Marradharma

Outside the woodpigeons are beginning to coo on the still-warm asphalt of the garage roof. The Clematis is coming into flower, and the neighbour is tending to his hanging baskets. I can see fret beginning to cluster on the horizon, past the docks and high-rises in the city, but for now the sun punctures the firmament, the tap still gushes clean water and the grapes are ripe in the bowl. Soon the shutters will come down on the shop below, my fiancé will be back from work, I’ll post this online, we’ll make some sandwiches and drive down to the beach. Hand-in-hand, we’ll walk the sands of Seaburn or Marsden, collecting pebbles for decoration at our wedding next spring, and before too long mention Monday again: shaking our heads, we’ll hope the sea has some answers to offer us.

Monday rattled us. It was too close to home. Even though, and I count every single hallowed one of my blessings, I personally know nobody caught up in the events of half past ten at the Manchester Evening News arena, I felt – and feel – sickened, shocked and confused.

If my own words don’t feel apt or appropriate – and they don’t – then I’m at least comforted by those of another, the poet George Szirtes. Here he is (on Facebook) trying to find the lexicon for this devastation:

“And like any writer - since words are my business - I will be seeking the right words for what has just happened, because what use are words if they cannot address our situation? I don’t mean publishable words, merely the vocabulary inside me, inside the language.”

Next, he articulates so plainly how we are surely all feeling, which I will deploy as surrogate for my brain’s inability to conceive any more nuanced or respectable words of my own:

“My own feelings count for little. They are everything you’d expect. An uncomprehending sorrow, a rush of fury. Why target little girls and their parents in particular? What ‘strategic aims’ are thought by anyone to be worth those lives? I know my fury is part of the strategy, as are the divisions such fury is intended to exacerbate. But I can’t help the fury. Then there will be the pictures of the missing and the victims. They are already starting to appear.”

Like everyone, my timelines on Tuesday morning began immediately with the beginnings of pleas for help in finding lost loved ones: social media shares of pre-concert photos; local newspaper images of kids with Mams and Dads or boyfriends or girlfriends or pals from school and college, smiling forever into a smartphone camera, praying to come back to Manchester, Scotland, Gateshead.

Chloe Rutherford and Liam Curry, two teenage lovers from South Shields, were killed on Monday. I don’t want to disrespect their families and friends by ‘latching on’ to them in this way, but when the news filters down from the abstractions of Twitter, as it began doing so late on Monday evening, and begins cascading outwards from a close-but-still-distant city towards your own region, and finally down to the particular case of a couple from your hometown, their whole lives glinting ahead of them, things begin to feel more real. The fury rises more steadily. You feel your fists begin to curl. Your heart might be beating a bit faster, your tongue pressed to the roof of your mouth. You are in the red mist.

I see the video-reel of this past week rewinding. It’s Friday, 19^th May, about 3pm, and I’ve just arrived in Manchester. Me and Kate have parked the car up near Oxford Road and are in a bar grabbing a coffee while we wait for our friend Matt getting in from Norwich. Later, the three of us will take a short stroll to Sound Control, an intimate venue beneath the railway arches, where we’ll watch the Canadian singer John K Samson, along with his wife Christine Fellows, play indie/folk-punk songs to a room of about 300 diehard fans. “Solidarity forever!” John will exclaim at the end of one song, before launching into another. We will, as the customary phrase goes, ‘rock out’ for another hour and a bit, grins plastered all over our faces, while one of our lifelong-favourite musicians plays a spread of hits from his twenty-plus year career. The room will grow increasingly stifling, voices beginning to break. John will tell us he’s got a few more, and that after that he’ll about-face to the side and have a chat, maybe a cup of tea. Everyone is loving it, and at the merch stand at the end, our hero waits diligently to sign posters and records, posing cheerily for countless photos. It is, in short, the epitome of why people converge on venues like this, be they small or large, headlined by international megastars or little-known DIY musicians: to feel connected to the rhythms and pulses of not just bass, drums and guitar, but to become part of the wave of the crowd; the hairs on its collective neck shivering as that one line is bellowed around the cavities of the room; to feel that, when the singer looks your way, the song is for you, and outside these walls, nothing else matters; and on the best evenings, you leave feeling that something urgent and vital has just taken place, and you might write a song of your own, or pick up that dusty guitar once again, and change someone’s life.

