Writing Nature

I’m just back from the 11^th Nature Matters event in St Peter’s School, York, still buoyed by its wave of energy. The theme this year was Time for Nature, spanning several thousand years, from the ancient past to the present. There were many highlights, from fascinating archaeologists and paleo-archaeologists Terry O’Connor, Paul Pettitt and Suzi Richer, to incredible female activists: wildlife crime documentary maker Ruth Peacey; ClientEarth lawyer Hatti Owens; environmental poet Sally Goldsmith, involved in saving Sheffield’s street trees; and Isla Hodgson, applying conflict resolution skills to disputes between wildlife and game interests in the Scottish Uplands. Ever since writer Mark Cocker, one of its founder members, introduced me to New Networks for Nature 10 years ago, it has been an important source of inspiration and solidarity for me. New Networks celebrates the absolute centrality of the natural world as it inspires and informs human culture — and it welcomes new people every year. In my own life it occupies and develops a place first identified in the 1970s by Sue Clifford, Angela King, Richard Mabey and others in an earlier influential organisation, Common Ground.

This year Nature Matters was organised by the brilliant Amy-Jane Beer and Ben Hoare. It was extremely encouraging to hear more female voices; to see a younger, more diverse range of people taking part; and, above all, to hear from speakers as different from each other as Feargal Sharkey and Sir John Lister-Kaye, talking about real, grass-roots positive environmental action taking place against the background of species loss and acute ecological emergency.

ATM Street Art’s fabulous Tansy Beetle mural, the Jewel of York

(commissioned by New Networks for Nature)

One of the panel discussions during the two days of talks was entitled New Directions for Nature Writing. The panellists, who included Katharine Norbury, Anita Sethi, Richard Smyth and Zakiya Mckenzie, chaired by Richard Kerridge, discussed the current preoccupation of much British ‘nature writing’ with the personal, and suggested that it needs to open up more to other cultures, and to develop new forms and new styles. This made me think about the place of poetry and song in ‘nature writing’. While the publishing industry is concerned with ‘genres’, poetry – relatively uncommercial – perhaps remains more open to experiment and, in every sense, more ‘free’.

On the first night of Nature Matters, I was honoured to perform alongside writer Nicola Chester, historian Jeremy Mynott and storyteller Malcolm Green, as part of the opening concert by the electrifying folk singer Sam Lee and his band. I adore Sam’s work, his connection with the people from whom he has learnt the songs and with the natural world he celebrates. English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish folk songs, often rooted in the particularity of place, are full of trees, plants, animals and birds, and of fluid shape-shifting ‘supernatural’ transitions between the human and the natural – transitions which are of course universal, as familiar to African, Asian, Arctic or other folk tales as to our own. I’ve always felt a strong connection to folk traditions in my own work, not least because of their anonymity, the communality of song passed down the generations. That is an excellent antidote to the dangers of solipsism, identified in some contemporary ‘nature writing’.

Sam Lee and friends at New Networks for Nature’s ‘Nature Matters’ gathering 2019

My own third poetry collection, Edge, was published by Bloodaxe Books last week. The book is made up of three poem sequences which stretch the definition of ‘Nature in Time’ as far as possible. Their theme is cosmology and astrophysics. All three sequences were written as collaborations. I worked, on the one hand, alongside university scientists researching in those fields and, on the other, alongside the brilliant inventor and electronic composer, Peter Zinovieff, who wrote the multi-channel music for them. A third element of collaboration was provided by Life Science Centre planetarium in Newcastle, who hosted the premier of each piece, with fantastic full-dome planetarium visuals selected from real space photographs.

Edge is an unusual book, not just because of its collaborative origin. For one thing, the poems contain almost no people. I want to explore the landscapes of other worlds against the almost unimaginable scales of nature: to remind myself and my readers that our planet is 4.5 billion years old; that life has existed on it for possibly as much as four billion years; that it has witnessed six mass extinctions; and that, depending on how you define them, human beings have been around for only half a million to a million of those years. Hardly anything at all. Our planet does not need us. I want to create a poetry that reminds us of these things – not to belittle humans, but to recalibrate our place in nature, in order to celebrate more powerfully the wonder, the true value, the extraordinary miracle of conscious life.

