Black Dogs

Ever since Winston Churchill famously likened his struggle with depression to a ‘black dog’, the term has entered our culture as a popular metaphor. In 1992, Ian McEwan published a brilliantly sinister short novel, ‘Black Dogs’, playing on their totemic significance. Thanks to the marvels of technology, you can read an extract here.

As Megan McKinley, writing for the intriguingly named Black Dog Institute puts it:

“In modern parlance, we let sleeping dogs lie; we go to the dogs or die like a dog; we dog someone at every turn, or compete in a dog-eat-dog environment. And when we put a name to our depression, increasingly it is that of the black dog, lurking behind us, or clinging
tenaciously to our backs.”

The term has far older supernatural connotations, of course. In British folklore, the black dog is a nocturnal apparition, often said to be associated with the Devil, and  its appearance was regarded as a portent of death. In my old stamping ground of East Anglia, some still fear the Black Shuck – a large creature with malevolent flaming eyes (or one eye, or eyes that change from red to green, depending on what takes your ghostly fancy), otherwise known as the ‘Doom Dog’.

These terrifying beings are often supposed to appear in mist or on lonely stretches of moor (as in the legend of The Hound of the Baskervilles, famously encountered by Sherlock Holmes), but almost always at night. In ‘A Pint for the Ghost’, I wrote a poem about Derbyshire sightings of Gabriel Hounds, who bring bad fortune to all who see them:

Each time I read a cloud’s dark countenance
or watch two crows stitch out a warning
in the clear blue air, I can’t forget

the Bradwell miners, bound for home
without a lamp to guide them, night as heavy
as the earth they’d toiled beneath all day.

They heard the long grass stir. They stood
dead still. A beam, sharp as a skinning knife
shone from the moon down to the hill

and carved the huge shape of a hound; a dog so quick
they’d barely taken flight before they heard it bay
and felt its harsh breath at their heels. They ran

full speed with burning lungs until the dawn,
until the daylight overtook them and they went,
grim-faced, down to the mine

to meet their certain fate. Remember them
as you lie in bed, when the empty house
has fallen still, and you stare through open curtains

at a starless sky, imagine it’s a dog’s
black flank that passes you, bound
for somewhere else tonight.

(from ‘A Pint for the Ghost’, tall-lighthouse, 2010)

Imagine my terror as I lay in bed in Grasmere the other night, listening to the silence outside – the A591 quiet at last, the lights off in all the other houses – and, through the shadows on my floor, saw the shape of a sleek black dog stalking towards me.

Luckily, the spectre leapt on to the bed and proceeded to lick my ear enthusiastically. It wasn’t a Hell Hound at all. It was Bell, my 6 year old rescue whippet. Bell comes from Animal Rescue Cumbria near Kendal, a charity supported by one of the Lake District’s most famous residents, Alfred Wainwright. She’s a real character and fast-attempting to become the most cultured pooch in the village, having attended several poetry readings with me around the country.

In fact, Bell was pretty chuffed to get her first ever poetry review after accompanying me to ‘Word Life’ in Bradford recently. She was even more chuffed to be described as ‘gorgeous’…

I can’t imagine a less sinister creature than the one who curls up next to me on the sofa, trots around on the fells or sits in on Dove Cottage poetry workshops. But, none the less, whenever there’s a full moon over Grasmere, I find myself eyeing her nervously as she pads around in the darkness… Well, actually, I don’t. But I can’t think of a suitably chilling conclusion to this blog. Perhaps I’ll let Bell have the last word. Here she is, windswept in Shetland.

It’s Nice Up North

In 2006, John Shuttleworth (alter ego of comedian Graham Fellows) went to Shetland to prove his theory that, the further north you go, the nicer people get. On a bleak day in February 2011, I found myself on Unst, the most northerly part of the Shetland Isles enjoying a blissful solitude – nice or not, there aren’t many people to be found on the islands once you’ve left Lerwick. Grasmere began to assume the status of a bustling metropolis as I thought about it, staring out to the Muckle Flugga lighthouse.