On Tuesday evening, watching rolling coverage of the Manchester bombing, we will both reflect on where we were stood in the venue – stage right, in a gap beneath the stairs, about as far away from the exit as possible – and note that, in a Bataclan-style situation, we would, the three of us, have been, to use another customary phrase, ‘totally fucked’.

And the tape spools forward: it’s Saturday and I’ve just arrived at London Euston. A post on Facebook, from one of my oldest friends, announces that, after a painfully-long labour, her son has just entered the world. We all smile from ear-to-ear at the photo and pints are raised in his honour: to the brother from another mother, exactly 29 years my junior—here’s to you, little fella! What an amazing, weird, wild world you’ve found; it’s fantastic having you along for the ride. And the night goes on long into the morning in Covent Garden, thousands of folk from Shields singing and dancing the night away in a bar called Mason’s, ran by an expat manageress from the provinces. And we gather outside, chanting our daft chants, making a human tunnel for the passing taxis and bikes, no doubt on their way home from the theatres, wondering what on Earth is going on in this historic square, bedecked in maroon and sky-blue shirts, pints of lager overflowing, spirits raised higher than Nelson’s Column.

Just over fourteen hours later, they’ll all gather at Wembley Stadium, and I’ll be there in their midst, to cheer on an historic 4-0 win against poor Cleethorpes Town – bless them – as the team celebrate a fourth trophy, the final, elegant piece of plumage in a truly exceptional cap of a season. There will be no animosity: no punch-ups, no goading the rival fans, no smashing up street lights or shop fronts. There will just be fifteen-thousand Sanddancers, partying into the night and the following week, thinking, ‘How did our little non-league football team manage this?!’

Let me tell you that there were some sore heeds on Monday morning. King’s Cross ran out of Anadin and Tesco’s at the Nook ordered in extra Alka Seltzer in anticipation.

And it all feels so irrelevant right now: this celebrating a sporting victory when something so wicked and desolate has just happened. When it has snatched our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. When it has set fire to joy and put a dagger through the heart of shamanic celebration.

But the taxi drivers and homeless heroes and blood donors and overworked nurses doctors police officers St John’s ambulance drivers and the I-just-wanted-to-come-down-and-offer-a-cup-of-teas are saying nar mate, not now mate, we’re not having this like: we are Manchester, North West England, Northern England, we won’t tolerate this bullshit. So dance on, friends, and hold your lighters and fists to the air. Put your arms round the stranger at the gig as they put their arms round the frantic kids. Dig that pound from your beer fund and give it, two-handed, with a smile, to the woman with the scruffy dog on the corner. Keep the beat going and keep the people knowing that we can be so much more.

The sun is cracking the flags the way it only can in May in northern England. The beach last night was paradise on Earth: the tide out beyond Whitburn Steel, a few rowing boats hunkered on the surf and the whole of the foreshore rippled with families walking dogs relationships blossoming joggers jogging surfers paddling and life going on with ice creams Foster’s and the lapping seabirds making fine evening music in the sea holly the scene something Lowry would have traded every one of his paintings for to see again just for a moment.

William Martin was one of the finest poets this country ever produced and his body of work is a catalogue of largely-unrecognised genius. Born in 1925 in New Silksworth, a mining community to the south of Sunderland synonymous with the great Northern coalfields of the latter two hundred years of the last millennium, he understood what Theresa May and her cronies and antecedents forgot or never knew: that if you keep cutting the branches, eventually the whole tree will sicken. The design, purpose and feel of places like Silksworth, constructed out of necessity for an inward-bound migrant labour population leaving places like Ireland to start lives afresh in a largely-untapped northern frontier circa the 18^th century, was replicated up and down this coast to cope with the demands of an exponentially carbon-dependent world—one that, as a species, we have not yet found the intellect and emotion to move beyond, even while it slowly presses the pillow further into our face. Silksworth, and places like it, have since been battered by sequentially terrible political decisions. Infrastructure, economies and tertiary civic services – not to mention the much less assailable assets of community value hinted at in Martin’s phrase and celebrated in his verse – have for so long been shorn, from both their roots in folk memory and their position in operational discourse, that a point has been reached where we no longer whimsically wonder ‘when might we be next?’ but actively project into rolling news of terrorist attacks the no-longer-irrational fear that it would only take a disillusioned ‘hoody’ from Horden or a stigmatised member of the Muslim community in Jarrow to travel down the coast in July to the Sunderland air show, stand on Roker beach amid nostalgic flag-wavers saluting Hurricanes and Lancasters, and tug a cord on a rucksack to blow himself and several hundred bairns onto the front pages of The S*n.

