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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Grounded Poetry

Black Cart, by Jim Carruth

Black Cart, by Jim Carruth, published by Freight Books 2017

Jim Carruth describes this as ‘a love poem to a rural community in Scotland. He comes from a farming family in Ayrshire, and this collection is a mixture of description, memory and elegy for a way of life that is changing and quite probably dying out. Parallels with Heaney and Clare come to mind here. His poems are as full of affection, observation and lyric description as Heaney’s, and there is a similar sense that he is heir to a way of life that isn’t for him in Into the Blue, where the poet

Was supposed to
Knock an old soup can off the fence post
But winged a cloud and brought down the sky

with the gun that was an intrinsic part of his father’s identity, or The Trouble With Ploughing, where the young Jim has proved so inept with a tractor he isn’t allowed to try it, and the sense of his vocation as a poet in Searchlight:

I look for them still, listen for their returning voices;
I will them back into the light.

But Heaney’s poetry starts very much with his own relationships, his memories and the way his past, his family, his community and landscape have shaped him – and then becomes his own way of looking at the wider world. Carruth’s is about something else. His complicated relationship with his origins comes through – as how could it not? but it isn’t the focus. The focus is on those people,that landscape, the way those communities lived, in all its beauty, crushing hard work, isolation and anxiety, its particular skills and cherished traditions and its eclipse.
Carruth’s poetry is like Clare’s or Burns’ in that it is not (like Heaney’s or Wordsworth’s for instance), a poet’s detached observation of another way of life, but is instead embedded within that life. It’s an issue often misunderstood. Clare himself was conscious that he was a poet and a scholar, and if not a gentleman, then not a simple peasant either, and I can’t be the only one that finds the epithet ‘heaven-taught ploughman’ thoroughly patronising when applied to Burns. The difference between Wordsworth and Clare isn’t education or art or craft versus genius, or culture, it’s a point of view. I don’t want establish a hierarchy of poetic style and intent, nor to trespass into Jim Carruth’s private or professional life, but simply to say that, like Clare’s, his poetry is from the ground up, not the desk down.
I love it. It has wit and affection and humour – how many jokes can you make about silage? It has a disenchanted eye, as in Drowning Kittens (be warned, this will upset you) but isn’t cynical or despairing, even in the bleak Farm Sale. And although it is elegaic, it also has a strong sense of continuity and tradition, that something can be kept from the wreck of a way of life that will enrich future generations if they remember it honestly.

June 3, 2017
Grounded Poetics – Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight

The Frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind.

And so begins my favourite poem by Coleridge. When I was younger I liked Coleridge’s poems better than Wordsworth’s – the language so much more precise, the imagery more vivid, the pace more varied and the tone so much less didactic. Now I am not quite so sure. There is less glitter and flash about Wordsworth, but he is more steeped in his subject, shaped by it more than adapting it to his artistic purposes. And yet. Can you really resist that picture of the quiet house, the dying fire, the baby asleep in its cradle while the poet tries to write? or the icicles ‘quietly shining to the quiet moon.‘?

I’m seeing other resonances now. The poet is the only one up – biographies of Wordsworth and Coleridge point out that it was a hardworking household, and what with new babies and all, everyone else is asleep, but Coleridge is restless. Even the calm irritates him and he can’t settle. He is looking at the soot-flag on the hearth – often referred to as ‘the stranger’, and popularly supposed to forecast an imminent visitor – and remembering his lonely schooldays when he would do the same, longing for someone to come and visit him. This is not a contented poem. He finds consolation in his current situation in the beauty of nature, which speaks to him of the wisdom of its creator, and intends to bring his son up familiar with all the manifestations of weather and landscape, wild or serene. It’s all beautiful, and therefore must be wise and healthy.

I’m no longer so convinced, though I am still bewitched by the final lines. Comparing Coleridge and Wordsworth, I am more conscious of Coleridge’s restlessness, his loneliness, his determination to use nature as medicine for what ails him. Nature is, for him, as a nurturing stability, a refuge from the turbulence of human relationships. Perhaps I read into it what I know of his later life, but it reminds me a bit of Jay Griffiths. She goes the other way in her engagement with nature, and looks for wildness, an escape from too much structure and control, and stresses ferocity and extravagance, but she is, in effect, doing the same thing – projecting the needs of a troubled personality onto a landscape, using it to find a balance. As a strategy, it didn’t work for Coleridge for too long, and he was soon back in the city, and into a life full of feuds and projects and failures, and less successful ways of medicating his troubles. As a philosophy of nature, I find it wanting in intellectual rigor and responsible praxis. But as a poem of observation, you can’t beat it:

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

You can find the full text of the poem here:

August 4, 2016
Grounded Poetry – On Being Local

There’s a song called All the Way from Tuam, by an Irish band called The Saw Doctors, which has a line that goes (roughly) ‘No matter where you’re from, everyone’s local’. They were a lot bigger then – 2009, I’d guess, and they were being interviewed about their music. They explained that they had found, when they sang about their home town, their audiences would identify with it, all over the world. Audiences had shared similar experiences and felt the same, often ambivalent emotions, about their own home towns. This seems to me to be an important point when considering what I am calling ‘grounded poetry’, because the big criticism of local or rural poetry is that it is narrow or parochial, uneducated and ill-informed, and of no real interest to the wider, more cosmopolitan reading public.

