BurnedThumb

Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Poetry

Scotland’s Soils and Stories

Yesterday we went to Benmore Botanical Garden, partly to celebrate our forty-fifth anniversary, but also to see the trail installed there as part of Scotland’s Soils and Stories. At five viewpoints around the garden there were storyboards showing extracts from some Scottish literature relative to the soil or landscape or trees growing there. Authors included Sir Walter Scott, Robin Jenkins, James Robertson, Kenneth Grahame, Sara Maitland, Kathleen Jamie and (ulp!) me. And here I am, in a beautiful mossy setting (though furthest away from the gate, and up a very high hill).

The poem chosen was this one, which was first published in TheTerritory of Rain (Red Squirrel Press) in 2015:

Blanket Bog
Blanket bog clothes the land
like a black melancholy, shrouding
the slopes in the weight of its slo-mo layers.
Grudges and peat break down slowly.
Bones of old loves and hates
are kept intact for ever.

Sphagnum can absorb
twice its own weight in tears.
Crazy insectivorous plants
thrive on trapped flies and imagined slights,
and lost birds wail, raking through pools
and stirring the endless mud.

Keep it safe, keep it undisturbed.
Under these tons of peat and apathy
enough carbon is sequestered
to melt the last chips of polar ice
and burn up every one of us
on the whole raging earth.

I was especially pleased by the background information which put the poem in the context of a discussion of buried ancient structures, and the concept of landscape time, which is something I’m quite intrigued with just now. I am very grateful to the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh who organised this display, and have made something lovely of my poem. The book is out of print just now, but I have a few copies left which you can buy from my shop if you are in the UK.

July 31, 2022
PoetryCon StAnza 2022

My daughter refers to StAnza as my PoetryCon. As in Convention, like ComicCon which features so often in the Big Bang theory. There’s not so much cosplay, though somebody did once enter the Slam wearing a powdered periwig, (my daughter begs to differ – ‘You ALL dress like poets’, she says) no film stars and very little merch except books, but she is right. Though she says it’s more nuanced than that. She is a comic artist herself, and says that StAnza is not so much like the big Cons, where readers go to see the re-enactments of their favourite comics, more like one called Thought Bubble, which is where comic artists go to hear their favourite artists talk about how to write or draw comics, and engage with the function comics perform in the wider worlds of art and society. As well as displays and panels, book signings and sales, there are outreach events within local communities, and a strong grass roots presence.

This describes the much-loved atmosphere of StAnza as we have come to know it. I have been to other festivals, and I do get the impression that they are places people drop into for the highlight events, and the big names, and then maybe tack on something attractive that is happening in the day or two they are there. That is not how StAnza works. For years I have been trying to write a StAnza-based parody of Christy Moore’s Lisdoonvarna because I can’t think of anything else that comes quite so close:

Everybody needs a break
Climb a mountain or jump in a lake ——

We go there and they come here.
Some jet off to … Frijiliana,
But I always go to Lisdoonvarna.

We go to St Andrews. We go for the whole thing. We book tickets recklessly and we go to everything we can until we fall over. You can see people dashing between venues to get from one event to the next, and the B&Bs and pizza places and coffee shops are full of poets all the time. The Byre Theatre is a hub,

Ramble in for a pint of stout,
you’d never know who’d be hangin’ about!

Well, you get tea and scones, during the day, or coffee and shortbread, though there is usually a lot of alchohol drunk later – and you get the gossip. This year, after a two year hiatus, it was like a dam bursting. We had a LOT of catching up to do!

Of course the big names are there. I’ve seen Jackie Kay, Don Paterson, Caroline Forche, Mark Doty, Gillian Clarke, Moya Cannon, Seamus Heaney and John Burnside. I’ve seen poets from all over the world. I’ve seen poetry films, comics, installations, performance poetry, music. The big name poets don’t just perform, they hold workshops and round tables, panel discussions and protests. They do sign books, but you can also find them hanging about in the Byre. There are plenty of book sales – Innes Bookshop during StAnza is the only place you can see poetry bookshelves raided and empty like a late night bakery stall, and the Poets Market is a valuable lifeline and showcase for small presses and pamphleteers.