A literature student in the audience at Nature Matters, who heard me read from Edge at Sam Lee’s concert, asked whether I consider myself an ‘eco-poet’. Apparently that is a genre now. I’m suspicious of any commercial or academic categorisation. But how can any of us, striving, as poets must, to be true to the time and place in which we live, not be eco-poets? In that sense, the poems which I wrote in the 1990s  about the old, sustainable traditions of the Northumbrian inshore fishing community, were ‘eco-poems’. My friends at Common Ground recognised this, because they were poems about the relations between human beings, our culture and language, place, and the natural world. ‘The sea’s the boss,’ fisherman Charlie Douglas would say, meaning that nature is always ultimately in charge of our lives. Similarly, when I wrote poems about the reclamation of former industrial land for the National Garden Festival in Gateshead in 1990, those were ‘eco-poems’. Again, when I wrote for Turning the Tide, about the project to clean pit waste from the Durham beaches in the late 1990s, those too were poems exploring our relationship to our environment, particularly to fossil fuels.

Most of the poems I’ve written in the last 20 years, including many of those in my second collection, Two Countries, draw on a variety of ‘voices’, imagined and real. My radio poem, Dunstanburgh, for example, is made up of the voices of that place – kittiwakes, skylarks, swallows, the wind – and scraps of local speech, like fragments of folk ballads. Sometimes two or more voices speak simultaneously in the poem, to abstract them and anonymise them further, so that they flow almost into pure music or wild sound. The Refuge Box, similarly written for radio, contains the voices of grey seals, geese, drowned travellers, old fishermen, chants and incantations, scraps of memory, history, myth and speech. All those voices are imagined or reassembled or conducted by me, but none of them is me.

Sometimes nature writing is accused of ‘escapism’, of turning its back on the social, political and ‘identity’ issues of our times. This can undoubtedly be a real problem with the genre. But I would argue that, at its best, nature writing is the opposite of escapism: that it can and should be a vital reminder of our place in the greater web of nature, which we forget at our peril. Our relations with place and nature lie at the very heart of our politics, because they determine what it means to be human. To elevate anthropocentric social and political issues above our relation to our environment is dangerous. The truth is, I don’t particularly want readers to listen to ‘my’ individual voice. I do want them to listen to the multiple and often conflicting voices I present to them or conduct for them – which are of course inevitably mine too, but also, in a complex variety of ways, not mine; and I hope that those voices might help readers to listen to nature directly themselves, and perhaps lead towards less narrowly ‘individualistic’, less ‘anthropocentric’, interpretations of the natural world.

Like those long landscape poems made up of many voices, the poems in Edge are not lyric poems. They use a variety of voices to sing the miraculous — the nature of a reality which we are only beginning to understand. We sit, like the inhabitants of Plato’s cave, looking out through a tiny window at that reality. Our place in our own planet’s history is minuscule, yet our impact is enormous. Our hope lies in our consciousness of these matters, and in our ability to imagine — to ask questions and find solutions. Poetry and science share a common root in these endeavours. I hope that the poems in Edge might encourage readers to imagine; that they might offer a different perspective on nature — and indeed on ‘nature writing’; and that they might – as nature writing always has – sing the miracle and beauty of being alive and conscious in the Universe, here and now.

Chairing ‘Nature in Deep Time’ at ‘Nature Matters’ with archaeologists Prof Terry O’Connor (centre), Dr Suzi Richer (right) and Prof Paul Pettitt (out of shot).

You can find audio and / or audio-visual versions of some of the poem sequences from Edge, with Peter Zinovieff’s multi-channel music rendered for stereo, by clicking on these two links:

Sun

Edge

You can hear me perform different aspects of my work at a number of forthcoming events, including:

Launch: The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry

Saturday 16^th November, 2pm, Scottish Poetry Library, Edinburgh

Although prose poetry is not my usual form, I have a poem — a lyric poem! — in this lovely collection, and will also give a short reading from Edge alongside other poets in the anthology, including editors Anne Caldwell and Oz Hardwick.

 

The Sun: Late

Wednesday 27^th November, 7pm, Science and Industry Museum, Manchester

I’ll perform a full version of Sun with stereo music and flat screen visuals as part of this event.

 

Words Weekend – Poems from the Edge of Extinction with Chris McCabe

Sunday, 8^th December, 11am, Sage Gateshead

I’ll perform Northumbrian dialect poetry as part of this event about poetry in endangered languages. Also reading are Peter McCarey in Scots and Chris McCabe in Scouse. 

