tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85393915003994411332024-02-19T07:58:15.740-08:00The Swift Flight of a SparrowThe writings of Jake Morris-CampbellA Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.comBlogger118125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-25788274490389864362019-07-18T08:07:00.000-07:002019-07-18T08:07:05.103-07:00Tutoring for the Poetry School<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://poetryschool.com/courses/narrow-road-deep-north/">Narrow Road, Deep North</a></span></b><br />
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This October I'll be running an online course for The Poetry School.<br />
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The following <a href="https://poetryschool.com/uncategorized/%ef%bb%bfnarrow-road-deep-north/">blog gives an in-depth overview</a> of the themes and intentions behind the course and my impetus for wanting to run it.<br />
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In short, n/Northernness seems to be gaining gravitas in both cultural and political circles, so it seems timely to interrogate the many trajectories we might take when embracing (or, indeed, refuting) its manifestations and idiosyncrasies. Tracing ideas of a/the n/North from every direction, I'll guide you, via writing exercises, close reading, feedback and conversation, to complete a short portfolio of poems which engage with your own northern land- and mindscapes.<br />
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If you've an interest in poetry and place and want to spend ten weeks (five fortnightly sessions) discussing and writing about 'the North', do sign up. Concessions and bursaries are available through the Poetry School, including a 30% discount to participants under 30.<br />
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<b><u>Details</u></b><br />
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Dates:October 2nd - December 11th<br />
Fee: £105.00A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-71337258898460145412019-05-08T06:18:00.001-07:002019-05-08T06:22:11.002-07:00Rich Seams: Poetry Podcasts<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLsOM6vkhSCKw1V3ItGmSPma1xxXArT4mhNezl1OiRxJRaBG1NdcJ7emkpoXEY74-qY_UXyzhGBU2Hj_XPwap3ANgx2gYeiwEROx0k1uauaYr9QXVLb_YkpHvd5A5xiLR8Wk2gF8ipqaxR/s1600/RichSeamsLiveDurhamOct2018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1104" data-original-width="1600" height="440" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLsOM6vkhSCKw1V3ItGmSPma1xxXArT4mhNezl1OiRxJRaBG1NdcJ7emkpoXEY74-qY_UXyzhGBU2Hj_XPwap3ANgx2gYeiwEROx0k1uauaYr9QXVLb_YkpHvd5A5xiLR8Wk2gF8ipqaxR/s640/RichSeamsLiveDurhamOct2018.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">L-R: John Challis, Andrew McMillan, Degna Stone, Jake Morris-Campbell</td></tr>
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Last autumn, I was invited over to Durham Town Hall to participate in a live podcast discussion with marras John Challis and Degna Stone. Curated by Andrew McMillan and commissioned by New Writing North's chief executive, Claire Malcolm, the recording forms part of a series investigating poetry in the (hazily defined) top half of the country.<br />
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Episode two has now gone live and can be streamed, beamed and downloaded ---><a href="https://soundcloud.com/new-writing-north/rich-seams-episode-2-durham-town-hall?fbclid=IwAR0n_Xw-GZox-Zpo7PNsFRR1GCNrgh2zESJ8t03xYbhDDutP8L3yF4nAevI">here</a><---<br />
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Do listen to the first episode (and subsequent editions) as there's already some fascinating overlaps, repetitions and thematic concerns beginning to emerge as Andrew delves into the denes, burrows through the burns and channels through the chares, unpacking, unshackling and uprooting what, if anything, might be meant when our poetry fasers are set to 'up'.<br />
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In other good news: I passed my Ph.D. viva a fortnight ago and am now working my way through some minor corrections. More on that sometime soon, hopefully...<br />
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As for the matter at hand, if you liked my musings on poetry from County Durham (+ bad stottie cake reference) and want to take part yourself in shaping this amorphous discussion of what it means to be a poet connected to the/a n/North, do keep your eyes peeled for news of an online Poetry School course I'll be running from September called 'Narrow Road, Deep North'.A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-3374836631002882492019-02-13T07:59:00.002-08:002019-02-13T08:03:27.711-08:00On Submitting my PhD<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Yesterday I submitted my PhD – a practice-led
doctoral thesis in Creative Writing – to Newcastle University. The result of
three and a half years of work, I began the research project formally in September
2015, first plotting it in the winter of 2014.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Poets’ Hyem</span></i><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">
is an exploration of what it means to generate poetic placemaking in England’s
North-East. A critical exegesis analyses four postwar poets, making a case for
International Regionalism as a hallmark of modern poetry written about the area
since the mid-twentieth century. The second – and majority – component of the
thesis, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Errata Slip for a Northern Town</i>,
is the manuscript for my first full-length collection of poetry, which I hope
to have published as a book in the near future.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’m hopeful that at viva, in the spring,
it will make a sufficiently original contribution to knowledge and not require
major amendments. From my current vantage (which, I admit, may be coloured by
the glow of having handed in), the thesis makes for a robust addition to discourses
surrounding place and poetry, and has the potential to catalyse <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>further work — either by myself, in a post-doc
capacity, or by other researchers interested in regionalism and writing belonging
to Bernicia.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Submitting a PhD comes with a kaleidoscope
of emotions. I feel relieved to have finally handed the thing in, for it to
(temporarily) not be of concern, but I also feel pretty melancholic. This is
probably compounded by the anti-climatic nature of actually submitting the documents:
I took two soft-bound copies and a USB stick to a centralised drop-off point at
the university and was given a receipt. Quite a clinical, formulaic transaction,
really. No bells or whistles, no banners and balloons.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">I sat for a while afterwards in the Town
Mouse and had a few pints. Did I feel less burdened or more, having jettisoned
this significant portion of my adult life? I don’t really know yet, to be
honest. I do think that my work is intelligent, nuanced and of doctoral standard.
I have faith in my poems: they read well as a cohesive whole. Insofar as I have
contributed to discourse, I feel that my critical argument – what I am calling
a polyparochial poetics – is in keeping with the zeitgeist. In short, I think
the PhD will set me up well and has value beyond Newcastle University and the
North-East of England.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">But I’m also not naïve enough to think there
won’t be rough patches ahead. Notwithstanding the elephant in the room (the ‘B’
word), a PhD is by no means a golden ticket to a career in academia. If being
part of a DTP (Doctoral Training Partnership) has shown me anything, it’s that
there are hundreds, thousands, of highly talented ECRs (Early Career
Researchers) out there, all vying for a limited pool of fellowships,
lectureships and post-doctoral positions.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">So, significant groundwork has been laid,
but what gets built on it remains to be seen. I will write again after the
viva, hopefully in late April, but for the time being I’m going to let all of
this compost through my brain and work out where it might take me next. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-49723543694429732562018-10-11T01:29:00.000-07:002018-10-11T01:39:58.924-07:00Durham Book Festival and Sunderland Literature Festival Events<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Pleased to say I'm involved with two of the region's literature festivals this autumn. Kicking off with a live podcast on Saturday at Durham Town Hall, I'll be discussing Northern Poetry with friends and fellow poets, Degna Stone and John Challis. We'll be steered by Andrew McMillan (whose second collection, <i>Playtime</i>, I've just read and loved), the curator of the Rich Seams project whose umbrella the podcast sits beneath. The series began at the 2017 Durham Book Festival and is touring to other venues across the North, with Andrew wanting to cast new light on what it means to be a 'Northern Poet' today. Alongside reading from our own work, we'll discuss which voices might be absent or marginalised in this conversation; what it means to honour the various cultural and industrial seams of the North; and what its people and landscapes might have impressed on a poetics of <i>northernness</i>. I've known Degna and John through the poetry scene in Newcastle for years now (Degna was one of the founding co-editors of <i>Butcher's Dog</i>, a magazine we set up after meeting via New Writing North's poetry development programme, while John has been a friend from the old Trashed Organ days to his involvement now with the <a href="https://www.ncl.ac.uk/ncla/">Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts</a>.) It should be a really rich and good-humoured discussion. It takes place this coming Saturday, 14th October, at the Burlison Gallery in Durham Town Hall, 12.30-1.30pm. Tickets are £3 and available <a href="http://durhambookfestival.com/programme/event/andrew-mcmillan-rich-seams-podcast-live/">here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Secondly, next Wednesday, 17th October, I'm co-delivering a talk for the Sunderland Literature Festival on the life and work of William Martin. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my championing of Martin, but for those who aren't, why not come along to Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens between 3 and 4pm to hear me and Graham, William's son, talk about his poetry? Bill was born in New Silksworth, to the south-west of the city, and served in the RAF in India during the Second World War, where he would come to meld a Methodist-Socialist upbringing with Eastern spirituality. He later had a career in the audiology department of Sunderland Royal Hospital while pursuing life as an artist and poet and was noted for his bardic style and rich tapestry of long poem-sequences imbued in the working-class traditions of the Durham coalfield. He is not very well known in his home city, which is a shame as his poetry, to my mind, is some of the most important to have come out of the North-East in the twentieth century. We will celebrate his life in words, images and songs next week. Tickets operate on a suggested donation basis of £3 and there's further information <a href="https://www.seeitdoitsunderland.co.uk/sunderland-libraries-literature-festival-2018">here</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Right, back to the PhD, on which I intend to post a detailed update soon.</span>A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-29753186565574138832018-09-05T06:34:00.001-07:002018-09-05T06:49:06.982-07:00Costafine Town<div class="gmail_default" style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: garamond, serif; font-size: large;">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">According to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, <a href="http://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/105778238455/anemoia-n-nostalgia-for-a-time-youve-never">anemoia</a> is ‘nostalgia for a time you’ve never known’. Explaining the word’s mysteriousness, the DOS invite us to ‘Imagine stepping through the frame into a sepia-tinted haze, where you could sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by. Who lived and died before any of us arrived here, who sleep in some of the same houses we do, who look up at the same moon, who breathe the same air, feel the same blood in their veins — and live in a completely different world’.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">My sense of anemoia has been kindled recently by discovering a song by a folk-rock duo from my hometown, South Shields. Splinter – aka Bill Elliott and Bobby Purvis – were signed to George Harrison’s Dark Horse label and found chart success in the 1970s. This post will try to explain what I find so endearing about their song ‘Costafine Town’. I know instinctively that it’s about more than sentimental lyrics, hand claps and key changes, but I can’t quite describe what it is that has me hitting ‘repeat’. My thoughts here partially function as notes for a poem – an extended exercise in kneading the pre-poem, referred to in an <a href="https://jakecampbell1988.blogspot.com/2017/02/what-could-be-meaning-or-use-of-such.html">earlier post</a> – and should not be regarded as complete or perfect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">‘Costafine Town’, a three-minute ear-worm in the style of the <i>The Likely Lads</i>, recounts the narrator’s conflicted feelings upon returning to his hometown. Described as being ‘too long away’ and ‘lonely’, the catabasis that the song implies is not simply resolved by ‘coming home’. Indeed, he boldly declares: ‘I wish I’d never made up my mind to stray.’ Forming the crux point between belonging and estrangement, the verb ‘stray’ is crucial to the song’s fraught melancholy. Are our primary identities shells that we necessarily outgrow? If we accumulate sufficient cultural capital, and if our education and status propel us away from those primary identities (for example, as we invariably begin mixing with more middle-class people at university – itself a status marker begetting other value systems and priorities), might we fairly feel inclined to discard them when they are no longer as valuable to the host culture? This is one of the meandering thought patterns I mull over when listening to ‘Costafine Town’, further complicated by the knowledge that the identities previously referred to – ‘working-class’, explicitly dropped in the song – are not identities I could justly pin on myself; that the Shields I knew as a kid, growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, was already post-industrial. Shipyards and mines were a vestige before I began secondary school and for as long as I can remember I’ve been happy to be funnelled through education (to the point where, PhD submission pending, I’m at the most concentrated end of that funnel) while working part-time in the knowledge economy so as to not have to use my diminutive frame to lay bricks or ‘go offshore’. I am, to use David Goodhart’s terminology, a product of the ‘anywhere’-dominated pattern of Higher Education policy post-1992, but I’m also a ‘somewhere’ who retains a huge fondness for this town, even if I do frequently roll my eyes at it. Straying, then, could be useful in combating one-dimensional feelings, such as the acute longing I detect in the song.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">Wistful even from a 1974 vantage, why, listening to ‘Costafine Town’ forty-four years after its release, as a thirty-year-old man, do I sense a doubly-potent nostalgia? And is that feeling, perhaps borne of a knowledge that the band were singing about the place I’m from, albeit a few decades earlier, problematic when thinking and writing both creatively and critically about my own relationship to the region today?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">First, it’s worth mentioning that the lyrics don’t actually pinpoint us to South Shields. While the title does locate an area of the town that can still be found (on Google Maps at least: see image above), it is in fact a corruption of Costorphine Town, referring to a strip of land around Holborn and Tyne Dock, gradually erased due to wartime bombardment and deindustrialisation. In reality, the lyrics of the song do little to evoke more than general Northern decay. Note the key signifiers: ‘working class’, ‘pub’, ‘hole’, ‘glass’. This could be Salford, Middlesbrough, Workington... So, Splinter, singing in 1974, were already conjuring a nostalgia for a prior time. This residual longing stems, I would argue, not from a specifically Tyneside-focused anomie, but by a subtle use of synecdoche. When we hear ‘open pub doors | Where the working class goes at night’ we think of <i>our</i> pub, or perhaps two or three regular haunts within close proximity. For me, this would be the Dolly Peel, Trimmer’s Arms and the Rose and Crown in west Shields. I have had a drink in one of those pubs in the last year, yet the song impels me to want to go out on Friday night, ‘whistling loud’ after my ‘4.30 shift has gone’, in ‘dirty old clothes’ drinking Scotch with my marras ’til kick-oot.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">This is the simple effectiveness of the song: listeners in Benwell or Bootle will have different reference points to affix. The mood is already established, you just provide the setting. When contrasted to Ronnie Lambert’s well-known ‘Coming Home Newcastle’, a sugar-coated lament for what the poet Tim Pickard calls the ‘North-East’s greatest growth industry’, a ‘drift south as there wasn’t any work of any kind in Newcastle [in 1973]’, a returning Geordie everyman squares the advantages of his economic migration (‘a few quick bob’) against the home comforts of ‘Brown Ale’ (‘ye can keep ye London wine’) and his mother ‘saying ‘hinny howay’’. I think ‘Costafine Town’ is a better song, but then I immediately wonder if that’s because I’m from Shields, not Newcastle further up the Tyne, and am projecting my own feelings onto the ambiance created by the music and the ‘timeless’ message conveyed by the lyrics: the wanderer returned. A peer on Twitter, himself originating in Sunderland, pointed out that, were the lyrics about Northampton, I might not harbour the same attachment. I think this is a very fair point, but still the song nags at me, begging to be written about. Or, better still, to be used as a leaping-off point. Where – or more pertinently, <i>what</i> – is Costafine Town now?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">How might the tone of ‘Costafine Town’, a jaunty piece of pop-rock enmeshed in a time I never knew, be stripped down, sandblasted and reconfigured as meaningful comment on my present circumstances and the wider socio-economic and cultural situation of Britain in 2018? Right now, I’m not entirely certain, though I have a good inkling that it all hinges on that vagabond, ‘stray’. Terry Pratchett asks the following, which I think is relevant: ‘Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you’ve come from with new eyes and extra colours. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.’</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">I intend for these thoughts to develop into a poem for the thesis. For a while now I’ve been using the working title <i>Errata Slip for a Northern Town</i>, but the literary quality of the conceit seems a little... worked. I think the narrative of ‘Costafine Town’, especially its inherent ambivalence (the contradiction in making up your mind to stray seems ripe for creative exploration), distils the melancholy I feel for South Shields in a nuanced way. Yes, it’s problematic to wish to reside in a sepia realm, but dipping in to it can be handy, especially if what you can bring back is a transformed perception of a present reality.</span></div>
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-85600821492693947822018-06-25T07:05:00.000-07:002018-06-25T07:09:45.744-07:00Marratide 2018<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Something
of a short placeholder post until later. By which I mean: until the PhD is
finished. Probably.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Walked
the Marratide pilgrimage, in memory of William Martin, for the third time this
Saturday gone. Strange to do it on a Saturday, having done so on Sundays in
2017 and 2016. Noticeably more traffic. Thoroughfares of Durham City chocker
with early evening drinkers, easing themselves in for a night on the tiles.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4q9EOc2r9n5yPbsyJvld3Xdt40lnfRBsxrCyC3PNLbxxxN4r-GsPBvk6SdrVeuxhH9_X3fQWep74YfHuwuy47OqPi3e9xrnMvgIkPDQ4AMc1v0E-FYxX68CeCFGEjbcaXmSuZvJ95OF7V/s1600/CoptHill2018.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4q9EOc2r9n5yPbsyJvld3Xdt40lnfRBsxrCyC3PNLbxxxN4r-GsPBvk6SdrVeuxhH9_X3fQWep74YfHuwuy47OqPi3e9xrnMvgIkPDQ4AMc1v0E-FYxX68CeCFGEjbcaXmSuZvJ95OF7V/s640/CoptHill2018.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">At The Copt Hill, near Houghton-le-Spring, 2018</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’ll
say more about the walk later. For a proper summary of the 2016 walk, see <a href="https://jakecampbell1988.blogspot.com/2016/06/life-canonly-be-understood-backwards.html">this post</a>, which I wrote at the time. A few brief points of observation or musings:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<ul>
<li>·<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: -18pt;">Not
having Graham, Bill’s son, with us on the walk was regrettable, though due to recentl
ill health, he was wise to remain at home. Graham did send us off in good
spirits, however, with Easthope coffee and biscuits. I hope you’re able to join
us again next time, marra!</span></li>
<li>·<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: -18pt;">We
missed the Seven Sisters, an impressive Iron Age round barrow on top of which
sit a circle of trees, framing a section of the walk which overlooks Hetton.
Again, it was a shame to’ve missed these trees (image below) where last year we
scattered some of Bill’s ashes. That said, the three times I’ve done the walk
now there have been minor differences to the route for one reason or another.</span></li>
</ul>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6P5OSzgzLAeXa12K2uLOUXMgDWWydd9X3W_AYrXxPSUthcAmKNG3UqMJ9ZuhC66y4XkhmoTdyqg3OzG-n0ScjshebVqNUbn2Vb8M6QOObjJmQc1GqkmGPid5Tl-7G8XRwHEww1YgXYykM/s1600/IMG_1606.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6P5OSzgzLAeXa12K2uLOUXMgDWWydd9X3W_AYrXxPSUthcAmKNG3UqMJ9ZuhC66y4XkhmoTdyqg3OzG-n0ScjshebVqNUbn2Vb8M6QOObjJmQc1GqkmGPid5Tl-7G8XRwHEww1YgXYykM/s640/IMG_1606.JPG" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Seven Sisters (in 2017)</td></tr>
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<ul>
<li>·<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: -18pt;">Also
around Hetton, before the Bogs, it was a shame to see the beginnings of a new
housing development. At risk of sounding ultra-conservative about this, sight
of the foundations did catalyse much discussion around land use, social housing
and planning laws, which seem either absolutely static or over-zealous, and are
so often stacked against those who most need to be homed. No doubt Bill would
have been keen to press for more social housing, albeit in a way that didn’t
further erode the precious greenbelt and beautiful open spaces of these
landscapes.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: -18pt;"><br /></span></li>
</ul>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu9ignXotWw8QB2kGvHrIjkJxMsp2MYXkgAuhRXA_AEwaGh8ss8ZNP9FjzgGUWiyJD0ol_19q_hgtLWfFDH377UbDJBDA6J_agKyTnYWgM1bh1ntqCtgNAD26y_Tj41GcpXYKGKAIxzehu/s1600/BuildingSiteWithWildflowers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgu9ignXotWw8QB2kGvHrIjkJxMsp2MYXkgAuhRXA_AEwaGh8ss8ZNP9FjzgGUWiyJD0ol_19q_hgtLWfFDH377UbDJBDA6J_agKyTnYWgM1bh1ntqCtgNAD26y_Tj41GcpXYKGKAIxzehu/s640/BuildingSiteWithWildflowers.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Beginnings of a housing development in Hetton. Note the wildflowers.</td></tr>
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<ul>
<li>·<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: -18pt;">Pubs.
