poetry – Unlocking Words

Slipper Limpet, Crepidula Fornicata

This post is inspired by a poem from Isabel Galleymore which I looked at in a poetry class and fell in love with. It’s part of her collection Significant Other which I’d highly recommend. Whilst the poem is enjoyable by itself, knowing more about the slipper limpet heightens the pleasure and appreciation of Galleymore’s skill.

Whilst slipper limpets are found in the UK, they are a non native species that arrived from America in the 19^th century. The first live slipper limpets were found in Liverpool Bay and are likely to have hitched a ride on the back of oysters. During the 19^th century, eating oysters became fashionable in London and native stocks rapidly became depleted. To meet demand, oysters were imported from America, along with the now invasive stowaway.

Slipper Limpets live under rocks in the intertidal zone and feed by filtering plankton from the water. They have thin, flattened shells which has a little shelf and when flipped upside down, apparently look like a slipper hence the name. The first half of the scientific name actually means slipper in Latin and whilst we’re thinking about the name, it’s also important to note they aren’t actually a limpet… They are instead a type of sea snail.

They live in groups of up to 12 with one stacked upon another, largest at the bottom and getting smaller as you go up the tower (or Galleymore’s “high-rise orgy“). The base slipper limpet attaches herself to things like rocks, scallops, crabs and mussels and thus the slipper limpets live a sedentary life. And it is always either a female or an empty shell, with the rest of the stack being male. It is advantageous for females to be bigger than males so they can carry more eggs. And they can lay between 10,000 and 200,000 eggs so they need plenty of space!

The male has a penis that can be as long as his body, and it needs to be; it has to extend round and under the female’s shell in order to reach her genital opening. It is because they need to be so close that they attach to one another – imagine being stuck with your ex literally on your back until you die…

Slipper limpets are born male and will later change sex, something known as sequential hermaphrodism. Recent research has shown that the change occurs as a result of physical contact with another male. However, it’s not instant and doesn’t happen as a result of every contact. The change itself takes about 60 days – or about two moon cycles – to change sex and during this time the penis shrinks and disappears and the female organs develop.

The more you learn about the slipper limpet, the more appropriate you think the scientific name is. But whilst it would be fun to imagine an animal named for it’s sexual habits, fornicate unfortunately comes from the Latin word for arch – fornix – and refers to their arched shape.

Peak breeding occurs during May and June and most females spawn twice a year, after neap tides. Egg capsules are brooded under the foot of the female, attached to the inside of her shell or her foot. The young hatch as larvae after 3 to 4 weeks and will stay in larval form for about 4 to 5 weeks. After this they will leave home. In their early life they are able to move, slowly crawling to find a suitable site to set up home, but generally after about two years they are stuck wherever they are. Hopefully having chosen the perfect spot, given they live up to 10 years. If they settle alone, they will turn female and become the base slipper limpet. Alternatively, they will join an existing chain and wait their turn.

Scientists have been looking at the Slipper Limpet to see if it has any medical benefits for us and hemocyanin – the same chemical that makes the blood of horseshoe crabs and octopuses blue – has been found in their blood and is effective in treating breast and bladder cancer. Their tough fleshy food may also have uses for human medicine. Collagen from it can be used in regenerative medicine, such as advanced wound care and bone and nerve repair. Whilst collagen is found in virtually every living organism, the collagen from the slipper limpets is stable in the same range as human collagen and thus provides an alternative source – at present collagen from cows and pigs is used.

Returning to the poem, I am in awe of Galleymore’s ability to make us stop and think twice about this seemingly dull, drab, slightly gnarled looking creature. Without her poem, I wouldn’t know about the slipper limpet and I certainly wouldn’t have had so many conversations about it.

Links

The making of bats

The making of bats
is an act
that must take place
in the darkest of spaces;
no full moon,
no starlit skies.

Instead shadows and coal,
Silhouettes and pitch.

Hand to heartwood,
whisper wishes to the owls,
pray they take them, swift winged,
to the goddess of the night.

If you are blessed,
hear the sky fill with wingbeats.

The making of bats is a gift,
goddess given,
not a right.

If you haven’t already, take a look at my post on spontaneous generation and read about some of the ‘recipes’ that were believed to create animals prior to the 17th and 18th centuries. You’ll realise that my own recipe isn’t that unbelievable!

The making of a witch

Summon the queen of death.

Split open the sky.

Scratch at constellations

‘til stars fall

to sand; petrified

lightning – her wrath.

There was a storm once

– long forgotten –

the night threw flames

and set the galaxy alight.