Martin is somebody who I ought not mention right now (just as I ought not mention football, politics, or victims of a terrorist attack when I did not know them), but feel unable not to discuss, for one very specific reason which I feel – and I only have words to feel my way from my head, on to this screen and back out of it into yours – is absolutely critical.

He coined the neologism ‘marradharma’. A portmanteau of ‘marra’, a North-East dialect term for comrade, friend or equal and ‘dharma’, broadly interpreted in Eastern spiritual traditions such as Buddhism as meaning ‘the way’. ‘Marradharma’ was for Bill the unwritten rule and guiding principles of the marras: his fellow miners, shipbuilders, farmers, family and friends from Sunderland and Durham who helped each other to help each other. For the people, by the people. In his own words:

“Poetry should be concerned with more than personal, domestic and confessional themes. Being [part of] creation, we are involved in the continuing search for a collective sanctus... if we reject elitism and ego-economic notions, we will find that ‘marradharma’ under our noses. Art is not a programme, neither is a poem a tract, but it is surely rooted in dharma.”

That same spirit has resurfaced, but it is in bother. The long-time friend and champion of Martin’s work, the poet Roger Garfitt, wrote, reminiscing on his time spent adjusting to life in the North-East, ruminations on Martin’s poetry and his position as a ‘remembrancer’:

“Bill suspected that the pithead lay under the artificial ski-slope of the new Sports Complex. When he talked, the landscaped areas around the ring road recovered their contours and I began to make sense of the names on the signposts, glimpsing the intricate pattern the pit villages had made in the days when each had its own band and marched behind its own banner at the Big Meeting [...] Below this history lay the other, the monastic settlements of the seventh century that had left St Peter’s church there on the riverbank, in the shadow of the Boilermakers’ Social Club, and its sister monastery at Jarrow under the bright blue necks of the shipyard cranes. The monasteries came first and the towns grew up around them, a process of development preserved in Sunderland’s very name: the sundered land, cut-off, outside the monastery wall, on the other side of the river. But to Bill there was no division: the primitive Christianity of the monasteries had surfaced again in the close community of the pit villages and their long political struggle [...] Such moments become images for the sense of community we need to develop, intimations that ‘Here and here is the Kingdom’.”

We are all of us now outside the monastery wall. Cut-off, sundered: the very word close to surrendered.

I don’t agree with Theresa May on much, but I do have a sense that, in a twisted way, her much-repeated phrase ‘citizen(s) of nowhere’ is about apt for the age we’re living through. My friend Chris Ogden, a staunch advocate of the type of progressive, left-wing thinking we could all do with a bit more of, lives but two miles from the Manchester arena. I contacted him immediately, knowing that if I had been shaken by the events of Monday evening, he must have been entirely pummelled. In correspondence that we have shared in the old-fashioned way, via our distorted but still-laudable Royal Mail, we have both echoed similar sentiments: that Ms May may have unintentionally tapped into the zeitgeist. Up or un-rooted from our communities and sense of kinship and municipal duty, forced to eat or heat, bow to the wage masters dangling another ten hours this week, is it any wonder that we want a piece of the wedge? Those on the other side are closer to you than you might know. They may have been forced into exile because of political persecution, ‘strategic’ drone strikes, rape, pillage, torture, climate change or genocide, and have braved perilous sea journeys in laughably small inflatables, but they are closer to you than you might know.

There is, as Miss Mayhem keeps telling us, a choice facing this country in two week’s time: me or Jeremy Corbyn. As the list of deceased tots up to the final twenty-two, and as minutes of silence add up to hours and days, we likely face the prospect of the fury turning to policy, and the policy turning on the old buggered knee of the warlords.

