I've started 2022 off with plenty of Geopoetic action. Paul Stringer and I have nearly finished our poetry film set in and inspired by the amazing features of the UNESCO Black Country Geopark and discussing my poetics during my residency with the Black Country Geological Society. We'll be showing this at festivals during the year, so keep your eyes out. I've seen the first cut and it looks beautiful.
Last week I had the great pleasure of running a writing workshop for Spelt Magazine. I led the writers through some of the layers of Geopoetics, including the works of Kenneth White, George Amar, Francis Ponge, Norman Bissell, Alyson Hallett and Don McKay. Together we wrote geology inspired poems about the genius loci always under and on the edge of our everydays. One such contributor was the poet, Anna Dear, who shared this beautiful piece with me:

Who needs ghosts when matter
 nonchalantly haunts us
(Don McKay)
 
Black Country graptolite,
pencil sketch on slate,
a quarried splinter,
 
watershed: the mountains 
spill their tiny springs and gravity
takes hold, a force so ancient
 
that they can't refuse,
these floating tentacles, these small
aquatic colonisers, transient others
 
like ourselves, our arteries and veins,
our fascination with the forms of ferns,
for aerial photography of deltas, river beds,
 
our blue home's distant fractures
seen from space.

I love the dipping into deep time, past and present, distant and local in these lines - definitely creating Don McKay's crossing point between the sciences and the mystical in her thinking about our fossil record and place-identity.

If you want to catch more of what I do, I'll be supporting the launch of Judi Sutherland's new poetry collection - Following Teisa - on the 4th February. I've been an admirer of Sutherland's work for a long time and see her as an important figure in contemporary place writing and poetic cartography, so it means a lot to have been asked to read at this launch event. Book your space here. We'll be joined by poet, Sarah Doyle, too, so you won't want to miss this one.

Following the success of last week's post, featuring the work of Sophie Ford, I've got another treat this week with another of my second year students. Julie Upton took part in my Geopoetics workshop for the University of Wolverhampton, and produced the following inverted cinquain. Always one to think outside the box, this up and coming creative loves to play with forms and traditions, bringing her unique and rebellious sense of humour and outlook into her writing. In this poem she works with pagan beliefs and traditions of solstice fusing that with the sensory experiences of the natural realm.

Litha
Celebratory dance and drink
Soft grass underfoot
Warm. Sweet
Midsummer.

JULIE UPTON

It gives me great pleasure today to publish a poem that came out of a recent masterclass I ran for the Creative and Professional Writing's Writing Week at the University of Wolverhampton. I presented some of the ideas I've been exploring over the last eighteen months as poet in residence for the Black Country Geological Society; the cutting-edge ideas of Kenneth White, Don McKay and the Geopoeticists, and the awe-inspiring places that make up the UNESCO Black Country Geopark.
Sophie Ford is one of our second year students, and has already impressed with her talent for poetic expression. She's a tremendous budding talent with an astute eye for detail and slick grasp of formal craft. Watch this space, says I, but let's let this deep-diving free form poem do the talking.

Interlocking weaves of webs of leaves of family trees,
Connected by heart, by blood, by feel, by mud.
Wiggling through cracks in stone through rubble and bone,
Struggled throughout, within, we keep going out and back in.
                                                                                                               Home. 

Sophie Ford

It's been a while since I posted to this blog. I've been busy arranging and editing my collection of poems, ready to submit to publishers. It's taken a different turn than I'd originally imagined; now forming a sort of archipelago of poems, fieldnotes, mini-essays and thoughts. I've borrowed Kenneth White's vision here - much of his work could be described with this cluster metaphor. Poems, Travel Writing, Philosophy all connecting in his landscape/mindscape. I look forward to sharing my offering with the world soon.