Here lie her eyes;

Deep, mysterious, dancing.

Look for old stone stacks,

Moss covered, lined up on paths that are not passed

– her unmoveable will.

An ancient mountain.

Find the place where the tide

rips over scorched limestone

and quartz.

Buried below is her heart.

Listen to the trees,

the whistle of the leaves.

Hear her.

In fog, shapes slowly transform.

In the making of witches,

earth turns to flesh,

stones turn to bones,

and fossils to blood,

under the pressure

of oppression.

To know her is to hold a storm

in the cup of your hands.

To love her is to offer your heart

to smouldering ashes,

knowingly.

Do you give it?

Campanula

Spreading and reaching | Reaching and spreading
into the crevices of the | roots creeping though
humanmade world. | cracks in domesticity.

Patiently establishing myself; | Weakening structures
dainty, delicate lilac petals | forcing a new perception,
– miniature stars. | a new perspective.

When I grow up, I want
to be a campanula, a paradox.
Lover and fighter.
Darkness and light.
A fairy-flower-wall-tumbler.

And no one to expect any less from me.

I struggled with wordpress formatting this.. I tried all sorts but it wasn’t playing friendly with me… The first three stanzas are two columns, side by side, the left column is aligned to the right so they butt up against each other. I’ve used |’s to separate the sides.

Place in poetry

I was going to write a post about how place is used in poetry as a complementary post to place in literature, and perhaps I still will, but I feel more drawn to sharing some examples of place in contemporary poems.

Gargoyle by Bruce Barnes writes from the perspective of York from one of the gargoyles on the minster. I tried to find a copy online as I don’t like sharing work without permission but I couldn’t so instead I’m going to point you all to the Versions of the North anthology which is a great collection of contemporary Yorkshire poetry. Having said that, here is an excerpt:

“Stuck up here, becoming less than what I was,
the mason’s mark still, even stone gets livid,
saying, “Oh, sod this for a game of soldiers…”

expletives deleted by the roar of the street”

I thought this was an interesting angle on place poetry, the gargoyles are such a fundamental, but vastly overlooked, part of the minster and they have endured for centuries, despite become less than they were. They have seen immense change, creation and destruction, life and death, each gargoyle looking at a slightly different part of York, a deep knowing of the small view they have.

Adrienne Rich’s Turning the Wheel (listen to her reading this and other poems ) sums up sense of place for me in the first two lines:

“The road to the great canyon always feels
like that road and no other”

Far away from the Yorkshire I am familiar with, Rich writes of the universal experience of sense of place in those lines. Here though, she is writing politically about the history of the place, what has been erased and what later becomes icon-ised, and in turn made unreal. The history of the land, of place, in America is one that is often fraught with tension and violence and colonialism. A history that was ignored and that more recently has been rewritten. “Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around”, writes Rich.

A very different poem is Amanda Dalton’s Making Space about both creating a room where there was none and creating space in our lives. From the blurb for the collection, we find that

“How to Disappear shines a torch into the dark corners and finds a world inhabited by the missing and the dead, by monsters and wounded beasts, discarded dreams and the memories of strangers – a trawl through the apparently empty spaces and what might be found there.”

“For days the builders filled the house.
They lifted wood and fibreglass
into the dark hole in the roof.
She watched their shadows lurching
in uneven shafts of artificial light
and tried to understand how anyone
could ever make a space of this.”
– an excerpt, again I couldn’t find an online copy

Jessie Lendennie’s Quay Street, Galway speaks to me of the parts of us we leave behind everywhere we go. We lose something of ourselves in the places we move though but we gain something else, something we often can’t articulate. But we change as we move through places and the places change as we move through them. What ghosts have you left behind?

My final look at poetry and place is an anthology which describes itself as “a book of place-awareness and companion to illness from the writings of David Dorward, CP Will and Adam Watson”. A far-off land is a small collection which is for MacMillan Cancer Support, here are some lines from it:

“to hear a place-name is to recollect a life”

“turn for home
when your foot-
steps stop follow-
ing behind you
in the snow”

“one learns          one learns
          to die to live
by dying
         to live           to die
by living by dying”

Place features heavily in poetry, in many ways, shapes and forms and I hope I’ve given a flavour of the different ways of approaching place and poetry.

Canals

Canals are sometimes forgotten when we think of water habitats but they provide wildlife with opportunities that are just as valuable as lakes and rivers.

A lot of Britain’s canals were built in the 1800s with ‘Canal mania’ erupting after the Duke of Bridgewater built his canal in 1761 to move coal into the heart of Manchester. When he opened it, the price of coal in the town was halved overnight.