There seemed to be a feeling at one time that, if you wrote about a particular place, landscape, event or custom, then it showed that you were only aware of that particular locality; that you expected your readers to attach an undue importance to that locality; or possibly even that you were restricting your attention to that locality for some cheap local popularity, because you knew that you didn’t have the talent or education to make it on the bigger stage. Class comes into this of course, as Clare soon discovered, but even Wordsworth suffered from it. To this day Liz Berry is often asked to justify writing in her local dialect, though I think myself her stunning collection, Black Country, should be justification in itself. Niall Campbell’s poems about his childhood home of South Uist do not create an romantic and exotic place to be sentimental about; they create the vivid sense of that locality because he is at home there, but they are as much about the experience of being at home anywhere as they are about that place. That is the root of grounded poetry – no matter where you’re from, everyone’s local.

Grounded poetry, because it is rooted in home territory, need not restrict its attention to the narrow lives and concerns of that home territory; on the contrary, a sense of rootedness and connection gives a different and a valuable perspective to the more universal vision. Sorley MacLean’s integration of the clearances on Skye into a survey of, and commentary on the world-wide proletarian struggle, is perhaps the best known example, or perhaps Michael Hartnett’s poems in Irish and English, heavily influenced by Lorca, which gave Irish poetry links to European Modernist writing, thus bypassing the habitual deference to the mainstream of writing in English. Christine de Luca does the same for Shetlandic, as I wrote at length in Northwords Now, and David Morley for Romani which he includes without apology or sweetening in his poems. There’s a place for the broader perspective, but attention to what Welsh poets call ‘your own quarter mile’ may give poetry a more intense focus and greater depth.

April 7, 2016
It’s Not Poetry Until We Tell You It Is
If you listen to Radio Scotland you might recognise my adaptation of a recent catchphrase ‘It’s not news until we tell you it is’. It has echoes of Tom Leonard’s iconic Six O’Clock News, and James Robertson’s recent The News Where You Are in 365 Stories. But lately I’ve come across the same attitude applied to poetry.
- in the #derangedpoetess row, sparked when Oliver Thring’s patronising and superficial column in the Sunday Times treated prize winning poet Sarah Howe to the equivalent of the ‘what are you wearing?’ treatment we see given to Oscar winning actors – if they are women – and he responded by calling his critics ‘deranged poetesses’.
- the hatchet job someone saw fit to give Andrew McMillan after his book Physical won the Fenton First Collection award.
- the sneering column in The Times about the question of the Scottish Makar, implying that no-one cared, and no-one ever read Liz Lochhead’s poetry anyway.
The overwhelming impression is that there is a group of privileged arbiters of elegance, who feel it is their duty to tell us what poetry is, or should be. It is something precious, very difficult, not really to do with the real life that the stereotypical hard working families are interested in. You lot will be taught it in school, of course, because you have to be confronted with just why you are too common to be allowed serious education, but don’t even begin to think you get to play with it yourself. Increasingly, literature seems to be taught this way in schools. Selected ‘classics’ are delivered shrink-wrapped, hermetically sealed, and rigidly decoded, according to the latest amendments to the syllabus. No wonder so many people don’t think poetry is for them —

Last night I went to see Mark Thomas in a show called Trespass, about how the private management and development of public land is increasingly leading to the absolute control of what remains (at least in name) our property, and the exclusion from it of most of us, except on very stringent terms. His response is to exercise his right to be there to the fullest, to draw attention to what is in effect a social cleansing of public spaces, and to take back ownership. The parallels seem to me to be obvious. We are all to be excluded from ‘culture’ unless we toe the line.