Muckle Flugga is now an automatic lighthouse, but was manned until the 1970s. What a singularly lonely existence it must have been, surrounded by sea and seabirds, operating a single beacon in the darkness every night. No job for the superstitious. In fact, it would be surprising if tales of the supernatural didn’t abound on Shetland. The isles’ Viking history, combined with their isolation, make for thriving legends and I was interested to find out more about rumoured encounters with the UK’s most northerly spirits.

On our first day, en route from Lerwick to Unst, we stopped to visit Windhoose, reputed to be the most haunted house on Shetland. The wind tried to crumple us as we left the car and set off up a balding hill (there are few trees on Shetland – the weather scours them all off). Windhoose was roofless and bare. I’ve often heard derelict houses compared to toothless mouths, but Windhoose was more like a mouth curled into a snarl. Fenced off on all sides, it stood glowering over the road below. We clambered over the barbed wire. I once read somewhere that animals are particularly sensitive to spirits and was anxiously eyeing Bell the whippet as we crept towards the house. Bell sniffed the ground. We waited, hearts in our mouths. Then she crouched down and pissed all over the grass. A collective sigh of relief was breathed, except by Bell, who was scanning the field for rabbits and yowling about the cold.

I’d expected Windhoose to be empty, but the spaces inside it that had once been rooms were crossed with planks of rotting, green timber, a detritus of stones and smaller logs carpeting the floor. It was as if what had once been the house had caved in on itself. There was something strangely still about the interior, barely protected from the weather as it was. Above the ruined front door, a worn-down coat of arms. We ducked into the main chamber and flinched to see a sheep’s spine, attached to a length of twine and hanging from a stone lintel, turning in the wind. It should almost have been a comfort – the presence of evidence that connected to the human world – but something about the way it had been arranged and hung there made us flinch. It was enough to send us hastily back down the slope, Bell lagging behind, sticking her nose into the grass.

But by far the most supernatural experience I had on Unst was the result of an entirely natural phenomenon. True to form, I failed to appreciate the beauty of what I’d seen at the time. And, true to form, I went back to the cottage and wrote a poem about it:

Aurora Borealis

How typical of us: thinking that pale green corridor
cutting across the blacked-out Baliasta road
must be a searchlight, hunting us.
We clutched each other as we never would again

then skittered towards home, imagining we were
extras in a B movie: the Shetland hills huge UFOs,
or the whole island a slumbering beast whose back
we clung to, this the beam of his mate’s eye.

We looked down from that slender radiance
to watch our steps along the track,
and missed the sky’s brief fire, the North
lighting its own touchpaper and standing back.

(Helen Mort, February 2011)

I’d like to dedicate that poem to Gordon, Penny, Hunter, Wilma, Edna and all the other remarkable people who were so kind to us during our visit to Unst. The sage John Shuttleworth was right – it really is nice up north.

Travelling ghosts

There's a chill running down my spine as I sit down to type this... It isn't ghosts that are to blame, however, but Cumbrian snowfall and a broken boiler. Nonetheless, I've had the privilege of reading in a number of haunted places recently: a few weeks ago, I performed a selection of pieces from 'A Pint...' in the grand setting of Marlborough College, the school attended by Betjeman, Nick Drake and others. Students murmured about strange sightings in the library, a ghostly child in the grounds and other stories, but I was too busy staring at the imposing buildings to take much of it in. Besides, never mind the opulent grounds of the school, the highlight of my trip to Swindon's environs was encountering the world's weirdest roundabout.

On November 20th, myself and seven other poets arrived at sleepy Aspinall Street in Mytholmroyd to take part in an exciting project organised by Andrew McMillan. Our destination was Ted Hughes' childhood house, a black brick terrace that now has a thoroughly (and surprisingly) modern interior. The day-long event, 'Crossing Borders' saw four poets with Lancashire connections (Mike Barlow, Sarah Hymas, Clare Shaw and Steve Waling) and four with Yorkshire links (myself, Joe Hakim, Ben Wilkinson and Sally Baker) divided into pairs and challenged to produce new, collaborative poems exploring the idea of landscape and its borders. I was paired with Mike Barlow and we set out on a muddy walk with some trepidation, only to find ourselves quickly agreeing that we'd like to write something that explored the way a hill seems different depending on which side you approach it from. Our piece adopted the voices of two mountaineers, one from the east and one from the west who meet at the summit of the peak and swap routes.

