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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

Poetry

The Wren in the Ash Tree
The last twenty pages of Haggards contain a long poem called The Wren in the Ash Tree. I’ve been going on about it , it seems like forever, and bits of it have appeared in Dark Mountain 9 and on this blog here, but now you will be able to get the whole thing.

It was inspired by Sorley Maclean’s ‘An Cuillithionn’ (‘The Cuillin‘, 1939), which I read two years ago. At that time,we hadn’t yet had the major political upheavals that were to happen, but I could see which way the wind was blowing, and I really thought we might be in for a major collapse of both environment and society. I was trying to chart both the progress of decay and the intellectual dereliction that made it possible, and, hopefully, find perspectives that might encourage us not to despair completely.

I chose the wren almost at random, because I love wrens, and because the song of wrens in the trees surrounding our garden often accompanies my writing. It was particularly fortuitous, as when I started research, I discovered its traditional use as the symbol of enlightenment, inspiration and creativity. I got hold of the definitive study of wrens The Wren by Edward A. Armstrong (published by Collins in 1955, and never bettered), and used his extensive research to structure the poem.

It is in seven cantos (including Prologue and Epilogue!) in tribute to Sorley Maclean, but it isn’t nearly as long. The cantos are
- The Bird that Brought the Fire, which sets the scene and introduces the wren marking its territory
- The Outcry, which is a protest from the earth about the wreck of our environment.
- Fuga Mundi, which evokes the responses I was hearing from activists and concerned people; the wren in this canto is surviving the harsh weather of winter
- There are Lights. This canto was originally going to be called Our Lady of Sorrows, and deal with compassion, but the election of Trump intervened, and more particularly, the Women’s March, so now it is about the networks of women who quietly resist destruction. The wrens in this canto are nest building, and it it noticeable that Armstrong sees this process as happening through negotiation and dialogue between male and female birds.
- Soil and Seed, which deals with both the literal soil beneath our feet, and, metaphorically, with the collective unconscious. In this canto the wrens are on the nest, and eggs hatch. Recent research suggests that chicks crack the egg shell only in response to the ‘whispering’ of a parent bird, and they can recognise their own parent.
- A Web of Speaking Beings was inspired by a quote from Colin Tudge which is used as the epigraph. I am very taken by Julia Kristeva’s idea of the human as a ‘speaking being’ whose identity is formed in dialogue with the people around him, but in this quote I saw that this applies to the whole of material existence. The young birds fledge at the end of this canto.
- In the Silence of Our Hearts talks about the moment of insight which might begin the process of regeneration.
By the end of the writing process, the poem wasn’t about collapse so much as regeneration. Donald Trump and Brexit may have divided people and caused havoc, but they have also united people who are simply not up for letting this happen. I started writing in despair, and I finished, not only with vision, but with gratitude, courage and hope.

I do hope you like it!
January 11, 2018
New Year, New Book

As it’s only just over a month until the launch of Haggards, I guess it’s time I started talking about it a bit! I don’t have a cover image yet but I hope these roses will give you a taste of what’s to come. They are growing in a stretch of wild land near my house. They are one of nine herbs I picked to write about in a poem called A Charm of Nine Haggard Herbs.

A ‘haggard’ is a patch of rough ground, too small to be cultivated. It often refers to where Irish labourers were allowed to grow food for themselves, but it survives in Ireland for patches of wasteland or hedgerow. Seamus Heaney uses it in Servant Boy –

your trail

broken from haggard to stable,
a straggle of fodder
stiffened on snow,
comes first-footing

the back doors of the little
barons:

but I confess I found the word in a cookery book. It’s exactly the concept I wanted for the book. I started by thinking of borderlands – here’s what I wrote in a piece called Maquis Machair Mearc:

The eleventh design principle of permaculture is to ‘use edges and value diversity’ – you can find the rest here if you’d like to follow them up. The reason is that where two sectors overlap, the border region shares characteristics of both, and can support more (species, ideas, artforms, activities) than either sector by itself. Permaculture design in landscape tends to create a lot of margins, most notably in the iconic herb spiral, specifically to maximise the different crops which can be grown in a small space.