But there is also a strong grassroots presence. The independent Scottish presses are there. The developments in newer poetry are represented and showcased alongside the familiar and established trends. Fledgling presses have the opportunity to test themselves against the heavyweights, and poets who might have found themselves at a distance from livelier centres get a chance to hear what’s going on and contribute. We compare notes, and collaborate, develop new projects and make new connections. When I came to Scotland there was what we called a ‘Scottish cringe’ – a feeling that Scottish culture was provincial, nostalgic, undeveloped – and that you needed to attract the attention of London to make an impact. I honestly think that has gone now, and events like StAnza, with its emphasis on encouraging Scottish, Gaelic and Shetlandic alongside English, and its confident opening of doors to a multi-cultural perspective, has had a lot to do with it. A tall tree needs deep and wide-spreading roots, and here is where we grew them. One performance poet said of StAnza, ‘You took us seriously when we didn’t know how to take ourselves seriously’.

If I felt that this dimension was lacking this year, I’d have to make a few qualifications. Clearly covid took a flamethrower to most of our assumptions and habits. Long-term planning after last year’s wonderfully light-footed and ingenious digital version couldn’t really start while new variants and changes of regulations were happening all the time, and applying for funding in such a challenging environment must have been a nightmare. You couldn’t predict how many people would be able to come, or feel confident in sharing spaces, especially as a lot of us aren’t exactly spring chickens, and travel was difficult and unpredictable even before the Ukraine situation happened. Also – and this took me by surprise – we had looked forward to being back among our tribe so much and we were so excited to be there, that the experience became intense and overwhelming. We weren’t used to being around so many people. We weren’t used to travelling. We lost things, forgot to pack things, locked our keys in our hotel rooms (just me? I don’t think so!). We got tired and emotional. My daughter used to talk about ‘con drama’ – a cocktail of too many people, too many events, not enough food and less sleep – and we all felt it. Some of us started cutting events earlier than usual, some went home early, a few of us got ill and had to stay in bed instead of getting into the things we’d come for. It wasn’t the same.

But then, how could it be? Things were inevitably going to change, and if we felt understandably disappointed, we need to think of new possibilities. But I would like to think we could appreciate what we had without being simply obstructive. This year had some real gems of highlights. My favourites were poetry from Vahni Capildeo, Hannah Lowe and JL Williams, discussions about Modernism and TS Eliot from Paul Muldoon and Sandeep Parmer, the lecture about the discussion of migration and human rights in poetry by Mona Arshi. Other people loved Robin Robertson’s reading, William Letford’s verse novel work in progress and the discussion of erasure poety and narrative by Alice Hiller and Gail McConnell. We had the extra curricular delights of gulls, the beach, pastries at the poetry breakfasts, fish suppers and reunion pizzas with people you only see at StAnza. We hung out in the Byre as usual, much to the bafflement of the staff who kept warning us the bar was closed. It was lovely.

Feedback questionnaires are going to be online this year, so we missed Annie’s ‘fill in your phones and turn off your questionnaires’, and I will have to think very carefully about how I raise some of the issues on my mind. I know the hard-working and invariably courteous and helpful StAnza staff and volunteers pulled off their usual marvel, and I want to give them my unqualified thanks and appreciation.

We will definitely be back next year, with our blank notebooks and empty suitcases for all the new poetry. Floreat StAnza!

March 14, 2022
Signs and Portents

We are expecting two named storms this week – Dudley tomorrow, bringing wind, and possibly rain, and Eunice on Friday, bringing heavy snow. This winter, for all its mildness and rain, is testing me sorely. And yet—

The birds know spring is on its way. There was a pair of robins in the garden, not attacking each other, so possibly pairing up, the crows and jackdaws are working on their nests, and the woodland strip down to the park is full of birdsong. I discovered that our soil is even heavier, fuller of stones, and stickier with clay than I feared, but I have planted an apple and a damson tree, and some fruit bushes. There are more daffodils and tulips in the garden than I expected, all lengthening and greening every time I look at them, and I have a witch hazel in full flower, just waiting for the border to be cleared for it.

