January Places: exercises

Loving landscapes in a busy month

Every January without fail, I am amazed by how much of my day is taken up by the January Writing Hour. It’s only one hour, I think. As long as I have a stock of poetry and exercises to draw on, my afternoons and evenings will be free.

And of course, it doesn’t work out like that. The January Writing Hours soak into everything. My mind is constantly busy looking for poetry to share, turning everything into prompts.

And life doesn’t stop! At the moment, apart from my regular work with St Mungos and the Royal Literary Fund, I’m curating an anthology of poetry by refugees and asylum seekers; I’m a pastoral mentor for New Writing North, and I’m also working with them on a Good Practice Guide for course organisers. Meanwhile, I’m working with Little Toller and Blue Moose to curate a collection of writing about bogs and moors, whilst simultaneously raising £12,000 to cover the printing costs.

Not much time for my own writing, or for reading, but last night Niamh and I travelled to London to attend the Launch of Songs of Freedom: poetry by Iranian and Afghan women. I’ll write about this in another blog, and I’ll include some of the poetry and exercises from the extraordinary Writing Hour which showcased poetry from Iranian women and which included Aniseh Pishgahi reading to us in Farsi.

For now, here are the poems and exercises from a bog-themed workshop delivered last Friday.

Warm Up Exercise

If you were a landscape, what landscape would you be?Would you be sea, mountain, moor, bog, city? Would you be a small town, or the moon, a volcano, an arctic wilderness? What season is it in this landscape – what weather, what time of day? What lives there – creatures and people - how is it visited or viewed or used? How does it sound, and smell?

Write into it, in detail, for at least five minutes.

I owe Helen Mort a debt of gratitude – in 2021, she pointed out that I am a landscape poet, which should have been obvious to me as I was the resident poet in Lancashire Wildlife Trust. I guess I had always confused landscape with the pastoral, and my poetry always seemed social and political to me, so concerned with the human. But landscape poetry simply describes where place is a crucial part of the poem’s world – where attention to place has something very important to tell us. And my poetry is profoundly rooted in place – the North; its post-industrial towns, moors and rivers.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in in the deep heart’s core.

Innisfree is an uninhabited island on Lough Gill which Yeats visited as a child. Whilst the poem might initially seem pastoral – concerned only with praising place – there’s a story here … his use of the future tense “I will go” tells us that he’s not actually there, and he wishes he was. The poem is brought alive by longing and by contrast.

Similarly, there’s a deceptive simplicity to the form. However, the poem originally had a very different rhythm, in long, rambling lines – this alone shows how carefully crafted the finished poem is: its lines are as controlled as music. Metrically, it’s exceptionally tight and rich. The a/b/a/b rhymes are as regular as waves, and there’s a folkloric resonance which lulls and holds us, whilst the slowing and speeding of the poem’s rhythm delivers us exactly where the poet wants to take us.

Exercise:

What place is in your deep heart’s core?

Use the verbs like “I will go” and “I have been” – to build contrast into the poem. Begin to consider how the qualities of place might be described in words and evoked in sound, rhythm and form.

All my life, I’ve loved the moors as great wild places I could roam and stomp and climb. Now I see them as places of immense detail, where the invitation is to look closely. They are not wild, nor bleak – they are tender, and delicate and full of life, and a proper sense of love for them, protective and almost parental. I’ve come to understand Patrick Kavanagh: that it’s not how many places you know, but how deeply.

“To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience’

from 'The Parish and the Universe', by Patrick Kavanagh

In his seminal book “Landmarks”, Robert MacFarlane points out how much of a role language can play in the “knowing” which Kavanagh speaks of. He tells of the smeuse – an underused name for the small paths made by the passage of little animals under hedges - how, once we know the word, we begin to notice smeuses everywhere. If we lack the words, we don’t notice or value our lands … and this impact can be seen most clearly in the case of moors, and bogs which tend to be seen a great bleak, wild wastelands, and which, as a result, are incredibly vulnerable to development and exploitation. Despite holding more than four times the carbon held by the UK’s forests, over 80% of our bogs have been drained, destroyed or damaged.

It's with this in mind that Anna Chilvers and are creating the Book of Bogs anthology, featuring writing by Rob MacFarlane, David Morley, Pascale Petite, Amy Liptrot, Gwyneth Lewis and many more, all finding language for, the incredible, rich and detailed landscape of bogs and moors. Here’s a poem from the book:

Love Poem, Sundews

by Vicky Gatehouse

Moss-rain and droplets of sun hung

on the tips of stalked glands

slow gluey buzz of afternoons

five-petalled blooms held at the tip

of hairless stems tender and nodding

This is leaf blade as mouth

an open and sticky yes So much

wanting both insect and plant

This is leaf blade as fist a roll-up

of mucilage and suffocation

All this suffering and for what?

To flower briefly in the poorest of soils

soft bodies broken down to their atoms

Love I would come back again

Exercise

Write about one small detail of your landscape …. Focus one plant, or stone, or insect, in precise detail, using, if you can, the specific language of that thing - whether it’s scientific, or local, or personal. See if you can make this into a love poem.

If you want more …

You can join Anna Chilvers and I for more bog-inspired writing at an evening workshop tomorrow – Sunday 19^th 7-9pm – with every penny raised going towards the printing costs of the anthology. Or you can simply donate using this crowdfunder.