Hello and welcome!<\/b><\/p>\n
We here begin this chain of dialogue with Paul Matthews<\/b>, whose sequence of poems \u2018Tongues of Fire\u2019 was published in Scintilla 16<\/i>. Over the weeks and months, the baton will be passed \u2013 as you will read below – to other poets published in Scintilla<\/i>, with each conversation offering a fascinating glimpse into that poet\u2019s work, inspirations and practices. The growing conversation will speak more widely of the range of poetry published by Scintilla<\/i>. If you are interested to know more about the poems discussed, please do think of purchasing <\/a>a copy of Scintilla<\/i>. Thank you.<\/p>\n Fiona Owen *<\/p>\n Paul, I’m very happy to have your sequence of poems ‘Tongues of Fire’ in <\/i>Scintilla 16. You have this remarkable ability, it seems to me, of being able to balance levity with gravity; profundity is present yet conveyed with a light, deft touch. My question for you is around the practice of writing, of poem-making \u2013 can you say something about your relationship with poesis, language and imagination? These seem to be at least some of the themes you were exploring in this sequence, where ‘Life after life \/ we are given tongues \/to sing our circumstance’ -?<\/i><\/p>\n Fiona, that title, \u2018Tongues of Fire\u2019, carries a Whitsun image; but if any \u2018bene diction\u2019 came it was in a form which shocked me \u2026 the tongue as blind amphibian<\/i>, both servant and dictator, lurking between dark and daylight. I was reluctant at first to admit it into my writing.<\/p>\n Mostly I begin with something in mind to say. But then the fiery tongue of some poem-not-yet-written starts wagging at the bottom of the page, an active presence moving towards me out of the future, and I scan the field for rhymes waiting to be arrived at.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not that I wish to lend my tongue to any old angel breezing by. If I have to be a wind chime let it be the one that Shelley speaks of, conscious and responsible in my craft to modulate what\u2019s moving.<\/p>\n The grace of Aspen<\/i> is my image for this \u2013 It flares at the slightest breath<\/i>. Well, grace it may be, but not comfortable. People have been filmed attending to the spoken word, and when it\u2019s played back slow motion the body is seen trembling in particular ways to each vowel and consonant. When the things of the world come close with their words and gestures I find myself among those quakers!<\/p>\n This is not mystical. It is a sense I am talking about, perceptive of the feeling tone of language, or \u2018Melopoeia\u2019 as Ezra Pound called it. He honed his apprehension of it by translating Troubadour and Anglo-Saxon poetry. Much of my poetic practice is founded on his instruction. The \u2018heart\u2019s tone\u2019 can be caught in words, he said.<\/p>\n And I am not just being playful if I say that fire does occasionally break out <\/i>when writing poetry. Once roused, the faculty I am trying to describe knows the power and origin of a word better than we do. It crosses some fiery threshold, and then miraculously brings back metaphors which move and mean within a rightful resonance. I would be happy to know how you and others experience this.<\/p>\n Paul, that is a most potent way to begin our chain of poetic thoughts. Fire has certainly broken out in my own imagination, having read this! I\u2019d now like to invite you to choose one poem from <\/i>Scintilla 16 that especially caught your eye. There are many fine poems to choose from, so I\u2019m excusing you from worrying about leaving any good poem out. Whichever poem you choose, please say something about what you’ve seen in it and why you like it. And then: could you ask that poet a single (ish) question? Thanks to you, Paul.<\/i><\/p>\n Dear Fiona, yes, so many good poems to choose from. How about this one: \u2018Brought to Mind\u2019, by John Freeman<\/b>. In my \u2018Touchpaper\u2019 poem I speak of metaphors clouding the simple light, but John\u2019s poem is almost totally free of them. I like (and can learn from) its directness. Seemingly, it is without artifice – spontaneous utterance; yet I am sure that its author has practised for years this art of being artless. How can it be a poem if there\u2019s not a metaphor in sight? Yet poem it is \u2013 it catches truly the fire, the motion of the emotion that I wrote about earlier \u2013 the line breaks, the ambiguity of the punctuation set up a tension as I read, puzzling at first, but actually (by making me unsure whether father or poet is speaking) it embodies what the poem is on about: I remember him every day \/ invite him to go on living through me<\/i>.<\/p>\n Dear John, in the context of \u2018poetic practice\u2019, I want to know whether (to quote your beloved Shelley) you wrote this poem as a profuse strain of unpremeditated art, or whether you worked it over and over to get it right. Thanks, Paul. (And if you\u2019ve never read anything by Paul Matthews, I suggest you visit his inspiring website and list of publications <\/i>here<\/i><\/a>. You will also find a full-length poetic conversation between Paul and myself on my website <\/i>here<\/i><\/a> .) <\/i><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Dear Paul, thank you for asking me to go next in this sequence; and, dear Fiona, thank you for initiating it. Paul, thank you for saying that my poem \u2018catches truly the fire\u2019, since it creates a context for your disconcerting question, as does your not doubting that \u2018I have practised for years this art of being artless\u2019. That sounds reassuring! By this stage you have me relaxed, my defences down.