Other things are happening too. After two years of Zoom only launches, Red Squirrel Press have two LIVE events in the next fortnight – books by Helen Boden (A Landscape to Figure In) John Bolland (Pibroch) and Laura Fyfe (The Truth Lies) will be launched at Avant Garde

and on Saturday 26th February at 1pm in the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. You will need to book tickets to ensure covid compliance and you can do so here.

I edited all three of these, so I know you will be in for a treat.

Poetry too, is beginning to break through – no finished poems, but a couple of drafts:

Time to look at the chaffinch on the feeder
the first primrose, almost transparent
in the winter wet – look, how beautiful,
look, how stubborn persistence wins through
against frost, look, pigeons amorous already,
look, catkins, look –

And some non-fiction projects have moved from the vague pipe dream stage, to structural plans and reading lists and task sheets. There are review notes in the planning process too, but they will have to wait. In March, someone is coming to build us a LIBRARY, and until then, all the books are in boxes. There will be painting of walls to do first, because the library is in what used to be a children’s playroom, painted lemon yellow and with cut-out woodland animals on the walls. I think there was a meme going around about women wanting a cottage in a forest with a herb garden and a library – and it does look as if I am getting close!

February 15, 2022
The Stone Age Jen Hadley

Published by Picador Poetry

I wrote last time about feeling like ‘a person’ through connections to place and community, and through the ways we communicate with them remember them and draw close. Jen Hadfield has a neurodivergent experience of being a person, and in The Stone Age she explores this. This is particularly fascinating to me, as my daughter was recently diagnosed as autistic. This has meant a radical reinterpretation of her history and current situation, and The Stone Age has provided an excellent commentary on the process.
Whereas the thrust of my thinking has been to expand my perception beyond the filters humans tend to impose on life, focussing not just on the human, but on the specific set of humans we recognise as ‘our people’, Hadfield struggles with the experience of having very few filters at all. Information about the world enters her mind in such a rush that it takes time to process:

Human communication is sometimes baffling to her – she describes feeling as if she is under an umbrella (Umbrella) and everyone else is out in the rain, breathing an atmosphere that would drown her, or broadcasting feelings like clanging bells, overwhelming her with incomprehensible alarm peals (Oyea). Yes, says my daughter, Like that.

Valuable as this is to me, and maybe many other people, it would be inappropriate to simply mine this book for human interest. Hadfield uses this unfiltered, uncategorised experience of the world to produce stunning and original poetry. Limpet divorces our language from its usual human references to neediness or greed. A limpet becomes a whirling dynamic purposeful creature ‘an introvert/tornado —- in an ease of gypsy skirts’ who matches her shell to its rostrum, locks itself deliberately into place. Landscape in Dolmen is not the observed, in spite of its arresting opening:
Standing Stone, let’s
Talk about
You!
Dolmen, Jen Hadfield

but an observer, saying –
humankind
are brief, soft
fireworks, prone
to go off at a moment’s
notice

and in Gyö the usual romantic presentation of landscape as a metaphor for human emotional states, (as indeed it was in my poem which I posted last time) is reversed, as the Gyö uses as emotions as metaphors for facets of its own existence:
I say rage is a cold
cliff; longing, a skerry. Pleasure is a kelp-hung arch, glittered
constantly by the licking of the wave.

I found reading this book to be like looking at a mirror-image of my take on the human place in the world, which has a particular fascination, but it is so much more than that. Hadfield’s use of language is wide-ranging and adventurous but highly crafted, and a particular delight. Shetlandic words are used without comment or gloss, binding the poems closely to their home-place. There are some quirky uses of punctuation in this book, and unusual layouts and fonts, which I didn’t quite get until I tried to quote the first poem here. They work not only on a visual (rather than cognitive) level, but also in a kinetic way, as the labour of reproducing them on the page conveyed meaning I hadn’t grasped. Jen Hadfield is a multi-faceted, gifted artist and poet, and this book is a must-read.

May 17, 2021
A Sup from the Well

The Gloup

I think of The Well of the Moon as a transitional book, perhaps more personal than the previous ones, certainly more ‘human’. There are a few poems about the brain-glitches that happened under stress, in revisiting painful memories or under medication (for migraines in this instance), glitches that made me feel lost, depersonalised, not properly ‘a person’.