The Blacksmith’s Arms in Low Pittington remains closed, though a squad of
handy-looking blokes with power tools informed us of its imminent re-opening,
in August. However, if The Copt Hill, 4 miles up the road, is used as a local
barometer, the new Blacksmiths faces an uphill battle. The Copt Hill is the
traditional first stopping point on the route, but it looks, feels and smells
every inch a hostelry on death’s door. It will be sad if it shuts, but I won’t
at all be surprised if we’re not parking up there for a mediocre beer next
year. Near the end of the route, we stopped – for the first time ever in the
history of these pilgrimages, according to Peter Armstrong – at The Gilesgate
Moor Hotel on the Dragonville Industrial Estate. An animated game of dominoes
was taking place as we supped lager and gathered our thoughts for the final
furlong. The day was concluded with crisps and ale in The Victoria, surely
Durham’s finest boozer.</span></li>
<li>·<span style="font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: -18pt;">The
end-point. Two times out of three now our passage to Cuthbert’s shrine has been
foiled, this year because of the choral evensong. So, once again, we paid our
respects to the Venerable and visited the Galilee Chapel instead.</span></li>
</ul>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1TlWHVUeq5OgQkEAPtMYZvSzuzJS4GDlLmEY4ZBX7vdJvZIKVScECZR0BR1ay4xiWa9IOXzTUIfT4QFHJimOhEIWMwnzHFxsmV0-hiO8mxsgpuXcJWnsjf4_YhRoT5Bfab60lizlDHdAP/s1600/Living+Otherwise+Event+Poster+.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1TlWHVUeq5OgQkEAPtMYZvSzuzJS4GDlLmEY4ZBX7vdJvZIKVScECZR0BR1ay4xiWa9IOXzTUIfT4QFHJimOhEIWMwnzHFxsmV0-hiO8mxsgpuXcJWnsjf4_YhRoT5Bfab60lizlDHdAP/s640/Living+Otherwise+Event+Poster+.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’m
speaking at an event called Living Otherwise at the Thought Foundation in
Birtley on Wednesday about Bill’s life and work. Framed around the pilgrimage,
I’ll discuss Bill’s concept of the Marradharma as an important way of framing
international-regional dialogue between poetics and politics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">After
that, I’m head down into the PhD, aiming to have a full first draft complete by
autumn, with full submission coming – hopefully – in the new year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-72566134589277274272018-04-19T02:51:00.001-07:002018-04-19T03:43:24.052-07:00James Kirkup Centenary Event (Also Featuring Francis Scarfe)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8oKzDl6HZ14rtq5n9fTkbWZYX5LWh3BOyXgfxrSq5QYKHLUEdtXLclqD7Gka5S5lulyp_hBLdlPbzk21bAqoUvJHFkyx5ibAEAbzc4FxQt2yx7szIwh-66L-OgguqFCfxITNdWmjVmS0d/s1600/KirkupAndScarfe.jpg_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="563" data-original-width="1000" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8oKzDl6HZ14rtq5n9fTkbWZYX5LWh3BOyXgfxrSq5QYKHLUEdtXLclqD7Gka5S5lulyp_hBLdlPbzk21bAqoUvJHFkyx5ibAEAbzc4FxQt2yx7szIwh-66L-OgguqFCfxITNdWmjVmS0d/s640/KirkupAndScarfe.jpg_large.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kirkup (L) and Scarfe (R)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Yesterday,
a small group of people gathered at <a href="https://theworduk.org/">The Word: National Centre for theWritten Word</a> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Child of the Tyne</i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgElCfUnaBmtfyV_h_Ww-XyuN481K5Oebhbypv3UbNpodiz6QaRdGzZPkyQer2f-siGvKDnut9r8eXINHeh0iyxhCXeFTshasVyToGipAAXCJGiqVB03pr3XqE1RRlihk-Jk1ZTmlJ07AjN/s1600/lo3r.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1216" data-original-width="778" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgElCfUnaBmtfyV_h_Ww-XyuN481K5Oebhbypv3UbNpodiz6QaRdGzZPkyQer2f-siGvKDnut9r8eXINHeh0iyxhCXeFTshasVyToGipAAXCJGiqVB03pr3XqE1RRlihk-Jk1ZTmlJ07AjN/s640/lo3r.jpg" width="408" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bloodaxe, 2017</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Neil
Astley of <a href="http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/">Bloodaxe Books</a>, Sheila Wakefield of <a href="http://www.redsquirrelpress.com/">Red Squirrel Press</a>, 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/land-of-three-rivers-1156">Land of Three Rivers: the Poetry of North-East England</a></i>. 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">During
his putting together of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Land of Three
Rivers</i>, 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 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lo3R</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR12yyruHey2AHfNUsXFYYHqI2kZNYhJZZxefHFB8IxRHddKlB2jZJznuj3DFiC7E6gBTl9Vibc0rTOzy4DPcV9etjp88I_PdgOfsxOq9k4Q0BADmNO20P3YVIXgDNR-Hi6QzSJWb-bTpW/s1600/KirkupMarsdenBay.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR12yyruHey2AHfNUsXFYYHqI2kZNYhJZZxefHFB8IxRHddKlB2jZJznuj3DFiC7E6gBTl9Vibc0rTOzy4DPcV9etjp88I_PdgOfsxOq9k4Q0BADmNO20P3YVIXgDNR-Hi6QzSJWb-bTpW/s640/KirkupMarsdenBay.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Red Squirrel Press, 2008</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">As
well as reading original draft materials from my new sequence based on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shields Sketches</i>, 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">If
you would like to see Dorothy’s fantastic film, there is an opportunity to do
so at 10am on Monday 23<sup>rd</sup> 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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuyhfuzeQdQc7gsfErj-rnRdAjc7tRJEzaR47kBf3XuUS8NWTaSsHVqhM_eV0wOsQOKCVhn_SqpLIjcUn3J_ZnwDYjrlxH1d5LdXZ5Etjf_CbN5rTQ2y1sIRtSO816qYqHHbKjq21FNRoZ/s1600/ShieldsSketches.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuyhfuzeQdQc7gsfErj-rnRdAjc7tRJEzaR47kBf3XuUS8NWTaSsHVqhM_eV0wOsQOKCVhn_SqpLIjcUn3J_ZnwDYjrlxH1d5LdXZ5Etjf_CbN5rTQ2y1sIRtSO816qYqHHbKjq21FNRoZ/s640/ShieldsSketches.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hub Editions, 2002</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br />A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-75662892235050792662018-02-15T03:31:00.000-08:002018-02-15T03:37:14.568-08:00Open Letter to Professor Chris Day, Vice Chancellor of Newcastle University<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYwBBP7n_l0oHOC1B72qk4NzArzNeZWkY-uhBVhQAkhH178B_qFbtGPYqBsdjH5jEgnM1PalrajpWXExlFLwbXJP4j35HhEY33yRChYW-qmJWbpdq8RDK-qf0WaBfi2D8GN1FXjZE8QsfS/s1600/ucustrikefeb2018.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="336" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYwBBP7n_l0oHOC1B72qk4NzArzNeZWkY-uhBVhQAkhH178B_qFbtGPYqBsdjH5jEgnM1PalrajpWXExlFLwbXJP4j35HhEY33yRChYW-qmJWbpdq8RDK-qf0WaBfi2D8GN1FXjZE8QsfS/s640/ucustrikefeb2018.png" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Below is a
now-open letter to Professor Chris Day, Vice Chancellor of Newcastle University,
first sent at 11.10 am on Thursday 15<sup>th</sup> February 2018. The framing
context is the <a href="https://www.ucu.org.uk/strikeforuss">planned strike action by University and College Union</a> (UCU) members
regarding changes to their pensions. Beginning with a one-day strike next
Thursday, 22<sup>nd</sup> February, strikes will increase incrementally until
week commencing 12<sup>th</sup> March, and/or until Universities UK (UUK) agree
to further rounds of talks, thus allowing UCU-striking staff to return to ordinary teaching
and administrative duties.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The UCU
strikes are yet to make many ripples with local or national news, despite 60 ‘pre-1992’
institutions being involved. The wider scenario surrounding the dispute is
difficult to comprehend, but boils down to proposed changes to the <a href="http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/blog/Pages/pensions-importance-getting-it-right.aspx">Universities Superannuation Scheme</a> (USS) which would see the average UCU member’s annual
retirement income cut by £10,000 a year.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I attended
a meeting led by academics in the School of English yesterday where much of the
intricacies and apparent rationale on the part of UUK for the changes were
outlined. Gratifyingly, there was a mix of undergraduate and postgraduate
students in attendance, testament to the bigger picture which overshadows the
dispute: namely, a widespread – and growing – scepticism towards market
fundamentalism pervading higher education.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Professor
Day is hosting an open forum event on Friday, which I hope to attend. Having
done so, and listened to his and the University Executive Board’s side of the
story, I will report back. If you are a student – and not necessarily a student
at one of the sixty universities taking industrial action – I would urge you to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2018/feb/15/its-scary-and-unfair-why-im-striking-over-university-pensions">read up about an issue </a>which, in the short-term could be hugely disruptive
during the spring term, but more importantly in the long-term, could terminally
wound lecturers’ ability and desire to carry out their important public roles
as facilitators of knowledge exchange. My letter, in full:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Dear
Chris,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I am
writing out of grave concern for the current situation regarding the imminent strike
action planned by UCU members. As a PhD student currently enrolled in my third
year of study within the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
at Newcastle University, I feel obliged to state my solidarity with those colleagues
who have been forced into these measures as a last resort. I, like them, hope
that this predicament can be resolved swiftly and fairly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I would be
grateful if you could explain what actions you and the Executive Board are
taking to ameliorate the situation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">As a postgraduate
researcher supported by the Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership (and
not – yet – I should add, a UCU member) I have nothing to gain in the short- to
medium-term in supporting the strike, but as a concerned individual – one who
anticipates a future career within the academy – I am deeply uncomfortable with
the proposed changes to the USS pension system. If seen through, these changes
would not only make my own, and many colleagues’, retirement significantly more
difficult, they would fundamentally undermine our collective endeavour as
committed, knowledge-sharing intellectuals who strive, in numerous ways, to
improve the world and our understanding of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What
impetus has an Early Career Researcher to pursue a vocation in which it appears
his or her talent, skills and critical judgements will slowly be eroded by
draconian measures borne not out of academic best practice, but
apparently-arbitrarily-arrived-at projections and worst-case scenarios?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">As a born
and bred Sanddancer and resident of South Tyneside, I am proud to attend my
local university, Newcastle, where I enjoy the benefits of excellent facilities
and the expertise of myriad world-leading experts, the majority of whom are committed
to scholarly practice and lifelong learning in a co-operative environment.
Newcastle University really is a huge asset to the North-East, but its benefits
are not strictly financial. My suspicion is that, in not supporting the UCU
members’ desire for further talks with UUK, you are only exacerbating the
market-driven model of Higher Education which so many young people in our
region and beyond have been burdened by and which so many academics – not to
mention ‘ordinary people’ – have rightly criticised.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Reading
the University’s Vision and Values, it is difficult to disagree with the
sentiments. However, I feel that, without your support for the UCU members who
only wish to divulge their specialism and share their passion with the next
generation of students, Newcastle University cannot honestly claim to be a ‘civic
university with a global reputation for academic excellence’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I look
forward to your open forum event on Friday, where I hope my concerns will be
allayed and my friends and peers who have elected to take such drastic moves
can get back to teaching their students safe in the knowledge that they – both students
and teachers – are not being taken for granted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">At risk of
lecturing somebody whose academic credentials supersede my own, I would just
like to leave you with the following thought. Like all great institutions, a
university is comprised of mutual relationships between people striving towards
common goals. The success of those institutions cannot, truly, be measured by
how profitable they are, but by the support structures they put in place to
enable and encourage all of their members to dream big and achieve.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Yours
sincerely,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "bell mt" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Jake
Campbell.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-84808305280447209182018-02-08T03:50:00.003-08:002018-02-08T08:02:42.843-08:00"We're done here, chaps."<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAUJoK-WLzTiRMI9L9tXSt2I-8UrEkh8EW5-pU0urRI9J0q7WNdHU1CRvKHiAgekIYkwGCqkjk1k_WIZtwOuANNCfLUEBLdsr2LbwxBHWsiFGXJ20v5av6dY5XPOllpfzG8ImhIEH17Mtd/s1600/RomanForum1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAUJoK-WLzTiRMI9L9tXSt2I-8UrEkh8EW5-pU0urRI9J0q7WNdHU1CRvKHiAgekIYkwGCqkjk1k_WIZtwOuANNCfLUEBLdsr2LbwxBHWsiFGXJ20v5av6dY5XPOllpfzG8ImhIEH17Mtd/s640/RomanForum1.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears..." View of 'archaeological graveyard', the Forum</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’ve just
got back from Italy, where I spent a week with a number of other PhD students
at the <a href="http://www.bsr.ac.uk/">British School at Rome</a> taking part in a pilot initiative to link the
Northern Bridge Doctoral Training Partnership – comprising students from
Newcastle, Durham and Queen’s (Belfast) Universities – with the BSR, a cultural
and academic hub in the city, committed to bolstering mutually-beneficial links
between the two nation-states.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">This blog
won’t dwell too much on the mission of the BSR, nor will it bore readers with
superfluous details of the programme I took part in. Rather, I want to use this
space to think aloud, as it were, about my experience as a first-time visitor
to the ‘Eternal City’, carrying with me as I do the baggage of various identities:
Professional North-Easterner; Poet; Creative Writing doctoral researcher;
white, able-bodied male; &c.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Specifically,
my intention is to use this post to dwell upon an incident which took place in
the small hours of last Sunday morning—one whose symbolisms, cultural potency
and ongoing political ramifications are tied indirectly with the aims and
intentions of the programme and its contents; speak broadly to some of the
hitherto mentioned intersectional identities; and in a roundabout way are
germane to what I am beginning to term ‘<a href="https://jakecampbell1988.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/marradharma.html">Marradharmic</a> Praxis’; that is, an
International-Regional approach to poesis, extending William Martin’s search
for social and spiritual equilibrium in late twentieth-century County Durham.
There’s a fair chance that this won’t make an awful lot of sense immediately,
but I think that’s part of the importance of sharing it. As ever, I welcome
feedback, debate and the high likelihood of having to correct myself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">With
apologies to Professor Helen Berry in advance, whose presentation and expertise
I am about to make a hash of, I’d like to indulge retrospective interpretation
of my own hastily-scribbled notes in order to frame the aforementioned ‘incident’
by situating it within a historical lineage opened up to me this last week by
Helen’s fascinating presentation. This will be based on a very basic summary of
a practice which gained traction in the late seventeenth-century, finding its
zenith in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I am, of
course, talking about The Grand Tour, excursions involving young British men
(and they were nearly exclusively all men) being chaperoned through Europe to
arrive in the Mediterranean, where they would encounter for themselves the
great works of art and Classical antiquity which entry into elite circles of
aristocracy presupposed not only knowledge of, but direct engagement with.
