chain coral Chorus
The title of this blog is taken from Canadian Poet, Robert Bringhurst’s The Tree of Meaning (Counterpoint: 2008), a glorious collection of lectures that fuse myth, folklore, language and politics with ecological perspective. In this quotation, he considers the magic and beauty that can be found or achieved in formal restriction and the intrinsic constraints of the natural realm.
I’ve always found that formalist verse offers this. There is an untranslatable power in the act of placing poetic restriction on one’s work - forcing the mind to think in, not just sound, image, mood and theme, but in rhythm, rhyme and metre, brings about new ways of arranging thoughts and perceiving things. One finds sonic and thematic links, clashes and connections between words and phrases, moods and themes, that would have been left unnoticed without the attention to form. It is, as Bringhurst states, the necessary restriction that allows for things to take off. To transcend, as birds do, the different and divergent terrains of earth, air and water. This is a noble goal for the poet - to produce work which can act efficiently and effectively in different terrains - ecological, social, philosophical and theological. A Blakean Fourfold Vision perhaps?! My work as poet in residence for the Black Country Geological Society is bound up in exploring the natural and earthy; in noticing its fearful symmetries. Geological observations of the world are also focused on pattern or structure, and on controlled investigation, extrapolation and portrayal. As such, not experimenting with form would be neglectful to the traditions of geopoetics, to the structures of the region’s stratigraphy, as well as the patterns in ecology and place-identity evident in the Black Country Geopark. As I go about my drifts through the geosites there is a sense of attempting to dig into the grounds - literally and symbolically - and I want this to be a formal feature of my poems too. I’m investigating the links between landscape, community and individuals, and in doing so, am navigating down to a base layer. A rock solid platform that allows for poetic observations akin to Bringhurst’s bird symbol. Here, I am trapped below the surface, on the immovable bedrock of our disparate topographies. Down here, I see things swarm, flood out in rhizomes. Down here, I see this swarming in rhythmite regularity. A form that does justice to this is the American Imagist Cinquian; a short five line poem tied together in strict syllabic measurements. Each line gets longer as the poem descends earthwards, allowing for slow, methodical meditation and magnification. It then hits its poetic bedrock with a snappy return to the thematic and formal aspect the poet began line one with - resulting in a sense of getting to the bottom of the thing, and yet returning too. Here’s an example of one of my recent cinquain geopoems: Mudrock, kinetic rains segment the shale and silt; an overlooked fissility - Time traps. This is a geopoetic trajectory - one of uncovering and reconnecting, of finding what might be within the known, of grounding oneself in the previously unnoticed and gaining a deeper understanding of one’s locale, land, world. We’re in the abyss, deliberately constrained, and it feels like home. Geology puts you in touch with the earth and the spacetime which is as old as she is. This provides embedded wayfinding wisdom of our locale, and puts us in touch with a primeval, animal consciousness and self awareness. Like the ancestral genius loci present in the rocks and soils, the ancestral beasts woken within us in our new wayfinding says; I am in all.
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January 2022
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