The day produced a striking variety of collaborations, which Sarah Hymas has described much more articulately here. I also had high hopes of startling a ghost or two from the Aspinall Street house where some of us spent the night. After muttering about ouija boards, we went to an excellent real ale pub instead and stumbled back after last orders for a night's sleep, undisturbed by the spirits of Ted and Sylvia... Now there's a surprise.

On Sunday, I performed at Maryport literature festival and a trip to the Senhouse Roman Museum surely unsettled a centurian ghost or two: the venue was right next to the museum with its variety of relics and murals.In between visiting these ghostly locations, I've also recently been to Peterborough to perform at 'Speakeasy' in the Brewery Tap. You couldn't ask for a better organised evening of poetry, or a more responsive, friendly audience. A big thank you to Mark Grist and everyone else who made the evening such a pleasure.

Later this week, snow permitting, I'll be appearing at The Poetry Cafe in Covent Garden on Thursday as part of a tall-lighthouse event, then for the fantastic 'Wordlife' in Bradford on Friday night at the Theatre in the Mill, Sheffield Saturday night and Sheffield again on Monday.

The last month has been dominated by a bit of exciting news from Picador: myself and nine other poets (including Alan Buckley and Ben Wilkinson, also published by tall-lighthouse) have made the shortlist for the inaugural Picador Prize for a first collection. The shortlist was mentioned in The Guardian here. You can read poems by all the shortlisted entrants here.

Now, back to building a fire and trying to keep the chill at bay! If all else fails, there's always the whisky...

The decay of lying: a pseudo-scientific blog post

‘In modern days, while the fashion of writing poetry has become far too common and should, if possible, be discouraged, the fashion of lying has almost fallen into disrepute.’

So claims Oscar Wilde in ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1891), a typically witty account of the ‘proper aim of art’, which he describes as ‘the telling of beautiful, untrue things.’ Recent and inevitable news of cuts to the Arts Council budget, might prompt us to question anew what art is really for, where it fits into the rest of our fragmented society. Commenting on Wednesday in response to the announcement of a 29.6% funding cut, Arts Council Chief Executive Alan Davey said: 'These cuts will inevitably have a significant impact on the cultural life of the country. There will be some tough decisions…’. But what does the term ‘cultural life’ really mean and where do art forms like poetry fit in?

(1.1 A bit of science)

In his new book ‘The Master and his Emissary’, psychiatrist and writer Ian McGilchrist looks at the segregated hemispheres of the human brain and their asymmetrical relationship. To vastly simplify one aspect of his infinitely complex argument, McGilchrist suggests that the left and right hemispheres deal with incompatible versions of the world: the left specialising in quantitative information, individual components and the right in holistic connections, intuition and metaphor – the domain of poetry. For all the left hemisphere depends on the right for its functionality, the information it deals in is highly-prized: ‘we live in a society where the indirect, the difficult, the implicit are not valued.’ (McGilchrist, October 2010)

The author relies on a rather neat metaphor himself when he says:

‘The left hemisphere, though unaware of its dependence, could be thought of as an 'emissary' of the right hemisphere, valuable for taking on a role that the right hemisphere - the 'Master' - cannot itself afford to undertake.  However it turns out that the emissary has his own will, and secretly believes himself to be superior to the Master.  And he has the means to betray him.’

In an interview for ‘Poetry’ magazine, McGilchrist outlines his ideas in relation to poetic expression. Metaphor is of key importance to society and the brain (indeed he characterises it as ‘the only way of understanding anything’) and yet it is marginalised. We live in a society that prefers instant gratification and quantifiable information (which we can constantly access through technology) over intuitive thinking and, as a result, poetry is bound to be marginalised too.