An image from ‘Sun’ (credit: NASA SDO)

You can find my previously-unpublished poem Invisible Mending in this new, beautifully-illustrated anthology from Fly on the Wall Press, Planet in Peril, available HERE.

 

 

 

 

Berwick Literary Festival

Holy Trinity Parish Centre, Berwick-upon-Tweed

Sunday, October 20th, 2pm – 3pm, £6

Tickets HERE

I greatly look forward to my third visit to this fantastic Festival, following appearances in 2016 and 17 with fabulous Northumbrian piper Alice Robinson. Those performances concentrated on poems about the landscape and people of Northumberland and the Borders. Sunday’s performance will be very different. I’ll be launching my new Bloodaxe collection, Edge, which contains three poem sequences written for the Planetarium in Life Science Centre, Newcastle.

(Photo by Explore Lifelong Learning, Newcastle) 

These poems take us from the micro quantum worlds underlying the whole Universe to the workings of the Sun, our local star, and the origins of life on this planet and perhaps on other moons of our solar system. The poems are based on conversations with research scientists, and are intended to translate their work to a wider public. They were written in collaboration with the distinguished computer pioneer and composer Peter Zinovieff, who wrote accompanying music based on space data. I’ll talk in Berwick about the process of writing them. My performance will be accompanied by stereo mixes of Peter’s music and by real space photographs. Coincidentally, Peter also wrote the libretto for Sir Harrison Birtwistle’s masterpiece, his opera The Mask of Orpheus, which is revived this week at ENO for the first time in over 30 years.

The scope of Edge, moving from the Big Bang to the origins of conscious life, is an attempt to open up questions  about the place of human life – so vanishingly tiny, so miraculously complex – in time and space. Time will also be the theme of the 11^th Nature Matters symposium, at St Peter’s School, York, October 31^st – November 3^rd. On the Saturday morning I’ll chair a fascinating set of presentations called ‘Nature in Deep Time’, by Professor Terry O’Connor, Professor Paul Pettitt and Dr Suzi Richer. On the Friday evening, Halloween, I’m honoured to be performing some of my own work, in the company of poets and writers Zakiya McKenzie, Nicola Chester, Jeremy Mynott and Malcolm Green, alongside another of my heroes, the astonishing talented singer-songwriter Sam Lee. Here’s a poster for the event:That’s the great thing about having a new book out. It gets you out to meet readers and other poets and artists — and, if you’re lucky, to complete the circle of exchange, from the people and places who inspire you, back to that source. In the last three weeks I’ve read at the excellent Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival in Cornwall with acclaimed Irish poet John F. Deane, and at Durham Book Festival with Forward Prize winner Phoebe Power. I shared a residency with Phoebe for Durham Book Festival and the National Trust’s People’s Landscape project in East Durham. I’d really love to read the new poems from that residency in Easington Colliery and Horden, the places that inspired them.

I’ve also run my first poetry seminar for Explore Lifelong Learning in Newcastle, with a wonderfully warm and enthusiastic group of adult students. I found that session particularly rewarding, and hope to return early next year. The photograph at the top of this post, celebrating the launch of Edge, was taken there.

 

The poems in Edge mark a shift of emphasis in my work. But I have not moved away from writing about the North East of England. Some people understood the title of my last collection, Two Countries, as a reference to England and Scotland, but that was only partly true. Although, coincidentally, that book was published in the month of the 2014 Scottish independence vote, examining the nature of the Borderland was only a small part of its theme. I felt that it was more about other divisions, within England itself: between North and South, country and town or – still more acutely – between those London-dominated or University-educated voices which are represented in places of power and some of those voices which are not. I am of course University-educated myself; the complexity of all of this I hope informs the poems. However you interpret the ‘Two Countries’ of the title, I think that the divisions explored in that book have been borne out in the events of the last three years. The result of the Brexit referendum, I’d argue, are every bit as much about those internal divisions as they are about our relations to Europe.

Still more urgently, my recent commission on the Durham coast has brought home to me once again the tremendous environmental and social costs of our dependence on fossil fuels. I’ve always considered my place-based work, particularly that concentrating on the Northumberland fishing communities, to be about ‘ecology’ in the broadest sense. To me, the highly particular, ‘local’ work in my first two Bloodaxe collections is deeply linked to the universal principles which I explore in Edge.Shippersea Bay, Easington Colliery, Co Durham. (Photo K. Porteous)

 

Edge

September is one of my favourite months. Perhaps with an echo of distant schooldays, it feels like the beginning of something. On the Northumberland and Durham coast, swallows, house martins and large flocks of finches are on the move, preparing to migrate. The garden is overgrown, sweet and abundant.