The beauty of poetry in Scotland is that it really isn’t amenable to this kind of thing. We don’t have a sufficiently developed public school cadre to impose this sort of aspirational cultural expectation on people (I know there are a couple of universities who try, but without much impact on the rest of us). We don’t have ‘schools’ of poets that poets think they have to imitate. We don’t have an authorised poetic vocabulary. We don’t even have a single language – I am aware of six, with outstanding work being published in all of them. We don’t have preferred genres or forms. We are comfortable with poetry on pages, in performance, on film and in song. There aren’t any established fast tracks or hothouses producing a privileged elite. We have an astonishing diversity of learned, vernacular, humorous, tender, political, cultured, narrative, local,lyrical, international, sacred and profane poetry. We have a diversity of outlets, venues, genres and publishers. This active poetry community is a great defence against the creeping of cultural imperialism, and it is something I’m very proud of.

In my capacity as Makar of the Federation of Writers in Scotland, I will shortly be judging the poetry submitted in the Vernal Equinox competition, and I’ve had to write some guidance notes. I put in a plea for variety and experimentation. Now I’m going further. Language is yours.

Poetry is yours.

Occupy it.

Make something beautiful and new and something that is your own. Don’t let anyone exclude you from it. Don’t let anyone tell you what poetry is.
March 3, 2016
Grounded Poets – Josephine Bacon

Last year at the Edinburgh Book Festival I heard three Innu poets read, powerful, compelling poems about the relationships of the Innu and their homeland, and the way the western culture distorts and oppresses both earth and people. (More about this event here) I’m not sure they would approve of that distinction I just made, and perhaps the necessity I feel to make it tells you all you need to know about the way we live. I bought Josephine Bacon’s book Message Sticks (Tshissinuatshitakana). Its poems are spare, short, incisive and beautiful, and come from a sense of identity with home, people and culture which gives her work authority. The poem that moves me most is this.

Someone seems to be calling me
to the woods,
there, in the back country,
our country.

It’s been so long
since I saw the Innu
pass by on sleds,
he seems to be saying.——

Where have the Innu gone?

Niteputakaunatak
tshetshi kushpian
nete nutshimit
nitassinat —-

Shashish
apu petuk teueikan,
nitikutak.

Tanite
eku nekanat Innuat?

I wondered if Sutherland is longing for all the people who were dispossessed during the clearances. (A quick google search reveals the names of the Duchess who did it and her bailiff, but not the names of the people she evicted, which I think is significant.) There are many issues which come to mind about land ownership and usage and the way we fail to pay attention to people we regard as ‘the poor’, and all that stuff, and we may have to get to it, but the big can of worms I want to open here is ‘indigenous’.

There is a big easy trap attached to this concept – the one that says only people that were born here have any rights; the one that won’t allow ‘outsiders’ to come here; the one that assumes no-one outside your chosen has anything to offer your superior culture. I should start by saying I am having no truck whatever with this one. As will be fairly obvious from my bio page, I don’t live where I was born, and I wasn’t born where my ancestors lived. I am a person of the Irish diaspora, and that discontinuity has shaped my life, my personality and my poetry. My relationship with Scotland is one of allegiance, rather than identity, and so far it seems to be working well for all sides.

This seems to be something that Scotland does with a singular grace. A story I like is that you will often be told that Glen Affric is the ‘second most beautiful Glen in Scotland’. And if you ask which is the first, you will be told that it’s your own. In Scotland it is understood that to live in, and belong to, a place does not challenge your primal relationship with the place where your roots are. And that primal relationship does not prevent you living in and becoming genuinely and appropriately involved with somewhere new. in fact, I realised, when I wrote Visiting the Dunbrody Famine Ship, you can’t actually settle in a new place if you haven’t a clear sense of where your roots are.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this since the referendum, because it was only in England that people were talking about frontiers and passports and border guards. In Scotland we were talking about a better, more mature relationship with our neighbours, and stronger connections with more of them. It seems that in England questions of identity and nationhood are expressed in terms of ownership and control, while here it’s connection and relationship. I relate this ( in one vast over-simplification) to the feudal system, whereby William the Conqueror gained England by force of conquest, and kept order by relating grants of land to military service, whereas in other places land and law were communally held by tribes, and administered by personal loyalties. One consequence of the English system is that peasants were tied to the land, and could only be free if they went to a town and managed to live there for a year; I don’t think this opposition of land and personal freedom has done industrialised cultures much good, but I don’t want to claim that one system is necessarily less abusive than another. I just want to look at the dynamic of migration and indigenous populations and the poetry that might come out of it.

Josephine Bacon’s poems have a vision of a place where identity is expressed as a conversation between the land and the Innu people, between the stories and traditional knowledge of the past and the needs of the present, a relationship as strong as life itself:

Kill me
If I don’t respect my land —-

If I keep silent
When they don’t respect
my people

Nipaii
manenitamani nitassi —-

eka tshituiani
manenimakanitaui
nitinnimat

It’s a concept I use myself, in a poem called Land Speaks, and here in Walking the Territory;

In this place I write
the dialogue we hold with the earth,
a continuous exchange
of love and fruitfulness,
almost, never quite, unconscious,
grounding, creating
the landscape of home.

