Looking beyond the plain
Revelin Moss, November
Beyond the
marled fell
beyond the
slate path
beyond the
bent larch
stripped bare
of needles.
Beyond this
seat my left hip leans against
beyond the
shale-grey flanks of Skiddaw
this
drystone wall, Derwentwater lying below me.
Beyond
Castlerigg's stone circle,
low clouds
rising like steam from a train
down in St
John’s-in-the-Vale.
Beyond the
slate-grey track
miners'
ghosts tread at midnight.
Beyond the plain where the Pennines' boned back
tucks itself around the first snow of winter, curled
inside the
knuckled thigh of Clough Head.
Beyond Icelandic ponies’ hooves
branding the
fells’ backs
down to where the Irish Sea swings
“Looking Beyond”: the Temporal and the
Spatial
Bakhtin
theorized the connections between literature and the world in terms of the
chronotope - "the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial
relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (Dawn Morgan
1996). I want to begin this chapter by
thinking about some of the ways in which, in my own work, this “intrinsic
connectedness” forms a central thematic thread.
I shall
explore this theme by analysing the poem, ‘Looking beyond the plain.’ Besides
placing the poem in a specific place and time it also shows movement outwards,
through the words ‘looking beyond’.
Revisiting the poem, I see how fully it embodies Massey’s concept of
place as “multiple, shifting, possibly unbounded.”
Although the
character in ‘Looking beyond the plain’ has paused to reflect it is not a
static poem as the person’s mind and imagination are active. It invites the reader to stand alongside the
poet’s persona, who is doing the looking, and do two things: one is to look beyond the Plain, that is, the Solway
physical, external, in constant flux with movement of tides and people and in
the poem physically out of sight; two, the poem invites the reader to look with
the ‘inner eye’ to see beyond what is said to be ‘plain’ and to try and
understand the intrinsic nature of anything that may be termed as such.
It is a poem
that not only exhibits the openness of places by gesturing towards the long
history of diaspora and transience, but also demonstrates a recurrent
characteristic of my poetry, that when I’m in one place my mind spirals outward
to other places, in an attempt to make conscious connections.
The act of
walking is for me a stimulus in making connections. When I stopped at the
viewing point I thought of the many feet which had trod the paths up and down
the valleys, through passes, over packhorse bridges, on foot or on ponies’
backs. For example, the German miners, brought in during Elizabeth the First’s
reign to share their expert knowledge of mining techniques; of gangs who
waylaid miners to steal plumbago; of smugglers, heading to and from Whitehaven
smuggling spices, rum and slaves; of those who built Castlerigg’s Neolithic
Stone Circle and of the hands who built the dry stone wall I rested against. As Massey notes, each place
contains an ‘accumulated history’ which is “the product of layer upon layer of
different sets of linkages, both local and to the wider world” (Massey 2007:
156).
The
complexity of any given place, therefore, relates both to its own nature and to
my subjective experience of it; of memories, thoughts, ideas and anticipation
that rush into my mind when writing in response to a place, whether familiar or
unfamiliar. This aspect of a place containing an ‘accumulated history’ with its
layers of social, political, emotional and physical aspects is similar to that
of a poem and the way a poem is read. It too is visited by the reader,
journeyed through, re-visited, remembered, anticipated and added to by each
reader’s own history, memories and experiences.
It
could be argued that a poem exists as a locus of consciousness through its
interlocking linguistic/physical/sensory/cultural and spiritual dimensions.
Extending the idea that a poem is like a place it could be further argued that
a poem is an eco-system. As William Rueckert observes in his essay titled
‘Literature and Ecology’: “The first Law of Ecology – that everything is
connected to everything else – applies to poems as well as to nature. The
concept of the interactive field was operative in nature, ecology, and poetry
long before it ever appeared in criticism” (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996: 110).
Before
I’d read this I’d already formulated the idea that a poem could be seen as
recyclable energy. A poem has its inception in a poet’s environment before it’s
processed through the poet’s creative imagination, experience and memory. The
poem is then read, or heard, by a reader or audience who in turn contribute
their own energy, experiences and memories to it. Rueckert observes:
A poem is stored energy, a formal turbulence,
a living thing, a swirl in the flow.
Poems are part of the energy pathways which
sustain life.
Poems are a verbal equivalent of fossil fuel
(stored energy), but they are a renewable source of energy, coming, as they do,
from those ever generative twin matrices, language and imagination (Glotfelty
and Fromm 1996: 108).
However
unchanging the landscape may appear it too is a “swirl in the flow”, inexorably
changing. Sometimes the change is slow, through the action of frost and heat,
sometimes change comes swiftly in floods, blizzards, earthquakes or tornadoes.
The
fixed identity of a place is a myth. For example, the name ‘Cumbria’ only came
into being in 1974 with boundary changes. Prior to that it was the counties of
Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, North of the Sands (of Morecambe Bay).
Its inhabitants have ranged from Scandinavians, Vikings, Picts, Anglo-Saxons,
Celts, plus people from the Roman Empire, including Bulgarians, North Africans,
Armenians and Spanish, each of whom brought with them their own religions and
culture. For example on Hadrian’s Wall there’s a stone altar to Mithras.
This
ingress and egress comes right up to the present day when many villages in
Cumbria are largely composed of second homes and towns within the boundary of
the Lake District National Park swell in number with an influx of tourists. As
well as the physical shifting and changes of the land there has also been a
constant movement of people. In Space Place and Gender, Massey, developing her point about the
fluid identities of place, suggests that:
the particularity of any place is…
constructed not by placing boundaries around it and defining its identity
through counter-position to the other which lies beyond, but precisely (in
part) through the specificity of the mix of links and interconnections to that ‘beyond’. Places viewed this way
are open and porous (Massey 2007: 5).
In this
sense a poem shares the same fluidity of movement as that of a place. Over time different readers put their own
‘stamp’ on it, their own non-carbon footprint as they journey through it with
their eyes. When a place is visited a person tries to get his or her bearings.
Similarly in a poem we hook onto what is familiar, thrilled when we discover
something unexpected around the corner, something surprising that jolts us out
of our comfort zone. Or when we’re in
the midst of the familiar and a sudden turn of a head, a shaft of sunlight, or
an object shakes us out of ourselves and make us see the familiar afresh.
Poems can
have this effect on us, just as places do. They spring their element of
surprise by juxtaposing two words, ideas, images or sounds that one wouldn’t
normally associate together, or by turning the corner of an idea through the
use of enjambment or volta. Like places, poems too are about culture, social
relations, human activity, human populations on the move, power relations,
social and personal history, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the physical and
the metaphysical.
To
understand a place we need to know its social and political dynamics. New
geographers, such as Massey, argue that “All attempts to institute horizons, to
establish boundaries, to secure the identity of places, can in this sense be
seen to be attempts to stabilize the
meaning of particular envelopes of space-time”
(Massey 2007: 5).
The idea
of a place being unfixed, boundary-less, or having fluid boundaries can also be
applied to a poem, to one’s identity and to the mind. For example, rather than
having the concept of one’s mind as being a static and bounded container,
another way of thinking of the mind is of the “[mind] as fiction, the compelling
output of a storytelling machine” (Fernyhough 2005.)
extract from "An Exploration of Identity and Environment Through Poetry" PhD Creative Writing Thesis September 2011. Viva Examiners: Prof. John Burnside and Tom Pow. PhD Supervisors Prof. Graham Mort and Dr Lee Horsley
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/projects/graham_mort/crew/geraldine_green_newyork.htm