I have a new book to celebrate: Edge  This one is quite different from my previous two collections from Bloodaxe. It’s not about landscape or the culture or history of North East England but about science — how astonishing it is, and how miraculous it is to be human.

‘Who’s it for’? my father asked of my last collection. The answer, for this one, as I hope for all my poetry, is that it’s for everyone.

Edge contains three poem sequences, Field, Sun and the title sequence, and they all deal, at different scales, with cosmology and astrophysics. All three pieces began as collaborations, commissioned for performance in Life Science Centre Planetarium, Newcastle between 2013 and 2016, with computer music by Peter Zinovieff. They take the reader from the micro quantum worlds underlying the whole universe, to the macro workings of our local star, the potential for primitive life elsewhere in the solar system on moons such as Enceladus, and finally to the development of complex consciousness on our own planet. As scientific inquiry reveals the beauty and poetry of the universe, Edge celebrates the astonishing local circumstances which enable us to begin to understand it.

How does Edge relate to my earlier work? I don’t think of it as being substantially different, although I expect others might disagree. I write about nature, place and time – often beyond the human scale. This work is an attempt to place our small planet, teeming with life, in the context of the physical processes of the universe as we understand them. I began knowing very little about science, and still know far, far less than I should. But I learnt through writing these poems, and from working with research scientists to try to ‘translate’ their findings to a wider audience. This has been a transformative experience, and I would love to take readers on a similar journey.

Please come and celebrate with me at one of these events:

Bodmin Moor Poetry Festival

Berwick Literary Festival

On another transformative theme, I’m also taking part in an event with award-winning poet Phoebe Power at Durham Book Festival on Saturday October 12^th. This is part of a commission from Durham Book Festival and the National Trust to celebrate ‘The People’s Landscape’ of the Durham coast from Seaham to Crimdon. This was the coast I wrote about 20 years ago in Turning the Tide (published in Two Countries), a sequence about the massive millennium project to clean up millions of tons of colliery waste from the beaches. How have the landscape and people of Easington and Horden fared since? Whether you live there, like to walk there, or just love poetry, please join us for some new writing and lively discussion!

Durham Book Festival

‘The People’s Landscape’. Eden Dene mouth, Horden beach. Photo by Katrina Porteous 2019

Dunstanburgh

Back in 2003-4, the brilliant BBC radio producer Julian May and I made a half-hour poem for BBC Radio 4 called Dunstanburgh Castle: a secret as old as the stones. I’ve always loved Dunstanburgh Castle on the Northumberland coast. It’s a ruin; not grand and inhabited like Bamburgh or Alnwick castle, but somehow in spring and summer – its cliffs populated by boisterous kittiwakes, its towers teeming with swallows and its acres of grassland blooming with wildflowers and moths – it is more alive than any human habitation. It is not accessible by road; you reach it by a half hour hike over fields or, from the north, across the sandy sweep of Embleton Bay. And it’s a mysterious place. A ruin on a high, black, basalt cliff, it stands alone, windswept, visible for miles around, the sea breaking at its foot. What is it doing there, so far from any settlement?

My idea was to write a history of the castle, human and natural. I wanted to write about it over the course of a year, tracing the seasonal changes in its wildlife and weather – things which would have been much the same when it was built in 1313. The idea was to summon ‘voices’ from its past, from the years when it offered shelter to local people from Scots raiders, or stood as an advertisement for the ‘good lordship’ of its creator, Thomas of Lancaster. It seems that Thomas built Dunstanburgh at least partly as visual propaganda – as an advertisement for his ability to provide justice and protection in a lawless country close to the Border, in rivalry to an ineffectual King. Surrounded by man-made ‘meres’, the castle referenced King Arthur’s Camelot – a subversive suggestion of entitlement to the throne within sight of the royal castle at Bamburgh.

Last month I revisited Dunstanburgh with another fantastic radio producer, Adam Fowler. Adam was making a programme called Fence Me In, in which he investigates how the acoustics of a space affect artists’ creativity. We talked about the varied spaces within and outside the ruin – from the imposing drum towers to tiny garderobes, to the 30-metre high basalt cliff on the castle’s north side – and about how I tried to evoke those spaces in the sound of words.