Herbs are a great example of being on the edge. Herbs touch borders on a practical level with cooking, fabric crafts, housekeeping, medicine, magic, animal husbandry, but also culturally with values of simplicity, authentic living, connection with nature, feminism, healing, spirituality, value for the senses and the body, recovery of one’s personal identity, resistance, repentance, wildness, renewal. There’s a lot of potential in herbs, for all sorts of reasons. I’m going for a dander along the edges of the garden, the roadside, the riverbank – and the uncanonical margins of the poetry world.

Now here I have to admit that I have been somewhat seduced by language. The headline of this post is a coincidental resemblance I’ve had in my head for some years, and it may be spurious. I was thinking of borderland country, marginal, a bit precarious, but which is characterised by a wealth of flowering plants, and surprising survivals – black bees on the machair of Coll, or the French resistance, that sort of thing. But the maquis isn’t the fragrant hillside, full of bees and lavender and sage and hyssop. That’s the garrigue. And the mearc is a more political thing – the badlands where law doesn’t run, and monsters may lurk among the outlaws. The English-speaking equivalent of the machair is the hedgerow, with its associations with foraged herbs, sloes and blackberries, and also the hedge witch, the hedge school, the tramps and vagabonds. But all of these borderland places have surprising riches and revelations. They are places that should be cherished wisely.

A haggard is exactly that sort of place. It also evokes grief, and something untameable (and it was an insult usually applied to a woman perceived to be beyond domestic control), which turned out to be more relevant to the themes of the book than I expected when I started!

The first section of Haggards is called Wild-Crafted. It has poems about wild land, and what you might find there, about grief and resilience, and new, or recovered old, ways of learning and seeing the world. The second is called Materia Medica, and has poems about the individual herbs, the many different ways we think about them, and the different kinds of healing they offer, some of which have nothing to do with physical health, but with connection and creativity. The last section is The Wren in the Ash Tree, but I’ll leave that for next time. It’s a big beast of a poem. It will take a while —

In the meantime, Happy New Year!

January 4, 2018
Red Yellow Blue

This plant is tansy. It’s a terrible thrawn persistent weed, but it yields a dye that makes interesting shades of yellow and green.

Ever since Alice Oswald’s talk abut translating colours in Greek texts, I’ve been thinking on and off, about how we perceive and respond to colour. There has even been some debate on Facebook about whether the Celts or the Greeks could even see colours like blue, as there doesn’t seem to be a word for it in early texts.

This doesn’t necessarily follow. I remember my youngest daughter playing with a box of coloured plastic cotton reels just after her first birthday. Although she was beginning to talk, she hadn’t got as far as numbers or colours, but there she was, completely unprompted, sorting the cotton reels into their separate heaps – red, green, white, yellow and blue, without any mistake or uncertainty. I guess what you speak about depends on what’s important to you.

Alice Oswald analysed the word ‘glaucopis’ which is usually applied to the goddess Athena, and often translated as ‘grey-eyed’, but she points out that the word actually means something more like ‘lively and responsive’ – perhaps even changeable – and sparkling. I thought of Tolkien’s description of the grey elf-cloaks the hobbits are given, which actually change to reflect light, grass, forest or water because, they elves say ‘we put the thought of all we love into what we make.’ Tint or pigment doesn’t seem to be on the elves’ radar either. What we record is not necessarily all we see.

Somehow, sitting in a tent at the Edinburgh Book Festival, a germ of an idea came, for the next step after Haggards, and some new writing. I thought I’d look at colour – what we see and how we say it, what we mean by it and how it makes us feel. And I thought I’d look at dye plants and how traditional techniques connect with the landscape, and then textile art especially as practised by women — it fair got away with me.