There's plenty more cool stuff that's been happening over the last few months that I want to tell you about. I'm really happy to report that The Black Country Geological Society have extended my residency until Spring 2022 - so keep your eyes peeled for more talks, workshops, walks and readings. During this extension, I aim to push the work of the society further and to help with the goals of the Black Country Geopark: reaching out to the other Geoparks; encouraging more people into the sites; finding new ways to express our geological heritage.

Some of my thoughts and poems found a home in Elsewhere Journal - an amazing literary journal focusing on place and place-writing, edited by the amazing Paul Scraton. Check it out: www.elsewhere-journal.com/blog/2021/10/12/fossil-chained-grounds

Another recent development has been a collaboration with the Film Maker, Paul Stringer. Together, we're making a filmpoem based on my research and poetics during this residency. We've recorded poems and been out taking shots of Wren's Nest, Bumblehole and Rowley Hills. Paul's currently editing this with his own take on the geopoetic vision - offering a cinematic expression of how people shape the land and how the land shapes people. It's been a joy to work with Paul, who has an instinctual and grounded understanding of the natural world and of poetry: check out his other works here - www.paulstringer.co.uk/

I'll leave you now with a poem. This one came out from a workshop I ran for the Geologists Association, and was written by Sam Scriven, Head of Heritage and Conservation for the Jurassic Coast Trust. 

Graptolite

black marks on a rock
veins
or a branching tree
or a complex river delta
braided channels seen from the air

but this is the scrapings of life
a smear of graphite
a meagre offering

It's how old you say?
well I suppose you want me to think 'wow!'
and fall about all amazed
awestruck

I'm afraid not

It's pretty, I'll give you that
If I tilt my head and picture its delicate structure

drifting in some long lost current
through some long lost ocean
I almost begin to sympathise
But it's dead, has been for millions of years
what do you want me to do about it?

A black mark on a rock

the last testament of some ancient animal
I think that it exists, in a way
only in our imagination.

Sam Scriven

This is the fourth and final commissioned pom and blog post for the Chain Coral Chorus. In this, celebrated poet, Roy McFarlane explores the history - geological, communal, familial and personal - of Black Country Geosite, Sedgely Beacon.

Fires of Sedgley Beacon

This is the hill they made us run up 
in the moulding of our youth. Hills moulded
through pre-historic times, once festooned 
with lagoons, where trilobites crawled as fast 
as my weary legs could carry me. McFarlane, 
you’re lagging behind the P.E. Teacher shouted.
This place marked by coral seas and icy wasteland.

Ground of claypits and limestone beneath bracken
and grass; the minerals for an industrial revolution, 
this Tartan hell, chained Titians blackened with labour. 
The labour that brought my father to these shores
to Bilston Steel Works, seen from the Beacon Tower – 
where fires were once lit for the warning of the Spanish 
Armada – Big Lizzie they called her standing tall, burning 
its own fires, bleeding molten gold, coughing her dark breath 
into the skies as long as there was labour but the Tories came 
and Thatcher closed her down. Our fathers laid off and mothers 
mourned, finding ways to make spam and payes; 
bully beef and rice last long enough for another day. 

Yet, we still burned in the brightness of our youth
on late summer evenings, sliding down the bunk 
on metal trays, after bonking off school for a snog 
or a bonk. Young lovers who knew nothing of the blues
of milkwort, as we burned with passion moulding 
into each other whilst carline thistle pressed between 
the leaves of our bodies. The hill was on fire 
as if from the heavens, some days an upper room 
of tongues; patois, Punjabi and yam, yam 
converting us all to the Black Country. 

In the third guest blog and poem for the Chain Coral Chorus, we're really excited to welcome the monumental and award-winning poet, Liz Berry, who takes us through the layers of place and people at Black Country Geosite, Walsall Arboretum. 

Walsall Aboretum

Listen, the trees are calling us in,
their voices the colour of old wenches' hair.

They are calling us back,
through bark and Lammas flush,

sapwood, heartwood, rings of days,
in their secret canting of fire and rot.

They were born in storm, split by lightning,
their bodies boats parting silver waters.