I wrote Dunstanburgh over the course of a year, during which I made many hours of audio recordings. Those recordings were often the starting-point for particular parts of the poem. Bursts of swallow-song in the drum towers gave rhythm and colour to one section. The pulse of seas breaking in a rocky inlet called the Egyncleugh punctuated another. Line-length, stanza form and rhythm were strongly shaped by the enclosed or open acoustics of spaces.

When Julian May and I recorded the poem on location, together with actor Trevor Fox, on a sleety February day in 2004, we tried to realise this mimesis by performing the poem in the actual spaces which had shaped it. So Trevor read the Egyncleugh section down among the rocks where the sea was breaking. It was reassuring to discover that the section I had written six months earlier still faithfully imitated the rhythm of the sea’s pulse. When I revisited the site with Adam Fowler more than 15 years later, that was still the case.

One thread that runs through the half hour poem is a chant, which alludes to the local folkloric story of Sir Guy the Seeker. Sir Guy arrives at the castle one stormy night, to be led down a staircase where he is shown the figure of a girl trapped inside a crystal. To release her, he must make a choice between a sword and a bugle. Sir Guy makes the wrong choice. I conflated this story with other folklore about the ghost of a child haunting the cliff, and wrote a chant which evokes the otherworldly, echoing sound of the city of kittiwakes on the ancient, shadowy basalt cliff beneath the castle. Julian May and I then recorded children from Seahouses First School reading that chant, and merged their voices with those of real kittiwakes recorded at the castle. The result both evokes that particular place in space and time, and paradoxically also gives a sense of timelessness.

I think of writing poetry as an act of listening. It can feel as if one is trying to translate an emotional resonance into actual physical sound architecture – as if one could turn an emotion into a place, something that could be revisited at any time. In the case of Dunstanburgh, I thought of it as a synaesthetic attempt to translate a place which spoke to all my senses into sound, both on the level of words, and as actual sound in the radio poem. Julian May and I worked together to weave the sounds I had collected over the year back into the recorded poem in the studio. You can hear the result as part of the eBook version of my Bloodaxe poetry collection, Two Countries, available HERE.

The full text of Dunstanburgh is published in Two Countries (Bloodaxe Books, 2014), available HERE.

Adam Fowler’s programme, Fence Me In, about the affects of the acoustics of a space on creativity, also features musicians Anna Clock and Ailbhe Nic Oireachtaigh, director Catherine Alexander of Complicité Theatre Company, and Chris Chafe of Stanford University. It is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday August 4^th at 13.30, and afterwards on BBC Sounds. You can read about it — and listen after broadcast — HERE.

For news of my forthcoming poetry collection from Bloodaxe, Edge, published in October, please click HERE.

For Katrina Porteous and Alexis Bennett in Dartington Great Hall 2019, please click HERE.

To hear Sea, Sky, Stars, a recording developed from a performance with Alexis Bennett in Dartington Great Hall, 2018, please click HERE.

Deranged Poetesses: Space / Exploration

Saturday July 20^th 7-9pm

ARC Theatre, Stockton Arts Centre

Deranged Poetesses? That’s quite a title. Must be ironic, I thought. A reflection on how poets have traditionally been associated with madness, from poor Thomas Chatterton and Lord Byron, ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’, to female poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Isn’t this a stereotype my generation of women struggled to leave behind?

Well, maybe it’s time to re-examine those ideas. Last year Apples and Snakes performance poetry group Deranged Poetesses presented three events at ARC Theatre, Stockton, all about female identity: Maidens, Mothers and Crones. This year, they’ve invited ‘female-identifying or non-binary poets’ to take part in an event to celebrate Space and Exploration, on the 50^th anniversary of humans landing on the Moon. I’m old enough to remember that historic event, which didn’t seem so extraordinary to a child who had grown up watching blurry black and white TV images of Apollo spacecraft. There were no women astronauts on any of them.

I’ve never defined myself as a ‘poetess’. When I was the only female among four winners of the Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 1989, an interviewer asked me how it felt to be a woman poet. I couldn’t answer. I thought of myself as a poet before I thought of myself as a woman. But my female identity has become more important to me as I’ve aged. There are many more women poets writing and publishing now than there were 30 or 40 years ago, and sex and gender are explored with greater complexity and fluidity than I remember from 1970s feminism.