\u00a0\u00a0But then you ask, quoting Shelley, whether or not my poem is profuse, unpremeditated, \u2018or whether you worked it over and over to get it right.\u2019 Eh?\u00a0\u00a0I feel like the man who was asked in court, \u2018have you stopped beating your wife yet?\u2019 Or how Robert Creeley may have felt for a nano-second being asked after a reading \u2018Was that a real poem or did you just make it up yourself?\u2019 (To be fair, he then saw it would make a good title for a book about poetry.) As Fiona says, you have a gift for balancing levity with gravity, and she might have added, you sometimes adopt a mask of naivety, as exemplified by your question, from behind which you can be devilish clever. So I think you know a lot already about how I might answer you. But as we are having this exchange in public I will say some of what you know and then try to push into other territory.<\/p>\n As you know, Paul, Shelley\u2019s line about \u2018unpremeditated art\u2019 occurs in an elaborately crafted poem in which every line rhymes across a complex pattern of line-lengths but which\u00a0\u00a0achieves an air of ardent spontaneity. Furthermore, it invokes a famous passage in Book Eight of\u00a0Paradise Lost<\/em>\u00a0in which Milton claims that his muse, \u2018celestial patroness,\u2019 inspires \u2018easy my unpremeditated verse.\u2019 Shelley applies the unusual word not to himself but to the skylark,\u00a0\u00a0challenging the distinction between human art and birdsong, wishing in the poem\u2019s concluding lines that he could learn the lark\u2019s \u2018gladness\u2019 so that the world would listen to him as he is listening to it. Incidentally this is not just an egotistic desire to be heard on Shelley\u2019s part, but a wish to move others to his own burning commitment to bring about a juster world. And actually the poem does convey something of that contagion from the lark\u2019s joy, though it appears only to beg for it. Shelley like Milton believed in poetic inspiration, but just as Dr Johnson said of Milton\u2019s epic \u2018no man wished it longer,\u2019 so few readers must have wished it was less carefully composed (consider the opening sentence, which runs for sixteen lines and\u00a0\u00a0in which the main verb is held back till line 6). And Wordsworth, about whom Shelley had been quite rude, said of the younger poet \u2018he was one of the best artists of us all, I mean in point of style,\u2019 an insight developed in some Victorian monographs on his verse forms. Shelley is not so much being disingenuous as aligning himself with a tradition in which spontaneity and craft coincide, and eloquence can be at its highest when the poet laments his lack of it.<\/p>\n But like yours mine is not a one-poet pantheon; I am attentive to the one great poem Shelley says in\u00a0A Defence of Poetry<\/em>\u00a0all poets across the ages weave together. Pound is important to both of us, and I know we share a lasting devotion to Yeats, who wrote \u2018A line will take us hours maybe;\/Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,\/Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.\u2019 Yeats also wrote: \u2018the common and its befitting language are the research of a lifetime.\u2019\u00a0\u00a0Wordsworth is a pioneer of \u2018the common and its befitting language\u2019. In the last century William Carlos Williams was a powerful focus of the same tendency, and so were \u2018The Objectivists,\u2019 George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff,\u00a0\u00a0Carl Rakosi, Lorine Niedecker. The discovery of Williams in my late teens was a revelation for me. In my early twenties I discovered those other Americans, and, on this side of the Atlantic, I saw an answering spirit in such diverse poets as Jim Burns and John Riley. \u2018Let us drop pretence of images,\u2019 wrote John Riley. \u2018Let us live barely.\/ In more than a pagan triumph.\/I have not loved you enough.\u2019 I am getting round to your point about metaphor, Paul. In one of my earliest essays, written when you and I were young,\u00a0\u00a0I praised the lack of metaphor in Jim Burns\u2019 \u2018authentic common language\u2019 with its \u2018simple forceful structures:\u2019<\/p>\n Given this cue, and with a trained sense of syntax and\u00a0articulation, the poet can make a vigorous poetic statement\u00a0using few of the much easier devices that can help stiffen up\u00a0limp poems \u2013 rhyme, metaphor, symbolism and the rest.<\/p>\n George Oppen had written: \u2018to entrust\/To a poetry of statement\/\/ At close quarters\/\/ A living mind\/ \u2018and that one\u2019s own\u2019 \/\/ what then\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0what spirit\/\/Of the bent seas\/Archangel\/\/of the tide\/brimming \/\/in the moon-streak\/\/ comes in whose absence\/ earth crumbles\u2019.<\/p>\n I come back to your question, looking for its deeper meaning beyond its teasing provocativeness. I look for clues in your fine sequence, \u2018Tongues of Fire,\u2019 which is steadily concerned with the act of writing, including taking a day to resist writing. I wonder how you overcome that resistance to start writing, generally, and how you did it in this case. I guess you do not write single words with long pauses between but at least phrases, if not lines. Is there not an element of the unpremeditated, the unforeseen, in what emerges? You say you can learn from the directness of my poem, so perhaps to oblige you I should write about my own composition methods.<\/p>\n What I do in cases like that of \u2018Brought to Mind\u2019 is live with a subject for years,\u00a0\u00a0in thought and sometimes on paper, leaving forgotten drafts in old notebooks. Often, as here, this subject is a remembered incident that crystallises many intangibles. Then, one day, everything is maybe better aligned; and I certainly know my theme well by now. I have developed a habit of excluding the extraneous and getting straight to the point.