Last week at the Burgh Poets meeting, I wrote the first few poems. Here’s one:

Wine-Dark

The sea is dark,
full waves just before breaking
tinted with lowering cloud
like ripely swollen berries,
like a calyx about to burst with bloom,
a child with a birthday cake
just before the explosion of tears,
like an angry choleric face.

August 23, 2017
What I’ve Been Reading

I had some thoughts about writing ‘poet of the month’ posts, and I had a list of poets I wanted to read, or re-read, and talk about. But life, as it does, intervened, and I haven’t done any of them apart from Jim Carruth, whose post you can see here.

I have been reading a lot though, and here are some of the highlights:

Love is a Place, by Joan Magarit, an aging man, confronting death and finding that the answer is love. Does it sound like a cliche? It isn’t, because it is determinedly unsentimental, unsweet and honest. Also concise, and perfectly crafted. Anna Crowe has done a fabulous job of the translation, too.

The Blind Roadmaker by Ian Duhig. On one level a virtuoso exercise in form, not just poetic, like alliterative verse, sonnet, ballad and so on, but sometimes deriving from folk dance rhythms too. But it’s also a consideration of the creation of stories, songs, poems and myths, with a powerful reflection on truth and integrity in story-telling and cultural appropriation. This poem, which you can find at the link below, was an instant favourite, but some of the other, less accessible poems will stay with me longer.

Void Studies by Rachel Boast, from which I learned that abstract doesn’t necessarily mean vague or arid, academic and intellectual or impersonal. Abstract can be vivid and sensual, and take you to ways of speaking about the world that you didn’t expect.

I have got hold of a few books that I haven’t read yet, but I’ve heard some of the poets reading over the last few days at the Edinburgh International Book Festival – Imtiaz Darker taught me that repetition has more to do than creating structural patterns or catchphrases. Rachel McCrum put a depth of resonance to work that performs powerfully but also sits well on the page. JL Williams created a new poem about the Sator Square which shows that playing with words is not mere trickery and mystification, but unfolds aspects of thought and belief that we need to understand in a world of media manipulation.

Sometimes it’s easy to think of reading as a distraction from writing, but goodness, it’s worth it.

https://npd.howoco.net/poem/bridled-vows/

August 16, 2017
StAnza 2017 Recurring Motifs

Poor internet connections have slowed the process of theses blog posts, but given me time to think over what to say – you are, of course also reading the in-house posts? you can find them here if you haven’t seen them already, and there are facebook and twitter feeds with photographs too.

I’ve talked a lot about how friendly StAnza is, and about how it is full of the meetings of friends. I love this aspect of the festival, because when you don’t live at the heart of poetry action, it is something to cherish, but it did make me wonder if I had created the impression of something rather cosy and inward-looking. Is it no more than the reunion of the same old faces?

The festival has a policy of not asking anyone back to do a similar event in less than five years, so the readers are always new, and you never get the same masterclass or workshop twice. And the regular features, Border Crossings and Past and Present, are designed to encourage more adventurous perspectives. Setting themes – this years were On the Road and The Heights of Poetry – encourages the planners to have a deliberate focus on something new every year, and there is an attempt to invite poets from a wide variety of countries, though this is inevitably limited by financial considerations. As a regular attendee, I’m constantly challenged by new ways of presenting poetry, new poetic forms, new writers.

But every year there are motifs which recur, in different contexts. This year it was so often the constraints on writing: on writing in this language rather than that, on finding the right kind of language – Alice Oswald’s ‘winged words’, which evoke a response, create a buzz of communication between people, a ‘through-movement’ she called it, as opposed to ‘wingless words’ which fall into empty air and are disregarded – on writing if you are perceived as being too young, or if your national identity is perceived as complicated, on writing about ambivalent feelings towards your own country (or your own people), on writing to make contact, create lines of communication rather than barriers, on finding the right words to render another person’s insight, on writing in forms that other people don’t recognise as being ‘proper’ poetry, or crossing barriers between prose and poetry, literature and art or film.