As for ‘deranged’, I’d refer you to Emily Dickinson: ‘Much madness is divinest sense’. Creativity always resists the constraints of convention, or perhaps rather subverts convention, using it in unconventional ways. Poets don’t always fit well with society when it’s difficult to be paid for our work. The value of what we do is not commensurate to the price. So perhaps it’s time to reclaim that word, ‘deranged’ – at least to think about why and by whom it might be applied.

I’m thrilled to be performing as part of Deranged Poetesses in Stockton ARC Theatre on July 20^th. My work has always been for the ear; it occupies the edge between the page and the cave-fire, or the hearth, or any theatre space. I write to be heard out loud, to share with a group, which is why I love writing for radio, and working with musicians. But I’m new to the Performance Poetry circuit. What will the audience and other performers think of my work?

The Space / Exploration evening blends poetry, performance, music and projected visuals in the Japanese PechaKucha tradition. There are six performers, and each creation lasts 13 minutes. In Lunar, Manchester Theatre Award winning Keisha Thompson mixes space exploration with afro-futurism. Other performers include Isabelle Kenyon, with a piece about women in space, Hannah Lasagne, Lisa Louise Lovebucket and Katie Greenbrown. You can read about their presentations HERE.

I’ll be performing Field, an astonishing blend of poetry, music, science and space photographs which explores the strange quantum worlds created at the Big Bang. This is a reconfigured version of a piece which I made with computer music pioneer Peter Zinovieff for the Planetarium at Life Science Centre, Newcastle in 2015. You don’t need to know anything about physics to enjoy it – Field is about the mysterious, beautiful realities which underlie the world as we understand it, and the music and visuals are awesome. Please come along on July 20^th to experience it.

Photo: NASA Hubble Space Telescope

Astonishing that, across
Immense distance,
It should speak,

Cold and articulate
As zigzags of light…  

Deranged Poetesses: Space / Exploration

Saturday July 20^th 7-9pm

ARC Theatre

Stockton Arts Centre

TS18 1LL

Age 14+

Free but ticketed. Book HERE

The Wund an’ the Wetter

IRON Press Festival of Words and Music

Peter Mortimer has been running the excellent IRON Press for 46 years, and he writes that the IRON Festival is ‘As far as I know…the country’s only literary festival built around a small press.’ June 20th – 23rd will be a fabulous weekend, packed, not with celebrity names from a national touring list, but with real working writers associated with the press or the region or both.

I’m lucky to be one of them. Twenty years ago, IRON commissioned me to write a poem in Northumbrian dialect, to celebrate the launch of the collected works of the Northumbrian Bard, Fred Reed. At the same time, they commissioned Chris Ormston to write a pipe tune. The result was The Wund an’ the Wetter, a collaboration in the dialect of the dwindling fishing community of north Northumberland, which was published by IRON Press as a book and CD with the support of the Northumbrian Language Society.

Please come along to St George’s Church, Cullercoats, on Saturday June 22^nd, to hear me perform the poem with Chris, together with some of my other locally-based poems and Chris’ music, old and new. It will be a night to remember!

More info and bookings HERE

The Wund an’ the Wetter at The 4th IRON Press Festival of Words and Music,

Saturday June 22^nd, 7.30pm

St George’s Church,

1 Beverley Gardens,

Cullercoats,

NE30 4NS

£7

 

 

Sea, Sky, Stars

Cutty Sark

I’m just back from a wonderful event on board the sailing clipper Cutty Sark in Greenwich. The evening was called From the Coble Coast to Bantry Bay and took place in the intimate pop-up theatre in the ship’s hold, to celebrate her 150^th anniversary. With the support of the London Irish Centre, Greenwich-based poet and sailor Mick Delap organised the event, which featured his exuberant sound piece, Bantry Bay. This fascinating piece tells the story of the Bantry Bay longboat from the attempted French and Irish landing of 1796 to the present day. It’s published in Mick’s second collection, Opening Time. The parts were read by Mick, radio and voice artist Doireann Ni Bhriain, and two leading Irish poets, Theo Dorgan and Paddy Bushe, with music by the wonderful Greenwich folk fiddler, Alexis Bennett.