\u00a0\u00a0A lot of the finished poem would be recognisable from this first (new) draft; but I wrestled with drafts over months and years before deciding that I could do no more with it \u2013 for now. \u2018A poem is never finished, only abandoned.\u2019 I am aware that it is a demanding poem to follow and I did the best I could to help the reader without betraying the poem. The labouring over what might seem minor alterations makes a poem sink or swim. Pound had his own pungent ways of making that point: \u2018the man not intolerant of his own defects is a smear.\u2019 But Pound is not above criticism himself. In his late poem, \u2018To My Friend Ezra Pound\u2019 Williams wrote, \u2018Your English\/ is not specific enough\/ as a writer of poems\/ you show yourself to be inept not to say\/usurious\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0A one-sided view, perhaps; but not without purchase, coming from the poet who had put \u2018the research of a lifetime\u2019 into finding \u2018the common and its befitting language,\u2019 working as a doctor among the poor of New Jersey.\u00a0Addressing the\u00a0d\u00e9racin\u00e9<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0author of the macaronic\u00a0Cantos<\/em>,\u00a0\u00a0he may have thought, as Jonson wrote of Spenser, \u2018In affecting\u00a0the\u00a0<\/em>ancients,\u00a0he writ no language.\u2019<\/p>\n I write verse every day, and most of what I write stays in the notebook and deserves to. Sometimes I produce something that seems worth typing, which occasionally I find time to do. Then redrafting begins, which always takes time. After all this, most of these poems reveal themselves as best left in obscurity. That Yeats poem again:\u00a0\u2018Better go down upon your marrow-bones\/And scrub a kitchen pavement, or break stones\/ Like an old pauper, in all kinds of weather; \/For to articulate sweet sounds together\/Is to work harder than all these, and yet\/Be thought an idler by the noisy set\/Of bankers, schoolmasters, and clergymen\/The martyrs call the world.’<\/p>\n But the less successful work is no more wasted than an athlete\u2019s hours in the gym away from the limelight. I am, in those daily sessions, keeping to a discipline of syntax, diction and rhythm which will be ready to serve me on the days when a new subject, or an old one seen in a new light, takes possession of me. And I am keeping open a link from the mass of stuff that moves in the mind to the small proportion that ever gets articulated, a channel which easily silts up from lack of use. I, too, have had my years of writer\u2019s block.<\/p>\n It\u2019s now my turn to pass the parcel, and I should like to pass it to\u00a0Ruth Bidgood<\/strong>, if she will accept it at my hands. Ruth, I constantly reread your poem \u2018From Time to Time\u2019, always relishing the emotional and spiritual journey it takes me on. The first stanza sets the scene, with the unnamed woman sometimes seen (but never clearly) looking out from upstairs<\/p>\n over that huge landscape I have loved<\/p>\n from the moment I first stood<\/p>\n by the rickety porch.<\/p>\n I am well drawn in by now, enjoying the double perspective from upstairs and down, indoors and out, on this view I want to know more about (and I will, as the poem progresses), already seeing it in three dimensions, and knowing that it excites love in the speaker and probably in the ghost. The house itself we get just enough of a sense of \u2013 we don\u2019t need more\u00a0\u00a0– \u2018faded\u2019 but \u2018with something about it.\u2019 But its glory is the view which you begin to describe, and which I feel myself expanding into like a homecoming as I read: \u2018that vast quiet expanse\/of hills, dips, hills again.\u2019 But this idyllic scene is juxtaposed with a shocking revelation.\u00a0\u00a0Again, we know just enough about the ghostly lady\u2019s life \u2013 a freedom she never knew\u2019, \u2018the cruel salt in her still-open wounds.\u2019 This line takes the poem to its emotional nadir.\u00a0\u00a0Like the house, the lady\u2019s tragedy is both individual and archetypal, and this is important because it allows you, the speaker, to empathise and identify with her. What life has not been touched by tragedy? And through this identification, which has begun by your imagining the gazing figure perhaps \u2018tortured by beauty,\u2019 the poem offers, along with a further vivification of the landscape description, an affirmation of the agency of the spirit or psyche to make as well as suffer its own weather. And in the speaker\u2019s mood swings between disproportionate sadness and \u2018illogical hope\u2019 which ‘suddenly\/expands the view from my heart\u2019, you say \u2018it\u2019s then\/I picture her, then I remember how it is to look out over first a gentle slope… and further, what the watcher surely seeks\/ endless embracing of the craved unknown.