It’s an interesting theory which, in turn, provokes questions of what we mean by ‘truth’ in society and in art. It’s clear that the intuitive, deep truths of poetry are different from our social concepts of literal , informative truth: the facts, just the facts and nothing but the facts. Information versus knowledge. So how should we approach ‘truth’ within an individual poem? Is Wilde right when he argues that we should shun ‘careless habits of accuracy’ and realise instead that ‘Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life’? In early November, Jacob Polley and I will be leading a weekend workshop here at The Wordsworth Trust about poetic fictions, whether poetry can do justice to reality through the unreal, though who knows what conclusions we’ll reach!

(1.2 A bit more science)

Positivism, of course, holds that statements are senseless if they cannot be verified or falsified. However, outlining his theory of falsifiability, Karl Popper famously asserted that unfalsifiable statements are ‘unscientific’ but not without relevance (having cultural or spiritual meaning) and equally a theory cannot be guaranteed true by past corroboration, even after rigorous and repeated testing. For his part, McGilchrist suggests that the kind of attention we bring to bear on the world at a given time changes the nature of the world we attend to and there is no single way of thinking which can be proved true. All the same, science ‘purports to be uncovering such a reality. Its apparently value free descriptions are assumed to deliver the truth about the object, onto which our feelings and desires are later painted…’

A traditional approach: science first, poetry later. We’re familiar with the idea of art as embellishment, as ‘alternative’, entertainment in its truest sense. When we speak about ‘truth’ in art, we aren’t applying the exacting standards of the positivist and its assumed that we’re dealing with a far more tenuous concept. Yet McGilchrist writes that science ‘is just one particular way of looking at things, a way which privileges detachment, a lack of commitment of the viewer to the object viewed. For some purposes this can be undeniably useful. But its use in such causes does not make it truer, more real, closer to the nature of things.’

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently in relation to Richard Dawkins’ book ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’ and his remarks on the relationship between science and the arts. My article ‘Re-weaving the Rainbow’ is a review of three recent poetry collections by Jo Shapcott, Pascal Petit and Patrick McGuinness. I’m no scientist, to state the bleedin’ obvious. My selective, biased response to some of Dawkins’ points is very tentative, just as my understanding of neuroscience is limited (expect a possible blog entry from the far more qualified poet Niall O’Sullivan about McGilchrist’s book at some point!).

(1.3 A bit less science)

Nonetheless, it seems to this amateur that the questions McGilchrist raises in ‘The Master and His Emissary’ about ‘truth’ are fascinating. They strike at the heart of what the domain of metaphor and, by implication, the domain of poetry is for at a time when cuts to arts funding make is ever more paranoid and defensive about what it is we do, what poetry is ‘for’. In some ways, he argues that the issue doesn’t even need answering, such is the significance of metaphor to human life. But doesn’t poetry (and art) thrive on marginalisation? Rumours of demise are always greatly exaggerated and, like it or not, the best work usually comes unbidden and asserts itself against the odds – not an argument for increasing the odds, of course.

In the midst of this, I’ve been cheered this week to attend a series of different events that variously demonstrated to me how poetry is alive and vigorously kicking in all its forms (a sestina, I’m told, delivers a lethal karate chop). On Tuesday, I was a guest reader on Felix Dennis’ ‘Did I Mention The Free Wine’ which saw an audience of hundreds gathering outside Windermere to hear several hours of poetry and, er, neck free booze. The next evening, performing with the very talented Luke Wright, I read at Hull’s ‘Write to Speak’: a vibrant and exciting spoken word night fast making an impact with its warm atmosphere and mix of new and established voices – I definitely recommend a look at their programme for the coming months. Friday saw the gala of the second Manchester Poetry Prize at MMU, a generous award for new work won this year by Judy Brown and Michelle Kern, proving that good poems will out.

(1.4 A slapdash conclusion)

And perhaps poetry is even more tenacious than we often think. To quote McGilchrist a final time, ‘poetry engraves itself in the brain: it doesn’t just slip smoothly over the cortex as language normally does. It has all the graininess of life, as it rips into being from deep within the limbic system, the ancient seat of awareness and affective meaning.’ In other words, better get used to it - there’s no bloody chance of getting rid of us.