I loved meeting the Irish visitors, and was privileged to contribute the ‘coble’ element to the evening, reading poems about the traditional Northumbrian boat from The Blue Lonnen (including from my two Bloodaxe collections, The Lost Music and Two Countries). Throughout the performance, Alexis played live and electronically-processed fiddle music — both his own composition and traditional tunes. I’m very grateful to Mick, Alexis and the Irish poets for making it possible. It was a powerful feeling, to summon the memory of my Northumbrian fisher friends, Charlie Douglas, Cathy and Redford Armstrong and many others, within the iron frames and elm planks of that magnificent ship. I think they would have loved it.

Alexis and I met at Dartington International Summer School last year. You can hear Sea, Sky, Stars, our 10-minute radio piece developed from our Dartington performance, HERE. We filmed From the Coble Coast to Bantry Bay, so I hope to put some of our performance onto my You Tube channel soon. We’d love to perform The Blue Lonnen again, so do please contact us via this site if you’re interested in a booking. Meanwhile, we’ll be performing a new set in August at the event below.

 

Dartington International Summer School and Festival

Dartington Great Hall, Totnes, Devon, TQ9 6EL

Sunday 4^th August 2019, 5.15pm

£10 (students 50%)

You can hear me with Alexis Bennett in this lovely setting, in a new concert of Northumbrian landscape-based poetry and fiddle music. I’ll also be performing a short excerpt from Horse, a very different piece, about the 3,000 year old Uffington chalk figure, with music by the electronic composer and inventor, Peter Zinovieff.

Book HERE.

For more information about my writing course at Dartington on the poetry of place, click HERE.

 

The Fourth IRON Press Festival of Words and Music

St George’s Church, Cullercoats, NE30 4NS

Saturday 22^nd June, 7.30pm (doors open 7.15)               

£7

I’m appearing with my old associate, the brilliant Northumbrian piper Chris Ormston, in The Wund an’ the Wetter, our Northumbrian dialect collaboration, as part of The Fourth IRON Press Festival of Words and Music.  We’re celebrating the 20^th anniversary of The Wund an’ the Wetter this year, and we’ll perform it together with other music and new poems about the North East fishing community and the sea. 

Book HERE.

 

Deranged Poetesses: Space / Exploration

ARC Theatre, Stockton Arts Centre, TS18 1LL

Saturday 20^th July, 7-9pm

Free but ticketed.

July 20^th marks the 50^th anniversary of the first humans to land on the Moon. Alongside Keisha Thompson, Isabelle Kenyon, Hannah Lasagne, Lisa Louise Lovebucket and Katie Greenbrown, I’ll be taking to the stage to celebrate the wonders of space and exploration. I’ll deliver a 13-minute extract from a longer piece, Field, an astonishing performance of poetry, music (by Peter Zinovieff), science and space photographs, that explores the strange quantum worlds created at the Big Bang.

The event is organised by Apples and Snakes and is free but ticketed.

Book HERE.

From the Coble Coast to Bantry Bay, Cutty Sark, May 24th 2019

Katrina Porteous, Doireann Ni Bhriain, Theo Dorgan and Paddy Bushe

(photo by Mick Delap)

 

From Geoffrey Hill to Patti Smith

Last week I spent an enjoyable couple of hours in Newcastle with Tyneside documentary film-maker Gary Alikivi, whose blog features interviews with a great variety of North East musicians, as well as artists and writers. Gary’s own work covers a wide range of Tyneside themes, including Irish, Russian and other international Tyneside connections, such as the writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, South Shields born Eileen O’ Shaughnessy, wife of George Orwell, and writer and artist Baron Avro Manhattan.

Gary skilfully compressed two hours of chat into a blog interview, ‘Some Kind of Magic’, which you can read HERE. He asked me about my early influences. There wasn’t time to go into great detail, but I did tell him about a few. Poetry – or playing with words as all children do – has been important to me all my life, and became more so in my teens. I had fantastic encouragement from my first English teacher at Durham High School, Mrs Wood. She was a great role model to me. Her son, the novelist and critic James Wood, has written about her in his New Yorker essay, ‘Lessons from My Mother’.

In the months between my university entrance exams and my first term at Cambridge in September 1979, I was still living with my parents, near Consett, where I grew up. In April 1979, Northern Arts paid for my place on a weekend ‘writer’s workshop’ in the Lake District. One of the tutors was the distinguished poet Geoffrey Hill. I was the youngest student there, shy, intense, writing awful, archaic, highly formal verse about unrequited love and feeling lonely in Consett. I’d never met any writers before. The heady mix of students and tutors was fantastic – I was discovering for the first time that there were other people out there with a compulsion to write.