I had the feeling that this year StAnza was a kind of breathing space where poets could speak or write or experiment with ways of communicating freely. A place where many people said, ‘It is okay to say this here’. This is more than a poetry party; it’s where art begins to take on its responsibility towards a whole culture. More power to its elbow!

March 6, 2017
Valiant Women: Extract from The Wren in the Ash Tree

Today I heard that Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced during a debate ; that the White House has said it will denounce anything it chooses as ‘fake news’ until media outlets realise that it is wrong to criticise the President; that the Dakota Pipeline is to go through after all; that the President has publicly threatened to break the career of a lawyer who opposed him.

There isn’t much I can do about any of this, and anyway there are plenty of Americans dealing with it (otherwise I wouldn’t even have heard about it). And Trump, although he is the comic-book coloured archetype of all the things that threaten decent human life on earth, is not the only villain, nor even the most dangerous. Our own government will bear close watching – a more polished demeanour and the trappings of an ancient parliament is a good camouflage for behaviour that is remarkably similar to the US colour-me-melodramatic destruction of the environment, social services, working conditions and respect for equality and diversity.

But what I can do is share a bit of my long poem which deals with women’s resistance to injustice. I started it when I found stories of feminist activism that somehow got edited out of public history – especially here in Scotland. In the last week or two my list of valiant women has got longer, and I’m going to have to exert some control before it overwhelms the whole poem. It’s interesting how often women have found that issues which start as one thing rapidly become connected. The personal is political – and so is the environmental, and the economic and the historical.

I’ve put links to information about these women on this page, which is a nice thing this blog lets me do (might have to put a notes page in the book!)

The air is cold towards dusk, and
the quiet lanes and curtained homes
are haunted by grief, rage, isolation
poverty, loss and fear.
But in the gloom there are lights
shining as women kindle fires,
put lamps in windows, look out
for the lost, the returning family,
the friends in need of shelter.
Every writing, cooking, walking,
protesting woman is a signal tower,
creates a net to catch us when we fall.

The voices of the dark will say
A whistling woman and a crowing hen
Will drive the devil out of his den,
But still the signals go on. There are voices.
There are lights. ——

But who will now praise famous women?
Who will remember Joanna Macy,
Elizabeth Warren, Mhairi Black,
Kathy Ozer, Rachel Carson,
Josephine Bacon, Malala Yousafzai,
Dorothy Stang, Berta de Caceres
Wangari Maathai, Mary Barbour,
Big Mary Macpherson of the Songs,
or Mary Brooksbank of Dundee?
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.

And who will praise the women in their millions
Who walked in pink hats, under rainbow flags
on January twenty-first, on seven continents,
And not one arrest anywhere on earth?
Women from the CND, from Jeely Peace,
the greens,the ones who fought
for fair trade,for women’s refuges,
Equality,or welcome for the stranger,
All walked and sang, spoke out for truth.

This will probably have to be revised quite a bit, because you get to a point where people then start asking why this woman and not that, and I want a range of the different ways significant women have inspired me. But here’s a start. All the valiant women of the world, I salute you!

February 8, 2017
Speaking Beings

I’ve been to see Paterson, and I am frustrated, intrigued, and in the end fairly outraged by it. You may have seen it – or plan to see it, but in case you didn’t, the blurb reads:

A hardworking bus driver (Adam Driver) in Paterson, N.J., writes heartfelt poems every day before his shift begins.

In the first place, they aren’t ‘heart-felt’, if by that you mean the outpourings of a gifted but instinctive untutored genius. They are carefully crafted and highly accomplished poems in the style of William Carlos Williams (who gets a lot of references in the film), and I quite like them. The bus driver has obviously been very well educated and has chosen to live as a bus driver for unspecified reasons, which never quite become clear. He may even like it, or like the town where he lives, but we can’t be sure, as he spends most of the film looking morose and misunderstood. He lives with his wife, a woman who paints everything in black and white and dreams of being a country singer – although she can’t even play a guitar, and running her own cupcake business. She wants him to publish his poems, but he doesn’t even make copies of them, and they get eaten by their dog.

