wilderness poetry

I had the feeling that I blogged about Chinese rivers-and-mountains poetry before, but maybe that was on Lúcháir. Last year at the Callander poetry festival Larry Butler and Colin Will introduced me to the concept of 'wilderness poetry' and Larry recommended Mountain Home, an anthology of this sort of thing, edited and translated by David Hinton.

I loved it. It has a lot in common with what I'm trying to do with my 'gleam of light on water' poems - Hinton sums it up as 'clarity and simplicity, silence and open emptiness'. It is elegant and spare, full of beautiful natural images and profoundly philosophical, which I love.

The poems in this collection were written between 365 and 1206 - about contemporary with the late Latin and goliard poets of Europe. Both respond to major cultural and economic collapse by a retreat to rural solitude and reflection. Wang Wei reminds me a bit of Hilary of Poitiers, both on their rural farms, missing companions of their youth, both reflecting on loss and change.

The differences in philosophy seem less stark than you would first think. The school of Chartres and the Victorines would have had less bother with the 'ten thousand things' than your average post-Descartes twenty-first century thinker or post- Romantic poet. The chief difference, even with the greenest of us, is that we still tend to think and write about nature in the context of human needs and aspirations, whereas wilderness poetry puts the human firmly in the context of nature. Less alienating than haiku, less self-regarding than the Romantics, it offers a discipline of thought and response that I find very appealing. It's the nearest I get, in poetry, to the Irish tradition of sean nos singing.

The major difference I find between China and Europe is that in Europe poetry and philosophy fell into the hands of what seem, compared with the Chinese, very young and passionately enthusiastic people. The Chinese poets are older, more reflective, sometimes bitter, sometimes compassionate, often melancholy. By contrast the goliards seem relatively brash and immature, passionate, undisciplined, but fresh lively, adventurous. I'm going to learn a lot from the Chinese, but I think my heart is with the goliards.They sound a note which I don't get from Wilderness poetry, but which I need. Delight.

Digging for Bait

Picture by Paul Rimmer, a rock pool at Ardnamurchan.

This is one of the poems from The Eurydice Rising sequence, which was published in poetry Scotland last year. It has a lot of Shetland references because I was originally inspired by the Shetland ballad King Orfeo, (it's quoted in the first stanza), in which Orpheus is a piper, and actually gets Eurydice back. The title is also a Shetland reference. If you don't want to tell where you got your bait for fishing you would say Sjussamillabakka or stakamillabakka - as non-committal as you could get!

Digging for Bait

Sjussamillabakka –
Da notes o’ joy.
Stakkamillabakka –
Da notes o’ noy.
Sjussamillabakka –
Da god gabber reel,
dat meicht ha’ made a sick hert hale.

Sjussamillabakka-
Between the sea and the shore.
Stakkamillabakka –
Between the rocks and the shore.
Sjussamillabakka
Is where I got this poem,
On water-polished shingle, where the sea
Drains bubbling
Over ribbed and wrinkled sand
And popping bladderwrack.
I found it in a rock-pool, cold as shadow,
With a gull’s feather floating in it,
And a thin blue sheen of petrol
Hazed like a mussel shell.

Sjussamillabakka –
The place without landmarks.
Stakkamillabakka –
Don’t look back.
Sjussamillabakka –
Never the same place twice.

Northwords Now

Northwords Now have a web-site, and my poems - also Sally Evans and the translations of Lorca by Christie Williamson - are up on it, though you'd better download the pdf, or you'll go cross-eyed reading the font. Northwords Now is based in the Highlands and distributed free through libraries and bookshops.
You can find it here

Nigh-No-Place

I'm just re-reading Jen Hadfield's Nigh-No-Place because I'm going to see her read on Thursday at SCoP, Stirling University on Thursday. I'm finding them very interesting, they start arguments in my head, conversations about geography and poems about wind and rock-pools.
For all the collection is called Nigh-No-Place, the poems seem very much rooted in the places she is in, Alberta or Shetland, growing from deep awareness of the specifics of weather and landscape - snow, wind and hail, 'hacked wet chunk of mountain,''fences strung with trembling streamers'.
They are embodied sensual poems, full of light, sound and movement, popping gravel and ice in a glass like the notes of a mandolin, like the sound of a train passing, swirling hail, the way the salmon's sinuous fighting upstream echoes the movement of the river's meanders, the blinks of sunlight you register a lot when warmth is fitful and fickle.
I especially liked Daed-traa :
'I go to the rock-pool at the slack of the tide
to mind me what my poetry's for'
which is fabulous.
It reminds me a lot of my Digging for Bait, - one of the Eurydice Rising poems, which makes me think again about the myths I was hatching about the differences between male and female attitudes towards the writing of poems. I might post it here later, but not today. Today I want to make you think about Jen Hadfield's poems. Go read some.

Stirling's makar

Stirling installed its first Makar on Friday - Magi Gibson. She is a really good poet, and a great teacher and I think she will do a lot to encourage people to read and write poetry.
The ceremony took place in the stunningly beautiful Holy Rude Church in Stirling. Almost all the poets I could think of in Stirling were there, except Richie and Steph and Megan, plus councillors, library staff and the Literary Society. The turn out was really impressive, which I hope is a good sign.
Ruari Watson introduced Magi, and Magi read her poems - a wide variety of her work, some feminist and radical, some personal,some moving and vivid, some less so. Then some children from Bannockburn Primary read their poems - which were very much better than the average. I'd say that those two will be people to watch later on, except that at eight the most intelligent children write the best, and you can't say which way their intelligence will take them.
And then there was tea and elegant little cakes, carrot cake and fruit slices and little tartlets the size of thimbles with three blueberries on. And I sloped off into the drizzle and went home.

all gone quiet

It's cold. It hasn't snowed much to complain about here, we're too close to sea level, but the three and a half snowflakes that did fall are still sitting among the snowdrops and fennel stems because the ground is too cold and hard to melt them. I'm putting together a sequence of Irish poems into a collection called Rushlight. There are more of them than I realised.
All the sick people here are getting better - the grand-daughter is even well enough to begin pinching food from other kids' plates at nursery. The house is gradually becoming less silted up with redundant paperwork, books, utensils that might be useful one day and invoices for things we no longer possess. I even started gardening again, until the snow came back, and now the ground is too hard.
Meantime the rest of the country seems to have totally seized up.

February already

January got eaten by family illnesses, de-cluttering the house, preparing the next chunk of work for the Lúcháir project and structuring Recusant - which I think I might have to call Who Time Sleeps Withal, and learning how to use my new, very shiny, and very complicated phone. It seems to do everything but make me a cup of tea.

Also I am now convinced that cheese causes migraines. Coffee and chocolate do too, but somehow I seem to find substitutes for them.
Let's hope that February gets better. I have plans ---