The genesis of the book was an incident in 2017 when, for about a minute and a half, I literally lost my mind. This phenomenon has a posh name, transient global amnesia, which is – to use the technical language of the doctor who gave me a check-up afterwards, ‘a weird stressy kind of thing that happens in your brain’. It passed almost before I had time to notice, but I got fascinated by what was in it when I got it back – the kind of things that let you know who you are – language, perception, memories, connections of all sorts, work, and artistic expression. It made me focus on how important questions of connection and communication are to my work.

There is a lot of all those things in the book. I’ve used Old English and Oriental verse forms, and included translations from Latin, Old Norse and Old English. There are folklore references from Greece, Rome, Ireland and Iceland, and some local archaeology from the village of Cambuskenneth where I live.

In spite of the dramatic opening, I hope it is mostly a joyous and hopeful book. I’ve revelled in all the connections and expressions of creative responses to the world I’ve found, and though it wasn’t possible to avoid the whole pandemic upheaval completely, with all the troublesome issues it threw up, I do hope I’ve crafted a way through and out.

Here’s a taster, from the first section, Thought and Memory. The geo in the picture is The Gloup in Orkney.

Geo

This place reminded me of home,
but wasn’t, though the red Victorian
tenements looked right. Then I was gone.
My memory emptied itself like a geo
between tides, leaving wet echoing cliffs,
and glimpses of small damp things making
for the dark safety of the crumbling rock –
and the words, ‘I haven’t lived there for years.’

The broken paving slabs were solid under
boot-soles, street lights changed from red
to green. The empty husk of me walked on,
even talked, I think, but showed distress,
not knowing who was walking.
It asked itself how old it was, and how
did it keep walking with no-one in it?

A rising roaring tide – salt, heavy, bitter –
flowed in, filled up the empty caverns
with time and place, the weather of the day,
the busy sandstone Ibrox street.
Memories like kittiwakes alighted
on ledges in the rock, and made their nests.

Not knowing how old I was turned out to be really odd. It would appear that knowing your age is much more than knowing how to behave in an age-appropriate way.

The Logie Burn before it flows into the Forth

I’ll be writing more about geos next time – Jen Hadley has a Shetlandic Gyo in her fabulous new book The Stone Age, which I want to discuss.

May 3, 2021
The Marks on the Map

Brian Johnstone ARC Publications Ltd.
Brian Johnstone has been a pillar of the Scottish Poetry scene for the last thirty years – founder of Edinburgh’s Shore Poets, and the wonderful Platform at the Off the Rails Arthouse in Ladybank, and President of StAnza, his years of dedication have made an enormous contribution to putting poetry firmly on the cultural map of Scotland.
Sometimes the organisers of big events can find their admin roles overshadow their poetry, but here we have a chance to redress the balance in Johnstone’s latest collection, The Marks on the Map.

Maps are a record of landscapes at specific times, representations of what a place may mean to the mapmaker, and we see Johnstone discover lost crofts, overgrown pathways, an ‘archaeology of home’ (Primrose). In the title poem, a tramp maps the houses and farms he visits by the welcome – or lack of one – he receives there, we consider trees planted by a long-dead neighbour to mark a boundary (Policies), we observe the erratic stone left to provide a resting place for a coffin as it is brought to the graveyard (Coffin Road). The opening poem, A Back Street in Leith 1911, talks of ‘the fresh breeze of an age/that’s barely past‘ and Johnstone’s poems range from Edinburgh to Fife and to Crete, a place with which he has had a long connection, and through history, from the Arthur’s Seat coffins discovered in 1836, (The Arthur’s Seat Coffins) Robert Louis Stephenson’s map for Treasure Island (The Treasure Island Map) to the coal mines of Central Scotland which closed in the eighties (Coal Tattoo).

There are less sombre poems – there is the light-hearted A Declaration, which muses on the outcome of a piece of graffiti on a wall, and the robust assertion of the value of Sabbath-keeping in A Day of Rest, or of binmen in Man of Dust, and the joyous Handel Composes ‘The Harmonious Blacksmith’. However, the overwhelming tone of the collection is the impermanence of our knowledge – many of the poems speak of erasure, loss or abandonment. Outfield discusses a croft ploughed over by a neighbour, obliterating the disused footpaths and last stones of buildings shown on earlier maps and missing in later ones as the buildings fall into decay and are lost:

A slow collapse
to dereliction – flagged as ‘ruin’ there,
in brackets, on the map – then nothing

on the later OS sheets.