The denouement of the film comes when he is given a new notebook by a Japanese tourist and begins to write again. Poetry, it seems, is not for publication or reward. It is a private act of personal integrity – a quiet, unshowy keeping faith with oneself, and not for anyone else.

It says a lot for this film that I can understand that this might be a credible outcome. The fault may be in the direction or the acting, but I came out of it raging. A little bit of humour, contentment or openness might have made the whole proposition seem more plausible, but the inflated reverence for the central character raises some ugly issues. The other residents of the town are presented as harmless but self-deluding fantasists, playing at love, or politics or careers; Paterson doesn’t share or even talk about his work with them, and we feel we are being told they are unworthy of it. His indulgence of his wife’s whims looks patronising (her interior designs are actually stunning – think less Cruella de Ville, more Bridget Riley, and her cupcake business is a success), and his refusal to read her his poems – which she obviously loves, and understands – is hurtful, especially as he spends a lot of time by himself writing them. And leaving his book about is probably the most passive-aggressive thing I’ve seen on film, calculated to show her that her appreciation doesn’t matter to him at all. And his assertion at the end that he is a bus driver, not a poet, is a lie.

Now I do buy the possibility of poetry as a spiritual practice. And I do buy that you don’t actually have to publish poetry if you write it. But then you can’t use it as your way of being in the world. I am very taken with Julia Kristeva’s idea that humans are ‘speaking beings’ – which implies that we not only have something we need to express, but also that we need an experience that something will listen and respond. Our lives are a constant dialogue, not only with the people we live with, but with the weather and our environment, the news we listen to, the work we do, the things we work on. If you write poetry for yourself only, it might help you focus on the conversations you most need to have – but your conversation with the world has to have something else in it, not just a sullen with-holding silence.

Over the years I’ve seen many conversations about who can be called a poet, and I like to keep the term as inclusive as possible, without issues of quality or relevance or recognition. I don’t like to see it as a status, especially not an elevated elitist one,and I really don’t like to see the kind of debate that inhibits anyone from presuming to write. But I think the difference between ‘someone who writes poetry’ and ‘a poet’, is that a poet sees her work as her way of engaging with the world – as a part of her conversation with the world that she is accountable for. Publication, recognition or reward may not be relevant. But communication, listening, responding, making a gift of your work that is of some worth – that’s the point.

Today I hand over to the next Makar of the Federation of Writers (Scotland) – Andy Jackson. He has two collections published by Red Squirrel Press, and has edited the anthologies Split Screen and Double Bill, which have given so much joy, both on the page and in performance. He also writes Otwituaries, tweet-length obituaries of significant people – you aren’t properly dead until Andy has recorded the fact! I would like to take the occasion to thank the Federation for a wonderful year, and hope that Andy has as much fun as I did!

December 15, 2016
Melissa Officinalis

https://www.poetry-festival.co.uk/poetica-botanica/

This is the link to the Poetica Botanica project I was involved in earlier this summer at Ledbury Poetry Festival. If you scroll down the page you will come to my poem, Melissa Officinalis, but also to a sound recording of me reading it, made during the festival. You can hear how long I have been in Scotland by the way I pronounce my ‘r’s, but the original scouse shows up in words like ‘lack’. I am very glad of this!

Thanks to Ledbury Poetry Festival and Hellens Garden Festival, for including this fascinating project, and to Adam Horovitz who developed and led it.

September 14, 2016
What I’m Reading in August

A couple of weeks ago we went to see the Celts exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland (fascinating, and on until the 25th September if you haven’t seen it), and so I’ve been reading The Celts by Nora Chadwick. It is an old book – I got it in a secondhand bookshop – and scholarship has moved on a lot since then. I’m not sure that we would want to measure cultural advancement by the yardstick of Classical civilisation these days, and there is a lot more material to draw on, but this is the book that raised the bar on Celtic Studies, and has given me a good place to start from as I get deeper into the subject.