Because of the Napoleonic Wars, travellers reached Italy via peregrinations
through the Alps, arriving in and touring through cities such as Venice,
Florence and Rome in order to acquire through osmosis the kinds of
connoisseurship that would grant them continued access to the most exclusive
echelons of society upon their return. These young men saw themselves as the
inheritors of the Greek and Roman world: they were public school-educated,
extremely well connected, able to afford the company of a ‘Bear Leader’
(essentially an older guide whose chief purpose was to provide the types of
‘experiences’ one could not possibly seen to be having in the Home Counties,
Gosh no) and they spent a year or more tramping around the continent picking up
the good tastes (and discarding the inferior ones) that would stand them well
for another few decades of privileged, bourgeois conversation in landed homes
across the country. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">While the
more lurid ‘souvenirs’ they took home with them (not to mention the ‘gifts’
they left in their wake) might be the subject of another post entirely, it is
worth considering the types of artworks these boys would purchase and later
hang in their country pads, cultivating the kind of mutual back-scratching that
such mementos signified. This Cappricio View of Rome with the Arch of
Constantine by Viviano Codazzi is typical of the Baroque style so favoured by
Brits of the time. Never mind that it represents an ‘impossible view’ of Rome
(something which, personally, I don’t mind: in fact, skewed truth can be a
blessing for poets), clashing architectural and archaeological elements
incongruously, the point was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">to be seen</i>:
to be regarded as a well-travelled, tasteful member of an elite club, a
collector of cultural capital who would be considered by others of a similar
disposition as understanding what good taste signified and how it might be used
to further the status-quo. Remember, this is the era of civic virtue and codes
of conduct: a top-down approach to social stratification in which the elite and
educated impose on to others the mores and manners of polite society.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjjQYq7QpO36idd2S1Hx5e5hyphenhyphenXY1MkugTDq-FfXZghT3PiIgpaZHaopyUYWchXzygaPaWpUuEN2nPy5G01PdeDH6VJsgOBHBqTApMeGE9eQUznruiqljwCrZOYxsVMdUpks64fJ01GxR7a/s1600/ViewOfRome.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="391" data-original-width="500" height="500" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjjQYq7QpO36idd2S1Hx5e5hyphenhyphenXY1MkugTDq-FfXZghT3PiIgpaZHaopyUYWchXzygaPaWpUuEN2nPy5G01PdeDH6VJsgOBHBqTApMeGE9eQUznruiqljwCrZOYxsVMdUpks64fJ01GxR7a/s640/ViewOfRome.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Viviano Coddazi's 'Impossible View', so treasured by bourgeouis Grand Tourists</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6KqIv-etMSNxLVaZEJvkTKJB1Dw68qxv47-QhVL4peFQhXe4n3WT0dA6y2MoAmEZKcqsV_YW_XxflCu-GhqY33fb_wgNOC-pdxGKxvI-0t7lpUG8rmEqr4UMIgugPqdOMJdnGrUYaxE3u/s1600/Zoffany.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="629" height="508" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6KqIv-etMSNxLVaZEJvkTKJB1Dw68qxv47-QhVL4peFQhXe4n3WT0dA6y2MoAmEZKcqsV_YW_XxflCu-GhqY33fb_wgNOC-pdxGKxvI-0t7lpUG8rmEqr4UMIgugPqdOMJdnGrUYaxE3u/s640/Zoffany.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>The Tribuna of the Ufizzi</i> by Johan Zoffany, showing what Robert Walpole called a montage of "troublesome boys" indulging in the behaviours alluded to above</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">How
funny, then, several hundred years later, to be encountering the descendants of
the Grand Tourists in a bar in Rome. What follows is, again, an exercise in
thinking-out-loud: an attempt both to try and process what happened, sure, but
a way of reaching beyond; to thinking about how class backgrounds, social
status and education and experience are always present, consciously and
subconsciously, in the way we conduct ourselves in public, especially on
foreign soil. The etiquette(s) we selectively deploy and the way we ‘choose’ to ‘break
free’ of those parameters (or not—often such practices and taboos are performed
in contradictory ways) form the focal point of what follows.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">To cut a
long story short, and spare the reader mundane scene-setting, here is an open
question: What drives a man – a white, Englishman in his mid-late twenties, to
scream directly into another man’s face (a man he has never met) a Millwall
Football Club chant? Now, I’ll be honest, I do not recall what the chant was in
any great detail, other than that it was about Millwall, a club well-known to
have historic problems with football hooliganism. The ins and outs of this are
beyond my frame of reference, and I do not wish to fall into the trap of
painting all of their fans with the same brush (and, by extension, all British
football fans: those kinds of simple narratives have been damaging enough in
the wake of, for instance, the Hillsborough disaster), but no matter how
apocryphal or unsubstantiated the claims and their skewing by media bias may be,
we are still talking about a football club whose support base (or its extreme
factions) is known for attracting, how to put this, rowdy tendencies. If a
Millwall fan reads this and thinks any of what I have just said is unfair, do
please get in touch: I would hate to read a partial account of, say, South
Shields or Sunderland supporters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Anyway,
this story isn’t about football, or sport per se. The man in question had
doubtless consumed large quantities of alcohol and I suspect will not remember
scoffing in my face, nor receiving in reply a firm but fair shove away, which I
admit was coupled with an impolite version of the aphorism, ‘go forth and
multiply’. If, by some magical nexus of the internet, the young man in question
does somehow end up reading this, I’d be more than happy to engage with him in
polite discussion about why he really ought not to repeat his actions in, say,
the Bigg Market, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I suppose
I’m interested in the reasons why his fellow drinkers, who had clearly
assembled much earlier in the bar to watch the first two Six Nations rugby
games, rushed to interject. Let’s rewind several minutes: before Mr Millwall
shouted in my face, I had politely introduced myself to one of the rugby fans
while ordering a drink at the bar. His reception was frosty at best: saying
that he couldn’t understand my accent. I admit: when I’ve had a drink – and,
for the sake of transparency, I had definitely partaken of several strong
libations by this stage in the evening – my accent does thicken, but it’s
hardly impenetrable and I was not introducing myself to an Italian with no
prior contextual knowledge, but to a fellow Englishman with whom I wished to
make acquaintance, perhaps partake in a bit of light chit-chat about the day’s
egg-chasing.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The rest
of this story hardly needs telling: it’s so fraught with stereotypes that only
the eye-rolling emoji need stand in as suitable response. Nevertheless,
compost... Following a bit of argy-bargy – the old hand shakes at dawn and “let
me buy you a drink on that daft fellow’s behalf” routine – I left the bar. It’s
worth pointing out at this stage that I was with two other Northern Bridge
students, who I won’t name, but were also men in their mid-late twenties who,
upon entering the bar with me some half-hour earlier, had expressed similar feelings
of cynicism about the group of rugby fans and their quarrelsome tag-along. I
think it is worth stating this as unambiguously as possible: I certainly made
hasty value judgements about the group, in an inverted snobbish kind of way,
but my sense of anticipation in these scenarios is usually prescient. Cutting
the meat from the fat, events culminated in a heated discussion with some
pushing and shoving. Having dared question why another man, part of the group
but not really privy to the initial squabble, had deemed it acceptable to stand
in front of a street-sweeper making provocative gestures and generally being a
menace to an Italian civil servant (no doubt on minimum wage) keeping the
square we were all enjoying looking fresh, I was once again approached and
provoked, the clear and loudly-articulated basis of which was incredulity at my
reckless impinging on a mere matter of fun and games. Let ‘banter’ be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">banter</i>? Are my virtue signals on
full-beam here; do I need to dim them?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Look,
I’ve been a tit in public. Only last spring, in my own capital city, I was part
of a group of several thousand South Shields FC supporters, converging on
Covent Garden, drinking too much and generally causing a racket. Now, I don’t
wish to, and couldn’t even begin to if I tried, speak for the other few
thousand Shields fans present, but I certainly didn’t interfere with any public
servants that night, nor did I scream my ludicrous chants mere inches from a
bystander’s face. However, sour-tasting as these actions are, their
undercurrents are more malicious still. Being pushed and shoved around a bit is
cause for a strong cup of tea and a moment of reflection, but I wasn’t actually
hit (and, I feel the need to say this clearly and frankly, did not hit out at
anybody else) and also, thank God, no Italian law enforcement personnel
witnessed the scene, which could very easily have escalated in all kinds of
ways had it been perceived as more than the in-some-ways-ridiculous display of
macho pea-cocking that it was. However, and I’ve had a few days to process this
now, something much more invidious took place. The sub-text of which was to be
found in, to borrow sardonically from conference proceedings, the closing
remarks: that is, the young man who elected to be diplomat-in-chief and diffuse
the situation by saying to me and the other two lads, de facto, “We’re done
here, chaps.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmE8ZR7Q9GH1h2RHbjJtofIBxUC93WNDhWjDZnyQ0pjpgiinwkbuNI5l3cPow_U6lngOgMHXPLlFo6GFm69ayxBwccPyIqD3cw2BMs-41y3BG1rAnTqJy_hiC0LIUWUBLPHvZAm9-Gj0Ik/s1600/WembleyDips.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="540" data-original-width="960" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgmE8ZR7Q9GH1h2RHbjJtofIBxUC93WNDhWjDZnyQ0pjpgiinwkbuNI5l3cPow_U6lngOgMHXPLlFo6GFm69ayxBwccPyIqD3cw2BMs-41y3BG1rAnTqJy_hiC0LIUWUBLPHvZAm9-Gj0Ik/s640/WembleyDips.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bunch of Saveloy Dips outside Wembley: 21st May 2017</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There are
many, many things I could now say, most of them unpleasant. However, in the
spirit of reaching out, let me unpack that phrase, “We’re done here, chaps.”
Syntactically, it constructs an interesting structural arrangement: the placing
of the collective noun ‘we’ at the beginning acts as a bargaining chip: the
by-line being: “We’ve all been complicit in this silly little kerfuffle, and
there’s no use dwelling on things when we will never reach a solution, so let’s
all be on our way.” In practice, the diplomat meant to use the first-person
‘I’, but, owing to his no doubt first-class degree in PPE (Philosophy, Politics
and Economics), retained enough self-assurance to penetrate the lager-fuelled
window of translucency sufficiently to deploy common rhetoric, thus diffusing
the situation not for our benefit, but for the collective advantage of his
fellow Grand Tourists. Better to call the whole thing off with a feckless
admission of complicity than being pulled in front of a disciplinary hearing at
Oxbridge and tainting the family name.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">That’s
not all. Let’s think of the meat in that proverbial sandwich: the “done here”.
Shrugging off the incident as a mere hiccup in an otherwise-bountiful evening
of banter, the phrase resonates so detestably for what it obscures: that is,
our encounter here in this square, in which the behaviours and actions of the
entitled are brought into question by the less-than-entitled, is being forcibly
closed. Discourse is being shut down and there’s not a jot you can do about it,
old bean. And then there’s that ‘chaps’, isn’t there? That wonderful piece of
vernacular that contains all of the privileges and presences of the leisured
class. “Chaps”, the diplomat might have said, “On this occasion you have been
lucky: we have elected not to use physical force, not because we couldn’t, but
because we are social media savvy and cannot possibly risk our names going
viral in an altercation with three individuals at a lowly institution like
Newcastle.” He might have gone on, “Chaps, your petty provincial concerns and
academic persuasions matter nothing to our six-figure salaries, and as for the
street-sweeper, push him in the Tiber and see what we care.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Chaps,
Chapettes, the Grand Tourists are alive and well and they are not about to
check their privileges on the account of some measly, Northern PhD students.
The problem for our Hooray compadres is that, via the academic discourses I am
so heavily invested in, I can at least bring to attention the problematic
nature of their conduct. I’m not naïve enough to think that, on the very slim
chance one of the perpetrators reads this they will in any way change their
behaviour, but it needs to be said <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">regardless</i>.
At a time when our links with nation-states such as Italy become ever-more
important, does it not behove of us to think more deeply about how we conduct
ourselves; how we refract back to the (baffled) onlooking continent and world
our better natures?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Perhaps,
having had a week’s worth of in-depth tours of places like the Forum, the
Lateran and Keats-Shelley House, by leading experts in their fields, my
resentment towards the ignorant Chaps was magnified. I suspect that this could
and will come across as me taking more than just one kind of moral high ground,
but my time in Rome was predicated on the basis of being an amateur. Wishing to
absorb and learn from art, architecture, archaeology, cuisine, language and
politics, I came to Rome acknowledging the narrow-mindedness of my knowledge
base on Romano-British relations, wishing to – and succeeding in – having my
horizons expanded.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In our
home nation, never mind in how we act when we’re ‘away’, civic discourse and
politics are being eroded by buccaneering PPE graduates with little care for
the ordinary person. I realise that that is quite a claim, and in some ways it
is unrelated to the matter at hand, but a culture of entitlement was on display
last Sunday so burly that it shudders to make me think that we are still being governed
by the vestiges of those Empire-expanders.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, (who, full caveat, I know little
about), speaks about ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’: the former being the
norms and customs coerced onto a populace using ideology; the latter being – I think?
– an individual’s agency and ability to grasp those inherited narratives for transformative
social change. Again, my knowledge base here is slight, so I’d welcome input
from critical theorists or Gramsci scholars. Anyway, the crux surely is the “We’re
done here, chaps” line as (anti)Gramscian coercion-in-action? Not prone to
violence (would a rugby league fan from Warrington have chinned me on the
spot?), the collective Chaps imposed extreme ideology, vis a vis learned
rhetoric, to simultaneously shrug us off and expurgate themselves of any
transgressions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In my
critical work on the poet William Martin, I situate his neologism, ‘Marradharma’,
as an important blend term or portmanteau which might offer a useful prism
through which to examine and critique the modern and contemporary region.
Predominantly, I am concerned with how this term can be used as tool, or
framework, in poetics, but its potential to be applied across a range of
humanities and social sciences contexts is profound. As humanities scholars, we
are used to seemingly-throwaway ciphers like ‘the past in the present’, but I
think Marradharma offers us a very potent tool for engaging with social change
from not only the ‘bottom-up’ (as its socialist ‘left’ implies), but from the ‘top-down’,
too (as its religious ‘right’ suggests). The term is, of course, contestable,
which is part of its excitement, but it seems to me to contain the kinds of
dynamism and inclusivity that a relational poetics – indeed, a relational re-<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">public</i> – ought to strive for. The past
was certainly on display in the present in Rome last week. In so many ways, it
was a pleasure and a privilege to ‘bridge the Tiber’, to bring to bear on
contemporary Rome my own discipline and field of expertise, but then have it
exploded by proximity to other vastly different frames of reference within the
settings of a literally palimpsestuous city.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I
genuinely don’t want to end this with a sarcastic comment, and I realise that
the prospect of carrying on this discourse with those who so firmly blocked it
is near zero, but something deeply troubling took place on that square in Rome,
and I’m saddened that it had nothing to do with a Roman or Italian—just several
English lads who, through ‘common sense’, might forever remain apart.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<br />A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-48737047432211892292017-12-18T08:02:00.000-08:002017-12-18T08:02:01.747-08:00PhD Stock-Take<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Having
lost a full week to The Dreaded Lurgy last week, I thought I’d begin the
wind-down to Christmas period with a stock-take. As a PhD is a slippery bugger,
it’s almost impossible to fully itemise and draw up an inventory, but here’s a
decent attempt as I go into my final, full* calendar year of study.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Poems
drafted: 60+<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Of
which I’m satisfied: 30+<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Collection
length to-date: 47 pages (Well within the realms of ‘satisfactory’, but still a
way away from ‘great.’ Howay.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Critical
component word-count: 26,000<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Of
which I’m satisfied: Impossible to discern, but I’d say two thirds of it is
decent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">While
this absolutely should not be thought of as a formal two-thirds report to RCUK,
AHRC or Newcastle University, as doctoral researchers we are encouraged to be
reflexive learners. So, as somebody in the business of words, let’s break down
the slightly arbitrary quantitative data above and get at the meat:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’ve
drafted a lot of shit material. Most of the stuff sitting in my drafts folder
will not see the light of day in the PhD, unless...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It
is cannibalised. For poets, this actually-opportunistic phrase is one often
applied to the process of allowing a stronger poem to subsume still-strong
elements of an altogether weaker effort. Normally this process is
chronologically typical: i.e. a ‘poor’ poem written six months ago, which I
know is beyond help, can later yield some of its healthy limbs to prop up a
poem that isn’t quite there. Occasionally the process is reversed, with the older
model being revved-up by glitzier components from the newer model. In either
case, it’s messy and sometimes the hybrid poem itself has to be rejected.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">That
said, I have written out (not for the first time), all of the poems I currently
think contain merit and/or are thematically on-point (i.e. they speak broadly
to my research questions) into one document, and that document is forty-seven
pages long. Superficially at least, I have a collection which provides a
skeletal outline of a thesis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Combined
with 26,000 words of critical prose (again, on paper) 80-90% of my PhD is written.
Would I be happy to submit that in an emergency? I absolutely would not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">This
is mainly because the major discrepancy with the project right now is the
disharmony between the poems and the criticism. While two thirds of my criticism
is, dare I say it, good, the final third of it is nebulous at best. This means
that a substantial part of 2018 is going to be spent making those final 10,000
words sing from the same sheet as the first 20,000; and to extend the metaphor,
the real magic will occur when I marry up those 30,000 words of criticism with a
fuller collection and get the harmonies pitch-perfect**.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">And
I have to factor in a 5,000-word ‘bridging chapter’, in which I summarily
connect the thematic collection (answering the research questions via a series
of taps on the shoulder) with the critical exegesis (extending the research questions
via a sustained dialectical extension of knowledge).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">That’s
all before doing the viva-voce: an oral examination in which I defend the shit
out of a bunch of poems that I’ve spent three and a half years gestating.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Itself
all having to fit ’round my wedding, in June.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Reading
back work written in the past twenty-seven months, a few things become
apparent. They were all outlined to me at the beginning of the PhD, and are
largely ‘common sense’ phenomena, but nonetheless they bear reflecting on:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
stuff you write at the beginning of a PhD – like the stuff you write in the
middle of a PhD – is not going to excite
you as much as the stuff you’ve just written. That’s only a problem for you: as
far as the examiners are concerned, this was all written in one, extended
session, thus explaining its academic rigour, its watertight referencing, its innovative
extension of knowledge in the field and its coherence as a sustained piece of
scholarly work of the highest calibre.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
person you are in the closing stages of a PhD is not the person you were when
you wrote your proposal, therefore your original proposal is about as useful to
you as the mild humour in a surreal joke about household appliances being made
of chocolate. But, again, this is only your problem, so either do some
retrofitting or recalibrate your research question(s) to fit the person you’ve
become while you’ve written all those odd words.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpLast" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm; mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; text-indent: -18.0pt;">
<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: Symbol; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Symbol; mso-fareast-font-family: Symbol;">·<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Creative
Writers only (the following may well apply in a tangential way to Fine Artists,
Musicians and practice-based researchers generally, but I suspect it doesn’t apply
to any other PhDs, including English Literature ones): the PhD is not the book.
Repeat: the PhD is not the book. It might be the skeleton – of the poetry
collection, novel or script – but it is not the book that the publisher will
take.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">*The
current aim is to submit the PhD <i>around</i>
this time next year. If I can get it in in October 2018 (when my funding
expires), then great, but like all good PhD students, I will probably require a
little extra time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">**It will
not be ‘pitch-perfect’. Somebody once told me that a PhD isn’t a Nobel Prize,
so there’s no way I’m busting a ball on the impossible.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-39549723729719393382017-12-05T07:08:00.000-08:002017-12-05T07:20:56.496-08:00We'll Keep the Red Flag Flyin' High<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’ve
never been to Coventry, Stoke-on-Trent or Swansea, and my only experience of
Paisley was watching a play one snow-filled evening in early 2013. I’m sure all
four places are as deserving of the title of UK City of Culture 2021 as
Sunderland is. I won’t begrudge a non-North-Eastern winner, but being a
Sanddancer, and therefore a cousin of the Mackems (as well as, for my sins, a
lifelong SAFC fan) I am throwing my hat into the ring in support of Sunderland’s
bid.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Sunderland I first got to know over a decade ago is a different place to the
city we see at the end of 2017. Thirteen years ago, in 2004, when I started
travelling into St. Aidan’s sixth-form on the 35 bus from South Shields, the
city was…well, it was an unknown quantity. Making the mile-and-a-half trek
between Park Lane interchange and sixth-form in Ashbrooke, twice daily for two
years, I began to see the place as more than just home to a football stadium.
When I attended Roker Park as a very young bairn, and later matches at the
Stadium of Light, there was no need to travel into the city centre itself, especially
given that we were always heading home in a northbound direction. In the
confines of the SoL (and Roker Park before it) both occupying sites to the
north of the Wear, it is easy to forget that Sunderland is an iceberg: two
thirds of it lying below the water line. I feel that, in the run up to the DCMS
decision on the 7<sup>th</sup> December, Sunderland probably still occupies
such a position for many people—especially those ‘down south’, but even those
in the wider region. How many people in Newcastle, Northumberland, North
Tyneside, Durham or Middlesbrough – even
Gateshead or Jarrow – have really spent much time in Sunderland? The facetious
answer, and I’ve heard it all too readily, is that Newcastle has it all; why
would you bother going to Sunderland? I think it’s important that we cease
thinking along these lines: partisan tensions between cities which, after all
are <i>only thirteen miles </i>apart, are
not only old-fashioned and redundant, they are preventing the region as a whole
making progress. It’s time to go diving.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Let me be
absolutely clear and upfront from the beginning: Sunderland city centre, as
well as some of its outlying suburbs, are still materially deprived. The
reasons as to why are manifold and do not form the core concern of this blog,
but let it be hypothesised that several things have (or, crucially, have not)
happened. Recently, seven years of brutal austerity measures have cascaded down
from central government to the Labour-ran local authority, Sunderland City
Council, which, like so many other local authorities, has had its hands tied.
