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!
When I grow up, I want | When I grow up, I want
to be a campanula, growing | to be a campanula, self
tight to rocks | sufficient, hard, persistent
to stones | resistant
to walls. | resistance.
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.
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.
“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 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.
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.
I mentioned in my post about the symbology of the sea that sexuality is often associated with it. We saw in that post that the sea is considered to be fertile, to be creative, to be the mother of all life. And so it is only a footstep away from sexuality.
We have also seen that water is often considered to be feminine, tying in again with the maternal aspect but we also find bodies of water dedicated to women. There are myths about water being created by women or gifted to women by deities. And of course we have Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and pleasure, who is born from the sea.
Many writers have made use of this construct including Emily Dickinson, using the sea to express wild sensual passion, but the poem I want to consider is by Mary Oliver:
The Sea
Stroke by
stroke my
body remembers that life and cries for
the lost parts of itself—-
fins, gills
opening like flowers into
the flesh—-my legs
want to lock and become
one muscle, I swear I know
just what the blue-gray scales
shingling
the rest of me would
feel like!
paradise! Sprawled
in that motherlap,
in that dreamhouse
of salt and exercise,
what a spillage
of nostalgia pleads
from the very bones! how
they long to give up the long trek
inland, the brittle
beauty of understanding,
and dive,
and simply
become again a flaming body
of blind feeling
sleeking along
in the luminous roughage of the sea’s body,
vanished
like victory inside that
insucking genesis, that
roaring flamboyance, that
perfect
beginning and
conclusion of our own.
Having written it out in word, got the formatting just right, I lost it when it came into wordpress. I don’t have the patience to make it look right but I do encourage you to have a look at it formatted correctly.
I really like the way she has used line length and structure here to echo the crashing of waves on the sea and the ebbing and flowing of the body. I read the poem on a blog initially where it was typed without form then turned to my book of her poetry and found it there in this structure. That in itself was interesting as I’ve never been so moved by the way words are set out before and I think if I’d gone straight to the printed version I would have missed that.
My reading of this poem is that the narrator is experiencing an orgasm after a bit of a drought. It also reminds me of the selkie and mermaid stories where women who lived in the sea were tricked into living on land, for example by men who stole their seal furs. It is the longing to return to this former life. And perhaps also the longing of women who’ve always lived on land to return to their ancestral roots, back so far in time that they were sea creatures, or even back so far that they were the sea itself. The narrator is becoming one with the sea, echoing a sexual union.
As well as selkies and mermaids, we also find sirens living in the oceans. All three have been portrayed as sexual, manipulative and dangerous creatures. Perhaps it is not surprising they have a bad reputation given that they tend to lure men into their worlds and men tell the narrative of our world.
Mermaids and sirens charmed sailors and fishermen with their melodious voices and once they succumbed, they would be dragged down into the depths. These ‘femmes fatales’ were said to shipwreck entire vessels to fulfil their sexual desires. To see one would be an omen of disaster but also by being seen by a mermaid or siren, you could become the object of their malevolence.
The original version of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid does not provide the reader with the same happy ending you find in the Disney version. Jen Campbell has a good video about this, but don’t say I didn’t warn you when it turns dark…
Mermaids sometimes fare better than sirens and in some cultures are considered lucky. Mermen, perhaps unsurprisingly, also have a better reputation – in Trinidad and Tobago, they would grant wishes, transform mediocrity into genius and give wealth and power.
Whether they are kindly, evil, or somewhere in between, mermaids and similar sea people have featured in mythology around the world for a long time. We find them depicted in Mesopotamian artwork, on a chapel in Durham Castle dating back to about 1078, later in a 15th century compilation of quotes from Chinese literature we find a mermaid who “wept tears which became pearls” and we still find them in our literature, art and folklore today.