But Bacon’s unity of place and people is much more dynamic and powerful. To be ‘indigenous’ might be to participate as one voice in this three way conversation between individual, landscape and community. You can do that, even if you were born somewhere else – and perhaps the quality of attention to the conversation already in place should be the criterion by which we judge grounded poetry?

February 17, 2016
Grounded Poets

I have a poem called ‘Grounded’ in which I talk about the state of the soil round here, the flat waterlogged fields – which are by no means as sterile and inhospitable as they were when I wrote it five years ago – and the rich silty loam over clay in our gardens, which has been cultivated for a good 800 years and is full of the seeds sown by the monks and rope-makers and miners who lived here before us. I like the feeling that my poems, as well as the herbs, are grounded in the place where I live, and that they are a natural part of the conversation humans have with the world around them. But there is another discernible trend in the way poets relate to landscape.

When things get a bit apocalyptic, a common response is to get back to nature, get back to the land. You get pastoral poetry, or the Romantics, or the Wilderness Poetry of the Chinese classical tradition. Sometimes it is seen in the appreciation of the work of poets who live in rural locations – Clare, for instance, or Wordsworth. More often it sparks writing from people who have moved to the country – Irish or Chinese hermits, exiled Romans – or Coleridge, whose life in the Lakes was motivated by a desire for revolution and a completely new society.

In prosperous times people talk about Pastoral poetry as escapist, artificial, even delusional, as if there was nothing more to it than Marie Antoinette playing milkmaids. But it can be a vehicle for biting political satire, for genuine social protest, or for deep personal or religious reflection. What it is not, very often, is anything to do with the environment. Nature is often no more than either a metaphor or a backdrop for the human questions under investigation. Geopoetics aimed to do something about that, to connect directly to the earth, sky and sea without obtruding human self-obsession into the work, and the oriental verse-forms and poetics formed a good medium to do so, but it leaves poetry quite detached, descriptive and cerebral. I have loved this, and still do – it has honed a style I find very sympathetic to the way my brain works. But I’m finding it a bit one-dimensional now.

I don’t like nature writing that is simply aesthetic, where the experience of wildness is ‘a treat’ – especially if it is a treat reserved only for the worthy. The standpoint of the detached observer who sets himself apart or in opposition to nature is as artificial as the quaint, the sentimental or the anthropomorphic. And I don’t like the way nature has become exotic, which enables us to protect otters, have safaris to see lions, and at the same time, want to exterminate town pigeons or himalayan balsam. What I’m looking for is ‘grounded’ poetry, where the life of the human is embedded in and engaged with nature, where human life is as natural as a spider’s, a kingfisher’s, an orchid’s.

Which brings me to Patrick Kavanagh.

He was a farmer in his youth, and lived as a writer later on, succumbing to poverty, ill-health and alcohol in 1967. His early poems are lyrical and lovely – Beech Tree, Four Birds –

Kestrel
In a sky ballroom
The kestrel,
A stately dancer.
He is a true artist –
His art is not divorced
From life and death.

full of rich sensual language and detailed intimate observation.

But there are also poems full of grim depictions of peasant life – the back-breaking hard work, the poverty, the isolation, the prison-grip of families that need so much of their children, the lost opportunities, narrow horizons and the casual cruelties of small town living, where everyone knows everyone else, and stepping outside the norm is resented.

Later there are poems about the loss of that lyrical vision, about the hollowness of life of an urban poet, without roots or convictions, the artistic politics, fads and affectations, and glimpses of the possibilities and promises of his old life, sometimes cynical, sometimes longing. It was a problem he never seemed to have resolved.

And neither have I. This is a temptation we fall into often. Surely one of these attitudes is ‘right’, the ‘real truth’? The other must be self-deception, or ignorance, or wishful thinking, no? I don’t think so. I don’t think that the countryside is nurturing and fruitful and lovely ‘in spite’ of the bad days. I don’t think the countryside is an uncouth wasteland ‘in spite’ of looking pretty when you’re on holiday. I think wherever you live, you grapple with bliss and bale, wherever you live you have to deal with life as you find it, and nature is wherever we live, not reduced to the margins, not a treat, or a decoration, or a pest. And poetry that deals with it is not marginal or decorative or necessarily consoling either.

So, far from seeing the ‘get back to nature’ impulse as a refuge from the hard things of our lives, I am suggesting that poetry properly grounded in nature as fully as it is in our human consciousness might help us to identify and understand them better.

And I am suggesting that you should go read Patrick Kavanagh. He’ll blow your socks off.

January 29, 2016

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