chain coral Chorus
Simon Armtigage, my first poetry crush, has spoken about literature’s relationship with geography and earth sciences, suggesting that the story and the poem are sort of cousins to geography since ‘in British Literature a sense place and a sense of geography permeates pretty much everything’ and that geography and landscape ‘characterise’ it.
My secondary school geography teacher, Mr Reynaulds, explained to our class why he loved the subject and why he thought we would too. He did this as a sort of geeky confession that kickstarted our GCSE learning. He explained that there was something beautiful and amazing to be seen in the everyday; that the study was a way of changing one’s perceptions. Once you learn, even a little, about the makeup of the terrains in which we live it is impossible to just see a hill, a grass verge, a housing estate; they become carefully orchestrated, even poetic things. These things, often passed at speed and without deliberation when moving through the mundane, become Corries, Glaciofluvial Sands, Meltwater Ridges, sites centred around ancient religious or cultural symbols, social patterns that mirror their geological histories. What Mr Reynaulds was explaining in his confession was Rimbaudian - The poet becomes a seer by the prodigious and rational, disordering of the senses - a reawakening, refinding, refining, renaming of the familiar. These become - are brought into being by the seer as- things of movement and narrative. Mr Reynauld’s nerdy-visonaryism struck deep and stayed with me (I’m probably not the only ex-pupil of his that has felt this which is testament to his pedagogical excellence); I went on to study Geography at A-Level, Environmental Psychology during my PhD, and have remained fascinated and awestruck by what can be achieved through acute observation of the everyday, the fusion of scientific, social and poetic mindscapes. Isn’t that fusion what we’re built from? Isn’t that awe what we seek meaning in? Isn’t its life (since these things are ecosystems) lifegiving itself? I understand this as a form of, or at least a fundamental element to, geopoetics - a search of the known, bringing about the unknown and using that to exfoliate (to use a geological term) one’s modernity-blinkered perceptions of the world. A return to the earth - returning in Rimabud’s Drunken Boat. This is why much of my work is preoccupied with place, landscape and setting - my poems’ voices and fictional characters are grown from the soils of the storyworlds. Place, and all the symbolically charged particles that make places, comes first and act as the compost for narrative, drama and poetry. For this Black Country Geopoetics, for my role as Poet in Residence for the BCGS and the Chain Coral Chorus project it is necessary to get deeper, to go deeper, to try to find the bedrock of place. Into geology. Graham Worton, Chairman of the BCGS and Keeper of Geology for Dudley appreciates this geopoetic position too. His geological expertise, alongside his passion for his locale has imbibed him with profound understanding of the way the history of the land makes decisions for us, allows us to make social and cultural movements, and how it connects us to different parts of the globe. In his thoughts about the rainfall over the region, he notices how the lay of the land connects this overlooked place to Hull, Nottingham, Bristol. He talks about the role that place-specific rock formations play in inviting populations to settle, work, build community and entrepreneurial spirit. In his narration for the Black Country Geopark Story he recognises the drama and narrative embedded in the landscape, and importantly considers what the Black Country might be like next - “that’s for future generations to define, and for the planet to give us, a new era to inhabit”. As such, his delving into the heritage of rocks and layers of land provides a deep time and longwave context to our understanding of place - what Kenneth White might call a topographic reverie. I'm making the geo of geopoetics Geological in my work. In a sense to get to the foundation stone of place - from where it all grew. Then, like Worton, fusing this with my Black Country passion and understanding of environmental psychological states. In this, digging deep, as deep as a poet can, physically and symbolically, and harnessing it's yield to the patterns of contemporary Black Country Place-identity - as wild and as simple as they might be. This reconfiguring of the everyday and fusion of different ways of seeing as routes towards geopoetic awe is shared by another important figure in the field - Normal Bissell - I'll let him have the last word; “It's about a poetic approach to the world, by way of sharpening our senses, being more acutely sensitive to our surroundings, developing a well-grounded, creative response to everything around us. Writing poems? Yes, but also walking hills, exchanging ideas, cutting peat, making maps - washing dishes?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrCCF3IMN2k&list=PL54EFE6FD674126C1&index=3&t=0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaxRX8-c2fU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGGReRnvGn0 http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/general/resources/2008-Kenneth-White-Geopoetics.pdf |
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January 2022
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