If William Martin was here, he’d be asking me, you, all of us, to employ something of the spirit of marradharma right now. So I ask you, please, take a few hours out of your social media feeds this evening, switch off the six o’clock news, and walk through your estate or in your local woods or along the coast and listen for how the leaves rustle, how the foam settles, and what people are saying. The dead are in our hearts and we must take the time to mourn them, but in the morning there will be work to do. They’ll be watching from somewhere above that shattered arena, hoping that, together, we follow the track of peace, comradeship and love.

Yours in the spirit of marradharma,

Jake x

Thoughts Towards a Chorography of my Thesis-in-Progress

Chorography

noun

historical

                The systematic description and mapping of particular regions.

Chorography

noun

historical

                The systematic description and mapping of particular regions.

This map, which I have spent around four hours this afternoon carefully plotting and scheming, is an ongoing visual representation — re-presentation — of work-in-progress for my PhD: a collection of original poetry, and accompanying critical exegesis, about my relationship to the identity and sense of belonging I feel in England’s North-East; specifically South Tyneside, where I was born and currently live.

I like to think of the map as a poem-in-its-own-right.

It can be looked at, thought about and discussed in myriad ways, but as it is uniquely mine (or, technically, Google’s), I thought I’d outline the main ways I am using it as a projection pad for, from and on to my PhD. I’ll be discussing some of these things before and around my reading of poems at an event this Thursday, 18^th May, in Newcastle University’s English Department.

1.      Roads

The main driving routes on the map are identified thus: A184 (black); A19 (Navy Blue); and A1018 (British Racing Green). We live in the age of the motor car, at a time of peak carbon extraction and its bed partner: debt-fuelled, exothermic, endemic economic growth-at-all-costs. Political and economic motives and arguments aside, the car, and by extension the network of roads it precipitated, are intimately bound up in our – certainly my – understanding of this place (and, indeed, placelessness) and its intricate, palimpsestic histories and topographies. A clear example of this occurs along the A194 (marked sky blue on the map), or Leam Lane, which in part retains the Roman name ‘Wrekendyke’, or ‘Rekendike’ (a corruption/derivation which speaks of accretive changes in topology and nomenclature), marking it out as an important, strategic arterial road between two Roman settlements: Pons Aelius, Newcastle, and Arbeia, the fort at the Lawe Top, elevated at a militaristically advantageous position atop the riverside tip of South Shields.

Figure taken from Wearmouth and Jarrow: Northumbrian Monasteries in an Historic Landscape, eds Sam Turner, Sarah Semple and Alex Turner (p.156, if you're really that interested). Note the Wrekendyke (contemporary A194) running in a southwesterly direction from South Shields, south of Jarrow, onward to Wrekenton (Gateshead) to connect with the Great North Road (A1) between Durham and Newcastle, and ultimately London and Edinburgh. Consider where the frame stops and why...

2.      Walkways

The orange zig-zaggy line is the route of the Stringing Bedes walks, connecting the twinned monasteries (“One monastery in two places”, in Bede’s own words) associated with the Venerable man himself: St.Peter’s (Wearmouth) and St. Paul’s (Jarrow). Crucially, the route bisects the red heart symbol, identifying where my parents live in South Shields and where I spent most of my teenage years. Much of the north and western part of the route follows the course of the river Don, a much smaller tributary of the Tyne.

3.      Railways

The light green and yellow lines indicate the two Metro routes through South Tyneside and Sunderland. The northernmost line terminates at South Shields, but I have chosen to flag Tyne Dock station, as I use it more often. The southernmost line terminates on the south of the Wear at South Hylton, but I have flagged East Boldon station, as it is the station closest to where I currently live and the one I have utilised the most. There’s not much more I could say about railways, other than that they were invented in the North-East and they have been and continue to be a fundamental part of my life, whether in local, narrow-gauge format or as fully-blown connections to towns, cities and regions outside the nucleus of our fine-yet-flawed republic.