\u2019 I feel certain you have started with a real house and a real former inmate of it, and a real landscape. You have lived with these images a long time. Because it is real and you, like the ghost, have often contemplated the view, the landscape has without any strain become naturally symbolic, something like an objective correlative for the inner life with its vivid feelings, a landscape carried internally to sound one\u2019s deepest experiences against. In quoting I have left out much I admire, every word contributes. At the end, there is a longing for transcendence which unites both the two\u00a0gazers and the reader. I wonder about quite how to take that last line. One could see it as regretful, with the unknown frustratingly unobtainable. This would be a fitting sympathetic note, considering the ghost\u2019s \u2018tortured\u2019 life. But it seems to me that, without gainsaying the power of circumstance to maim and destroy us, the poem affirms the autonomy of the spirit, in creative partnership with the layered landscape, to rise by stages of rich emotion to a higher state of identification with \u2018the craved unknown;\u2019 perhaps,\u00a0\u00a0what some would call the All, or the One. I wonder if you could tell me how you yourself intend that last line, and whether you recognise your own poem in my account of it, and anything else you might care to share about the poem\u2019s origins or your own working methods? With best wishes, and thanks for the pleasure this poem has given me, John.<\/p>\n (And you can find out about John’s publications\u00a0<\/em>here)<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Dear John, the account of your reactions to \u2018From Time to Time\u2019 pleased me very much with its considerable understanding of what I am trying to say about this ghostly woman, her house , her view and her feelings. Thank you. \u00a0 The poem originated in two visits I made to a North Carmarthenshire house on whose early history I eventually wrote an article for a historical journal. As an amateur local historian as well as a professional poet, I sometimes have found it intriguing to work two ways on the same subject, the factual and the imaginative. This isn\u2019t planned- it just seems to happen occasionally. A bit like having two wildly different children. Cefn Trenfa has haunted me since my first sight of it. I was told in passing of a figure (gender unspecified) seen, none too clearly, by various people at different times standing looking out of an upstairs window. I thought of the figure as that of a woman. One of the Cefntrenfa wives was a poet, but she seems to have had a very outgoing life – I don\u2019t associate her with any sort of imprisonment, including that of her emotions. As to the last line, I remain (as I so often do) a \u2018don\u2019t know\u2019. I don\u2019t rule out the ghostly woman\u2019s ultimate attainment of some kind of identification with all she sees and longs for – but neither can I affirm that with certainty. In one of my poems I have the phrase \u2018fertile uncertainty\u2019!\u00a0 Working methods? A bit motley – sometimes I live with a theme or a fragment of something (seen, heard, happening to me) for a very long time; it can be years. Sometimes the poem surfaces and gets written in a day, though it\u2019s usually tinkered with later. Sometimes the alterations are far more radical. When I start a poem I don\u2019t know how it will end. If it\u2019s any good it takes me there. Favourite poets include (from the past) Donne, (from the present) John Burnside. The only poet I am sure has influenced me is Edward Thomas (never cut-and-dried, tentative, opening out his subject – and haunted). Time to make the next link in the chain! To\u00a0Andie Lewenstein<\/strong>: I find your poem \u2018Leaving Iona\u2019 a moving expression of loss and leaving. Here it\u2019s a dead father, but any kind of loss and goodbye resonates. The movement of the verse and sound of the words, so very musical, help to lift melancholy towards promise and reconciliation. I love \u2018Sometimes I carry you like air\u2026.\/Now you are made of nothing\/I carry you everywhere\u2019.\u00a0 Do you write rapidly, or does a poem like this, with its apparently total spontaneity, go through many drafts? Are you conscious of any poets having a particular influence on your work? With all good wishes, Ruth<\/p>\n (Please see\u00a0<\/em>here\u00a0<\/em><\/a>for information about Ruth’s publications. Her most recent collection is <\/em>Above the Forests\u00a0(Cinnamon Press, 2012) available\u00a0<\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.)<\/em><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Dear Ruth, thank you for your response and for this invitation.\u00a0\u00a0I have read your poem ‘From Time to Time’ with pleasure, feeling a resonance in the notion of some strong emotion that \u201cexpands the view from my heart,\u201d the ghostly presence and the vision of the \u201cendless embracing of the craved unknown\u201d. \u00a0 I wrote ‘Leaving Iona’ two years after the death of my father.\u00a0\u00a0It marked the end of a period of intense grieving, though I realise this only in retrospect.\u00a0\u00a0I had spent a week in Iona on a writing retreat with Roselle Angwin and Kenneth Steven.\u00a0\u00a0It was suggested that we each choose a stone from the island to throw into the water as we left.\u00a0\u00a0The poem, written shortly before I took the ferry, came quickly and more or less all of a piece and I changed very little. Though I will often draft and re-draft a poem many times, I find that poems such as this one, utterances which stem directly from some lived emotion, tend to come in this way and all I need to do is allow the words to be written, as though the work has already been done before putting pen to paper.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps it helped that for long periods I was in the habit of \u201cfreewriting\u201d in my notebook each morning. My influences: how to choose?\u00a0\u00a0The first thought that came to me was some lines from Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s ‘A Child\u2019s Garden of Verses’.\u00a0\u00a0My second thought was,\u00a0but I can\u2019t say that<\/em>!\u00a0I was eight years old and since then I have studied literature and read many poets.