Forced to make savings in one area at the detriment of another, there is
resentment and confusion (Witness Brexit, and Sunderland being unfairly lauded
as its ‘poster boy’). The same formula is true in Newcastle, as it is in other
towns and cities up and down the land, but the consequences are felt most
keenly in the North, Midlands and South-West. In Sunderland, the closure of local
libraries, museums and domestic violence services – to name just three – are
the direct result of this callous government and its lack of concern for
ordinary people.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Secondly,
the vacuum left by the calculated withering of once-thriving industries such as
shipbuilding and mining (did you know that the Wear, not the Tyne, once
produced more ships than any other river in the world?) since the 1980s has
largely not been filled. The opening of Doxford Park, a 1990-designated
Enterprise Zone four miles south of the city, has no doubt stemmed the flow of
further emigration from Sunderland, but its physical remove from SR1 has had
the knock-on of making the city, at 12 o’clock on any given weekday, void of
sandwich and coffee-buyers. I’m not suggesting that a city’s entire economy can
or should be propelled by a one-hour sales window of hungry office workers, but
there’s a certain illogical premise to situating several thousand of your
gainfully-employed populace away from the nucleus of the place they live and
work in. The re-development of the Vaux site, then (derelict for a staggering
17 years) into mixed-use office, leisure and retail, can only be a good thing
for a city which all-too-often feels like the shutters have been pulled down
before closing time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sun rise, Roker Beach: A new dawn?</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Right, no
more negatives! In February this year, my partner and I moved to a flat just
north of Sunderland, in the suburban village of Cleadon. Quick bit of history:
originally a part of the city until the Local Government Act of 1972 created
the metropolitan county of Tyne and Wear, Cleadon was then subsumed into the
newly-formed borough of South Tyneside. This is why it still has an SR6
postcode (like neighbouring Whitburn) and Sunderland on the address, despite
its bins being emptied in Shields. Equidistant to both Wear and Tyne, however
(with its wealth coming from industrial magnates building grand homes here from
the 18<sup>th</sup> century), Cleadon has always felt to me like a hinge point:
the liminal space between Geordie and Mackem. As somebody writing a PhD about
North-Eastern identity, this makes it an opportunistic vantage point: both for
ease of access to the wider county and an ideal spot from which to observe, and
participate in, Sunderland’s bid.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">When my
partner took a job at the University of Sunderland, at the City Campus on the
south of the river, I once again started making regular journeys from South Tyneside
into Sunderland. A drive of no more than five miles, I feel this year that I
have been re-examining my former self. In 2004-2006, sat on the bus going over
the Wearmouth Bridge, I had had time to build up resentment for the city and
for the wider area. As a hormonal and fickle teenager, more interested in music
made in California than Castletown, I had neither knowledge nor inclination to
think critically about the myriad, complex reasons why this place seemed so
destitute, and so my irrational brain made up its mind: Sunderland was
irredeemable and I had to leave. That did, of course, turn out to be a
brilliant decision: applying to UCAS in spring 2006, the University of Chester
beckoned, and six months later I was 180 miles away in a delightful,
middle-class haven in North-West England. I don’t think I ever considered what
Sunderland and the North-East would be like over a decade later, nor how I would become actively involved in its creative economy and an ambassador for
its cause. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">When
making the fatal mistake of reading comments beneath <i>Sunderland Echo</i> (and <i>Shields
Gazette</i> and <i>Newcastle Chronicle</i>)
articles outlining the development of the bid, I have been stunned to see the
reactions of some people from Sunderland and the wider region. Ranging from at
best antipathy to at worst stereotypical jokes about there being “more culture
in a yoghurt pot – har, har”, there is a bizarre (mis-)representation from
certain quarters that people would rather nothing happened. To me, that kind of
mindset is probably an indirect result of the already-mentioned austerity, but
it is not helpful and residents of Sunderland and the wider North-East region
ought to realise that this bid has the potential of being transformative for
the area. Speaking as somebody with vested interests in Higher Education, yes,
but also as somebody who simply wishes the region’s universities to succeed,
the following should be obvious: if your student populace (drawn from national
and international pools) have further opportunities for work, entertainment and
living after their degrees, more of them will feel inclined to stay, rather
than feeling compelled by the all-too-understandable lure of ‘brighter lights’
in London or Manchester (or Newcastle).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I can see
the appeal. Looking at flats earlier this year, I had initially wanted to be
based north of the Tyne. Not necessarily in Newcastle (though I study there, so
it would have been easier), I had in mind the feeling that Tynemouth or Whitley
Bay would be excellent places to live. I’m sure they are: I have friends in
both, and I enjoy visiting them. But, with my partner’s job being in
Sunderland, it made sense to live nearer the Wear. When we found the flat in
Cleadon, knowing it was a short walk to East Boldon Metro station (itself only
a twenty-minute ride into Newcastle), I realised we’d struck very lucky. In a
fifteen-minute walk from our front door we can be up on Cleadon Hills, one of
the North-East’s most glorious areas of natural beauty, with stunning views
over Wearside, Tyneside and right out into Northumberland, County Durham and
North Yorkshire. In thirty minutes, or five in the car, we can be at some of
the best beaches in the country: from Marsden in South Shields to Whitburn, Seaburn
and Roker, there are miles of coastline here which, in my opinion, are much
more varied than anything the north side can offer. The one downside to Cleadon
is its lack of a decent pub. True, The Britannia does a cracking carvery, but
The Cottage is not the bouncing boozer of five years back. But then, two miles
away in East Boldon, there are an abundance of watering holes and eateries,
especially for a small place. Highlights include the recently-transformed (from
sad, sorry and smelly) Sleepers into Beggar’s Bridge, and the stunning wine bar
come Charcuterie, Black’s Corner. At the risk of a) this sounding like a food
and drink supplement and b) me sounding every inch a man on the precipice of
thirty, let us re-focus.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pop Choir at Fausto: Guaranteed to put a Geet Big Smile on your face</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">At the
end of the summer, we began taking part in the pop choir at Fausto Coffee. Originally
in a much smaller, end-terrace shop in Roker, Fausto moved around about the
time we did, to a new, purpose-built unit on the seafront. Known for its
eclectic range of sporting events and gigs (bike rides, sea-swims and morning
fitness clubs sit happily alongside acoustic performances), Fausto is a
community-driven café which, I’ve no doubt, would be the envy of everybody from
Jesmond to Hackney Wick. Led by the Cornshed Sisters’ fabulous Jennie Brewis,
pop choir’s short life has already garnered regional attention, with the group
singing live on BBC Radio Newcastle (in support of the Sunderland 2021 bid),
with a Christmas performance at Park Lane scheduled for the 16<sup>th</sup>
December. While I haven’t been to every meeting (honestly, I’m feeling
withdrawal symptoms having not been for a fortnight now), each Monday I do
attend is a joyful opportunity to make new friends, drink good coffee and belt
out the lyrics to George Michael and Tina Turner. My eighteen-year-old,
NOFX-listening-self could scarcely imagine...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
city’s other well-known coffee shop, on the other side of the water, Pop Recs
has been going strong since 2013. Now onto its second location, the record
store come coffee shop come performance space is a genuine grassroots marvel.
Set up by the indie band, Frankie and the Heartstrings, and now operating from
just around the corner to the bus interchange I used to miserably walk past,
Pop Recs is the type of inspirational place that I wish my seventeen-year-old
self had had access to. Of course, my seventeen-year-old self was swigging blue
pints in Ku and gan mental to The Mercury League in the little room above Pure,
so he didn’t miss out too much.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Walking
through Keel Square a few weekends back (having attended an excellent, late
afternoon performance by The Cornshed Sisters at Pop Recs), we went for a few
drinks at some of the city’s newest establishments. The Old Fire Station,
having recently undergone substantial structural and cosmetic surgery, is now a
bar/restaurant and performance space that – when it’s fully kitted out with its
auditorium – will be a fantastic asset for theatre-makers and audiences across
the region. The place already feels like the cornerstone of a palpably-buzzing,
upcoming cultural quarter, the middle of which is already home to what is known
locally as the West End of the North-East: Sunderland Empire. With The Peacock
and Dun Cow, two fine boozers brought back to their Victorian splendour,
book-ending the area, it’s easy to imagine the light nights next summer
being very well spent in this part of town. In fact, the Fire Station and Keel
Square as a whole mark for me a bold statement of intent: with new street furniture,
public art, fountains and clearly classy entertainment venues all in one space,
the real question should be: ‘How much further can we go?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">As I said
earlier, there are still some very worrying visible signs of deprivation in
other areas of the city. But the feeling I have walking through Sunderland, and
enjoying time on its stunning coastline, is that this is a city moving in
absolutely the right direction. Whether or not that is enough for it to be
crowned the UK’s next City of Culture on Thursday remains to be seen, but what
is obvious is that there is huge momentum here and a growing pride across
business-owners, artists, musicians and members of the public that Sunderland
has the potential to be an absolutely terrific place to live, work and visit. Following
Hull’s granting of UK City of Culture for 2017,<a href="http://www.hull.ac.uk/Work-with-us/More/Media-centre/news/2017/city-of-culture-impact-findings.aspx"> interim reports already show</a> impressive
and wide-ranging benefits to the city, its wider economy and residents’ sense
of pride. There is simply no way that, were Sunderland to be crowned the winner
in 2021, our magnificent hotels, restaurants, shops, bars and assortment of
other service industries wouldn’t gain. As a proud Sanddancer, I am certain
this would also translate to increased revenue further up the coast, as well as
incentivising tourists to spend time in our other fabulous towns and cities.
Grumpy commenters: maybe you want to re-think your cynicism? If people in
Newcastle – or Sunderland – don’t want to support that, then that’s up to them,
but I’d urge them to brave the thirty-minute South Hylton Metro journey and see
what’s on offer. And, if you live nearby and you haven’t paid the city a visit
in a while, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. Now, if only Chris Coleman
can get the football team winning...<o:p></o:p></span></div>
A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-74921252325201611462017-11-02T09:39:00.000-07:002017-11-02T09:44:35.278-07:00Hospitalfield: A Creative Practice Symposium<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Near the
end of my weekend at <a href="http://hospitalfield.org.uk/" target="_blank">Hospitalfield</a>, the artist Michael Mulvihill said to me
that, while he enjoyed hearing about everyone’s artistic practice and research,
the opening up of the world of poetry had affected him the most.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">For my
part, I’d like to reverse-echo the sentiment: discovering the visual and
musical arts has, for me, been a revelation. While the experience was at its
most pronounced this weekend, with sixteen artists showcasing their works over
a two and a half day intense period, I really mean to say that the past two
years (and before that), via the opportunities that I have had to meet so many
fascinating artists—some of whom I’ve collaborated with—has surely shaped my
thinking and influenced my work in myriad positive ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Hospitalfield
is the kind of place that is a joy to every one of the bodily and spiritual
senses. From the culinary delights, to the coastal setting just outside
Arbroath, to the pulchritudinous grounds, to the ornate and eclectic collection
of paintings, tapestries and sculptures, the house is a fertile breeding ground
for new ways of working as much as it is a place of solitude and contemplation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
project of wife and husband duo, Elizabeth Allan-Fraser and Patrick
Allan-Fraser, Hospitalfield occupies the site of a 12<sup>th</sup>-century
Benedictine monastery, since transformed into a beguiling site of artistic
splendour. Somewhere between country pile and contemporary gallery, but not
really so much of either, Hospitalfield is a genuine one-off. The opportunity to
have spent this weekend there, then, was a special one. Organised by Joanne
Clement, the Northern Bridge Creative Practice completion symposium brought PhD
students from across the Arts together, swiping us from our routines, asking us
to address ourselves and the challenges and opportunities our works face in
both dividuated and interdisciplinary ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">For my
own part, I was able to frankly discuss with practitioners at one (or several)
steps removed from Literature, the concerns I currently have with my work:
namely, will poetry of the margins stay in the margins; and to what extent can
I, and should I, take steps to steer it?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">These
open-ended conversations took place, largely and thankfully, in the most
informal ways: over drunken dancing to the likes of competition and </span><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">co¥ᄀpt</span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Craig Pollard and
Sean Cotterill, respectively], musicians not so much at the cutting-edge, but
questioning where the edges even are. With Simon Woolham (and the ‘with’ is
both instrumental to Simon’s practice and the rationale behind the weekend as a
whole; a Harawayan ‘making-with’) it involved following the tracks of his
practice: fusing seemingly-disparate artistic ‘hats’ into what I am calling in
the most generous sense that of co-curator. His ‘Wythy’ [Wythenshawe] Walks
blend citizen map-making with story-weaving in a way that questions where and
how we tell tales. Which is a bit like the practice of Christy Ducker, whose
first book-length collection, <i>Skipper</i>,
draws largely on her Creative Writing PhD, in which she succeeds, splendidly,
in de-ventriloquising the Victorian Northumbrian heroine, Grace Darling.
Untrusting of ‘official’ accounts while equally suspicious of apocryphal
claims, Christy’s poems perform biographic ‘rescues’, analogous with the daring
life lived by Darling.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
weekend’s bounties extended further when we were introduced to the
meta-narratives of Harriet Sutcliffe, who re-writes with precision and power
the female experience back into the visual arts – Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery
and Basic Design course – in a way that I’ve never seen. It also meant
encountering the Geordie Iaian Sinclair: Michael Pattison’s dérives ’round the
river Lea being some of the most pressing engagements with psychogeographic
space I can remember. It meant seeing Rob Blazey playing an instrument that
he’d not only learned, but conceptualised, designed and built. It meant
hearing, in stunning polyphony, excerpts from Linda France’s wonderful new
poems about Susan Davidson and the landscapes of Allen Banks and Staward Gorge.
It meant wondering with Lisa Matthews where a poem starts and prose stops and
how the writer, in electing to blur those boundaries, can create dazzling new
commentaries on grief, marine life and un-packed-away holiday items. In Phill
Begg’s case, it meant asking how the auditory can push the visual into new
kinaesthetic realms in hypnotic and arresting ways. In Juliana Mensah’s, it
meant writing luminous fiction in the spaces-between identities, creating wonder
and puzzlement equally in the folds of race, gender and nationality. Similarly,
for Andrea McCartney, it meant adopting a literal and figurative shadow script
to trace the map-makers of conflict-ridden Ireland, quizzing narratives of
power. In Sabina Sallis’s work, it meant wondering, on a large scale, how
drawing interrogates myth and how that myth is bound up in the interdependent present
and might be a solve towards our crises. In not-too-distant terrain, it allowed
Michael Mulvihill to probe the hidden nuclear militarism via object-interfaces
and popular culture references which situate the reader in a profoundly uneasy
position, given the recent US-North Korea chest-bashing. And in Jo Clement’s
work, it meant figuring out what we mean by ‘type’: in an alphabetical,
anthropological and ekphrastic way, her poems delve deeply into the traces left
by the Northumbrian engraver, Thomas Bewick, recasting them as important and
beautiful way-markers for how we might live better lives now.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">It was a
real honour to spend the weekend with these people, who will all, I’ve no
doubt, go on to great, great things. Hospitalfield, you’ve been a pleasure: I
hope to be back soon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Thanks to Sabina Sallis for this image.</td></tr>
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-44356532206984940872017-10-13T07:47:00.002-07:002017-10-13T07:54:30.418-07:00Northern Rising: A North-East Poetry Social and a Milestone Issue for Butcher's Dog Before We Take a Break<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg29C5KdJHB4gVa3ISOzpeMjjzzVF07xWLdO3PvjkqJlAzhD3wOyvltBrsMIjtrvVR2YSZUjFh7sMjUsvu0nd2WYc7N1xrY4FVzY2V7znTz30yA7xwBHftTuUPiFEA-xpqVQI-1Fw5rr7Ut/s1600/NorthernRising.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="664" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg29C5KdJHB4gVa3ISOzpeMjjzzVF07xWLdO3PvjkqJlAzhD3wOyvltBrsMIjtrvVR2YSZUjFh7sMjUsvu0nd2WYc7N1xrY4FVzY2V7znTz30yA7xwBHftTuUPiFEA-xpqVQI-1Fw5rr7Ut/s640/NorthernRising.jpg" width="442" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I read at
the first Northern Rising event at Ernest in the Ouseburn on Monday night.
Billed as a ‘North-East Poetry Social’, and inspired by the bohemian <i>happenings</i> on Tyneside in the sixties
(most notably the Morden Tower poetry readings, which famously re-kindled Basil
Bunting’s poetic career and saw literary heavyweights from America pass through
Newcastle), Northern Rising was a primer for how poetry nights, tied to a wider
political consciousness, might function in the city in 2017.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Organiser
Alex Niven spoke at the start, saying how he hoped that the events would ‘draw
a circle around a moment’, allowing exciting conversations to begin, networks
to be made and voices – be they dissenting, entertaining or belonging to
categories altogether unclassifiable – </span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">to be
heard. Putting poets of various backgrounds together in this way, and
introducing them without the inflated biographical details which so often
function only to affirm a slew of prizes
or publications, Northern Rising is a democratic space for live literature and
lively discourse. Questioning who poetry is for and how it might coalesce with
the emergent socio-political paradigm, the night felt like an important one
post-Grenfell, post-Brexit, and post- well, you get the picture. As Fruela
Fernandez, the ‘featured’ poet, said: Poetry is both there and not there. In
its shape-shifting guise, perhaps it speaks best to these turbulent times.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivg2i1PenjQ9KS0pcqUI1m1Fb4WSfjsPBO8uE5uzlNbXi5051b4S_o1blzYc1AX0IBBXCpXuiMFeOkcBInQmB8O1ixiAXUWtwJ0hgEom_hJ4VMUTrF8-LSjYIsM1wyfnG90tP6D0EDOLWh/s1600/northernrising1groupshot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="960" height="426" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivg2i1PenjQ9KS0pcqUI1m1Fb4WSfjsPBO8uE5uzlNbXi5051b4S_o1blzYc1AX0IBBXCpXuiMFeOkcBInQmB8O1ixiAXUWtwJ0hgEom_hJ4VMUTrF8-LSjYIsM1wyfnG90tP6D0EDOLWh/s640/northernrising1groupshot.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">L-R: Me; Ryan De Leon; India Gerritsen; Patricia Robles; Fruela Fernandez; Grace Herring; Alex Niven</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Look out
for the next instalment on 13<sup>th</sup> November as this is set to be a
regular fixture on the regional circuit: one which, I’m sure, will gather
momentum very quickly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
second event I want to talk about is last night’s launch of the tenth issue of <i>Butcher’s Dog</i>. I have been involved with
the magazine since the start: in 2012, when, along with six other poets, it was
agreed that a new magazine was needed to harness the energy of poetry being
written in the North-East. Since then, <i>Butcher’s
Dog</i> has enjoyed phenomenal success, collaborating with the Poetry School
and enjoying the benefit of a run of exciting guest editors, each of whom have
put an original stamp on the magazine as it's gone along. Unfortunately, not long
after securing Arts Council funding, most of the editors moved to different
parts of the country, which has meant, increasingly, each issue has been a
challenge to put together, not least for Degna Stone, indomitable Top Dog and
managing editor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Butcher's Dog</i> 10 cover by Mark Bletcher</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">With
those logistical pressures in mind, and having reached a landmark issue, we
have decided to put the Dog to bed for a year. Last night was both a
celebration of the most recent issue, and a reflection on where we started out.