4.      Roundabouts

Possibly the most niche elements of the map, the six roundabouts shown are much more important than they first appear and absolutely haven’t been picked arbitrarily. Scanning west to east these are: the ‘Nickelodeon’ roundabout (I don’t know its official name, but it’s the awful, semi-subterranean roundabout beneath the Gateshead highway, not long after you come off the southbound Tyne bridge, forming the start of the Felling bypass. I named it so because there’s a building adjacent to it with ‘Nickelodeon’ written on its facade, and it sounds funny); Heworth roundabout (name-checked directly in one of my poems); White Mare Pool (apparently a stop-off point for the cavalcade of monks carrying Cuthbert’s coffin to Durham); Testo’s (again, name-checked in the aforementioned poem); Fullwell Quarry (adjacent to one of a trio of semi/defunct mills in the vicinity); and Lindisfarne (further north, where Jarrow spars off against Shields). As roundabouts by their very nature are circular and have at least two entry/exit points, and often – as their names attest – speak of nearby structures, historical events or bygone traditions, I find them to be useful points of rumination for a palimpsest poetics which gathers various sedimentary layers and attempts to recast them in medias res as complex, authentic poems-in-place.

The eagle-eyed viewer will note that there are at least a dozen other icons, which they may or may not be able to see properly on the copy attached here. In short: these are pubs, ice cream vendors, libraries, religious sites, animal encounters, ex-mines and sporting facilities which in some way have been or are important to my sense of this space as a holistic environment, where, to take lines from my own poem ‘Errata Slip for a Northern Town’, ‘You could spend your life here/you could be happy’.

                                                                                                     

Please come to the event if, like me, you are geeky enough to want to know more. At some point I will make this map more widely-available; and will almost certainly blog in more detail about its various sites, axes, directionality, crossovers and points of convergence at a later date as it is added to and further appended with poems as they develop over the remainder of my PhD.

Why Does Poetry Not Sell?*

Yesterday was the first Northern Poetry Symposium. An eclectic spread of panel discussions, film screenings, readings and breakout sessions were held in the rafters of the Sage, Gateshead – the iconic Tyneside concert hall and landmark which first spearheaded the gentrification of Gateshead Quays (or, as the marketers would have it ‘NewcastleGateshead’) during the heyday of the Blair government – with the intention of gathering the North’s poetic literati under one (big, shiny, curvaceous) roof.

Opening with the provocatively-titled panel, ‘Is Poetry Relevant?’ and continuing through themed sessions which included the fascinating ‘Print Revival’ and a heated discussion of ‘Poetry in the Media’, among others, the day sought – I think with mixed degrees of success – to bring together disparate elements of the UK’s poetry scene and ask how they could begin to work together to further the cause of this most loved, and hated, forms of arts.

Organised by the recently-revived Poetry Book Society, operating under the auspices of the Newcastle-based Inpress since the original outfit spearheaded by Stephen Spender and T.S. Eliot in 1950s London folded last year, the symposium was a clever rouse on the PBS’s part to wave the flags, sound the horns and declare triumphantly: “We are still here!” It was perhaps no surprise, then, that much of the rest of the event should be taken over by conversation aimed at selling not only more PBS memberships (shamefully, I haven’t been a member for around 3 years) but more volumes of poetry: be they traditionally slim, bulky anthologies, spineless, or altogether more three-dimensional or non-dimensional at all; merely nebulous concepts affixing themselves with capital-p ‘Poetry’ badges.

The poetry world is a broad church and I am a supporter of its variety and willingness to experiment with other art forms and challenge assumptions about what a poem should be. This doesn’t stop it also being a small world: where poets know each other and factions exist and overlap and grudges can be borne for years over incidents (or non-incidents) which to the outside world would look entirely trivial. But I’m already off topic. We were here to talk sales, or their lack, and if the conclusions of the Northern Poetry Symposium are anything to go by, none of us really know why more of our books aren’t being sold, other than the fact that, you know, 99% of the population still think poetry stopped in the nineteenth century.

I can only really speak for myself and my own experiences. In February this year, I placed ten copies of my 2015 pamphlet, The Coast Will Wait Behind You, in the gift shop of The Word in South Shields on a sale-or-return basis. The plan was that The Word would take a 30% commission on the overall sales, and the books would remain on display for a few months. I went down this afternoon to see how they were doing, not expecting them to have all gone immediately, but certainly not expecting all ten to still be there. The manager of the shop explained that local titles had been selling poorly in general recently, which is fair enough: this is a library, after all; why pay for a book if you can borrow it for free?