And in the final poem Meaning, we wonder if all human life is as ephemeral as the drawings a child makes in the condensation on a windowpane:

Only there when viewed at a slant
but lost with the swab of a hand.

Death overshadows the collection – in war in Resistant, Orcadian Gothic, most powerfully in Detail, a poem which will remain with me a long time:

They called a scare, a scare; a shock, a shock;
endurance indispensable. His to yomp away
into the future, that face ever there: a friend
who never said to him, Don’t bury me, but says it
every waking hour in all the trenches of his brain.

but most movingly in A Lock of Fleece

A lock of fleece
held tightly in the hand
when laid between the boards

enough to say this man
was never one to turn his face
away from God, say –

Look, a shepherd comes
to hills he only could imagine.
Now let him pass.

This book is a moving map of a personal as well as a poetic landscape.

April 1, 2021
StAnza On-Line

This is a picture from 2019, an exhibition in the foyer at the Byre Theatre, by the artist Nicola Martin. You might notice, along the bottom row, Haggards (launched at StAnza in 2018) peeping out from behind a picture. We weren’t there this year, but I have to admire wholeheartedly the way StAnza embraced the on-line experience, including zoom chats, a catch-up facility for when people couldn’t get to the event at the right time, some glimpses of poets at home in their usual working spaces, and walks with poets Helen Boden and Beth McDonough which wouldn’t have been possible in other circumstances. There were films, music and exhibitions as usual, slams and open mics, and opportunities for random chats outside the events via Discord and Zoom breakout rooms.

There were special highlights for me – the walks, I mentioned, Ella Frear’s ‘who is driving this poem?’ and Malika Booker’s hammock. Jacqueline Saphra’s lecture on seeing poetics forms as accessible to everyone struck a chord, and Raymond Antrobus’ clear-eyed but tender poetry was just the right note for the week which brought violence against women to our attention (again).

I have to say, I didn’t get to nearly as much of it as I usually do. The pandemic prevented me from going, and therefore blocking out the chunk of time I’d usually take, and family circumstances made it very difficult either to get to things, or to concentrate when I could. It was lovely to see people’s faces on the screen, but I couldn’t stay long enough to chat. Which brings me to the BIG contribution StAnza has made to my life as a poet. It creates one week in the year where I have time to focus on poetry. It’s a place where to take poetry seriously, think deeply about form and technique, to debate its function as if it mattered, is not only possible, but normal. It’s where you can go into bookshops and the books are there on display (it’s also the place where poetry sells out very fast, which is also a good thing). It’s a place where there is no divide between talent and audience, because all of us are at everything, and also in the coffee bars and restaurants (I once ate a croissant next to John Burnside in Costa) and hanging out in the Byre, because, just like at Lisdoonvarna, ‘you’d never know who’d be hanging about’. How I missed this!

The main point of this blog, however, is to praise Eleanor Livingstone who has been the backbone of StAnza for seventeen years and who has just stepped down as Director.

She has been wonderful. The organisation is always meticulous. She knows everybody’s name. The care she takes to make poets welcome, to look after them while there, and to make sure people are thanked is second to none. Under her care the festival has been innovative, inclusive, diverse, light-hearted as well as academic, engaged politically as much as aesthetically, experimanental without disowning the tradition. It is a hard act to follow. Her assistant throughout this time, Annie Rutherford, wrote:

Eleanor is the kind of leader the arts need more of. She’s been quietly lifting up poets and arts industry folk for years. She’s pushed the boundaries of what festivals can do. She’s erased hierarchies. She’s offered sustained support to emerging poets, while trying not to keep that support limited to a small group of people. She’s always made time for students, for emerging poets, for new voices – both on and off the stage. She’s constantly worked towards more openness, more accessibility, more diversity. When Covid hit last summer, her response was to offer paid commissions to as many poets who’d lost work as possible, in ways which offered people stuck at home consolation and inspiration. And she’s done all of this without shouting about what she’s doing, without ever asking for the kind of recognition she deserves

Poetry, in Scotland and beyond, owes her an enormous debt of gratitude. I can only say a profound ‘thank you’ to her for her support for my work in amongst all the bigger things, and wish her all the best for her retirement.

