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| Kirkup (L) and Scarfe (R) |
Yesterday,
a small group of people gathered at The Word: National Centre for theWritten Word in South Shields to commemorate the centenary of the poet James
Kirkup, and also to celebrate the poet Francis Scarfe. Born just seven years
apart – Scarfe in 1911, on Stanhope Road, Kirkup in 1918, on Robertson Street –
they were near contemporaries of each other whose lives, right from birth,
would run parallel, though it’s not certain they ever met.
The
event yesterday was a chance to remember the town’s most well-known interwar
years poets and to consider their legacy on modern and contemporary poetry on
the south side of the Big River (that’s the Tyne) as well as further afield.
We
started by showing a short film, ‘I Love Our Town’, shot in 1972 by James
Kirkup’s long-term friend, Dorothy Fleet. Made on one of Kirkup’s rare visits
back to the North-East, the film is both a brilliant introduction to some of
the recurring themes in Kirkup’s work and a precious glimpse into life in the
town 45 years ago. Dorothy recalls plucking the courage to speak to James, who
was giving a poetry reading further up the river in Newcastle’s Hancock Museum
a while before the film was made. After their meeting, Kirkup suggested that
Dorothy write a radio play based on extracts from his first autobiography, A Child of the Tyne. Newly-married,
Dorothy admits that the project simply didn’t get done. In its place appeared the
script for a cine-film: a 13-minute movie which shows Kirkup dandying around
sites in South Shields, with cut-aways of street kids, feral cats and riverside
traffic adding additional ambiance to Kirkup’s narrative, where he both
reminisces about his childhood in the town and muses on some of its idiosyncrasies
in verse. Kirkup once described South Shields as ‘the most surrealistic in Britain’,
both, I suspect, as a nod to his love of the Surrealists (many of Kirkup’s
poems, in the way that they conjure bizarre, metaphysical landscapes, often
incongruously, are very much akin to de Chirico’s Surrealist images) and his
love-hate relationship with a town whose ‘limitations’ he would tire of.
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| Bloodaxe, 2017 |
Neil
Astley of Bloodaxe Books, Sheila Wakefield of Red Squirrel Press, Tom Kelly and
myself then each read poems from Kirkup and Scarfe’s back catalogue – all of
the recited poems generously represented in Bloodaxe’s recently-published Land of Three Rivers: the Poetry of North-East England. What came across, as we jumped from Kirkup to Scarfe
and back to Kirkup again, was the subtle differences in tone and voice and the
way that, when brought together, two poets ostensibly writing about the same
subjects can come at things in distinct ways.
During
his putting together of Land of Three
Rivers, Neil Astley remarked that a previously-unseen poem of Scarfe’s, ‘Tyne
Dock Revisited’, had been discovered by the poet’s son, now living in Spain.
Illuminating and adding to his well-known ‘Tyne Dock’ poem, which recalls the ‘shaggy
mining town’ where he grew up, ‘Tyne Dock Revisited’ (published in Lo3R with earlier, undated manuscript
lines) evokes the industrial atmosphere of Shields with precision and
poignancy: ‘The foghorn through the briny night/The blue fog churning through
the night’ (alternate line). Scarfe and Kirkup both wrote poems about the town’s
knocker-up, the man tasked with rising labourers from slumber at the crack of
dawn, with Astley speculating that it is entirely possible both poets were unknowingly
writing about the very same man. Tom Kelly and Neil Astley further alternated
between the two poets, with readings from Scarfe’s ‘The grotto’ and Kirkup’s ‘Marsden
Rock’ giving a good sense of the otherworldliness of Marsden Bay, a place that
has been close to my heart since I was a child.
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| Red Squirrel Press, 2008 |
Sheila
Wakefield, born in County Durham, read Kirkup poems set in landscapes she knows
intimately. Shorter poems about Ferryhill and Chester-le-Street (recounted as
Haiku, a form Kirkup would come to adore) were set against the lyric ‘Durham
Seen From The Train’, which contains the beautiful line ‘The heart imagines
what the eye no longer sees.’
As
well as reading original draft materials from my new sequence based on Shields Sketches, the book of
illustrations by George McVay with poems selected to match by Kirkup which I
first discovered while clearing out my great-grandmother’s flat in East Boldon
seven years ago, I read two Kirkup poems that were geographically apt: ‘The
Town Where I Was Born’, where, travelling on a ferry to North Shields, Kirkup
witnesses the Tyne as the Styx; and ‘The Old Clothes Stall, South Shields
Market’, a moment of empathy set against the Winter of Discontent (1978-79),
where he imagines an afterlife for the ‘collier’s clogs [and] seaman’s denims’,
once worn by now-‘out-of-work puppets’. Both poems are set yards from The Word,
so it was especially pleasing to be able to bring to life their settings within
the town’s fantastic new library, the original one on Ocean Road harbouring the
many books so cherished by the adolescent Kirkup, providing the inspiration
that both he and Scarfe would later kindle, going on to be revered as poets and
translators in Japan and France respectively. As somebody involved in both the
writing of my own collection of poems inspired by South Tyneside and as a
critic interested in pre-existing work from the area, this event was both a
pleasure to be involved with and an inspiration. As Scarfe’s fantastic poem ‘Miners’
has it, ‘the warmth of whose heart lights a fire in each hearth and home’ will
certainly continue to glow for me as I read more about both poets and add to my
own collection.
If
you would like to see Dorothy’s fantastic film, there is an opportunity to do
so at 10am on Monday 23rd April at The Customs House. Marking
exactly 100 years since Kirkup’s birth, the event will hopefully not be an
end-point, but more a continuation of a series of markers to acknowledge the extraordinary
talent and vision of a man who may have left these shores physically, but
always remained in touch, through poems, letters and, just occasionally,
scrambles back down to the shore.
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| Hub Editions, 2002 |