\u00a0\u00a0But still \u2013 this is where it (consciously, at any rate) began:\u00a0<\/em> The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all<\/em> And the star of the sailor, and Mars,<\/em> These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall Would be half full of water and stars.<\/em><\/p>\n I knew that though the pail did not literally contain the stars, this was more than mere reflection and that the water\u2019s transformation was also mine.\u00a0\u00a0I did not articulate this at the time, but it stands behind the lines that you particularly liked \u2013 introduced the possibility.\u00a0\u00a0 The Russian poets Marina Tsvetayeva and Osip Mandelstam were an early influence on me.\u00a0There was something direct and bold in how they encompassed strong feeling and thought within the pristine clarity of an image that was different to anything I had met in English poetry.\u00a0\u00a0This is from a long sequence called ‘Stone’ by Osip Mandelstam:\u00a0<\/em> O my prophetic sadness,<\/em> O my quiet freedom,<\/em> and the forever laughing crystal<\/em> of the unliving firmament!\u00a0<\/em> Some of the poems I remember most clearly contain the exclamatory O! where something or someone is addressed or apprehended.\u00a0\u00a0This also perhaps stands behind how I begin the poem to my father.\u00a0\u00a0 Of the poets that influence me now, one that I would like to name is Paul Matthews ( included in the conversations here) \u2013 his work with creative process and imagination as much as his poetry.\u00a0\u00a0 The poet I would like to invite is\u00a0Rose Flint<\/strong>.\u00a0 Rose, when reading your poem, ‘Angel With Glittering Hands’, I remember another poem from a reading you gave at Emerson College: ‘Visitation of the Swans’.\u00a0\u00a0In both these I felt a sense of recognition, as though the vision and story that you present are already powerfully known to me and I was just waiting for the poem to reveal them.\u00a0When you write a poem like this do you begin with an image and allow it to unfold its meaning as you go along or is the story already formed in your imagination before you begin writing?<\/p>\n (Andie’s\u00a0poems and stories have been published in various anthologies and magazines, including\u00a0<\/em>Poetry South East, Rockingham Press, Obsessed with Pipework\u00a0and<\/em>\u00a0Artemis. She has taught creative writing and was a co-ordinator of the annual\u00a0<\/em>Poetry Otherwise\u00a0conference in Sussex. She keeps a blog called ‘Reading the Signs’\u00a0<\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.)\u00a0<\/em> Thank you Andie, for including me in this fascinating chain of poet\u2019s thoughts. I am intrigued that you found these poems resonated so deeply with you, giving you that sense of recognition.\u00a0\u00a0Writing them, I was aware\u00a0\u00a0of something coming to me over distance, either through the unconscious, or some other inner\/outer world that we sometimes glimpse. The initial image in ‘Visitation of the Swans’ came as a powerful dream, utterly whole but without meaning attached. To find that took a long time, meditating on the image I had been given, trying to find where it was in my conscious self. With\u00a0‘Angel of the Glittering\u00a0Hands’,\u00a0the process was different. I knew I wanted to write the subject of the poem \u2013 the death of a child \u2013 but not how to write it. It contains more than one story of personal grief, including the remembering of my own loss of a baby at two weeks old. I don\u2019t think I even tried to write it for a long time, didn\u2019t sketch anything out or try to find a form to express my emotional engagement. I just felt it in me as a need, a necessity.<\/p>\n Then I had a very strange and powerful experience. Just as I was falling asleep one night \u2013 maybe in that state called\u00a0hypnogogic<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 I became aware of a presence close to me and in some way visible. This presence had \u2018seen\u2019 me; and was perhaps curious, I don\u2019t know, but it came closer. I was conscious of its vastness, and otherness, but surprisingly, not afraid. It seemed to hover for a while and\u00a0<\/em>I felt the drum of my heart nearly break. Then it was gone.<\/p>\n This experience really affected me. I looked at a lot of images of angels, read bits of writing about them, until quite unexpectedly, I just wrote the whole poem in one go. It took time to edit, but essentially it was all there from the first draft. I found it impossible to change details which I had scrawled down very fast, without knowing what their reference was until much later.<\/p>\n I have always written with trust in the unconscious. Allowed images and stories to float up from the practice of free-writing or free-drawing, or dreams. Not all my work is based in this but my poems that I cherish most do have a sense of\u00a0coming in<\/em>, an element of\u00a0being given.\u00a0<\/em>Or at least some part of the poem does. I don\u2019t mean I wait for them, I get on with other things, but when they happen it makes me wonder just what our universe is, and what is the nature of consciousness. I think many poets who work with myth and spirit are reaching in towards what Jung called the collective unconscious, which offers the world back to us in ways we would not think of. But I also believe it is a two-way stream. I don\u2019t see it as a storehouse for primitive and useless junk, but as an area of engagement with our imaginations which can illuminate our humanity. For the stories we tell, are making the world all the time. And if we all have access to the collective unconscious \u2013 or the soul of the world \u2013 then images and ideas that originate there will be recognised by others, who are also open to this source.