We've slept in their cradles, been carried
in their bones to the worms' dark banquet

and if we come now, surrender ourselves
to the earth's green unravelling,

it might not be too late --



​
Walsall Arboretum - June 2021

Walking with Ted, who's four, I find myself so aware of the layers of a place - digging under the soil with a sharp stick; crouched down low rubbing the dirt from a little bibble that looks like an old arrowhead; climbing on the glacial boulder the old uns call the Devil's Toe Nail to pocket the jewel of an empty snail shell. The layers go on, outwards and upwards into the air, as I stand head tilted up, watching his skinny legs shimmy along a branch towards the slender twigs and green of the canopy, knowing beyond there's clouds, and beyond that the secret uninterrupted blue.

There's other layers too, when you know a place: the layers of the years, the layers of old selves that still exist there, going about their three year old, eleven year old, twenty year old business. There's me with Mom, age six, waiting for my dad to come from work at social services. Me at the Illuminations watching the man slipping on the lit-up soap into the flashing bathtub. Me with my first boyfriend, listening to Nirvana on a walkman under the trees.

This morning, walking through the Arboretum in the sunshine with Ted, all I can think of are those layers, what's buried here - although buried feels like the wrong word, too macabre, too dead - better to say what's living here.

Under our feet there's the trampled grass, buttercups, wet-the-beds and daisies, their roots pushing down into the dark soil, sediment rich with worms; somewhere deep below that there's the rough undulations of the old lime workings, the two flooded quarries with their secrets and drownings; deeper still, the Silurian limestone, tropical and unimaginable.

Around us, the trees: their bark, cambium, sapwood, the tender heartwood encircling the pith; the way they watch it all, nodding gently or shaking their heads in green dismay.

Closer, and more intimate, there's our own layers: Ted's small body and mine. Beneath his thin t-shirt the softness of his hair, skin, cells, fat, muscle, the precious architecture of his skeleton. How once he was inside me, layered like the cross section diagram in the text book, skin and muscle peeled back to reveal the baby, unearthly and singular in the womb.

Ted still can't believe there was a time before him. He calls yesterday 'tomorrow' and likes to imagine the microscopic egg he once was, waiting inside me from the moment I was formed. Sitting together on the old bandstand, he looks pleased when I show him a photograph of me there in 1985, eating candyfloss under the lights. I think he's imagining himself there too somehow, all that sweetness and luminescence seeping down into him like rainwater through rock.

For that's the way it feels sometimes, human time, all that's been there before us seeping  into our being: the courtings, running races, the neat patchwork of a hundred wartime allotments, the pale goosebumped calves of girls jumping into the open air baths, the fights, dog walks, the man who got down on one knee under a flashing pink windmill at the Illuminations and the local newspaper reported "there was electricity in the air".
​
I text my mom to tell her that we're at The Arboretum. "Is he still there," she texts back "that man slipping on the soap?"

Liz Berry


Walsall Aboretum






Listen, the trees are calling us in,
their voices the colour of old wenches' hair.


They are calling us back,
through bark and Lammas flush,


sapwood, heartwood, rings of days,
in their secret canting of fire and rot.


They were born in storm, split by lightning,
their bodies boats parting silver waters.


We've slept in their cradles, been carried
in their bones to the worms' dark banquet


and if we come now, surrender ourselves
to the earth's green unravelling,


it might not be too late --

Over the Bumble Hole
​
‘A landscape is like a wormhole linking different times and different places of living organisms and inanimate objects.’
Graham Hardman
 
bumble: late Middle English (in the sense ‘hum, drone’): from boom + -le
hole:   1. a hollow place in a solid body or surface.
           2. a place or position that needs to be filled because someone or something is no longer there
                