March 16, 2021
Poetry As Conversation

Back in 2017 I wrote a piece called Speaking Beings, about the film, Paterson, in which I talked about the social, conversational nature of poetry. Since lockdown, this has been hard to achieve, except on-line, and I have clearly missed it. No readings, little writing, even less conversation, and very few submissions – most of which did not go well. I dug myself into a typical poetic ivory tower, and reflected on the inwardness of poetic existence.

Well, sometimes! Clearly, there were external things going on in my life as much as anyone else’s, but as a poet, I might just as well have been at the bottom of a well. Until last week, when two things happened.

The first was reading a couple of poems at a Zoom writers’ group event. It was lovely to be doing it again, but it showed me how big a part of the writing process reading aloud and getting the feedback is. I will never be a performance poet, but the sound and flow of what I write is really important to me, and you don’t get how it works until you have read it aloud and someone has listened. You also don’t realise, until you introduce a poem, how much is implied, rather than stated, or how much context it needs, and that’s a really important part of my reviewing process.

The second was sending my nearly-finished manuscript to two friends to read it for me. Both are working hard at their own projects just now, so this was fairly cheeky, but they are people whose judgement I value enormously, and it was the best thing I could have done. The level of engagement was beyond the missed commas (many of those) and clumsy expressions (also more than I would have liked), but criticism that made me ask myself why I had written these poems, what I was trying to achieve, and connect technique with meaning, as well as effect. It was a wonderful experience, I can’t recommend it too highly!

Poetry as dialogue has always seemed to me important as a way of being in the world, but it is also an important part of the composition process. If you are the sort of poet who doesn’t read other poets for fear of being influenced, or if you go from amassing a heap of poems to trying to get a book out (especially if you want to self-publish), your work is almost inevitably half-finished, and you are selling yourself short.

So this blog post goes out as a special thankyou to Rothbury Writers Group, Helen Boden, and John Bolland, for getting me out of the well, and beyond them, to all the writers groups, events organisers, festivals, competitions and magazine editors who have been part of my life as a writer. You make my work what it is.

February 10, 2021
The Well of the Moon

This was taken at New Grange, looking over the Boyne Valley, where Finn got his wisdom. The famous story, which you’ll find referred to on the poetry page is about cooking the salmon of wisdom and is all about how destiny will get the good stuff to the right person, but there is another story, referred to in Lady Gregory’s Gods and Fighting Men, and nowhere else, as far as I can see, about how Finn went to the Well of the Moon, which was guarded by the daughters of Beag, son of Boan (the goddess of the Boyne river) to get the sort of wisdom poets need. They wouldn’t give him any water, but when he tried to take some, one of them emptied a bottle of it over him —

The result (allegedly) is a pair of poems which are frequently anthologised, on the subject of summer and winter. I like Lady Gregory’s translation, because it includes the line: ‘the talking of rushes has begun’. The whole landscape seems alive, waterfalls calling out, seas asleep or awake, plants talking to each other, horses and people alert and active. These poems make the point that poetry is a matter of attention to all the beings of the world, listening trying to understand and communicate.

Which is a long way of getting to a bit of news that I sneaked out on Twitter last week. Thanks to the phenomenal organisation of Sheila Wakefield, battling through the havoc created by the pandemic, Red Squirrel Press have given the next collection a publication date – in May – and, after a lot of swithering, dithering and distraction, I have a final title: The Well of the Moon. This is also the title of a sequence of five poems, including Burnedthumb, which are the heart and pivot of the book. Because of the Burnedthumb motif, there are a few rather free translations or perhaps, responses to translations, in it, from Old English, Old Norse, and Latin. Honestly, I didn’t realise how much of this I had done, and why it was so important to my work.