<\/p>\n My question is for\u00a0Roselle Angwin<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Roselle, your evocative and thought-provoking poem ‘Chagford Haibun’\u00a0has so many layers I seem to unfold some new meaning every time I read it, turning it round in my hands like painted origami. You are a very visual writer, how does art and poetry integrate for you \u2026 does the use of form have any relationship with your painting?<\/p>\n (For further information about Rose Flint’s work, please see\u00a0<\/em>here<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Rose, thank you so much for your choice of my poem with which to continue this poets\u2019 conversation: I\u2019m touched by that, and feel privileged to be in such fine company \u2013 so much inspiration, so many competent and moving poems in\u00a0Scintilla 16<\/em>, and such eloquence and insight from those writers before me in the conversation. And Rose I think \u2013 I hope \u2013 you know how much I like and admire your own work; some of your poems, such as a sequence from the Mabinogion, and one about a white deer (sorry to be so unspecific!), have become part of my inner world. And\u00a0Nekyia<\/em>\u00a0I admire greatly as a collection (and also I relate to the title, its relationship to the night-sea journey, and its Jungian resonances, and therefore the sub-terrain).<\/p>\n You ask about the origins and relationship between my painting and my poetry, focusing on the visual. How do they integrate, you ask: and what about the use of form? Well, I\u2019d have to say there\u2019s a co-arising for me, I think; they emerge, both, as a kind of ecstatic response to the natural world. And also I think I\u2019d have to say that they are both a way of \u00a0expressing my profound lifelong relationship with land, sky, water, place, animals, birds, trees, plants \u2013 and also integrating it all into\u00a0myself<\/u>.\u00a0 The place of poetry, though, includes a kind of interrogation, for me, of my lived relationships to what appears to be \u2018other\u2019 than me in order to recognise myself as \u2018part of\u2019, not apart. I suppose by this I mean that while both my painting and my poetry are attempts to move beyond dualistic perceptions of self and other, the poetry, the verbal, incorporates the questions; the painting doesn\u2019t, it simply expresses a lived response. (I think!) Perhaps I need to mention that my own spirituality resonates with your own, Rose (I probably don\u2019t need to explain this to you, however!). I walk very much in the British Mystery Tradition, with its mythic, shamanic and bardic expressions of our relationship to the natural world and the wider cosmos. As a committed Green, like yourself, all of my practice is centred on our relationship to the planet and its beings.\u00a0 In addition to this, though, I\u2019ve been deeply influenced since my late teens by Zen practice and Zen writings (this combination has been described as dharmic druidry).<\/p>\n Two specific threads arise here in relation to my writing and your question.\u00a0 One thread is that I\u2019m always groping to move beyond my perception of self-and-other into a way of living that recognises the unified field of it all, unified \u2013 non-dual \u2013 consciousness. It\u2019s something about resolving a kind of split. (There\u2019s another dichotomy, that actually isn\u2019t, but can seem like it in the Western world; and that is the dualistic split between matter and spirit that is part of our Judeo-Christian heritage.) My poetry expresses that struggle, quite often, I think.\u00a0 Painting, as far as I can tell, for me, doesn\u2019t. Painting is also for me a kind of relief from the verbal, sometimes, too, and I usually find that I paint when I have exhausted, for the moment, my words. It\u2019s true that there may be an ambiguity at times in some of my paintings, but it\u2019s quite different from the boundaries and edges that words bring, set as they are on differentiation, clarity, focus.\u00a0 Having said that, and thinking out loud here, I\u2019d also be the first to say that poetry, more than any other verbal form, does indeed vibrate on so many levels \u2013 well, a good poem does \u2013 that its opacity and ambiguity, its ability to speak laterally and to carry more than one meaning, does challenge our more usual verbal requirements, in conversation, say, to speak clearly and be understood on the rational level; obviously both poetry and art speak to the imaginal, the feeling nature, the soul, even; and to that extent, for me, my poetry and my painting elide. I said there were two specific threads.<\/p>\n The second thread for me is the way that poetry from the Zen tradition, and I\u2019m also thinking here of the poetry of Gary Snyder, who was a big influence on me in my teens and early twenties, speaks of the natural world by stripping away superfluities and leaving us with the bones of \u2018how it is\u2019, right here, right now (as well as, as I alluded to above, also situating us\u00a0within<\/u>\u00a0nature rather than \u2018pitted against\u2019 or at least separate from nature, as so much Western poetry in the canon, perhaps because of our cultural emphasis since the Enlightenment, has tended to). Zen poetry is also a record of transience; of the passing moment. I mention the Zen aspect because my Chagford Haibun is reasonably true to this tradition: Basho\u2019s\u00a0Narrow Road to the Deep North,\u00a0<\/em>which is an early if not the earliest example of haibun, the extended prose-poem form that includes haiku, also influenced me greatly, and still informs my writing. I