It was really great to see new and old Dogs taking to the stage in Culture Lab,
Newcastle, and to have the magazine so enthusiastically supported by the
director of the Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts, Sinéad Morrissey. The
night was filled with poetic delights from contributors past and present: Roy
Marshall had made a 400-mile round poetry road-trip from Leicester, bringing
co-editor James Giddings and reader Suzzanah Evans with him; and Staurt
Charlseworth had trained it up all the way from Norwich. Poets based in the
region who’ve appeared in previous issues – Bernadette McAloon, W.N. Herbert,
John Challis, Kris Johnson, Blaine Ward and Lisa Matthews – all read, and I was
introduced to some phenomenal new voices: Lauren Garland, Rob Walton and Rowena
Knight. For me, this is the ultimate joy of events like this: that they can
stimulate community in a way that is genuinely uplifting and thought-provoking
while resisting cliquiness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Butcher’s
Dog now enters a fallow year, but I reckon when it returns, it will be as – if
not more – vital than five years ago when it was just a glint in a workshop
group’s eye. For now, do get your hands on a copy of the latest issue, and, as
Carolyn Jess-Cooke’s poem, </span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">‘1
day old, 6.03 a.m.’, </span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">implores, ‘hold each other close’.</span></div>
A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-42384747996687987132017-08-24T08:45:00.002-07:002017-08-24T08:45:39.910-07:00Singing The World: A Dawn Chorus at Cheeseburn<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-size: x-large;">Singing The World</span></i></b><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">A Dawn Chorus at Cheeseburn<br />The Stables Gallery<br />26-28 August and 2-3rd September 2017</span><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid8NZGSKynyN77M1TNOA6znPKf9C5sfyENvAFN2qmeHbbVuN1gvdZR383Hh6rxojz1eQVKPCmDDEF3JGpCLhlYmsqVcJMAZvDhD7OUOLsAQIN2pMtu7jUZLXxDy_Qr59jdI3yiaqVuwppm/s1600/Dawn+Chorus+CV+detail.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid8NZGSKynyN77M1TNOA6znPKf9C5sfyENvAFN2qmeHbbVuN1gvdZR383Hh6rxojz1eQVKPCmDDEF3JGpCLhlYmsqVcJMAZvDhD7OUOLsAQIN2pMtu7jUZLXxDy_Qr59jdI3yiaqVuwppm/s640/Dawn+Chorus+CV+detail.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Dawn Chorus, Cleadon Village' (detail), poem laser-printed onto beech wood, with the assistance of Fab Lab at Hope Street Exchange, Sunderland.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;">I have a
new poem, ‘Dawn Chorus, Cleadon Village’, on display at Cheeseburn Grange
Sculpture Gardens in Northumberland as part of Mike Collier’s exhibition, </span><i style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;"><b><a href="http://cheeseburn.com/events/mike-collier/" target="_blank">Singing The World</a></b></i><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;">.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
exhibition was inspired by listening to the dawn chorus at Cheeseburn—a choir
of sixteen birds heard early one morning in May 2016. Together their songs,
represented here variously as digitally-manipulated sonograms and musical
transcriptions, form the basis of this show of screen prints, digital prints,
relief sculpture and, in my case, poetry.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Lead
artist Mike Collier’s work is shown alongside that of glass artist Ayako Tani;
musician and composer Bennett Hogg; sound recordist Geoff Sample; and digital
artist Andrew Richardson. The combination of sound and image, colour and light,
form and freedom make <i>Singing The World </i>a
really unique exploration into the dawn and evening choruses, which until I was
asked to work on the project, I knew shockingly little about.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mike Collier, <i>The Dawn Chorus at Cheeseburn</i> (2), produced in collaboration with Geoff Sample and EYELEVEL Creative, assisted by Tina Webb. The sixteen birds here are those Mike heard between 4.30 and 7.00am at Cheeseburn in May 2016. The circular images have been loosely adapted from Sample's sonograms and 'placed' on staves.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">My poem
captures the early-morning awareness of a burgeoning chorus of suburban village
birdsong, transgressing the binary, reductive boundaries between nature and
culture. It is the first time I’ve had work on display in Cheeseburn, and I
encourage you to go and see the show, if not for mine and the other artists’
work then for the fabulous aspect of the gallery within Cheeseburn Grange. Set
amid acres of beautiful landscaped parkland and gardens, the exhibition takes
place in the Stables Gallery, but there is also a Hayloft space and chapel of
St. Francis Xavier. Ten miles west of Newcastle, near Stamfordham, I can’t
think of anywhere quite like this in the region – so close to the city yet most
definitely in the country – where striking contemporary art is being shown in
innovative ways.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mike Collier, <i>The Dawn Chorus at Cheeseburn</i> (4). This is a seven-layered screen print of the sixteen birdsongs from the dawn chorus.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Mike Collier, <i>The Evening Chorus at Cheeseburn</i></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><i>Singing
The World</i> is on display as part of Cheeseburn’s two open weekends: this bank
holiday in August (26-28<sup>th</sup>) and also on the 2<sup>nd</sup> and 3<sup>rd</sup>
September. Entry is free with a suggested donation, and I’m told that delicious
refreshments are also available at the Stables café.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Dawn Chorus, Cleadon Village', set on the wall of the Stables Gallery, Cheeseburn.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZmD8QWI6nfqIjA_8OKt0zD8BeBe5OI5NT8dj0JYPV0IA9IJNsnlLjmKWHM4g7WQr5t4fFzUinsXx7N7N4n9y1kARj_gqiYG3OR_cxaMfgJ1FJyji9Tx10EddxVRTLBb0RKlL8uPE4OfE5/s1600/ayakotani.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZmD8QWI6nfqIjA_8OKt0zD8BeBe5OI5NT8dj0JYPV0IA9IJNsnlLjmKWHM4g7WQr5t4fFzUinsXx7N7N4n9y1kARj_gqiYG3OR_cxaMfgJ1FJyji9Tx10EddxVRTLBb0RKlL8uPE4OfE5/s640/ayakotani.jpg" width="480" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ayako Tani, <i>Pre-dawn Light</i>. Borosilicate glass, heat-shrunk tubes, steel and a lighting unit. The opportunity to show work in the darkness of the Hayloft at Cheeseburn presented the artists with a unique opportunity to represent the transition from night to day, moving from darkness to light. Ayako's glass chandelier of birdsong signals the dawning of a new day.</td></tr>
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-6125387445166901942017-07-20T08:27:00.001-07:002017-07-20T08:43:31.606-07:00The Federal Republic of Greater Sheelz Visits the South Bank: Thoughts Towards a Sympoiesis of the Regional Writer<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFFjJE7WAAEQdva.jpg:large" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="605" data-original-width="800" height="484" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFFjJE7WAAEQdva.jpg:large" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Geet Big Wheel. Photo courtesy of Joanne Clement</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Joanne Clement and I were in London
yesterday, giving a guest workshop-come-poetry reading for the <a href="https://poetryschool.com/poetry-writing-ma/" target="_blank">Poetry School’sWriting Poetry MA</a>, a course co-convened with Newcastle University. Converging on
the South Bank, we talked to the students – drawn mainly from London but also
from the Hyem Coonties – about ‘further pathways’: academic routes they may
take post-MA; specifically Creative Writing PhDs and how they might go about
persuading the Arts and Humanities Research Council to fund them to undertake
one.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">[The nutshell summary of how to get the
AHRC to fund <a href="http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/study/postgraduate/students/jakecampbell/" target="_blank">your creative-practice PhD</a> is this: Come up with an innovative,
original project, driven by a clear research question(s), outline a feasible timeline
through which you will progress and ultimately submit, and apply to work under
the guidance of a supervisory team and School and Institution which will
wholeheartedly benefit your practice by offering you more than just criticism
(i.e. access to specialist archives, a wider research culture and tertiary
training and development opportunities). In short, you need a watertight
project, articulated as an original contribution to knowledge, which you will
conceivably be able to complete in a timely fashion. Ask me whether I’ve
managed all of that in eighteen month’s time, however, and I’ll probably want
to shoot you.]<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I read half a dozen poems, two from the
pamphlets, four from The Beast. What follows are some thoughts gleaned off the
back of this particular trip, germinating in the fuzzy line between pedagogy and
practice, but also veering into: the ambiance of being in London post the
multiple terror attacks and Grenfell Tower tragedy; the feeling of disconnect
travelling between Newcastle and London; and the carrying-with of a clearly
demarcated regional poetics whose subtleties, subtexts and intentions do not
always transfer to the metropolis.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">After Jo and I had read, thoughts and
comments – which I must say were largely positive – ranged from the evocation
(in both of our work) of a rich landscape, with which some of the students were
not familiar; the difference in rhyme and rhythm to the supposedly more
‘jagged’ aural textures of poetry readings in the capital; and the pros and
cons of writing in such a way, so closely with and about a place, or ‘after’
regional artists (this refers, in Jo’s case, to Thomas Bewick, the 18<sup>th</sup>-centruy
Northumbrian wood engraver whose tail pieces <a href="http://www.ncl.ac.uk/elll/study/postgraduate/students/joanneclement/" target="_blank">her thesis investigates</a>, and in
mine to poets such as Bunting and Martin, whose tracks, literally and
figuratively, I follow). I was asked whether I don’t wonder (sub-text: worry?)
if writing in such a strong ‘Geordie’ voice, about the North-East, might not
pigeonhole me as a regional writer (sub-text: with little to nothing to say
about elsewhere?). Interestingly, the prior afternoon, over a quick
lunchtime catch-up with the great London-based poet and comrade, <a href="http://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/ticker-tape.html" target="_blank">Rishi Dastidar</a>, we mused on similar considerations. Would Faber, for instance, that
bastion of the English canon, protector of all who tread after Eliot, Larkin
And Other Men, be interested in representing the work of a poet who ascribes to
Robert Colls’s view that ‘[New] New Northumbrians [...] were English people who
found other ways of being English’? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I don’t wish to sound mean-spirited
towards my questioner (in fact, if memory serves, I actually thanked them for
both the toughness and relevance of their point, which does pervade my work and
its theoretical underpinnings—there are, after all, no hard and fast rules or
‘answers’), but I wonder to what extent a London poet in London would be
questioned about a ‘Cockney poetics’ (dear me)? Or whether, and this is the
more salient point, why I’ve never really been asked such a question in the
North-East (and why it’s <i>imperative</i>
that, in a reflexive but not overly-postmodern, Aren’t-I-Clever way, my thesis
does its best to get to the heart of the matter)? I was once asked something
similar in North Wales (I paraphrase, but it boiled down to: ‘Do you consider
yourself more Geordie than English?’ I did and do.) Why are poems about the
North-East, or in some way gesturing to a Northeastern consciousness or with a
Northeastern texture or field of semantics, when read or performed in the
North-East, so seldom seen as potentially problematic markers of insularity?
This begets a series of further questions, then. Chiefly: to what extent is the
North-East, as both a geographic space and gallimaufry of cultural or totemic
stories, happy in and of itself, but perhaps unhappy in its position to, and
reception by, elsewheres, principally those hegemonic cultural-capital spaces
such as London, to whom its civic institutions and their purse strings are
beholden? To what degree do we put up barriers, seal ourselves in? To what
extent are our poems – my poems, this is me, Jake Campbell speaking, whether or
not I assume the voice of a collective – translucent? Willing to be seen as figures
behind the glass, but void of telling detail, do they risk ‘trapping’
themselves on Möbius strips; destined to gyrate around fixed points until they,
like the proverbially wound-up toy car, run out of propulsion? Or is there joy
in ploughing that furrow?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I would like to hope that what my poems
actually do is align themselves<a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526113344/" target="_blank"> Internationally-Regionally</a>. Paraphrasing John
Kinsella, that poet of Western Australia whose tendrils of thought and embodied
experience extends to England and Ireland, I aim for something of an international
regionalism in my work: ‘facilitating international lines of communication
while respecting regional integrity.’ If Bunting saw himself, complicatedly, as
a ‘Northumbrian Nationalist’ (or was later held up as a paragon of such), and
contemporary poets are venerated as ‘Northumbrian internationalists’ (see the
blurb to Paul Summers’s collected poems, <i><a href="http://smokestack-books.co.uk/book.php?book=58" target="_blank">union</a></i>,
as proof of this) then why not continue that genealogy, as an imaginative
framework, and couple it with efforts to re-politicise and re-vitalise the
devolution debate?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In an essay in the recently-published <i><a href="https://www.routledge.com/Reanimating-Regions-Culture-Politics-and-Performance/Riding-Jones/p/book/9781138931534" target="_blank">Reanimating Regions</a></i>, Philip Johnstone
makes a case for regional devolution, on the back of both the Scottish
Referendum and Brexit, as one of the only ways to solve what he calls ‘The
crisis at the Centre of the UK’. Johnstone posits that, (rightly) furious at
decades of under-investment (Common parlance: “What have they ever done for us,
like?!”) in the provinces, people mistakenly vented in last year’s referendum
both their legitimate and irrational concerns about their communities’
despoilment by putting a cross on a ballot paper that corresponded with their
acquiescence for the United Kingdom to
divorce from the European Union. What Johnstone suggests they should have done
(be doing) – and Christ knows countless other commentators have said as much –
is instead of questioning the EU (many of whose laws actually directly
advantage those ignored communities, in places like South Wales and County
Durham) question(ed) the failed Westminster model whose political actors and
neoliberal consensus has so wrought inequitable development to London and the
South-East at the expense of nearly everywhere else (See HS2: little more than
a quick-trip to the finance magnet, not a comprehensively thought-out,
long-term strategy for actually, not illusorily, improving the lives of people
in the midlands and Yorkshire.) ‘The marginalisation and inequality felt by
many’, writes Johnstone, ‘have more to do with the problematic nature of the
British state over the past thirty years than with the E.U.’ A more crude way
of formulating this, and again it has been done everywhere from broadsheet
columns to stand-up comic ‘gags’ – is to suggest that, far from rejecting The
Establishment, the Brexiteer was actually ushering it in wholesale.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Where the regional poet, alive to the
frailties of his place and the contradictions of his people, fits into all of
this remains to be seen. It is a project in-progress. Bunting called his poem, <i>Briggflatts</i>, a ‘dialect written in the
spelling of the capital’, and so it seems to me that any considerations of
devolution agendas and how they dovetail into imaginative poetic communities
must embrace both the lexicons we are working with and are constrained by (language
as english, region as top of england [the lower-case ‘e’s there are a
deliberate provocation and enquiry into what might start happening if we remove
the primacy of ‘England’ or ‘Britain’]) and the places they might get us to,
however dreamy or insubstantial they presently seem. Poems, I think, are one of
the best ways of opening up the dreamscape: going beyond theorising what a
region might be, and actually contemplating its possibilities, its chance for
self-determination, and its sympoiesis – making-with – in relation to
neighbouring regions and nations (scotland may yet become Scotland) whose own
territories do not have to be beholden to capitalism at any cost.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble" target="_blank">Donna Haraway</a> is the scholar from whom
I’ve borrowed ‘sympoiesis’. Writing in <i>Staying
with the Trouble</i>, she says:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">‘<span style="background: white;">It matters what matters we
use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other
stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts,
what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what
stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.’ <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">We are on an
interesting precipice. Confronted with the very real, very exciting, possibility of a Labour
government, led by a committed democratic socialist, we must begin to think of what
any future government deals with places like North-East England, caught between
a still-resurgent Scottish nationalism and a bullish middle England, might look
like. But that’s somewhat putting the cart before the horse, and I think this
is where poetry again becomes vital. In allowing us to confront the inherent
complexities of writing about regions – even, no, <i>especially</i> very ‘well conceived’ [read: stereotyped] ones like the
North-East – poems do what politics alone cannot: they open up spaces for creative
imaginings and retellings. That was why, walking across Westminster Bridge
yesterday, having seen for the first time the steel barriers erected to the
side of the pavement, before spending 30 minutes stuffed into the District line
to King’s Cross, where armed guards stand sentry (as they frequently do at
Newcastle Central), I couldn’t help but be moved by the intricacy and
connectedness of it all, these Times We Live In. When the Prime Minister has
become a parody of a poor leader, yet retains her seat; when hundreds of
cranes populate the skyline of the Thames, constructing new mega office
complexes and luxury flats while people in the West End of Newcastle <a href="http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/newcastle-west-end-foodbank-closed-13344158" target="_blank">rob their own food banks</a>, you have to ask, 'How can I help?' Perhaps poet-critics/educators like me, shipped in temporarily for a day to talk
to people, some of whom are twice his age and have had previously successful
careers of their own, can only ask further questions about how and why to write it all down so
that it might, in the writing, make some sense, and touch someone. The
butterfly is beginning to flap its wings, sheet lighting erupts over the Thames
and the Tyne. What it will hide, and what it will reveal, well... that’s up to
the poets before it’s up to the policymakers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFHT5B5WAAYT9yc.jpg:large" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="800" height="360" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DFHT5B5WAAYT9yc.jpg:large" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jo doing the ready thing; me doing the army thing. Photo courtesy of John Canfield, Poetry School</td></tr>
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-65342639658788342582017-06-14T07:59:00.002-07:002017-06-14T08:12:46.821-07:00The Irrationality of Rationality<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There’s a
brief flapping at the letterbox and half a second’s delay until the
by-now-all-too-recognisable ‘thump’ of the half dozen poems, plus subscription
form and printed rejection slip (sans comment) land on the door mat.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">You don’t
know for certain it’s a rejection, but the weight of the envelope, scrawled in
your own handwriting of ten weeks ago, tells you that if they wanted the poems,
they’d probably have kept them and sent only a sheet of acceptance back: some
congratulatory note detailing, perhaps, how the editors were impressed by poem ‘x’
(and maybe, if you’re lucky, also poem ‘y’) and want it/them for the magazine,
so please could you confirm that it/they haven’t appeared elsewhere? There’ll
likely be a cursory note to say that magazine ‘z’ receives thousands of
submissions for each issue, so it’s testament to the strength of your poems
that they found their way in. 90-99% do not.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">How do
you know this? Because you’ve been involved in both sides of it so many times
before. As editor of magazine ‘a’, you’ve rejected hundreds of poems by
hundreds of poets—sometimes flippantly, with the click of a button on
Submittable; sometimes after sustained deliberation with your fellow editors.
You’ve also, half a dozen or so times in nearly a decade of trying, been privy
to the other side of the coin: the acceptance slip coming through after months
(occasionally weeks) of waiting has flipped the day on its knife-edge, and for
the weeks and months that follow, you’ve been buoyed by the knowledge that an
editor (or group of editors) you’ve never met have decided to take your poem or
poems and align them in a manuscript alongside other poets, some of whom you
know or have met or have read, others who are just names to you. You spend the
time until the magazine containing your poem(s) drops on the door mat in a
state of elevated spirits. Perhaps you Tweet or post a message on Facebook
about it in advance. And while online acceptances, for e-journals and the like,
can be just as salient in terms of their prestige (if not more so in terms of ‘reach’,
theoretically at least), there’s something about this art form you’re involved
with that tells you, irrationally, that the printed page is still superior; and
that the journals you’ve been reading since you were an undergrad eight years
ago are still the ones where your poems ought to be published.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Then
there’s the third state, which you discuss anecdotally with colleagues, peers
and friends involved in this world. This is the written-on rejection slip: the
halfway house between the poem(s) being <i>hypothetically
</i>good enough for the magazine, but for whatever reason or combination of
reasons, not quite making the grade. Occasionally, this can be as simple as the
poem being a couple of lines too long, thus pushing the setting of the rest of
the mag entirely out of kilter. More often, it’s to do with a small fissure in
the poem(s): some irredeemable flaw which, while not fatal, does nonetheless leave
the poem(s) feeling ‘not quite there’. In a jostling match in which one poem is
not quite there and another is, it makes absolute sense to side with the stronger
candidate. Oftentimes, a theme begins to emerge, binding the poems already
accepted for the issue, and whether or not yours is a firecracker, the issue,
in its own stubborn way, does not demand your presence right now. The editor
will occasionally imply all of this, in muted, conciliatory tones, in a few sentences
of his or her own hand, with appended well-wishes and encouragement to try
again soon. If human-printed ink accompanies laser-printed ink, so the theory
goes, the editor can see and has acknowledged tacitly that you are a Good Poet.