At a different tangent I’ve read The Secret Life of God by Alex Klaushofer, which deals with non-conformist religious observance among in Britain of all sorts, from Catholic nuns to Islamic and pagan groups and solitaries. It’s an easy read, thoughtful and respectful of all the groups the author meets, and it becomes clear that while religious structures and institutions are having some serious problems, spirituality itself is thriving.

I’ve also read If Women Rose Rooted by Sharon Blackie. It’s not quite the book I thought it was going to be. It isn’t a survey of Celtic myths and stories from a woman’s point of view, though it does contain some well-told stories, and it isn’t a workbook for women to go on a spiritual quest themselves,though there is a short summary of the ‘heroine’s journey’ at the end, but a themed autobiographical account of Sharon Blackie’s own spiritual and geographic journey, paralleled by the stories of several other women (some of whom I know and admire greatly). It’s a well-crafted book, and a satisfying read, but —–

I think, because my journey is almost entirely the reverse of hers, from almost drowning in domesticity and earth-consciousness to the practice of my creativity and intellectual skills, I’m a bit wary of the earth-mother archetype. It can make a great excuse for women to be prohibited from education or public life. It can become a prison as surely as the relentless grind of working for the man. I’m not really convinced by this book at all.

I have a lot of poetry to be reading too – Clare Pollard’s Ovid’s Heroines, which I’ve just started and Falling Awake by Alice Oswald. I went to see her read at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and the event was unforgettable. I’ve never been at a reading where there was such a complete silence, and the applause was like thunder. I may review these books soon. On the other hand, words might fail me.

August 21, 2016
What I’m Reading

I’ve always had a thing about wrens. I think it may have had something to do with being small myself, and the fact that wrens were usually known as ‘jenny’, which was something of a rarity in the macho bird-watching culture I grew up in. Later I rather liked the fact that they are pretty loud for such a small bird, though this was somewhat damped by the revelation that it is the male who sings, claiming his territory. I like the effrontery of the ‘king of the birds’ story, where the wren hitches a ride on the eagles back so it reaches the highest flight, and I love the association of wrens with druids and bards.

Michael Hartnett has a wonderful poem called The Necklace of Wrens, which you can hear here, and which inspired this lovely piece of music by The Gloaming.

But what I’m reading just now is a monograph, The Wren by Edward A Armstrong, a summary of the extensive research Armstrong carried out over several years from 1943-48. It is an exhaustive study, explaining a lot of what has puzzled me about the wrens I see and hear, and with a lot of information about territory, nesting behaviour, and why I’m hearing wrens singing now. Wrens are going to be significant players in the long poem, so it has already paid off.

But also, while I’ve been running about getting to readings and so on, I’ve been catching up on other things. Common Ground by Rob Cowen was pleasant, if slightly heavy, but covered familiar ground – a man’s personal growth reflected in his engagement with an area of wild land.

More interesting, though a slightly frustrating read, was the twin volumes of poetry by Sean Borodale Bee Journal and Human Work. There’s something about a man discovering the inner meaning of jam making and stewing apples that is going to be a bit irritating if you’ve put in forty years of domesticity to the accompaniment of people telling you your perspective is too narrow and over-familiar. And yet, I nonetheless found myself fascinated by the focus of poems written in the middle of the process – what Borodale calls ‘lyrigraphs’. Physically the manuscripts are marked with splashes and pollen and mud and flour, but more importantly, the lines are shaped by the pauses and rhythms of the work in progress, and the perspective – very close observation, but without the baggage of repetition, tradition or the many other conjoined tasks of a kitchen – made me think again about the possibilities of writing – the capacity of poetry to transform and re-engage with received wisdom.

The long poem is taking me into strange places and making many new discoveries. I have a lot of research to do, but the first twenty lines are written!

July 29, 2016

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