Headlands

Back in 2008 I was looking through some of the poems I had written before I discovered poetry on the internet and became a refugee in the out-lands of New Formalism. One poem called 'Alnmouth' written in 1979 caught my eye, and I wrote some companion pieces to make a little suite of poem about estuaries.

The following year the Raintown Review published the suite. It struck me then that using some of the material in my 'juvenilia' notebooks and locating these around newer poems might be an interesting way to explore how my ideas and technique had developed over the years. A number of the poems were written about the sea and coastal landscapes - so I had a half-baked idea about writing a small collection of these suites - a set of 'seascapes'.

I spend so little time now writing poetry. When I travel I get so lost in the moment that time to be reflective evaporates, and what time I have to write gets spent on the travel blog, which is engaging and fun, whereas poetry is, at least for me, a serious business. So, I have written no poetry at all since last summer. I went through a phase of thinking, maybe that's it, I have nothing more to say. However, over the past two years we have travelled 10,000 miles around the shores of the Mediterranean, and even if no humans read the words, somehow I feel I need to pay back Mare Nostrum for all the beautiful dawns, spectacular sunsets, starry nights and grey wind-lashed days she has gifted me over recent months. 

But my starting point is a colder, bigger sea. I wrote 'Cap de Chevre' soon after returning from a holiday in Brittany in the summer of 1980. So, the starting point of a suite called 'Headlands' could have been this grainy snapshot.

Cap de Chevre, Finisterre, July 1980

Headlands


1. Cap de Chèvre

Finistère means 'earth's end'. 
Gulls cry,
sea, sky,
fractured rock,
all crave chaos.

Granite stacks,
obdurate, crumbling,
plunge dizzily into nothing

Sea fret
dank silence,
always the Atlantic surging close,
then distant.

Images of Ys
possess our dreams.
Awakening, we see traced in mist

cracked domes
broken colonnades.

Skulls of the drowned 

glimpsed through seaweed.

Nothing exists beyond change.

Over the past two weeks I have had a go at adding to the suite - firstly a Triolet recalling a walk we took in early February 2015 around the Puntas de Calnegre, a remote headland south of Mazarron in Murcia, Spain.

Evening, Puntas de Calnegre

 2. Puntas de Calnegre

The road becomes a stony track -

find solace in dilapidation,

wind-seared palms, a sun bleached shack.

The road becomes a stony track,

we reach a cove, then double back

through bleak garrigue and desolation.

The road becomes a stony track –

find solace in dilapidation.

One idea I had about these suites is that each would reference boyhood memory, an acknowledgement that my love of the sea and coasts is rooted in childhood and teenage experience of the Northumbrian coast. I still have copies of the Agfa transparencies I took in the summer following my A levels - looking at these was the starting point for the following rondeau. 

Cullernose Point, Howick, July 1973

3. Cullernose Point

Old transparencies: colours fade,
feeding false memory. Afraid,
beneath a dark promontory, a lone
boy plays among the staithes’ splintered bones,
his red coat rusted, his blond hair greyed.

Everything decays. Clouds cascade

over whin-sill cliffs, spindrift’s spray
mists the bay in sepia-tones.
Old transparencies

degrade. Our shabby masquerade
becomes a handy stock-in-trade;
opaque ceremonies condone
unquestioned myth, we crave the known;
though uncertainty's dank perfume pervades
old transparencies.

4. Homecoming

For Susan Sharman


The sky, sea, white cliffs – all grey,
or so it seems when we return.
Our journey gently drifts astern,
the sky, sea, white cliffs – all grey
metaphors of mundane today -
the tyranny of trite concerns.
The sky, sea, white cliffs – all grey
or so it seems when we return.






I wrote about Gill's description of homecoming as an 'endish feeling' on our travel blog. I guess this is an attempt to capture endish slump in a triolet. It was prompted by a post by fellow traveller, Susan Sharman on the Motorhome Adventures Facebook site, so it only seems fair to dedicated it to her.

The odd thing about exphrasis..

"For me, poetry is very much the time that it takes to unroll, the way music does...it's not a static, contemplatable thing like a painting or a piece of sculpture."  John Ashbery

“A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

At the core of exphrastic poetry lies an ambiguity. As Ashbery so beautifully puts it,  a poem 'unrolls' in time, whereas Barthes observes, images deny ripening. I would argue that the greatest exphrastic poem is Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Throughout Keats plays with this ambiguity, the poem is built around a paradox. He claims at the outset that the images on the urn  'express a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme' but the stanzas which follow explore how this is in fact a 'cold pastoral' - the imagery is centred on stymied intent and desolation:

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

... What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

What draws me to exphrasis is the possibilities which open-up when you apply poetry's capacity to 'unroll through time' to static objects, like paintings or photographs. To go back to the Barthes quote, by inhabiting exphrasia's paradoxical territory perhaps it is possible to re-conceive duration, affectively or symbolically, the poem becomes an impure discourse, but one that seeks to re-assert 'mythic Time' -

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

With these thoughts in mind I have been looking back on some of my own efforts - for a long time I felt uncomfortable about writing poetry about paintings - it seemed a cop-out somehow, trading on 'ready-made' imagery. It was only when I came to think about the opening chapters of Camera Lucida and discovered an early work by Panofsky from the 1920s - Perspective as Symbolic Form that the potential of exphrasis began to occur to me. I think I failed to see beyond the Art Historian's 'pure intellectual discourse' and began to re-discover a more visceral relationship with pictures.