However, you had best be prepared for that default printed slip: try not to be
consumed by the gravitational pull towards oblivion that you know it means to
avoid, but nevertheless exerts. After
all, magazine editors need and want to publish the ‘best’ collections of poems
they can. I know: I’ve edited magazine ‘a’ twice now. The reason the subscription
form comes through with the rejection isn’t a cynical attack on the rejected (a
less-than-subtle suggestion that if only you’d subscribe, we might take your
work next time); no, it comes through because subscriptions, if they are voluminous
enough, guarantee the magazine’s future survival, which, after all, shores up
the continued promotion of the art form we’re all apparently-invested in.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What is
the purpose of this little diatribe? I don’t entirely know. Sour grapes? Yes,
partially, inevitably. We’re human: rejections hurt, even if we pretend they
don’t; that it’s just par for the course. But I wonder. Is there something
inherently flawed in the way our poems are expected to grace the eyes of a
potential readership? Something askew in the commonly-accepted parlance which
has it that magazine publication (years of), followed by pamphlet(s) publication,
followed usually by another year or two of ‘higher-brow’ magazine publication,
invariably leads to first full-length collection with a publisher (ideally one
of the dozen in this country who can command if not international then at least
fully-national reach) and the commensurate prizes (slew of, or at least
shortlist for) and maybe later (long after both your death and further eight
books, of course) full assimilation into Poetic Singularity: a five-page spread
in the <i>Guardian </i>magazine;
anthologisation en-masse; your name boring hundreds of thousands of GCSE
students each spring or spoiling (when misquoted) many an otherwise-enjoyable after-dinner
game of <i>Articulate!</i> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Even now,
levels of facetiousness ramped at least halfway up, I am loathe to mention
names. I am aware of my ‘reputation’, which whether I say so or not, I wish to
protect, as well as the reputation of the publications and bodies alluded to. I
am not aiming this at any one of them in particular. My gripe – I think – is with
the very means by which poetry is published. The word ‘means’ there is crucial:
implying a plurality of publication routes (the aforementioned ‘trajectory’ may
be typical, but it is certainly not unique) and a plurality of reasons and justifications
for <i>wanting to publish in the first place</i>.
What do we ‘mean’ when we say our poetry is published?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I talk to
a lot of poet-friends about their craft: forthcoming readings, publications,
projects, commissions, residencies and so on. What we often fail to talk about
is why we are doing it in the first place, and the implied sub-question: who is
our work for? At a conference last week surrounded by twenty-five other Arts
and Humanities disciplines, I was asked by two other researchers – one from an
Archaeology background, another an Art Historian – why I started writing
poetry. That, I said to both, is a very good question. On both occasions, I
replied (honestly) that I was inspired at undergraduate level by a series of extraordinarily
talented and passionate lecturers; knowledgeable academics-come-writers who
both introduced me to the types of poetry that could say meaningful things
about the modern world (reading the Bloodaxe anthology, <i>Staying Alive</i>, during a ski trip to the Italian Alps in 2008, I
mused to one of my questioners, was a transformative experience) and began me
on a journey, which I’m very much still on, into thinking about how and why I
could and should attempt to transform my own experiences into a body of poems
that other people might gain some insight or joy from.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Since
then, I’ve committed myself to that journey. It has brought me mainly
happiness, and some more understanding of my life and the place I’m from and
where I’d like to be in the future. I hope, sincerely hope, that in one way or
another – via the many readings I’ve given and the few hundred pamphlets I’ve
sold, not to mention the handful of poems which have found their way into the
pages (textual or virtual) of a few magazines and journals – that I’ve affected
people: made them stop for a moment and see something of their own humanity
reflected back at them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In a
first-year English Literature module, I remember the then-Head of the
department I was studying in asking the assembled hall of two hundred students
why they had signed up to their chosen course (no matter of its potential
combination with Drama, Creative Writing, History or Whatever). The feeling I
had at the time was much the same as it is now: to have some kind of effect on
the life of at least one other person, via the rendering in original text, of complex
emotions and feelings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Another
related anecdote: at the Queen’s conference last week, I saw a talk by Anthony
Bradley, an associate professor of Religious Studies at the King’s College in
New York (much of which, I freely admit, baffled and estranged me, based as it
was on heavy theoretical terms and a non-linear argument) who posited the
belief, which I fundamentally agree with, that our research, try as hard as we
might to prevent it from becoming so, is absolutely subject to our interests,
experiences and biases. This prompted an audible ‘Hmm’ from the lecture
theatre, with a student at the end commenting to Bradley that, contrary to his
experience of the American academic system (in which scholars are encouraged to
‘personalise’ their work), she had been advised to do the opposite, adding as
much distance as possible between herself – a flawed human being – and her research,
with its designs (no doubt inculcated by her School or Faculty and its historic
modus operandi) on calculated, objective reasoning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Something
about that argument seems daft to me. Maybe I don’t get it. But somebody who I
think does is Phil Scraton, Professor of Criminology at QUB, and author of <i>Hillsborough: The Truth</i>. Listening to
Phil’s two talks, in which he recounted in immense and unsettling detail the
twenty-eight-year long struggle to appease the families of the 96 Liverpool
fans who were tragically killed (and later vilified) at a football stadium, I couldn’t
help but thinking that his whole lecture, not to mention the book and possibly
even his career as an investigative researcher, was probably founded on his
decision on the morning of the 15<sup>th</sup> April 1989 not to travel with
his son to Sheffield to watch his hometown team.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What does
all of this have to do with being rejected from a poetry magazine? Maybe not
very much. A friend of mine recently told me that the reason they write poetry
is for themselves. Some within the arts world would caution against this view,
regarding it as sycophancy, or even nihilism. Poetry, the purist attests,
transcends capital-driven ownership structures to reside in, with and for the
world. That the self-congratulating professional poet, making strategic
decisions to bolster his or her career, should hold this view is inimical to
the supposed sanctity of capital-p Poetry: that un-tainted art form which is
both primary and transcendent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I believe
that this opinion is still important and relevant, but I also believe (and
perhaps, as a holder of two degrees and somebody with vested interests in
finishing his PhD within a well-regarded English Department, I would say this)
that we absolutely write from the ground up. Yes, creative writing workshops
and exercises, as well as in-depth reading of literary heavyweights from the
past as well as protégées from our own generation, is fundamentally important,
but what I think is more important is nurturing the quiet, troublesome voice in
each of our own heads which says ‘You need to find out who I am.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">That
voice has nagged at me for at least a decade now, and at all times it has been
in competition with the voices of both form and reception. Allow me to explain.
In a poetic sense of judicious, editorial decisions being weighed up, my approach
to ‘form’ often involves a conflict between deciding instinctively where to
insert line and stanza breaks into a ‘poem’ (or, going further, as I sometimes
do, whether a pre-modelled form, such as a villanelle, might be applied advantageously
to the draft content) and where to permit it to bleed into the much more
nebulous category of the ‘prose poem’. To complicate matters, I have nearly
always regarded these blog posts as variants of the prose poem, even if they
will likely never be re-published as part of a ‘book’. Further, form does not
for me strictly mean deciding on whether or not a fourteen-line poem is, in
fact, a sonnet; but has much more to do with myriad (often contradictory)
niggles I face with regards to how to negotiate and amalgamate ‘content’, which
of course includes things such as ‘tone’, ‘image’ and ‘[meta]narrative’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Secondly,
then, ‘reception’ might be thought of as the product of the process which is ‘form’.
Example: I write a batch of poems, I send sub-batches to three or four
magazines, wait a few months, and perhaps one or two ‘stick’ and are published,
and perhaps two or three years later, I have a pamphlet of perhaps two dozen of
those original poems (alongside a few of the newer ones I was too proud to omit
from the manuscript) published. Widening this process out and tying it to the
project-in-question – my PhD: a practice-led investigation into my fractious relationship
with England’s northeast – the form[at] (not to mention demands and
constraints) of practice-as-research becomes problematic. You have three or
four years in which to ‘practice’ this ‘form’ (poetry, music, film &c.) but
at the end of that period, you better damn well be able to provide us with a
product which persuades us that you are the expert, or else this platinum-grade
degree to which your work ostensibly gestures might as well go on the bonfire,
pal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">All of
which takes us a long way from the half dozen rejected poems hitting the door
mat. Sort of. If the ‘product’ of a practice-led PhD is only half-received (and
conceived) in its academic context (manifesting in the viva: that blood-curdling
hour and a half in which an external and internal examination panel scrutinise
your work, deciding for how much longer you must polish it before it is awarded
the platinum-standard of degrees), the rest of it is usually thought to be ‘received’
(or not) incrementally – by a series of small publications, performances and
talks of almost-endless variety – before finally finding cohesive, publishable ‘form’
(taking us hopefully full-circle) as a ‘thing’ which can be packaged, sold,
broadcast or else disseminated to the body politic in some way known or
hitherto unbeknown. The hope, and this is one which transcends the academy and numerous
institutions with which we poets plot in order to be read or heard, is that a
minimum of one other person is in some way changed by our efforts; and that,
perhaps if we are fortunate enough indeed, might affect a somewhat more
substantial coterie. The rest, as they say, is for the future-makers: the
canonisers and editors; the clique-makers and trend (re)-setters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Meanwhile,
we who feel compelled to do this thing, and all of its associated quirks,
tendencies and habits, must hope that the next time the envelope comes through the
letterbox, the news is good, so that we don’t again have to reel of two and a
half thousand words defending our own inscrutable imaginations and niche
fixations; so that we might get on with the job at hand, and once again rise to
the kettle with some firm resolve to try again harder, or at least mull it all
over with a packet of biscuits, feeling the caffeine hit and the dread of the
void subside into buttery, sugary goodness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-16240889385008473612017-05-25T08:49:00.002-07:002017-05-25T08:51:24.433-07:00Marradharma<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“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.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“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.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I see the video-reel of this
past week rewinding. It’s Friday, 19<sup>th</sup> 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 <i>that
one line</i> is bellowed around the cavities of the room; to feel that, when
the singer looks your way, the song is <i>for
you</i>, 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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?!’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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<sup>th</sup> 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 <i>The S*n</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: #fbfbfb; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“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.”</span><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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’:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“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 <i>sundered</i> 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’.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">We are all of us now outside the
monastery wall. Cut-off, sundered: the very word close to surrendered. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Yours in the spirit of marradharma,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Jake x<o:p></o:p></span></div>
A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-41160610324662509452017-05-15T10:00:00.001-07:002017-05-15T15:46:02.406-07:00Thoughts Towards a Chorography of my Thesis-in-Progress<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Chorography<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">noun<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">historical<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The systematic
description and mapping of particular regions.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtgcFYQHUk5g3AhGEEnalQnbT0bZfW7JO8JqAd-0DthX9eN9j0tb6ZM2chjIMQmUKNHj8EnYNMrQTXpQD0Q-gbCR8wzrp8KAB3ap2PjOwet5-hdCLj2atjRTGcxOFSBVpUbRZ81OfvT6EL/s1600/LandmarksRoutesSouthTyneside.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="408" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtgcFYQHUk5g3AhGEEnalQnbT0bZfW7JO8JqAd-0DthX9eN9j0tb6ZM2chjIMQmUKNHj8EnYNMrQTXpQD0Q-gbCR8wzrp8KAB3ap2PjOwet5-hdCLj2atjRTGcxOFSBVpUbRZ81OfvT6EL/s640/LandmarksRoutesSouthTyneside.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 14.0pt;">Chorography<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;">historical<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The systematic
description and mapping of particular regions.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I like to
think of the map as a poem-in-its-own-right.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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<sup>th</sup> May, in Newcastle University’s English Department.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">1.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Roads<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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,
place<i>lessness</i>) 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.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjcdvcyLqtcciVrc6pVIdAvt7Ek4_TyWDGHtmxCJsL8TUXfC31Af_YQi1CWxqfKJHkB1KCZdO-Qk_LOuJFpdivc_ALZZWybna0SuaJMajpAS7Bk-aRyGvBwEfvzi01Tzgp6mJ0TTyBIqIF/s1600/Wrekendyke.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjcdvcyLqtcciVrc6pVIdAvt7Ek4_TyWDGHtmxCJsL8TUXfC31Af_YQi1CWxqfKJHkB1KCZdO-Qk_LOuJFpdivc_ALZZWybna0SuaJMajpAS7Bk-aRyGvBwEfvzi01Tzgp6mJ0TTyBIqIF/s640/Wrekendyke.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Figure taken from <i>Wearmouth and Jarrow: Northumbrian Monasteries in an Historic Landscape</i>, 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...</td></tr>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">2.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Walkways<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The orange zig-zaggy
line is the route of the <a href="http://walk.uk.net/portfolio/stringing-bedes/" target="_blank">Stringing Bedes walks</a>, 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">3.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Railways<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">4.<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 7pt; font-stretch: normal; line-height: normal;"> </span></span><!--[endif]--><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Roundabouts<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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 <i>in medias res</i>
as complex, authentic poems-in-place.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-45791698031682008582017-05-10T07:30:00.000-07:002017-05-10T07:44:32.017-07:00Why Does Poetry Not Sell?*<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwSkPwbwYOIcH7kNMGNWpNYTVZ6FIf-91zni5ug8IexAeKH1XXbGDPYc6DF91-zl7z20TIKwb2xP-fgKWQ-J9pEEwwiaPdKY4w-aj1mhBvEz9SIk_YsrDLw4P1bfOY_61i7IWj-2FzjPyT/s1600/NPS17.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwSkPwbwYOIcH7kNMGNWpNYTVZ6FIf-91zni5ug8IexAeKH1XXbGDPYc6DF91-zl7z20TIKwb2xP-fgKWQ-J9pEEwwiaPdKY4w-aj1mhBvEz9SIk_YsrDLw4P1bfOY_61i7IWj-2FzjPyT/s640/NPS17.jpg" width="360" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I can
only really speak for myself and my own experiences. In February this year, I
placed ten copies of my 2015 pamphlet, <i>The
Coast Will Wait Behind You</i>, 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?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The Coast Will Wait Behind You</span></i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">, like <i>Definitions of Distance</i> 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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Similarly,
<i>TCWWBY</i> 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. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">N.B. As
copies of <i>The Coast Will Wait Behind You</i>
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.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">*(In
quantities which precipitate the consumer-capitalist economy)?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-16705540336788116572017-02-08T06:46:00.000-08:002017-02-08T07:32:54.846-08:00'What could be the meaning or use of such love?': Thoughts towards a verticality of South Tyneside; the pre-poem; and an old-new model of sustainability for Cleadon.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“I
suspect that writing a poem can be as much about the storing up of the energy
before the poem’s written down as about the casting of it on to paper. One can
have a strong sense of a poem being there, even when there isn’t anything
there. Spooky.</span>”<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">That’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/21/jacob-polley-my-writing-day" target="_blank">Jake Polley</a>, T.S. Eliot prize winner, on what he, or
I, might term the ‘pre-poem’. In thinking about my collection to-date, I’ve
begun noticing a few things – most of which, you’ll be relieved to hear – I won’t
be harping on about now. Patterns, cadences, repetition. Images have started
recurring, as have phrases and sometimes single words. Sites, too, have drawn
me back. One such site is Cleadon Hills. Now, depending on who you ask, this is
either: part of South Shields, part of Sunderland, or wholly, and entirely irrefutably,
part of the independent Republic-to-be, Cleadon. One, none or some of these
things are true. (That’s why they call it <i>Creative</i>
Writing, y’knaa.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEies78kBHQFDctrrwHgzSys8u_XCifEq8sOh7ulbJN_7fEuFKfYxiAX6FT7K_MqFlIgj7vL1Z-yRRfGKh9hI-X3xd1ABbdWH-wh9UGo7f1FJTaGeDS1SJgg_bnfi3q7OIjlYfx_NVEdj4Aa/s1600/jakespelksreading.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEies78kBHQFDctrrwHgzSys8u_XCifEq8sOh7ulbJN_7fEuFKfYxiAX6FT7K_MqFlIgj7vL1Z-yRRfGKh9hI-X3xd1ABbdWH-wh9UGo7f1FJTaGeDS1SJgg_bnfi3q7OIjlYfx_NVEdj4Aa/s640/jakespelksreading.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Me reading 'Spelks' at Cleadon Mill (Pin), proving that the mill, and I, am real. No fake news here, folks.</td></tr>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I’ve written about this before. Ego alert! My poem ‘<a href="http://www.ofipress.com/corcoranandcampbell.htm" target="_blank">Spelks</a>’,
which I think from the privileged position of a few years of hindsight is still
a good poem, ostensibly documents and bears witness to the heartbroken Elizabeth
Gibbon, daughter of a late nineteenth-century mill-owner, Thomas Gibbon, who,
refusing her courtship to a local sailor (or, in some stories, pirate) is said
to have driven the young girl to an early suicide.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">There is evidence that the mill and farm buildings were still
productive until the mid-late 1800s, with further suggestion, thanks to our
friend the <i>Boldon Book</i> – the Domesday
Book of the North(East) – that there may well have been a functioning mill of
some description on the present day site since 1183. Given the prospect – only
around 2KM from the North Sea, at an elevation which must be several hundred
feet above sea level – it is entirely understandable, from the point of view of
even rudimentary physics (poets’ physics) why you would choose to site a
windmill here. The catchment area, too, must have been advantageous, certainly
until around the late nineteenth-century. As Cleadon Park, the ward of south
Shields that my parents have resided in for over fifteen years having moved
from Harton, is largely comprised of early twentieth-century housing stock, we
can safely assume that for most of its life, the mill ground wheat down to
flour for sale exclusively in Cleadon Village, or at most to parts of Boldon and the then much more Tyne-centred South
Shields. (Whitburn and north Sunderland, as I will describe later, had/have
their own mills, thus presumably further limiting the economic viability of
Cleadon Mill). While the exact parameters of to whom and where the mill
supplied its wheat is unknown, its physical proximity to the sea, its elevation
and equidistance to the growing nucleuses of the rivers Tyne and Wear, must
have guaranteed centuries-long, farm-to-fork flour production. ‘We Sack ’em,
yay bak(e) ’em’ is a slogan the future Cleadon Milling Company are welcome to
(for generous royalty payments, obvs.) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">'Plug' and 'Pin' shown within red circle in South Tyneside.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Same view, zoomed in. 'Plug' (Water Tower) in red; 'Pin' (Mill) in yellow</td></tr>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">So far, so floury. ‘What does this have to do with poetry?’