More and more were built around the country to support the transportation of goods around the country. They were a crucial network that provided people with food, fuel and livelihoods. Once upon a time, when Queen Victoria was on the throne, barges transported vast amounts of ice into the capital for refrigeration, and, very importantly, for ice cream.

“Canals generate a degree of prejudice. While rivers are seen as the life-giving arteries of our landscape, canals can been viewed as septic sumps accumulating the detritus of the industries that created them.”
– Hugh Warwick, BBC Wildlife

Weil’s disease cast a bad light over our canals along with the other pollutants that Warwick refers to. But we have to see them through a contextual lens. Their existence is down to those industries which polluted them, down to the industrial revolution and once, these gentle currents were the motorways of our lands. Unfortunately, as quickly as they arrived, they were abandoned. Train travel took over and left the canals to decay, inevitably becoming derelict. And this has coloured our view of them.

Canals are often slower paced than rivers and this can lead to a build up of litter but they also create wonderful wildlife corridors. They connect habitats, provide a route for animals, and people, to leave or join a city. In a world where habitat fragmentation comes up again and again, we should see the canals as opportunities. They also provide a space for people living in urban areas to connect to nature living on their doorstep, sometimes literally as canal side buildings are converted into housing.

Canals are home to kingfishers, herons and toads and many other species including the water vole who has suffered badly in recent years and the otter which has a place in many of our hearts.

These spaces have also become home to poets. The Canal Laureate programme, run by the Poetry Society and the Canal & River Trust, has been running for since 2013. In that time, it has birthed a plethora of poems, artworks, films and events. Previous Canal Laureate, Jo Bell, said of her experience:

“Waterways are such a big part of my daily life but I had mostly avoided writing about them, perhaps in case I didn’t do them justice. The laureateship compelled me to write about my private environment… There’s a big body of work about the sea, or rivers – but not so much about canals. What exists is often ‘folk’ poetry, or poetry about an imagined urban experience which is no longer quite true… Writing about water is often heavy with sentimentality and anthropomorphism, because writers seen it as mystical or symbolic. In the inland network, water is vital and unglamorous. I try to write it as it is, not as I wish it to be.”

You could write a poem based on canal boat’s names alone; ‘Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’, Blue Moon, Morning Mist, Dreamcatcher, Drifter, Halycon, Little Gem, Stargazer and perhaps my favourite so far – Unsinkable II.

And if names don’t grab your interest, perhaps you could write about the history, or take a trip along one and write a travel-esque piece about the geography of your trip and the nature you encounter. Canals are excellent places to slow down and notice what normally passes you by. And if you’re steering or navigating the locks, then you have the added bonus of being more deeply connected to the water itself.

Or instead, just head over to waterlines and see what other poets have written about these once vital water ways of Britain.

One Wednesday Night, the Poem

I was talking to a friend about poetry and she’d generously let me read one of her pieces of writing. When I did, I was reminded of advice that my old English teacher gave me. He was the first person, offline, that I showed my writing to. He taught me for four years and, unlike many teachers, he would talk to me like an equal. It felt like he valued my opinions and we would debate the Shakespeare biased curriculum time and time again. My stance being that he wasn’t the only playwright and we should get variety. Anyway, come sixth form, when he was no longer my teacher, we shared poems we’d written and he’d ask for my thoughts on his and offered his thoughts, gently, on mine. He played an important role in my life and in shaping who I became.

But back to the point. One piece of advice he would give me time and time again was to use what I’d written but say it in less words. Strip it back. See what it becomes. And in doing so, you learn a lot about what you’re saying, the point you’re making and the language you’re using.

Having offered this advice to my friend, I went through some of my old poetry and tried to find one to exercise brevity on. But nothing caught my attention, none of the poems I returned to hooked me today. And then I picked up a copy of One Wednesday Night which I’d printed to critique and that did hook me. A poem about nosebleeds and tummies would be hard to pull off but I liked the starry sky part of it. And so I picked out a few words and phrases and started to play with them:

A dusty sky; the stage is set.
Leading role – the crescent moon.
Venus; shining golden in the spotlight.

Before my tired eyes
Dots begin to glow

– the constellations of closed eyes?

The supporting cast step out
From hiding in the wings.
The starry queen holds court;
a dancing bear and timid cub perform.

Street lamps conceal stage hands
and then, like the curtain closing,
the cast, the stars and stage

All fall away.

The play is lost to sleep.

NB, the stars you see when your eyes are closed are called phosphenes.