Eco-Poetry: unearthing what’s always been there
Barberry in Blue Sky, Holes Bay, Dorset (I learnt that clusters of three berries identify the bush as ‘native’).
Many people have influenced my writing - throughout my life’s stages. I’ve found myself inspired by the wide continuum of Pastoral and Beat poetry - Keats milked it, TS Eliot broke it down and Steve Turner, well come on! - I was able to embrace all of them (within reason). If there’s too much of anything I just seem to want to break it up and shake it up. When I’ve run workshops with children and young people I love the regular comment
“I’ve learnt that poems don’t have to rhyme!” - result.
Copper Sulphate Love
Copper Sulphate it was,
Sky like that
With clouds of precipitation,
Floating on.
Copper Sulphate love,
was it an explosion,
No pulled by strings above
Explosions don’t make love.
cp30 November 1980
Deeply in love - this poem was written in my head walking up Red Lion Road to my girlfriend’s. I always look up! The blue sky contrasted the cream concrete and the greyness of suburbia as I saw it back then.
I need to establish that I grew up in a suburban context, on Red Lion Road, that links a main artery to the A3 between Guilford and Roehampton and the postal course from Epsom to Kingston upon Thames. Surrey yes, comfy no! My ancestors lived (and were raised) on Red Lion Road, but they knew it as countryside, allotments, with clay feeding the brick making and osiery beds, the wicker industries. So I guess it’s in the genes. Further back on my Father’s side in the 19th and 18th centuries they worked the land, in Wiltshire - ‘Agrarian Labourers’ the Censuses inform me. My Mother at 95 still recounts stories of walking through countryside in the environs of her upbringing in Derby, The Midlands.
Mum used to take us to, The Fishponds on the Ewell Road between Tolworth and Surbiton and at weekends we would explore various cricket pitches around Surrey, while Dad excelled at his love and passion for cricket - Mum did the teas and knitted! The point being, we escaped from our suburban concrete - our 2 down three up (over a shop) backed onto a small engineering firm where oil and metal filled our senses - to the country.
Once a year, for two precious weeks we would be by the sea, “To breathe in the ‘owzone’!” as my Dad would delight in telling us. Clambering up sand dunes and peering into rock pools, running along the foreshore feeling the ridges of the hard sand under my feet, I would run and run and run.
RiverRun ‘For Earth’s Sake’
I received a link to the RiverRun Eco Poetry project and found myself in Nature, writing for the day with Eco Poet and Mentor Helen Moore helenmoorepoet.com as part of Cape Farewell’s For Earth’s Sake project in the lead up to the COP26 the United Nation’s conference on Climate Change.
Now I’m learning as I approach self-publishing some of my work, to have my poems pored over and commented on. I’m not one who has readily signed up for ‘writing workshops’ in the past. But I’m piecing back the abilities and skills that I have and so off I went to Upton Country Park where three of us assembled with Helen. On my way out, wrapped up appropriately for the changeable Autumn weather, I grabbed my Dad’s old flat cap. The size of the group (and Dad’s cap!) comforted me and after brief introductions off we went into the wooded parts of the park that I know so well leading down to Holes Bay which marks the northern most part of Poole Harbour.
A great Oak was our first stop. But this was no stereotypical ‘Tree-hugging’ exercise (not that I mind getting ‘barkside’, up close and personal!).
One of us (the one with the sensible waterproof mat!) was asked to lie at its base looking upwards, one of us close up to the trunk and I was asked to stand at the extremity of the Oak’s branches. From this vantage point I could take in a variety of views - looking outwards, in, up and around. I saw saplings and smaller, established versions of what we estimated to be our four to five hundred year old subject.
I looked across to a fallen limb of the same thickness and stock, a victim of the great storm of 1987 perhaps? We were encouraged to jot down images and thoughts.
Revered, in my own space,
a hundred crimped leaves
on fir covered branches
mourning my fallen, ancient neighbour.
Raindrops from my bough provide sound effects for falling leaves.
With a far wider outreach than my juvenile neighbours - even the nettles stand longer by me,
picked off as individual stems,
a trailing bramble Ivy-like
sends tendrils along my limbs
and I can see the Silver-leaved poplar trees
dancing and swaying in the wind high up from here.
(Working notes 27.10.21.)
We took a break and broke the relative silence of our morning over lunch. Then proceeded to the outreaches of the park to a boundary fence with a view across Pergins (or previously Doughty's) Island and the mud flats of Holes Bay fed by Upton and Creekmore (sic) Lakes.
I knew the view that was coming as we broke through from the trees and the weather did not disappoint! Blue, blue sky, we stood by the fence and Helen encouraged us to take it all in and reflect on the images that it evoked. It pleased me that humanity barged in on our creativity as the path was being used by visiting families during the first day of the school Half Term break. I felt the need to subvert the supposed reflections by using this in my writing:
“They’re All Ducks Mummy!”
“What can you see?”
“They’re All Ducks Mummy!”
All
Ducks
in separate tribes
in separate lines
on separate banks.
Waiting.
For a new tide,
a fresh wind:
Plover, Goose, Curlew
and a choir of Terns, flying low.
Each will have its moment -
but what’s the prompt?
A backdrop of traffic, an endless stream
in and out of town,
roundabout - red light, green light -
Go!
The prompt?
Who says go first?
But at least noticed,
you asked me what I saw mummy,
and I saw that they’re all
Ducks.
cp27.10.21.
The weather began to change and threatened rain. We moved on to our final viewing point and through a giant picture frame overlooking Holes Bay Helen asked us to look again at the panorama and reflect on the workshop and surroundings. We placed the sea within our own lives and ancestory. We shared stories, there’s many stories of the sea in Poole and the relative safety of the harbour.
I was entranced by a family of silent finches (were they Chaffinches? Hawfinches? Maybe Bullfinches?) in the Barberry Bush in front of us, the two adults high atop the branches overseeing the younger ones. I looked back and they had moved on, then they returned. After we had said our goodbyes I went and stood finishing the dregs of coffee from my flask.
Family Hedgerow,
proud parents oversee their young outriders.
Foraging berries over swaying ferns,
relaying to the dead, brown prongs of Docks.
Attachment training?
and
“Move on!”
Gone.
Spring and Summer gone
and Family Hedgerow moving on through Autumn
bracing themselves
for Winter.
cp27.10.21.
Despite my apprehensions - infused by the unknown qualities of my writing post-Stroke, Helen’s supportive and adept stewarding of our day enabled me to ‘do what came naturally’. We walked, observed, sensed nature all around, connected as humans and Art (and specifically Poetry!) had its way. So I’ve always been an Eco-Poet it seems, I’d just been supported in unearthing what’s always been there!
There’s an opportunity at Lighthouse Poole in the Sherling Studio on Saturday 6 November, 10:30am–3:30pm to workshop material and to rehearse/prepare to share our work in a showcase there on Wednesday 10 November from 8pm.
The RiverRun ‘For Earth’s Sake’ performance is at Lighthouse on Wednesday 3 November from 6.45pm.
Details and booking here: https://www.capefarewell.com/for-earths-sake/ and yes I will go, and I will perform my work and I will wear my Dad’s old flat cap.
Useful Links
Dorset Birds: dorsetbirds.blogspot.com
‘Why Eco-Poetry’ article by John Shoptaw Poetry Foundation.org/poetrymagazine
