroom I regularly find myself discussing the central aim of poetry to make something that is absent become present. It seems to me one of the most basic concepts to understand in writing a poem. How do we make what is not there, appear as though it were?

T.S. Eliot of course came up with the idea of the Objective Correlative – a way of using concrete objects to stand in for abstract emotions. It has become an orthodoxy in creative writing, underpinning the endlessly-touted imperative “Show Don’t Tell”. And it is in his stead that the Canadian poet Anne Carson, for example, writes about her father’s blue cardigan (the present object) to stand  in for the abstract idea of loss (the absent). Don’t name the loss, we teach, which is abstract and absent by nature; simply write about the empty cardigan. It’s a simple enough idea, an extremely effective one and, I think, can be traced back to that most simple of forms: the riddle.

Yet even the riddle itself may find its roots, perhaps, in something much simpler: the Old Norse compounds known as Kennings. “Sea-steed” says the Old Norse poet, and the absent “ship” is suddenly made present. “Bane of Wood” he says again, and this time the absent “fire” springs into presence. It is perhaps the simplest form of conjuring with language; a piece of magic. Going beyond two- or three-word kennings, the riddle aims to do the same thing: to conjure the absent into presence: “My first is in Howl but not in Owl,” and there we have the first letter in the name of our mystery object that will, by the end of the poem, magically appear.

            So why might I be thinking about riddles? Living and writing in Exeter places me in immediate relation to The Exeter Book of Riddles, one of the few surviving miscellanies of Anglo Saxon poetry. It comprises ninety-six riddles from an original one hundred, describing animals, weapons and household objects, music and writing, and Christian symbols. I’ve also just read one this morning in Paul Muldoon’s magnificent book of poems Horse Latitudes - a riddle about a griddle. And I’ve written riddles myself in the past; most notably as a commission in 2002 to commemorate the lifting of restrictions to animal movements during the Foot and Mouth crisis in the area of North Devon where I was living at the time.

The commission was to provide a riddle for a bell, made by the sculptor Marcus Vergette, to be cited in the community. During the Foot and Mouth crisis, the ringing of church bells was temporarily halted, to begin again on the day that restrictions to livestock movements were lifted. The ‘peal’ of the bell reaches to the ‘pale’ of the parish, these two words having an intrinsic etymological root: ‘peal’ has its origins in the Saxon word for the picket fence erected on the ‘pale’, or boundary, of hill forts. Traditionally bell towers were designed so that the peals of the bells could be heard throughout the parish, right the way to the ‘pale’. And as they reached there, and beyond, the peals paled. The riddle I wrote for the Highampton bell (pictured above) says:

My feet in Earth

My Mouth in clouds

on one side of the bell and, on the other,

My song is soft appeal

To bring home flock and herd.

The answer to both riddles being, of course, ‘Bell’.
          Bells have complex sounds, not only in their pitch, but also in what we perceive the bell to be ‘saying’, a complexity compounded by the complexity of social and cultural lore surrounding bells, and the complexity of the musical patterns in campanology. At the end of the Foot and Mouth epidemic in 2001, the local church in Highampton rang a peal all day, for the first time in six months. My riddle, with its own gently swinging ding-dong rhythm, the ding-dong rhymes of ‘bring’ and ‘song’, and its obvious pun on ‘appeal’, suited the subject well. Along with its cultural reference to historic shepherding methods – the shepherd bringing in the sheep penned in by the ‘pale’, it also makes clear reference to the restocking of the contemporary landscape after the mass slaughter of animals in the Foot and Mouth crisis – ‘to bring home flock and herd’ is intended literally as well as historically. These matters also suited the situation of the bell, which stands on the boundary of the village school, where the local children can hopefully come to understand the complexities of land stewardship. And every schoolchild loves to unpick a riddle.
          Kevin Crossley-Holland and Lawrence Sail argue in the Foreword to their New Exeter Book of Riddles, that riddles establish metaphoric relationships between things and other subjects in a peculiar way: ‘In this way, a riddle may not only be pleasurable but also have a healing power,’ they write. This was certainly a quality I wanted in the riddle for the Highampton Bell. And, although I’m clearly no longer a schoolchild, I still can’t resist the riddle as the simplest and most inherently thingy of poems. As Stephen Spender wrote:

‘in most poetry which has as subject a concrete or animal thing – Shelly’s Skylark, say – one begins with the object, the title, the thing, in mind, and then reads the poetry as referring back to this already-conceived idea. The Riddle is back to front. One gets the poetry emanating from the subject – thing – first – and arrives – if one does ever arrive at it – at the title last. The effect is something like pure poetry – a peculiar concentration on imagery – before one arrives at the actual image’ (in The New Exeter Book of Riddles).

The relationships between poem and thing, absence and presence are made quite overt here. From the ‘thusness’ of the poem the reader works towards the ‘thisness’ of the thing. And to go back to from where I began: where the lesson about ‘presence and absence’ is concerned, it’s this careful balancing and orchestration of thisness and thusness that lets us find our ideas in a poem. You got it right William Carlos Williams: ‘No ideas but in things’.

“Autobiographical and yet entirely fictitious…” :

how poems emerge

I was teaching my 3rd year writing class last Friday afternoon when questions of collaboration came up. Is all writing ‘a solitary act’ as John Burnside said to me years back when I interviewed him for Binary Myths my book of correspondences; or is it collaborative in the widest senses of that word? In class, my teaching assistant, the poet Ben Smith, pressed me on it: what about Goose Music, the collaborative book I published with John Burnside in 2008?

Goose Music as a whole was informed by ideas of Emergence theory – how we get very complex patterns in the world (and in poems) through very simple rules and local interactions. John suggested we use Emergence as a theme, and a technique, to which we both responded, letting the new poems listen to each other to build a unified whole out of our constituent parts. Emergence favours the collective over the individual, and it found its way into our poems about human and natural world relationships, poems about myth, fable, folklore, politics, ecology and much more besides. John had also suggested we originally write with Indian Raga structures in mind (a particular interest of his), but we never did this. However, it did lead to us organising our poems into long improvisatory sequences – even though the poems were often written individually.               

We swapped our poems and sequences several times throughout the collaborative process, and looked at where the book was heading, identifying other poems that we might write in response to each other’s contributions. My poems have often explored these themes, and John has often dealt with ideas of kinship in its local and philosophical meanings. I remember setting myself the task of responding to John's poems by writing a kinship sequence that engaged with Emergence, poetry sequences and kinship all at once.               

The trigger for it came in the form of a book review. I had read a review of one of my previous books that week. In it the reviewer had written something that could be applied to many poets’ work, but for some reason it stuck with me. They thought my poems were both ‘autobiographical and yet entirely fictitious at the same time’. That struck me as exactly right: poetry should be about us; emerge through us, but absolutely not be 'about me'. As Borges wrote: 'The poem gains if we look at it as the expression of a longing, not the account of an actual event.' ('The Other') I took that idea  on and decided that I would write my sequence of kinship poems as an entirely fictitious biography. To do this, I needed a title. I was playing around with inconsequential phrases, and was reminded of a poem written by an old poet friend Miles Champion, called ‘Elves in the Shelves’. Silly stuff. John Ashbery has done similar things with titles. It made me choose my title on the spot – this new sequence would be called ‘The Other Brother’, and it would be an homage (another of John’s recurring themes) to the brother I do not have. I sat and wrote seven lyric poems in sequence, in a couple of days. I was very pleased with them. They came at me virtually from nowhere (although I’ve just revealed the truth of what that ‘nowhere’ really was – not ‘nowhere’ at all, but a complex mix of Emergent collaborations). I showed them to John, and he thought them suitable for the book.               

So Ben… in answer to your question… the act of writing is solitary, yet everything about it is a collaboration.