But, something doesn’t sit right for me, and I don’t think it’s as straightforward as the pamphlet being a spineless volume (therefore less ‘dominant’ on a book shelf) or The Word being predominantly a free space, or even the folk of my hometown’s lack of interest in local poetry. If conversations at the Northern Poetry Symposium are a barometer, small press books and authors (often alongside their supposed ‘big’ counterparts) need a ‘hook’ or a cleverly-worked biography off which to propel their titles and cause the average punter to go from casually flicking through a blurb to parting with the cash at the till.

The Coast Will Wait Behind You, like Definitions of Distance before it, is a limited-run edition of poetry. Both were lovingly put together by dedicated and passionate advocates of the arts, and in the case of Red Squirrel Press, by an editor, Sheila Wakefield, whose staunchly independent commitment to publishing collections of poetry and novels by largely northern English and Scottish writers is a feat which should earn her a medal, trophies and a cabinet big enough to keep them all in.

Similarly, TCWWBY was a labour of love. Designed by the ineffable Manny Ling, and with stunning front and rear cover photos from Damien Wootten and Tim Collier (alongside kind words from Jean Sprackland, Esen Kaya and Mike Collier), the 28-page volume, gorgeously set on cream paper, is the product not only of my imagination and two and a half years of writing and editing, but the cumulative efforts of people who take care and attention to ensuring that poems are presented seriously. In short, for £5, it is a steal.

Yet. And, of course, yet. I’ve heard myself saying something like the following: “A fiver! It’s only a few sheets of paper folded into some card!” Perhaps. Or perhaps you’re paying for the thought—the long, deep ruminations which lead to the slow craft of poetry; not to mention the subsequent months of editing and revising and the time spent (nearly always with at least one other collaborator) designing, printing and trying to then sell the bloody thing!

Look, we all want people to read our work. That’s one of the main reasons we do it, isn’t it? Buying it – Christ! – that’s a different thing. On reflection, I’m not surprised the pamphlet didn’t sell at The Word. I would have dearly loved all ten copies to’ve found their way into ten new homes, where they might have enriched the lives of those who read them, but they haven’t. They’re sat in a plastic bag on my desk, waiting for the ‘hook’, which will probably be at least two more readings, where something of the personal craft, time and attention-to-detail of the book’s composition might rub off, via my especially good recitation of a poem, onto an audience member, who might then part with one of their new plastic fivers in exchange for an A5 volume of poetry published two years ago. This means, and the Northern Poetry Symposium tangentially covered it, that the role of the poet is not only to write the best poems they can (the first and foremost thing, according to Sean O’Brien, a maxim I tend to agree with), but it is also to go out banging on doors, with luminous signs above their heads, totting up change from rounds at the bar, selling to strangers in circumstances which bear absolutely no resemblance to the book shop or Amazon marketplace.

That all sounds like a rant, but I actually love doing it. One of the best readings I’ve ever done was in the upstairs room of The Blue Boar in Ludlow. Poetry at the Sitting Room, organised by the lovely Jean Atkin, was certainly not a record for hand-to-hand sales, but it was a three-hour period in my life where, listening to and being listened, I was able to remember, really, why I do this: to connect with people and feel something of their humanity. I don’t yet know when my first full-length collection will be out, and while I hope it is published by an outfit with the same fervour as Red Squirrel or Arts Editions North (ideally with an enlarged marketing budget and a general target populace altogether more prone to walking into their local Waterstone’s and buying more than one poetry book a decade), I will still be there in the room above the pub, reading poems about being from a stupid little town in the North-East, hoping that someone wants to hear something about it.

N.B. As copies of The Coast Will Wait Behind You can now only be acquired by myself, do please let me know if you’d like one and I’ll post it out to you, signed and with a little note, in exchange for a carefully-concealed fiver. I like to think of this as my own little cottage industry.

*(In quantities which precipitate the consumer-capitalist economy)?