love that haibun can incorporate so much within it: personal narrative, journaling, nature observation, philosophical asides, the little jewels that are specific moments captured in haiku that are not simply reprises of the prose text, and so on. All of it is centred on an expression of the spirit of the present moment, in\u00a0this<\/u>\u00a0place, via the particular. One of the most exciting projects of my writing life was an agreement with poet Rupert Loydell that over 100 days we would write in alternation between us 100 little haibun-type prose poems of exactly 100 words each, interweaving a thread from the other\u2019s last piece. This was published as\u00a0A Hawk Into Everywhere,\u00a0<\/em>and although I don\u2019t think the little \u2018envois\u2019 work as well as if we\u2019d been true-to-spirit and embedded a proper haiku, I\u2019m still proud of that book, and feel that the work is strong, even though we didn\u2019t redraft any of it but let it unfold spontaneously. Before, and since then, I have often used the haibun form as a poetic discipline and also as a kind of meditation. I\u2019m so glad you feel that the Chagford Haibun unfolds more meanings as you reread it. It should do, but I wasn\u2019t sure that it did. I wrote it on a Zen and Poetry retreat I was leading, in which we were also using the haibun form. I was going to say that while my poetry does take form (I mean I pay some attention to shape on the page, whether it\u2019s formal form or not), my painting doesn\u2019t, as I\u2019m more concerned with the relationship of colour, and a direct expression of lived experience. I see that that\u2019s not true, though; although I\u2019d like to be an abstract painter, in fact most of my work veers inexorably towards a more figurative expression of a landscape, a seascape. Sigh. I have an unswervingly irresistible albeit largely unconscious urge to mark a horizon, and as soon as that happens more deliberate form comes into being on the page or canvas. So that then leads me to note that I have a particular fascination for the golden ratio, golden section, golden mean, Fibonacci sequence, whatever you want to call it, and its place in art, music, architecture, natural forms, the singing of the spheres, the underpinning structure of the universe(!), and, of course, poetry.\u00a0 So I guess you might be righter than I first thought: what interests me is that little dimensional leap that, say, a sonnet takes with the volta, or a haiku takes between the second and third lines, or a painting might take with a horizon placed gratifyingly just so at about 5\/8ths of the picture plane; the way that kind of correspondence, metaphorically, might, just might, induce in the viewer or reader or listener a corresponding subtle leap over an imaginal horizon. Well, I didn\u2019t know I was going to go\u00a0there<\/u>. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to say what I didn\u2019t know about my work!<\/p>\n I\u2019d like to invite\u00a0Se\u00e1n Street\u00a0<\/strong>to speak about his \u2018Avebury\u2019 sequence in\u00a0Scintilla 16<\/em>. Se\u00e1n, I noticed your poems here immediately, and have been drawn back to reading them over and over. I admire the fact that you\u2019ve used the sonnet form so successfully here. I also notice that you\u2019ve been free with line lengths but fairly strict with end-rhymes. There are questions I\u2019d like to ask you here about why you chose the sonnet, and why you worked with it as you have; there are questions I feel would also be interesting to ask you, such as \u2013 as Prof of Radio, how do you see radio as continuing an oral tradition, and what is your relationship to sound within your writing; but actually what I want to ask you, as I know that you, like me, are a \u2018poet of place\u2019 (and often similar places, as you know, such as Hebridean islands; and we both are drawn to \u2018ancient\u2019 landscapes, like the megalithic \u2013 I have a long Avebury sequence, written \u2018on the hoof\u2019 walking the serpent temple of that landscape, in my first collectionLooking For Icarus<\/em>) is: how would you speak of your poetry and its relationship with place? In other words, I suppose I\u2019m asking what is it about place\/certain places that inspires you, and catalyses the response as poetry?<\/p>\n (Roselle Angwin is a poet, author and writing\/ecopsychology retreat and course leader. Her long Dartmoor poem\u00a0<\/em>River Suite\u00a0has just come out as a limited edition with the water photographs of Vikky Minette, and her newest novel\u00a0is <\/em>The Burning Ground. Her work can be seen here: www.fire-in-the-head.co.uk; thewildways.wordpress.com; roselle-angwin.blogspot.co.uk<\/em>\u00a0)<\/p>\n *<\/p>\n Thank you Roselle. I was interested in your comments, and the links between our work are as you say, strong. One of the pleasures of\u00a0Scintilla<\/em>\u00a0is to explore unity as well as diversity in the writing, and to trace at the same time a thread of the Vaughans in it. I take this opportunity to thank the editors, past and present, for their guardianship of that principle, which has preserved the continuity of its voice so impressively, logically and apparently effortlessly, while many other journals’ attempts at doing so too often feel artificial and ‘imposed’. When\u00a0Scintilla\u00a0<\/em>goes on the shelf, it does so not as a journal but as a book.