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New Statesman​

Poetry doesn't only exist on the page

I've been on the road for a couple of weeks, giving readings from my new book of poems, Dwell. A few years ago I bumped into Tim Smit in a pub in Yorkshire. We started talking about some of the site-specific poems I'd been writing and the ways text can be presented in a landscape, and cooked up a plan to install poems at the Eden Project. On a visit there to scope out possibilities, he invited me to the Lost Gardens of Heligan, and I think we both recognised that the gardens are a more naturally poetic place, all nooks and hollows, full of 'lostness' waiting to be discovered and versified. I've never studied English beyond A-level (some of my old teachers would rightly argue there wasn't much studying even then). I did a geography degree, and there's a circularity in the way things have turned out: I was reading poems when I should have been learning about topography and terrain, and these days a lot of the poems I write are not primarily for the page but for al fresco locations. Of late, these include a poem for a newly created park on the banks of the Tees in Stockton, a poem inscribed in the paving stones of a pedestrianised street in Huddersfield, and a poem incorporated into the new sea-defence wall along the Portsmouth-Southsea shoreline. That poem has been artfully fashioned in ship's brass and is positioned about half a mile from where I lived as an undergraduate, just to bring that circularity… full circle. One of my former lecturers got in touch the other day to say he'd cleaned some seagull shit from it. It must have felt like marking one of my town planning essays all over again. The poems in Dwell will all eventually find their physical shape in the Lost Gardens, as carvings, signs or sculptures, but for now they're making their way in the world on the printed page. I gave them an airing at the Hay Festival the other week, accompanied by slides of Beth Munro's illustrations to bring some visual relief to the occasion – without which the event is just a man with a book in his hand making his mouth open and close. I love a good slide deck, and always run a PowerPoint with the poems where technology allows. The purists probably consider it vulgar, but it reminds me of the homemade ways we entertained ourselves when I was growing up, watching somebody's holiday snaps projected against a living room wall at a slightly cock-eyed angle, the clunk of the slides as they dropped into the carousel, the upside-down photos ('Ha ha ha, did you go to Australia?') and the smell of burning when something went wrong. Hay Festival is a countryside experience. Hay Bluff forms a striking backdrop, and further off Bannau Brycheiniog (aka the Brecon Beacons) balloon on the horizon, often darkly. The site is in a field on the edge of the town, and the events are held in marquees. When the wind blows the big tents flap and rattle. It sometimes feels like a dialogue with the elements, or as if the gods of meteorology are passing judgement on the presented work. It's a festival of ideas rather than just books and literature; the famous, wealthy and powerful are sometimes part of the programme – I've been in the green room when there have been more bodyguards than authors. On the last Saturday I went to see Sam Lee, folk singer, folklorist, writer, and many other things beside. His face was burnt from a month outdoors, despite being pretty much nocturnal over that period. Each spring he leads groups of people into thickets of English woodland where nightingales mate and nest. In the middle of the night the birds sing and he sings back to them. Or he sings and the birds respond. I've never been, but must do soon, before the nightingale becomes extinct in this country and Sam has to warble requiems into a dark absence. On stage he apologises for his croaky voice – he's been breathing campfire smoke for the last few weeks. No one would notice. He makes wonderful records but to hear him live is to witness something unique, not just in his delivery (which is extraordinary) but in the songs themselves, songs rescued and revived from dying traditions, songs taught to him by travelling communities, songs that feel like nature itself in musical form. I kid you not, at one point the birds outside joined in. [See also: We are all Mrs Dalloway now] Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Related