The Latin one is a hymn to St Felix by a poet called Paulinus of Nola, whom I found in The Wandering Scholars, by Helen Waddell. He was a bishop of Nola (354-431) whom Waddell mentions as a pupil of the poet Ausonius (310-395), in connection with poems Ausonius wrote to him, lamenting the fact that Paulinus didn’t visit. This struck a chord with me, because no-one is visiting anyone just now, and as it turns out that it is the feast of St Felix today, I found myself writing this:

For Distant Friends

Written on 14^th January 2021

It is the feast of Felix, and though the snow
makes roads a penance, I am working
on a springtime poem from a long dead man
in Italy. He serves a shrine to Felix, ransoms slaves,
sends loving poems to his teacher, missing him.
The teacher comments, ‘He answered many things,
but did not say that he would come’.
My friends, I can’t come either. More
than winter weather, bad roads, the fall of empires
keeps us apart, but like Paulinus, I send you
poems of love, of memory, of debts I owe you,
hope for better times, a promise to keep you
close to my heart, although I cannot come.

waterfall at Glendalough

January 14, 2021
The Season of the Witch

This is the title of a song by Donovan – you can hear it here. But it’s also an appropriate title for what’s happened here in the Haggard. Lockdown has given me more chance to read, and though its fair to say a lot of it has been thoughtless escapist reading, there has been a lot of reading that was truly excellent, thought-provoking, joyful or inspiring. For poetry there was Seán Hewitt, Rebecca Sharp, Natalie Diaz and David Morley, but there has also been prose from Alice Tarbuck, Rebecca Tamás, Elizabeth Jane Burnett and William Least-Heat Moon.

While I’ve been thinking about the burned thumb legends, Finn and the salmon, Sigurd and the dragon’s heart and the cauldron of Ceridwen for the next collection, it occurred to me how much of today’s writing concerns by crossing the barriers between us and the other creatures we share the world with. There is a lot of shamanic writing about, and a lot of witches.
There was a time when witches on the internet were gentle wise earth-mother people, much into self-care and spirituality, the sort I had in mind in my poem in Haggards:

She haunts you, that possible self,
a wise earth mother, whose pots
run over with good food, medicine,
dyes for hand spun wool, or soap.
There’s comfort in that channelled woman
who knows her place, seductive
as Circe, but nurturing, her power
contained in that small scented realm.
There’s glamour there, the lure
of home, an art-nouveau dream
of flowing skirts, long hair,
a voice of power, though gentle,
glimpsed firesides, the feel of magic
in the dim cave of your house,
archetypal,
Dreaming of Herb Gardens

You can still find many of them at the Earth Pathways Diary, (where, however, they are very much less quietist than you might think). They were peaceful, misunderstood but anti-intellectual and a little bit anarchic, no threat to anyone really, and wasn’t it a shame that so many were burned?

These witches are not at all like that. A lot of the witch-writing is not only heavy-duty intellectual, but academic, and it is no longer a gentle faerie aesthetic side-line to mainstream culture, but is seriously engaged in creativity, environmental activism, feminism and politics.

Alice Tarbuck

Alice Tarbuck’s A Spell in the Wild looks at first sight to be a book of the familiar sort, with its recipes, its lyrical nature writing and its reminiscences. It is a most endearing and engaging read, but it deftly tucks a lot of something much more subversive and interesting under its ‘broad-brimmed fetching black hat’. Tarbuck is very clear about the fallacy of romantic connections with beautiful or wild spaces as a prerequisite for magical connection. Witchcraft for Tarbuck is not an aesthetic nor an escape from uncomfortable reality. She writes graphically about the squalor of the urban settings most people have access to, finding as much connection to the weeds growing in cracks in tarmac and gulls scavenging among the litter as among woods and fields and mountains.