You may well be asking. In 2015, when I <a href="http://walk.uk.net/portfolio/stringing-bedes/" target="_blank">walked Bede’s Way</a>, and into 2016 when I
delivered talks and read poems based on it, my mind was continually drawn back
to the site of the mill (and the yet-to-be-discussed water tower). Partially
this is because, within the confines of the Stringing Bedes walks, Cleadon
Hills marks the approximate halfway point. Culturally and linguistically, too,
it marks for me and many others a point of convergence: Cleadon sitting within Tyne
and Wear, this is what I often refer to as the ‘hinge’ of the county; the place
where Geordie meets Mackem, where Wearside meets Tyneside, where ‘bewk’ becomes
‘buke’ (or sometimes, in plain English, ‘buck’, as they say in Cleading, their ‘ing’
suffixes always annunciated, unlike their heathen ‘in’-ers’ to the north and
south.) TL;DR: Cleadon ‘posh’, South Shields ‘common’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The highest point in South Tyneside, visible for miles,
Cleadon Water Tower, designed by Thomas Hawksley and built sometime in the
mid-eighteenth-century (I can’t find a precise date), is actually a chimney for the steam-powered
pumping engines which sat at the base, drawing water from deep within the
magnesium limestone ridge that characterises the geology of this flank of the
country. An act of parliament in 1852 created the Sunderland and South Shields
water company, as a response to the proliferation of waterborne diseases such
as cholera. By the 1970s, however, with the opening of the Derwent reservoir,
the tower and pumping station became redundant. (Much of the information here I
have effectively copied verbatim from South Tyneside Council’s ‘Cleadon Hills
Conservation Area’ plan of March 2007, freely and easily available online: <a href="file:///C:/Users/Acer/Downloads/Cleadon_Hills_CA_Character_Appraisal_(March_2007).pdf)">file:///C:/Users/Acer/Downloads/Cleadon_Hills_CA_Character_Appraisal_(March_2007).pdf)</a>
The tower still stands, dormant yet imposing, with the former pumping rooms and
outhouses converted to apartments and houses. What I find particularly
interesting about the site, which henceforth I will take to include both the
Water Tower and Mill, is that they are remnants of a time in which two of
humanity’s most basic needs, water and bread, were met locally. It is far
beyond the scope of my research to carry out any further archaeological,
historic, sociological or anthropological studies into the site, but its
continued presence in the landscape – as more-or-less intact structures –
continues to fascinate me and get my mind firing towards the pre-poem.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cleadon Mill (Note the Water Tower in the background)<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cleadon Water Tower</td></tr>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Actually, other sites within only a five-mile radius begin to
further stoke the mind’s boiler. Two additional mills – Whitburn and Fulwell,
both no longer functional, though the former is at least superficially ‘all
there’ and the latter is, apparently, set to be restored – and a lighthouse
(Souter, the world’s first electric lighthouse) speak to me of two things this
part of the world is most famously associated with: the sea (and by extension
water and water courses: the Tyne and the Wear and assorted tributaries and commerce)
and the hills (mainly in the form of the extractive industries, which of course
were dominated by coal mining, reaching a peak in the early part of the
twentieth-century). An additional vista below, now lost, shows the Westoe Crown
colliery shaft. Closed in 1993 (I was five: I don’t really remember it), the
impression one must have had looking south to north on the day it was
demolished, with the ghostly backdrop of Tynemouth Priory a few miles behind,
must have been, truly, one of an era coming to a close.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Souter Lighthouse, Whitburn<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fulwell Mill, Sunderland, as it looks today</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Whitburn Mill</td></tr>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The sense of verticality in South Tyneside, then, is a vestigial
one, but one kept half alive by former industrial and civic buildings and their
after-image. It strikes me that whether it’s a water tower (chimney), mill or
lighthouse, or indeed a shaft leading into the earth, the place that I’m from was,
until recently, dependant on man’s ability and willingness to ascend or
descend; to coerce from the crust of the earth up to the surface the raw
materials of life: water, fuel and food.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">All of this has a ring of genesis (Genesis?) about it, does
it not? Possibly that is one pre-poem thought: an inkling that some kind of
religious, or quasi-religious meta-narrative might be the one in which to (re)frame
The Site As Origin. Another might be socio-political. As the tip of the iceberg
known as food scarcity has been in the news recently, it seems pertinent to
think about the site as a potential place of self-sufficient food production
and even alternative currencies and employment models. What might the socio-economic
benefits, not to mention the long-term cost-benefit coefficient, be to Cleadon,
and South Tyneside, of a fully-reinstated water tower and mill? Lacking
anything beyond a very rudimentary knowledge of ground water and bread making,
I daren’t speculate too far, but it strikes me that the ‘Plug and Pin’ have at
least the capacity to catalyse a new, localised micro-economy of water
provision and bread making. The environmental benefits, surely, would be
obvious? Which is all fine, in theory (if not at all in practice), but how
about culturally?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Westoe Crown pit head, gan doon in 1993</td></tr>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Much of our literature draws on and reinterprets myth and
legend. Eliot drew heavily on fertility rituals in <i>The Wasteland</i>, for instance. What would a literature of this
specific place look like? For a start, it is worth noting the ease with which
not only literature of this type, but discourse more generally, can become too
parochial, sycophantic or niche to matter. For Wendell Berry, however, the
Kentucky farmer-come-writer, being rooted in a specific locale lends his work
credence. Writing from his homestead in Port Royal, he says, among other
things: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“The
test of imagination, ultimately, is not the territory of art of the territory
of the mind, but the territory underfoot. That is not to say that there is no
territory of art or of the mind, only that it is not a separate territory. It
is not exempt either from the principles above it or from the country below it.
It is a territory, then, that is subject to correction – by, among other
things, paying attention. To remove it from the possibility of correction is
finally to destroy art and thought, and the territory underfoot as well.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Berry’s writing is concerned with place, citizenship and
identity. But not in the abstract: always attuned to the actuality of tending
his land, and watching the slow decline of rural America, his concerns are, for
lack of a better phrase, real. Here he is, musing philosophically on his ‘calling’;
his vocation as a farmer-writer:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">“After
more than thirty years I have at last arrived at the candor necessary to stand
on this part of the earth that is so full of my own history and so damaged by
it, and ask: What <i>is</i> this place? What
is in it? What is its nature? How should men live in it? What must I do?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">An ‘American Sage’, according to James Rebanks (author of the
excellent <i>The Shepherd’s Life</i>)
Wendell Berry’s philosophy of knowing-yet-not-knowing appeals to my current
ruminations about the site, my interpretation of it, and how I can live in it,
if only partially or temporarily. Elsewhere in <i><a href="http://dark-mountain.net/blog/the-world-ending-fire/" target="_blank">The World-Ending Fire</a></i>, the new volume of essays from which I’ve
taken these quotes, Berry differentiates between the aestheticsisation of a
landscape for artistic ends and the kind of deep knowledge that comes from
living in and in-tune with it. I realise that, aside from the technical and financial implications of retrofitting a mill and well to be contemporary producers of wheat flour
and water is not only hugely problematic, it is also not the real point of my
work. Clearly, as the Transition model has shown us, these kinds of schemes are
much needed as we enter the world of declining fossil fuel reserves and a
damaged climate, but they are not without drawbacks. My question or concern is
focused on the cultural potential of the site: how might we look through the
past layers of these hills as a place of localised production, to a place of
leisure, to a future place yet-to-be-determined? How does the prose become
poetry; the thought become meaning?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Really, I suppose like Berry I am asking: How might I know
this place – Cleadon Hills, with its mill and water tower, its fulcrum-like vantage between the Wear and the Tyne – and write about it with reverence and
respect? How might I at once frame and distort it – make it strange, beguiling,
new – while simultaneously desiring of it the potential for a more equitable,
just and connected mode of living? As Berry says, ‘Why should I love one place
so much more than any other? What could be the meaning or use of such love?’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-90894151322980453012017-02-01T11:09:00.002-08:002017-02-01T11:09:40.797-08:00New Misos<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">A quick
update regarding two new poems which have been published online recently. ‘<a href="https://newbootsandpantisocracies.wordpress.com/2017/01/28/neu-post-truth-poetics-day-eight-jake-campbell/" target="_blank">M56Hymn: 20.01.2017</a>’ appears at </span><b><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">New Boots and Pantisocracies</span></i></b><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">, Bill Herbert and Andy
Jackson’s excellent blog, first set up to document the outcome of the 2015
British General Election and since morphing into a wider take on the new
un-real politic(king-off).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;">‘<a href="http://www.misomagazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/MISOss17-FINAL.pdf" target="_blank">Manifest: The Leas</a>’, appears today in the new edition of </span><b><i><span style="font-family: "Garamond","serif"; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">MISO</span></i></b><span style="font-family: Garamond, serif; font-size: 12pt;">, the Magazine of
Literature and Languages. I’m in the fine company of Sophie Collins, Adam O’Riordan
and Martha Sprackland, which is ace, and the journal’s editor, Caroline Jones,
set it up off the back off her Creative Writing MA at the University of
Chester, where I did the same course. So that’s canny. Do have a deeks at both.
Chee-az.</span></div>
A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-10384350196563184322017-01-26T04:57:00.002-08:002017-01-26T05:04:01.466-08:00The North-East as an 'Alternative Centre': Thoughts Towards a Literary Genealogy of Bernicia<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Freud
said that ‘Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.’ In
establishing a literary genealogy of the post-1960s North-East, this thought
has recurred.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Part of
my research puts forward the case for the North-East being an alternative
centre. When I started this project, and indeed as I reach its (approximate) halfway
point, I continue by following a driving impetus, or research question or
statement, namely: ‘[...] Poems belonging to the palimpsest of North-East
England’. The ‘palimpsest’ part has become overbearing and cumbersome, so I am
wearing it sparingly, but the ‘belonging’ part, and of course the ‘North-East’
part, are fundamental.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">What do
we <i>actually</i> <i>mean</i> when we speak about ‘the North-East’? I cannot stress enough the
importance of accuracy. To people south of the Tees, west of the
Pennines or north of Berwick-upon-Tweed (and here, of course, I am falling into my own trap of vaguery), there is a fair chance one word
dominates. Sweeping up millennia of conflicted histories, varied topographies
and contested cultural niches into a homogenous, catch-all term, ‘Geordie’
tends to cover it. Which is both helpful and very, very reductive. Being more
philosophical (this is a doctorate of philosophy, y’knaa) the ‘North-East’, as
both a geographic location – the northeasternmost segment of England – and as
an abstract concept prone to the worst stereotypes – Geordie, the tab-smoking, Broon drinking radge-pot – is
only helpful to a point. After that, you’re going to have to zoom in and be
more specific.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">If
Newcastle-upon-Tyne can be considered the capital of an alternative centre
(indeed, rightly or wrongly, fairly or unjustifiably, it is widely regarded as
the region’s capital already), then it goes, surely, that its literatures must
also have a point of focus. In the poetry of the last half century written in
and/or about the region, no star shines more brightly than Basil Bunting’s <i>Briggflatts</i>. With national and
international acclaim for Bunting growing, thanks partially to Don Share’s
authoritative Faber edition of the Poems appearing last year, and aided by the
tireless work of many Bunting scholars, both in this region and country and
abroad, it is fair to say that there has probably never been a better time to
consider – indeed reconsider, as I’m doing – Bunting’s ascendancy and position
as a literary heavyweight tied to a regional core.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Let’s
pause. Remember – as I periodically have to tell myself – this is not a
Literature PhD. More pertinently, I am not writing solely about Bunting. In
reality, my work on him will take up at most 15% of my overall thesis, more
likely 10. This means that both concision and accuracy are of paramount
importance. It also (necessarily) opens the door to other figures in the
regional, literary cohort, of whom I venture William Martin is one of the most
neglected. Those who are au fait with the workings of a Creative Writing PhD
will be aware that, depending on institutional guidelines, usually around 30%
of the work should be devoted to a critical study germane to the creative
project. The mathematicians among you may have deduced that, if I’m writing
10,000 or so words on Bunting, I will probably only have a similar amount to
spare on Martin, leaving me a scant 10K – effectively an undergraduate
dissertation – to devote to other writers. Quite what I’m supposed to do with
those words is for me and my supervisors to decide, but it seems pertinent to
consider how Bunting and Martin (overlapping shades of grey, or, more fittingly
for Northumbria, gold and burgundy) have, in the work of contemporary regional
poets, gone on to exert influence.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
map, Basil Bunting, identified by a cigarette symbol (he loved tabs), is
indicated in the locations most relevant to the Northumbrian aspect of his life
and work: Scotswood, where he was born in 1900; Wylam, where he moved in 1956;
and Washington New Town, where he moved (and was deeply unhappy) in 1977.
Zooming the map out, Brigflatts Meeting House in Sedbergh, Cumbria, links the
place (one ‘g’) to his most famous poem, <i>Briggflatts</i>
(two ‘g’s).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">William
Martin is identified by the red-orange colour. Tunstall Hills, noted by the
mountain symbol, are to Martin what Brigflatts was to Bunting (a primal site,
festooned with cultural, sexual and spiritual significance); and Durham
Cathedral (which of course was also important to Bunting) is flagged for its
status as both a place of holiness tied directly to Cuthbert (thus linking Martin
into the deeply-rooted creed and iconography of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria) and
the end/beginning point of his (bi)-annual pilgrimage through the east Durham
coalfield, which itself was also a symbolic act of solidarity with the miners,
whose own genius loci found – and finds, even sans mining – its locus in the
shadows of Durham Cathedral at the annual Miners’ Gala.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">The green
symbols indicate my primal sites in and around South Shields. The two religious
buildings are St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s, monasteries in Jarrow and north
Sunderland respectively. Note that the home icon, where my parents (and to a
large extent I) have lived in Shields for 15 years, falls on the route that
Bede would have taken between St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s, bisecting flatlands,
hills and coastal terrain through what we might now call the edgelands of South
Tyneside. Notions of bisection, cross-referencing, superimposition,
stratigraphy, recursive language and conceit are to be found in the work of all
of these poets, so it is helpful to conceptualise of them all cartographically
(if not topographically) to gain a sense of how they relate to one another in a
landscape.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">A single,
yellow icon represents the poet Peter Armstrong, a friend of Martin’s; and on
the zoomed-out map, over on the Solway Firth in Cumbria, a purple bird points
to the current home of Tom Pickard, whose biography especially, but own poetry
to some degree, is inexorably bound up with Bunting’s.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">In anticipation
of a likely viva voce question – Why are no female writers considered? – I have
thought to append an additional map. I haven’t, but in it you would be pointed
to many female poets who live and work in the region. The somewhat parallel
work of Joanne Clement, a friend and peer in the School of English at Newcastle,
is of note for her study into Thomas Bewick, as is Bernadette McAloon for her
representation of female voices in mining communities. Additionally – and this
is not a complete list; I realise all lists are reductive; please don’t shout
at me – I would recommend: Anne Stevenson (connected to Martin and a host of
other North-East poets); Catherine Ayres; Jane Burn; Christy Ducker; Katrina
Porteous; Joan Johnston; Tracy Gillman; Kris Johnson; Degna Stone and Mandana
Ghoyonloo. I would also point to Red Squirrel Press, ran by Sheila Wakefield, who
published my first pamphlet; and to a tertiary figure, James Kirkup, whose proud
homosexuality, at least for a small-c conservative audience of the late
1950s/early1960s was often considered blasphemous (and, I would speculate, formed
part of the reason he found solace abroad). A whole other PhD could be written
on all of these topics, but Joanne, Bernadette, Mandana, Tracy and Kris in particular
(being colleagues at Newcastle) have or are all doing great work on their own
and related topics and you ought to look it up immediately. The others are
women whose work I admire and whose names are mentioned because they spring
immediately to mind as rotating deliberately around the centre point of
Newcastle. I am simply not writing about them because: A) I am not doing a
literature PhD and the scope of my criticism is limited; and B) because the
all-male poets I am looking at also happen to write the poetry I admire and
will be of benefit to my study.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Now,
scale. Zoomed out further, a few things become apparent. First: these poets
were and are operating a long way from London. Second, and in a sense I am
reaching for this, willing it to be self-evident, there appears, in what I am
terming (not without risk) the ‘supra-North’, to be a territoriality that
cannot be entirely serendipitous. When the current government speak of the
Northern Powerhouse, and people in South Shields, Sunderland and Ashington get
annoyed because they really mean Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool, you can empathise
with the sentiment. Okay, now I really <i>am</i>
pushing too tenuously toward the political (and I love the North-West, having
spent over a decade here, on and off), but I think my point stands: there is a
gravity, peculiarity and independent spirit to this part of the world – old Northumbria,
Bernicia, whatever you want to call it today – that still applies. Around an
alternative centre (Newcastle), a cluster of poets have and continue to gyrate.
Positioning my own work in relation to theirs, and thus claiming a poetic case
for belonging to the region, is tantamount to an act of political signalling,
of course, but it is one I am proud to make.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">How far
all of this fits into the workings of the so-called literary establishment is
probably the subject of another post, but it is worth dwelling, briefly, on
Bunting’s case. The critic Peter Quartermain said: ‘Basil Bunting’s writing is
inevitably political; he is a northern nationalist and his writing is
profoundly subversive of the literary establishment.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">There
will be some who will read this and disregard it. Possibly I am outdated and
out-of-touch, but I wonder. I don’t need to spout off about and justify the
region’s many fine, literary establishments and traditions. Everything from the
success of <i>Vera</i> to Alexander
Armstrong’s presidency of The Lit & Phil to the Poetry Book Society’s
recent rebirth and subsequent move to Newcastle corroborates my point: that the
North-East is a great place to read, write and critique books, as well as a
great place to live. My concern or fixation, and hence the justification for
this whole PhD, is not the mechanics of how those processes continue; but how
my own work negotiates – earns – a place within it all. I am keen for literariness,
in its widest sense, to thrive in the region, and I have and will support it
however I can, but right now I am interested in this place as a site, on to
which my own poems can be mapped; and how, in mapping them over other poets, I
continue a dialogue which has been going on since at least </span><span style="background: white; color: #252525; font-size: 12.0pt;">Cædmon</span> first wrote about these
wind-swept shores in the seventh century.</span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-68330855193921326392016-12-01T08:17:00.000-08:002016-12-01T08:30:57.550-08:00Thoughts on Bunting's 'bastard language': Geordie<div style="background: white; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: medium;">As I read more about Basil Bunting for the critical portion
of my PhD, and in preparing my paper this coming Saturday (which is only
partially about Baz), I find myself getting irrationally-but-steadily-more-annoyed
by the following quote, which he made in an interview recorded in 1981 (ed.
Richard Swigg, re-quoted here from Don Share’s authoritative new Faber edition,
<i>The Poems of Basil Bunting</i>):<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: medium;">“What is called “Geordie” is a bastard
language, it’s a mixture mainly of south Northumbrian with the Irish that was
brought in by the labourers who came first to dig canals, then to build
railways, and finally settled down largely in the coal mines. So that a man
from Jarrow is speaking what has a double origin in Northumbrian and in
northern Irish.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: medium;">Are not all languages, and dialects, ‘bastard languages’
with, at least, dual origins? I understand and appreciate Bunting’s assertion
that Geordie is a kind of hybridised mix of multiple ‘old’ northern tongues,
forged both by necessity and serendipity in the mettle of the Industrial
Revolution, along the banks of one of its great commercial rivers (the Tyne),
but I detect a smug sense of superiority which seems to claim that a more authoritatively
(because older) Northern vernacular lies behind it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: medium;">Sure, parochialism in its rawest sense is probably at play
here: Basil Bunting was, as he was at pains to reiterate, a Northumberland man;
and I am not. Bunting was not fond of the county boundary changes in the 70s, which would lead to the formation of Tyne and Wear, the metropolitan
county borough which I have written and taken to be part of my address all of my life. And, yes, it’s
true: certain partisans of the old county system still refuse to write ‘Tyne
and Wear’ where ‘Durham’ or ‘Northumberland’ will do the job nicely
thankyouverymuch. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="background: white; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: medium;">Part of me thinks that this is all bollocks anyway:
arbitrary borders, especially in as far as they are nearly always <i>not real </i>(certainly in the English
counties sense), are part of this problem we now have of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘here’
and ‘there’. They are ways and means of tricking us into pens; siloing our
concerns away and signifying them as ‘different’, when more often than not they
are ‘same’, or ‘similar’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: medium;">I’d still venture that most people outside of the region
(Northumberland, County Durham, Tyne and Wear and the Tees Valley – the North-East)
would still say – yes, simplistically, in too-broad-brush-strokes – that we all
speak Geordie. This is not accurate and belies the richness, variation and
tonal dexterity of the region’s many accents and dialects, but to John Smith
from Kent or Jane Doe from Shropshire, whether we’re from Berwick or Billingham,
we pretty much all – or might as well all – speak with what they perceive to be
Geordie accents.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: medium;">Basil, then, is right to point out the complex ways in
which Geordie is an inheritance of Irish and Northumbrian; but I think he is
also wrong in that Geordie also influenced and shaped the Northumbrian accent
of today. If the Geordie accent ‘peaked’ during the Industrial Revolution,
sometime between the late-nineteenth and mid twentieth-centuries, and has been ‘receding’,
‘softening’ (or, as I prefer, ‘evolving’) since the late 1980s, then we must
also assume that its influence spread north and west, co-mingling and
co-habiting with more traditional, rural Northumbrian accents in towns like
Hexham, Morpeth and Alnwick.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="background: white; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: medium;">Thanks in part to the surge in international broadcast
media, the general trend towards globalisation of goods, services and labour,
and the calculated and measured decline of the once-prodigious manufacturing
bases around the three (main) North-Eastern rivers (Tyne, Wear, Tees), the
North-East’s accents are undoubtedly not as strong as they were 30-plus years ago.