<\/p>\n With the Avebury poems in\u00a0Scintilla 16<\/em>, I thought often of Henry Vaughan, of streams and strange hieroglyphs found in landscape; my idea in writing the sequence was to explore a place through its component parts, and Avebury, a place I’ve known from childhood, is the ideal place to do that because it is a pattern of human evidence spread not only across the land but across time. I chose a form based on the sonnet because I wanted this link between the various stages within the place, while trying to make windows of particularity focusing on individual topographical details. Roselle, you mention the apparently free line lengths; in fact, I find myself returning often to a line of nine syllables in many poems, and\u00a0Avebury<\/em>\u00a0conforms to this.<\/p>\n You mention radio and sound, and I’m grateful that you do. Having worked in radio documentaries and features for more than forty years, I have come to find the links between poetry and radio as being increasingly complementary. I recently wrote about this connection, and a crucial part of that work for me was in the layers of poetic expression that broadcast media (and now downloadable audio) have the potential to unlock. Poetry was oral before it was print, and the coming of radio in the first half of the twentieth century reclaimed to a certain extent poetry from the printed text \u2013 or at least enabled a parallel oral text alongside the print. It is no coincidence that so many poets have also been radio practitioners. The microphone can capture vernacular speech at its most transcendent, at times of joy, pain, anger \u2013 passion in all its colours. Even ‘the cold poetry of information’ contained in formal radio statements like the Shipping Forecast can take us to spectacular places through the power of the imagination, in that instance made even more powerful by understatement. This is one of the key links for me: both poetry and sound offer us the raw materials to do our own imaginative making.\u00a0 Furthermore, there is a poetry of\u00a0making<\/em>\u00a0in radio – when we choose to invoke it – that moves beyond the journalistic need to identify answers, and instead poses questions.<\/p>\n Location recording for radio is a wonderful discipline because one is interrogating a place very closely through its sound nature and specific character. It is a highly concentrated way of working, and it is not surprising that poems tend to come out of that process. A few years ago Michael Symmons Roberts and I made a number of radio programmes in which we explored the relationship between Place and the human spirit. For BBC Radio 4, we recorded two programmes with Anne Cluysenaar at Llansanffraed, examining Henry Vaughan’s presence there; we also made five programmes for BBC Radio 3 under the title\u00a0Celtic Soul<\/em>\u00a0which sought to examine Celtic Christianity in the context of the places in which it developed: Iona, St David’s, Holy Island, Kildare and Glendalough in Ireland. Both these projects produced poems and sequences. Likewise, I’ve made a number of radio programmes in Newfoundland recently, a province of Canada that explores its past through a strong oral tradition in which radio and poetry cannot help but reflect the relationship between Place, time and mortality. Places have their own voices, be it in the unique tone of a lighthouse siren, the way a fishing boat rubs against a quay in the swell, or the sound of gulls’ cries echoing off the side of a cliff.<\/p>\n Places are almost always peopled, whether by a plant, a bird, (I see my poems are full of avian presences!) or a human. I happily acknowledge the importance for me of my long friendship with that quintessential poet of Place, Jeremy Hooker, and in doing so, I borrow a line from his excellent essay in\u00a0Scintilla 16<\/em>, ‘Reflections on Lyric “I”‘: ‘The poem must first surprise the poet, enlarging his or her sense of being.’\u00a0 Here is another link with sound; I am at the moment writing about the relationship between sound and memory, and I think it is true that when we hear something we don’t understand for the first time, it lodges in memory in a particular way, and becomes a formative part of who we are. Looking along my bookshelves, I see evidence of the voice of Place in the writers I love: John Clare, Thomas Hardy, Charles Tomlinson, George Oppen, David Jones, Edward Thomas, the prose of Richard Jefferies and the writing of Jeremy Hooker himself. Indeed it’s summed up by that wonderful sentence in the introduction to\u00a0The Anathemata<\/em>, quoted by Jerry in his article, a statement we have discussed many times over the years: ‘One is trying to make a shape out of the very things of which one is oneself made.’<\/p>\n The Avebury sequence has found its way into my collection,\u00a0Cello<\/em>, opening the book and starting a journey through various landscapes in memory of my friend, the composer and cellist, Jonathan Harvey, a journey that ends in another sequence – hinted at in the last of the Avebury poems – where two rivers \u2013 the Thames and the Mersey \u2013 reach the open sea in their own particular ways. Always Place asks the questions, and always \u2013 always \u2013 there is a figure in the landscape.<\/p>\n Memory is very much a part of my sequence, as it is \u2013 inevitably \u2013 in the new collection. I’m writing about memory in prose too, and the idea of a river flowing through a landscape, always in the present tense, but always moving onwards, is one that preoccupies me a lot at the moment. So with this in mind, in handing the baton forward, I would like to ask\u00a0Philip Gross\u00a0<\/strong>to accept it. Philip, with your wonderful poems in\u00a0The Water Table,\u00a0<\/em>and in\u00a0Scintilla 16<\/em>, your ‘Conversations with the Taff’, you strike me as the perfect writer to discuss the nature of flowing water and its relationship to the poetics of memory.<\/p>\n
\nPoetry Editor Scintilla 16 & 17<\/i><\/p>\n
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