We’d like to do our magic in beautiful places: in green fields by clear rivers, in lovely cottages, all stone and roses round the door. But the world is full of municipal buses, and drying greens, and scrubby grass that’s been kicked up by football boots. It’s full of squirrels eating spring bulbs and broken bottles on pavements and uncollected Christmas trees, and dog shit. It’s full of crumbling flats and expensive heating, and friends we love getting fucked over for jobs, or getting ill. It is full of precarity, and worry, fascist governments continents catching fire and the long shadow of global pandemic. P 9.
We bring things into relation with ourselves, to help us practise effectively, but those things can be, well, almost anything. Empty pizza boxes, our child’s crayons, whatever we have to hand —We make magic as best we can, with what we have, acknowledging that everything in the world, from the most beautiful thing to the least, exists in relationship to us. P11
A Spell in the Wild, p 9-11

Her understanding of witchcraft is explicitly inclusive, avoiding some of the pitfalls that plague a lot of pagan groups – nativism, heteronormative assumptions or preoccupation with giftedness. It is grounded very firmly in her urban experience of precarious employment, deprivation, marginalised communities and environmental destruction. It questions the oppressive structures of society and creates agency in a world where we are increasingly directed to become cogs in the machine.

Rebecca Sharp

Rebecca Sharp published a pamphlet called The Beginners recently in which she and sound artist Simon Whetham create images and sounds relating to human occupation and abandonment of landscapes. Opening with the phrase, ‘This is becoming a ritual’, the images and texts establish a process of connecting and learning, leaving and re-learning what it means to live in places that may be new to us, but have an old life of their own.

In an earlier work, Peripheral Visions: Edge Hill Arcana, she uses tarot to unlock creative responses to various locations around the university. As she explains in the accompanying essay it is ‘a creative response that aims to restore ‘individual perception, practice and agency’ while nourishing meaningful experiences of connection: demonstrating the ability of those divinatory objects and systems in the construction of meaning story and place.’ (p54) Divination, she points out, is less prophecy and more imaginative reconstruction of perceived norms – a desire to reclaim individual identity and agency in the world’ (p56).

Rebecca Tamás

Rebecca Tamás goes one giant step further. In The Songs of Hecate: Poetry and the Language of the Occult, an article in The White Review (issue 24 march 2019) she writes:

My particular occult interest is the witch – the witch as an explosively radical female figure, a site of resistance, a way out of silence and silencing. What she has made possible for me is a new relationship with poetic speaking, with the power of the word, and with what that power might make possible for liberatory, feminist thinking.The Songs of Hecate
The Songs of Hecate

In her collection Witch, she does just this, in explosively original poetry. Here the witch comments on the suffragettes:

Again somehow the witch finds it is about eating and not eating
they don’t eat and so they are made to eat
she asks a policeman ‘what is it with this eating thing?’
but he doesn’t know why just that when a woman eats
she is eating for the state
when she watches her friend forced to lie back and be fed
she retches
the feeding is the same as being sick it is the same as not
being fed because it leaves you hungry
ghost meal fattened with air.
WITCH AND THE SUFFRAGETTES

Tamás gleefully embraces all the misogynistic stereotypes thrown at women – witch, hooligan, nag, sex demon – and uses them in a blazing critique of the whole patriarchal hegemony from capitalism to religious orthodoxies, government to academia, right down to the philosophical gate-keeping of assumptions about ‘rationality’. I have been impressed with this book since I read it, but when I went through looking for quotes, I realised I’d forgotten how adventurous it really is. It is hard to find quotes suitable for this blog, though – when the cover describes it as a ‘small bright filthy song’, that isn’t an understatement.
As a Catholic, I have enough rituals and symbols in my life already, and there are a lot of places where I would disagree strenuously with many of the arguments made in these books. But I can’t deny we need such a radical rethink of current orthodoxies, and there is plenty of find common ground. My attention was drawn, when I was writing the ‘valiant women’ section of The Wren in the Ash Tree for Haggards, to the way women activists often act out of an awareness of the connections between campaigning for their own rights to tackling poverty and environmental exploitation.

Women whose signals were sent
through poetry and politics, songs
and planted forests, women whose voices
cry out for the poor, for democracy,
for the life of women, for the earth.
The Wren in the Ash Tree: There are Lights

In Strangers, Tamás makes this connection more explicit, writing about ‘watermelon people’, green outside, socialist within. I’ll finish with her vision of a world that is really willing to tackle the problems we face.

‘such a radically different world may not be as comfortable as what we in the west currently experience. It might, however, be a world with many more forms of thinking available to us – of joy, of freedom, of pleasure, of community, of self-worth and of love’
Strangers, p23

November 27, 2020

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