Geoffrey Hill was immensely encouraging; gentle, paternal and patient. He read my awful poems and found things of value in them. He took me almost as seriously as I took myself. When he heard that I was preparing to read History at university rather than English he approved, although he added: ‘Better if it was quantum physics’. He told me that I was ‘much too thin-skinned’ to go into theatre, which I was considering; and, understanding my commitment to poetry, gave me the wisest advice of all: ‘Don’t teach!’ On the last night of the course he read from Mercian Hymns and his finest work, King Log, during a mighty thunderstorm. It was like listening to Zeus. Hill was an enormous influence on me at a very impressionable age, and we remained in touch for several years afterwards. I’ll always be grateful to him.

Around the same time I earned some spare cash shifting scenery, running errands and acting as an usher for the RSC during their first visits to Newcastle, at the Gulbenkian Studio in what is now Northern Stage. It wasn’t all Shakespeare. There were plays by Brecht, Edward Bond, David Edgar and Pam Gems, and I met many well-known actors, including Ian McKellen and Judy Dench, and others, like Ruby Wax, who later became famous names. The pay packet was tiny; but can you imagine an 18-year-old today being paid to run errands for a prestigious theatre company? There seemed to be more money for the arts in those days.

In August 1979 I had another errand-running job, on a summer school course for American students visiting Edinburgh Festival. I was given free board and lodgings in return for showing people how to get around the city, and standing in endless queues to buy show tickets for them. For me, the highlight of the whole Festival was hearing Patti Smith read from her poetry collection Babel, then being among a small group of girls who hung out with her briefly before her evening gig. Babel couldn’t have been much further from King Log¸ or Patti from Geoffrey Hill, if they had inhabited different planets; but they each represented something vital to me. Here I am, aged 18 and star-struck:

It’s striking to me, looking back, how few of the ‘big names’ who inspired me were women. Plenty of women and girls studied poetry and wrote it. Few, it seemed, qualified as ‘leading poets’ in those days — whatever ‘leading poets’ might mean. The late ‘70s and early ‘80s were a very different time for young women. Patti Smith was therefore particularly important to me. From her album Horses onward she was one of my favourite poets — and she rocked.

Gary Alikivi brings all this together in his interview. He also touches on my two years in America, during which I encountered several other inspirational poets. At Berkeley I studied Basil Bunting’s Briggflatts with Thom Gunn and was taught poetry by the wonderful Robert Pinsky, whose ear for music helped me tune my own.

Then in the summer of 1983 in California I met Seamus Heaney, who became my tutor on the East Coast at Harvard in 1983-4. Boundlessly generous with his time and attention, Seamus read and commented on my still-awful poems with enormous care. It was at this time, aged 23, that I wrote the earliest poem in The Lost Music, ‘If My Train Will Come’. Seamus recognised it as ‘one of those poems that comes as a gift, from nowhere’. At the end of my time in the States, when I was trying to decide my future, his advice to me was formative: ‘I think if you go home you might write the Northumbrian Under Milk Wood’.

I didn’t manage anything so ground-breaking or grand; but I did gravitate towards the fishermen and women’s dialect voices, and the authentic speech patterns of my chosen place. Thinking about all this, I feel extremely lucky to have received university education at a time when it was free, and to have travelled and encountered so many gifted poets, thanks first to Northern Arts, then to the Commonwealth Fund which supported my Harkness Fellowship, and to the Society of Authors, which funded my later Eric Gregory Award. I’ve had a great deal of support over the years, without which I would not have been able to develop my work.

          Coffee with Seamus Heaney and students, including poet Amy Bartlett (right), Harvard Square 1984

Gary brings the story up to date at the end of his interview, by asking about my upcoming gigs. One I’m particularly looking forward to with fiddler Alexis Bennett takes place on board the 150-year-old clipper ship Cutty Sark at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich on Friday May 24th. It’s called ‘From the Coble Coast to Bantry Bay: the poetry and music of the Sea’, and you can book tickets HERE.

Cutty Sark, where I’m performing with Alexis Bennett, Mick Delap and others on May 24th

Do please look at Gary Alikivi’s site. It contains some great interviews. And do please read ‘Some Kind of Magic’. Thanks, Gary, for giving me the space and the opportunity to think about some of the people who’ve been important to me along the way.