Black Country born and bred. It has a certain ring to it. Or perhaps more of a boom, with those drop-forge consonants. It’s a phrase I hear quite often, and one that I’ve rattled out myself more than once. An off-the-cuff troth of belonging, with a stray spark of pride and the slight rust of nostalgia. Not bad for a region so derided over the years. But what is it that we’re attaching ourselves to exactly?
The more I traverse the Black Country, the more I think of it in terms of layers and levels, rather than boundary lines and questionable borders. Depth above breadth. A place where rich seams of history and culture are intertwined with the off-kilter landscapes. And there are few spaces where this palimpsest is more porous – or the various elements more charged – than over the Bumble Hole.
If industrial alliteration can evoke a sense of Black Country heritage, then the name Bumble Hole goes a step further – albeit by default. For while there’s no definitive account of how the site gained its title , it conveys both the heyday of the Industrial Revolution, and the voids that were left in its wake.
Straddling the border between Dudley and Sandwell, the Bumble Hole pays little heed to what author and presenter Phil Drabble called the ‘arbitrary meanderings of cartographers’ – shaped instead around the ancient formations below. Coal, limestone, iron-ore, fireclay. It seems fitting then that my first introduction to the site came by way of the Netherton Tunnel , or the Nevvy as we knew it. From beneath the ground, rather than above it.
Growing up, the long, ungainly walk through this subterranean cut-through – from the Tipton end – became a rite of passage; the incursion into enemy territory carrying with it the risk of being thrown in the cut, or worse. Intermittent air shafts, or pepper pots , provided the only source of light, as well as transmitting the ghostly echoes of the world above – situated as they are between houses, on a park, and even moonlighting as the centrepiece of a suburban mini-roundabout. Add to this the eerie tintinnabulation of dripping water, lime-slimed walls, and the possibility of a broken or missing handrail, and it’s no wonder that these youthful forays filtered into the sub-conscious.      
These days I approach the Bumble Hole from the opposite direction – along the Dudley No 2 canal  – and usually on two-wheels. As the housing estate to the right slopes away, the landscape ahead opens into green space. From here, the view is almost pastoral. Almost. In every direction, the industrial past breaks the surface; nature, growing around the bones of centuries-old infrastructure. Take Bumble Hole Lake – a former clay pit – that shimmers in a wreath of bulrush, bluebell and forget-me-not. Or the canal’s iconic cast iron bridges with their familiar Toll End Works signature; towpaths looped over and under each, like some colossal rope and pulley system. In the distance, Cobb’s Engine House peers out from the tree line, the adjacent stack rising above the branches like a periscope. My ride invariably takes me out towards Gorsty Hill, but not before I’ve circled this totemic structure. Whether by force of habit, or some other strange compulsion, I’m drawn to it every time.  
The Grade II listed building was once home to a Newcomen steam engine, pumping water from the deep coal mines until 1928. Shortly afterwards, the engine itself was transported to the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. There’s an almost vampiric symbolism attached to this peculiar turn of events: sucking the land dry, then laid to rest only when head and heart were separated. Stand beside it today, and the old pumphouse is attended by a clotted, uncanny silence, punctuated by birdsong.
Elsewhere, the remnants of this bygone era can be found under the fingernails and behind the lugholes: abutments to disappeared railway bridges; grooves in thick iron guardrails from the back and forth of rope that coupled horse to barge - the rub of centuries; Blow Cold Bank – or Black Bonk – a grown-over spoil heap with its tell-tale, begrimed brow.  
There’s something irresistible about the sweet-spot meld of industry and nature in spaces like the Bumble Hole. These shape-shifting interzones where neither past nor present can claim hegemony, while deep time – in its vast arc – humbles them both. If I ever tell you that I’m Black Country born and bred, this is probably the place I’m thinking of.
 
Reference list:
 
Davis, B (2012) On landscape ontology: an interview with Graham Harman. Available at: On Landscape Ontology: An Interview with Graham Harman – landscape archipelago (wordpress.com) (Accessed: 22 May 2021)
Drabble, P. (1952) Black Country. London: Robert Hale Ltd.
​

​
The Bumble Hole
 
Smoke still pours from the stack,
if you’ve the eyes for it.
There’s a hiss of steam and
a seething underfoot.
The taste on the air changes with the breeze.
Grease. Sweat. Soot.
 