I notice this in the variation between my own accent and that of my parents and
grandparents, the latter of which would be termed the ‘broadest’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: medium;">In many ways this is common sense stuff; and I have
perhaps, in writing this, become as finicky as Bunting in highlighting the
whole issue. However, as somebody fiercely proud to be from South Tyneside,
born a kick in the pants from Jarrow, whose lineage traces directly back to
Irish labourers, and who ultimately draws his surname from that great
Scottish-Gaelic pool, I say: ‘Aye, it’s a propa bastad language, and aa bliddy
love it.’ I think the Geordie accent, which I am proud to retain a diluted
version of (but which I can and do ‘ramp up’, depending on company, excitement
and/or levels of alcohol consumed) is a beautiful thing and not mutually incompatible
with any of the various Northumbrian tongues. Listen to folk in Seashouses, for
instance: it sounds initially like something you’d hear in Shields or Whitley
Bay, but it’s quite different, and I think that’s a great thing!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif";"><span style="font-size: medium;">Two things for the record: first – I am not a linguist;
second – I love Basil Bunting’s poetry dearly. The fact that Faber & Faber
have finally put out this edition is absolutely mint. But my God, he was some
boy of an antagonist when the occasion took him!</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-81527216604864710052016-11-24T10:22:00.001-08:002016-11-24T10:26:46.910-08:00Deeside Dérive<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Despite
doing a PhD in Newcastle, and writing about the North-East, I still live in
Chester, a place I have frequented now, with some interruptions, for over ten
years. In September 2006, as a plucky eighteen-year-old, I first came to this
city; then in 2010, at the end of the taught portion of my MA, I moved back to
South Shields, only to return to Chester for work in November 2013.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">It is
now November 2016 and much – and little – has changed. I have occupied six rented
properties across two delineated periods: four as an undergraduate and MA
student; two as a working professional/PhD student-come-freelancer.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
relationship you have to a place necessarily shifts and evolves. This is what I
have been thinking about a lot, 15 months into being a student enrolled in an
institution which I am regularly at (weekly, at present) but on paper (and not
just for administrative purposes) am routinely 180 miles away from.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I’m
meant to be writing a paper on Basil Bunting for a symposium at Durham
University’s Institute of Advanced Study on Saturday 3<sup>rd</sup> December.
The weird thing – probably the <i>weirdest</i>
thing – about going into doctoral study after having done a few years of ‘real’
work, is that you are largely your own boss, colleague(s), tea-making
facilities, photocopier, diarist and teller of bad jokes and jeerer-on in times
of challenge. You can ‘skive’ and nobody will know, except you, and you better
damn believe that the walk you took this afternoon had some justification in
your research. Oh, hang on, are you making a brew? Milk, no sugar, please.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This
has nothing to do with Basil Bunting, the paper I’m meant to be delivering or
the poems I’m meant to be writing. But… no, maybe it does.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">‘Jake
Campbell is a writer who divides his time between Tyneside and Chester’, I have
just written in a poetry submission. ‘His practice-based research at Newcastle
University is an investigation into the nature and identity of belonging in
England’s North-East.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Can we
‘un-belong’ just as much as we ‘be-long’? I have thought about this nearly
constantly for at least the last year. Those of you who know me outside of the
internet will no doubt have been bored by my frequent comparison of Newcastle
(Tyneside) to Liverpool (Merseyside). For the last 18 months, travelling
between Chester and East Boldon or Tyne Dock (on the Tyne and Wear Metro), I
have emerged from Gateshead/Birkenhead (how serendipitous that both places
carry the ‘head’ suffix?) and been startled by how very alike the two vistas are.
Honestly, take the Merseyrail twenty minutes out of Liverpool, on the Wirral
Line, heading south to Chester, and the view back across to the skyline of
Liverpool will be staggeringly similar to that which you will witness when
travelling out of Newcastle City Centre east through Gateshead towards South
Tyneside. Nominally, this is to do with how the train tracks skirt the two
rivers in a fortuitous mirror-like simulacra; but I think it is also a result
of the cultural, industrial and socio-topographic foundations that both places
are built upon.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">I woke
up in the middle of the night last night and I had <i>no idea</i> where I was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Poet
John Kinsella has a forthcoming book on Displacement. <i>Polysituatedness</i>, according to the pre-blurb on Manchester
University Press’s website, ‘</span><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">extends
John Kinsella’s theory of ‘international regionalism’ and posits new ways of
reading the relationship between place and individual, between individual and
the natural environment, and how place occupies the person as much as the
person occupies place.<span class="apple-converted-space">’ The book is not due
until January next year, but I’m sure that Kinsella would recognise what I mean
when I speak about ‘be-longing’ (with hyphen) and ‘un-belonging’ in not
strictly binary ways. How much do I ‘long’ to ‘be’ in South Shields (or
Chester) and how much is my not being there (being elsewhere) a symptom of
(cause of) my un-belonging?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">People
– rightly – direct scorn at the super-rich buying up spaces in our cities and
towns only to spend a fortnight of the year there while pricing out of the
market the local, indigenous communities, often young people. From the Lake District
to Vancouver to London, these issues have been prevalent for some time, and in
some places – like Vancouver, who have put <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/02/vancouver-real-estate-foreign-house-buyers-tax" target="_blank">a 15% tax on foreign investors</a> – a sense
of civic appropriateness is beginning to take a stand.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Fleetingly
in Shields and Chester, but nearly always transitory, to what extent are my interactions
with these urban locales meaningful? I pay council tax to Cheshire West and
Chester council (though, probably, I should receive a discount as I am a
full-time registered student) and my rent currently goes to a landlord (whom,
of course, I’ve never met) in another part of the city, via an agency. I buy
food, beer, clothes and other things here: coffee, books, train tickets, but I
don’t know my neighbours, no contractual obligation other than the one for my
rented flat keeps me here, and I am lucky if I now speak meaningfully with or
to <i>anybody</i> in the city who isn’t my
partner. I don’t use the italics as a plea for compassion or understanding: I
merely do so to highlight the fact of my displacement; what it engenders and
how, nodding to Kinsella, place(s) inhabit a person, and a person inhabits a
place(s) <i>even when they are not there</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Walking
around this place I can feel like a ghost. Severed from most economic commitments
originating in the vicinity (incoming and outgoing); not answerable to any
vocational authority in the city or region; and apparently-‘free’ to utilise
the space of the city to my will, I am able to drift through various past
edifices of the once-much-more-significant parts of my life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">This
is exactly what I did this afternoon, as the sun began to sink over the river
Dee. The Dee, rising in Snowdonia, north Wales, winds its way to the Irish Sea
via Chester, holding this border city in a cupped embrace before dispensing
itself into banked-up mud flats adjacent to, were it not for the Wirral Peninsula,
that other great river: the Mersey. From the 14<sup>th</sup> Century, Chester
was an important port city, linking the North-West to Ireland and the
continent. However, the Dee began to silt up in the 18<sup>th</sup> Century
(despite the excavation of the ‘New Cut’, effectively a straight channel to aid
navigability) concurrently affording Liverpool, and the wider Mersey
conurbations, the fortunes (quite literally) to expand. Chester, meanwhile,
became, well, less developed. To the credit of historic and geophysical
circumstance, the city the visitor sees today is advantaged principally because
of its declining naval, marine and dockside infrastructure. This city, arbitrarily
part of the North-West, feels <i>so</i>
different to Liverpool, Manchester and, yes, Newcastle. Principally and superficially,
that is because it is much smaller, but the knock-on effect of its not having
had a prolonged industrial satellite, connected to its core riverbank, has
meant that in contemporary terms, the city feels much more like present-day
York, or even Oxford, Shrewsbury or other cities in the Midlands and South. No
doubt the Shropshire Union canal stemmed the flow, so to speak, of the Dee’s
misfortune, connecting the city – via North and Mid-Wales – to Birmingham and
Manchester and forming vital trade links with two of the country’s hotbeds
during the Industrial Revolution; but this is a place, I feel, where the
identity of the body politic – insofar as it is comprised of myriad layers of
affected meaning – is missing something, and that something is a historic
manufacturing and nautical base.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">On
a visit to post-industrial Tyneside, or to use that clumsy portmanteau ‘NewcastleGateshead’,
no doubt coined to ‘Coin’ the Blairiband New City (of New Labour), tourists may
peripherally be aware that they are at the nucleus of a once-thriving place of
industry, but they are likely more interested in, and steered towards, the new
consumer-based norms of the Pitcher and Piano wine bar, or the Malmaison Hotel,
or the Sage concert hall—all of them, and there are others, sites of spectacle
and consumption: of alcohol, music, leisure. There is a reason Newcastle is
such a magnet for Hen and Stag do’s: its watering holes are numerous, its
hotels are ample and reasonably-priced, and at the back of it all, one can
imagine oneself slaking the type of thirst that could only have been generated
hammering rivets onto ships as the hoarfrost hung over the filthy river and the
mercury plummeted below zero.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Needless
to say, taking a stroll even a mile or two to the west or east, the scars of industry
become much more stark, the money dries up and it – as Brexit has shown –
becomes clear that maybe the task of replacing monolithic industry with haphazard
service jobs hasn’t quite worked. I don’t wish to speak for much further west
of the Tyne than Dunston Staithes, itself an interesting vestige of the Tyne’s
prior might, but I do know the east of our beloved regional ‘capital’ very
intimately. Take the right-angled bend around the river, to where Wallsend is
in a staring match with Hebburn, and you will get an impression of what I mean.
Travel a few miles further, to the Port of Tyne (yes, to be fair, it’s doing
very well) it will become pretty evident that, while industry is still here to
some limited degree, the deliberate conversion of waterside activity from
production to consumption hasn’t at all been a balanced and smooth process. I
am from a time and place where all but the vestiges of this industry remain,
but even now, looking out over the mouth of the Tyne from the Lawe Top in South
Shields or from the High Light in North Shields, it is possible to feel connected
to the rhythms of work and commerce: where the Shields ferry carries commuters;
where the DFDS ferry carries holidaymakers; where ships carry Nissans for the
export market and coal and tea for further processing and distribution; and
where, more philosophically, the ocean meets the river, England meets Europe,
and in the intertidal and littoral zones, we become acutely aware of the ebb
and flow of all life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">But
we’re back in the North-East and I don’t think we were supposed to be. Are we?
My writings about Chester are conspicuous for their absence. Bearing in mind
that this place has dominated the majority of my adult life, it is strange that
I have written so little about it. I am curious about that. Does perspective –
distance – give meaning to place? Do we find symbolism, pattern and connection
only from afar, or can we look for it <i>in
situ</i>?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">My
role in Theresa May’s economy may well become more marginalised as the teeth of
Brexit begin to sharpen. I hope that this will not become the case – that writing,
the arts and academic research and curation remain valued as means of interrogating,
exposing and challenging Who We Are And Why We’re Here (And Not There) – but,
in a system clinging not by the fingers but I suspect only the fingernails, to
the thermodynamically limited idea of perpetual economic growth, people who
walk around cities at 3 in the afternoon and don’t even stop to buy a bloody
coffee you cheeky git are likely to become ostracised and pushed to the
margins. Or, so the case might go in one of <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/books/1847-four-futures" target="_blank">Peter Frase’s <i>Four Futures</i>.</a><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">When,
on my walk this afternoon, I reached the point where the Shropshire Union Canal
expels into the Dee, and turned onto it to begin my home stretch, I was shocked
not by the sheer physicality of the new student flats, which have been under
construction for around a year, but by the massive marketing slogan draped over
their nearly-finished outline.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">‘THE
TOWPATH: LOVE YOUR UNI YEARS’, beamed the marketing guff, in stark white on
red. The word ‘fresh’ appears somewhat arbitrarily (one assumes a newly-built
flat would not be stale) and there is of course direction to the adjacent
marketing suite. Told to love (or do) anything, we tend to question the
motivation and instruction. As it happens, I did and do love my uni years. I’m
still in them, after all, but how should I feel – and here I am imagining that
these flats were completed in the early part of 2006, on one of my visits to an
open day at Chester – about being sold rhetoric which implores me to ‘love’ my
uni years? Are not the years already slipping by before I have had time to
consciously enjoy them?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">For
those not familiar with the site, let me briefly explain a) the controversy and
b) the personal significance. The controversy is the same to be found in any
university city: namely, a town and gown tension, exemplified by a burgeoning
Higher Education sector; the ‘intrusion’ or ‘studentification’ of city spaces
(usually but not always on the peripheries) at the expense of local and
long-term residents; and the collusion of a private sector set to profit monumentally
from often shoddily assembled buildings which will perpetually be rented to transitory
residents, for short-term gains over a long-term timescale. Liverpool has these
problems, Newcastle has these problems, Cambridge has these problems. It also
has the benefits and, in a city like Chester, these are often overlooked. Before
the early 2000s, there probably wasn’t what we would today describe as a ‘brain-drain’
in Chester, but certainly the University was far less developed (it was still a
college of Liverpool, for a start) and places like Manchester, Leeds and
Birmingham were probably much more appealing to the would-be student. I have
nothing other than lived experience and anecdotal evidence on which to stake my
claims, but take it as a fairly sound (if biased) thing of me to say that the
University being here has made this a far better place to live.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">You
will have noticed that the b) personal significance of The Towpath development
was implied towards the end of my last paragraph, but let me tell a short
anecdote to add context. On the bottom right of that picture is the beer garden
and part of the building of my favourite bar in probably the world or at least
the city of Chester: Telford’s Warehouse. Named in honour of the
Shropshire-born industrial pioneer responsible for much Great and Good work on
the UK canal network in the 19<sup>th</sup> Century, the pub has been a staple
part of my social and personal life for around a decade. About two hundred
yards from where this photo was taken, on Whipcord Lane, my partner lived for
three years as an undergraduate, and we would regularly take a short walk from
the terraced house she shared along the canal to Telford’s, to sip pints of
bitter and listen to people strum acoustic guitars (and, on one memorable
occasion, a fifty-piece orchestra) at the bar’s still-going-strong open-mic
night. This is the place I took my family for sandwiches and beer before and
after graduation and it is the place where I have vomited after doing too many
tequila slammers and the place where I have had foosball tournaments and
planned the future and drank to absent friends and made new ones. One of my
mates from home even once drove from Newcastle, to Chester, on a whim because
there was especially pleasant guest ale on.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Now,
you assume that I will tell you what has become synonymous with so many of
these stories of gentrification: that the bar is under threat. In fact, no:
actually, the opposite is true. Purchased outright by the owners this year,
Telford’s, should it choose to embrace them and offer student deals while
keeping true to its roots as a community pub for residents of the Garden
Quarter, stands to be the new local of a several-hundred-strong army of
freshers. People like me, ten years ago, and ten years later.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background: white; font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">The
way water courses rise and fall, whether over days or centuries, in line with
tidal pull, pollution and other environmental and human-based factors, has
always fascinated me. Strolling beside the Dee and the Shropshire Union canal
today, I had in mind the thought that my connection to this place would seem to
be ebbing. With no ‘work’ here and no other reason to stay than my partner’s
job, it might be the case that, just as in 2010, we soon leave this walled
city, with its views over to Wales. There is beauty here: of a traditionally
British kind, yes – all Tudor buildings, lazy river cruises with high tea and
compact cathedrals – and it is probably a beauty borne of historical,
geographic and cultural happenstance. It is different to what I know
intimately, in the North-East, and I don’t sit in places like Telford’s
anywhere near as often as I ought anymore, but the student flats opposite are I
think tied into that: they speak of a new generation of incomers (and some
locals): people who will be paying a huge deal more than me, to study and live
here, and who, maybe, might be from other riversides, and who might, in 2026,
walk down by the Dee and think about what has flown away, passed on; and also
what has remained, silted and shored up, safe, secure, permanent.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8539391500399441133.post-70924788525017817612016-11-16T06:55:00.005-08:002016-11-16T07:16:37.497-08:00Dark Mountain Issue 10: Uncivilised Poetics<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSrVZmxcxR-12A5pA1LyUSxCPjtqx9riYj_1406XMmuhUq_U1xYwrQMeGDZIloTKRqH_qhHAPpuN4RKFET10Y5TQm_1aWM5zI1wSDkxyESAKfVQHKeR8wZHBjWRTW3sGsFCvBOcTUMXU5t/s1600/DarkMountainTenUncivilisedPoetics.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSrVZmxcxR-12A5pA1LyUSxCPjtqx9riYj_1406XMmuhUq_U1xYwrQMeGDZIloTKRqH_qhHAPpuN4RKFET10Y5TQm_1aWM5zI1wSDkxyESAKfVQHKeR8wZHBjWRTW3sGsFCvBOcTUMXU5t/s640/DarkMountainTenUncivilisedPoetics.jpg" width="360" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Darkness Around Us Is Deep</td></tr>
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<i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"><a href="http://shop.dark-mountain.net/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=85" target="_blank">Dark Mountain: Uncivilised Poetics</a></span></i><span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> is out now, including
my essay, ‘What Kingdom Without Common Feasting?’ based on the work of the late
County Durham poet, William Martin. </span><span style="font-family: "garamond" , serif; font-size: 12pt;">The blurb
at the back of the book poses a simple but (should-be) shocking abstract:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">‘We are living through
an age of turmoil: climate change, extinction, failed economics, stagnant
politics. In such testing times, what’s the point of poetry? <i>Uncivilised Poetics</i> brings together a
unique gathering of writers and artists to tackle this question.’<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Since its
inception in 2009, <a href="http://dark-mountain.net/" target="_blank">The Dark Mountain Project</a> has been a steady stream of water
in a drying world. Bold, confrontational, thought-provoking, the editors have
never shied away from destabilising literature, artworks and commentary
designed to force our eye on a changing world. Six years ago, many of the
issues they raised – across their website, at their events and in their books
and other publications – felt very much on the fringe. Pre-Trump, Pre-Brexit,
pre-alarming climate change projections, these things felt incompatible. Now,
in an ‘alt-right’, ‘post-truth’, ubiquitous-smartphone-use, hello-the-new-normal
world, their work feels, well, compatible, urgent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
current volume alone, despite a steep price tag (you’ll appreciate why when you
get your mitts on it: it’s big and it’s beautiful), is worth purchasing just
for poems, essays, artworks and spoken word recordings from contributors like
Vahni Capildeo, John Kinsella, Nancy Campbell, Robert Montgomery, Harriet
Fraser, Mark-bloody-Rylance(!) and many, many others.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "garamond" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">I urge
you to invest the money in a copy. Switch off your phone and computer, kill
this blog, make a pot of tea, and be absorbed in this staggering anthology.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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A Broken Fence Between Past And Present Tensehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14786507210372996305noreply@blogger.com0