This is everythin’ and nothin’; the onny song we’ve ever known.
 
Dig the scene that separates
dolerite hills from Darby End;
Rowley Rag and the spit-polish rows of
post-war utopia.
Where the scraped-back landscape re-invents itself -
forging new links and strange acquaintances.
Tuned-in to the heavy-metal reverb of buried lives and 
sunken trades;
Chain-maker and nailer.   
Colliery and boatyard.
Where spoil heaps rub shoulders with silver-shafted
birch, and hawthorn sparks shower
blue-collared walls.
This is the space where time
clocks-off, unwinds, goes wild.
Finds itself.
Thin-placed and hard-pressed.
Courting the in-between.
 
Pick at the seam of picture-postcard
vistas,
sitting pretty in their off-kilter
kingdoms.
A cast of bridges still reflecting on the
old ways;
criss-crossing epochs. Straddling aeons. 
Ambered in the glass-bottle brown of
the cut.
The walkers and riders that float like
ghosts on pitted fields and fire-crack pathways:
cow, desire, barely-theres.
This is where time gets deep;
ponders its past in death-knelled bell-pits.
Tunnels its secrets in calcite scrolls -
age seeping into age. 
Where the bones of the long-departed are
sketched in bedrock pages.
 
A smokeless stack abides,
if you’ve the eyes for it.
The whisper of trees and
seedlings underfoot.
The ring of industry still carries on the breeze.
Magpie. Blackbird. Coot.
 
This is nothin’ and everythin’; the onny song we’ve ever known. 

R. M. Francis, The Black Country Geological Society and the University of Wolverhampton Early  Research Award Scheme is excited to present this guest blog by poet, novelist, performer and Wolverhampton Poet Laureate , Emma Purshouse. In this specially commissioned poem and blog post, Purshouse guides us through the Black Country Geosite, Wightwick Wedge and Smestow Valley.

​Crows over Smestow Valley


Each winter dusk and dawn
they come mob-handed,
streaming in over the canal
and the fluttering tennis courts,
to gather above this ragged street,
caw at empty playgrounds.


Black paths fracture the sky
above our erratic homes.
Murder settling on roof tops,
stirring aerials and furious slates.


And in their cracked scrub song,
their gravel eyes is the rise and
fall of land, cold seas, long nights,
the glacier’s slow slow bite.


Emma Purshouse
Poet Laureate for the City of Wolverhampton

With just a few things to announce, I want to dedicate this blog post to a gallery of some of my favourite finds over the last few months of stretching my legs around the Black Country Geosites. Just like the creatures and natural histories held within, I home these keepsakes as tokens, totems and mementos.
But first. You can catch me discussing my Black Country Geopoetic ideas at the following two events:

Thursday 15th April, 6pm. I'll be delivering a Geopoetry workshop for the Lapworth Museum in Birmingham. Using images from their collections, we'll be delving into place-writing using fossils found in the Black Country Geopark. Including Graptolites from Dudley and the Coseley Millipede. More details here: 
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/facilities/lapworth-museum/events/lectures/2021/15april-vitrualgeopoetryworkshop.aspx

Thursday 6th May, 6pm. University of Wolverhampton: Telford. I'm delivering a public lecture on my travels around the geopark during the 2020 covid-19 lockdown. Exploring the ways we have had to re-examine our locales, our movement and spirit of place during these difficult times, and thinking about the ways Geopoetics offers an interesting and energising lens for this palimpsest travel. Book your free spot here: 
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/walking-down-waking-up-travel-and-place-in-lockdown-tickets-148236181409?utm-medium=discovery&utm-campaign=social&utm-content=attendeeshare&aff=estw&utm-source=tw&utm-term=listing 

​And now, the smile of Brown Old Earth