---

Below: the author, engaged in a highly scientific experiment about the optimum consumption of Budweiser (picture by Andrew Marshall)

The green grass of home

Tomorrow morning, the UK will wake up to National Poetry Day: an annual celebration of the written and spoken word. Across the country, there’ll be edible poetry cakes (better than inedible ones, no doubt), limericks and readings a’plenty, and the South Bank Centre will host a daunting ‘thousand poem challenge’.

Each year, the day has a different theme and this time around, it’s the deceptively simple idea of ‘home’. Deceptive because we all instinctively know what ‘home’ is, but its a far more elusive concept than it first seems – home can mean almost anything; a long-abandoned birthplace, a landscape, a set of four walls. To many, home is more to do with people than place.

I often find I have a clearer sense of being away from home than ‘at home’. Returning to the town where I grew up this weekend, I encountered my dad in the kitchen, grimly muttering the words of Robert Frost: ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.’ Well, who can blame him…

Likewise, anywhere can be a home-from-home: just ask the barman of my local pub. Home is where the heart is, after all… Daljit Nagra, Dreadlockalien and others have all been blogging about personal notions of home and homesickness on the National Poetry Day website and you can read their thoughts here, including Ian McMillan’s ‘home as a haven’, Jo Shapcott’s ‘home, a baggy old coat’ and my meditation on mountains, Larkin and whisky.

Ironically, I’ll have little chance to put my feet up at home throughout October: you can catch me on the road at a series of forthcoming readings, notably Hull Truck Theatre (with Luke Wright) on October 20th and at The Low Wood Hotel with Felix Dennis on October 19th – did anyone mention the free wine? Next month; Peterborough, Cambridge and a pennine poetry extravaganza…

Meanwhile, tomorrow afternoon from 1-4, The Wordsworth Trust will be hosting poetry readings every hour, with readers including Mark Ward, Penny Boxall, Andrew Forster and myself. We’ll be exploring the theme of ‘home’ within spitting distance of Wordsworth’s own homely cottage… Do drop in if you’re in the area!

Ghost train

Having recently ordered the Selected works of the American poet Galway Kinnell, I'm finding myself drawn back to the same poem over and over again, unable to let it be. Appropriate enough: the piece, 'Fire in Luna Park' is about a terrible accident in a theme park and its haunting ending resists clear resolution.

The poem hinges on the idea of 'crying wolf' - the narrator relates how neighbours of Luna Park would often be kept awake by 'the screaming produced by the great freight machines', until 'it seemed the same big-lunged screamer cried out in mock terror / each night across the water, and we hardly heard and took no notice'. I was reminded of the children up the road from my house in Chesterfield, whose screams as they played in the garden would momentarily terrify me, assuming some accident, until I became so accustomed to them I almost blocked them out. Anyone who has ever held on for dear life and screamed on a rollercoaster or been on the kind of ride Kinnell describes that 'holds its riders upside down and pummels them until the screams pour out freely' will know that half-laugh, half-scream that fairgrounds produce.

In this case, it's the Ghost Train, jerking 'through dark tunnels / here and there suddenly lighted by fluorescent bones' that carries its passengers through the ground into a true nightmare, which we presume to be a fire:

'...last night the shrieks of actual terror pierced through our
laughter, and kept at it, until we sat up startled.

The Ghost Train, now carrying seven souls and the baffled grief of families
has no special destination,
but must worm forward, twist, backtrack, looking for forgetfulness,
through the natural world,
where all are born, all suffer, and many scream
and no-one is healed but gathered and used again.'

It's an ending typical of Galway Kinnell's lyrically dexterous style, an almost apocalyptic note that would seem heavy in the hands of another writer, but retains a certain lightness here, though the words themselves are incredibly poignant, appropriately weighty. There's something horrifying about the juxtaposition of fairground glee and mortal terror, an awareness of how the macabre often lurks behind the faintly ridiculous.

Kinnell is a singularly compassionate poet and his work recalls the poems of Robert Frost to me - a poet who he addresses a homage to in his 1964 collection 'Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock'. 'Fire in Luna Park' achieved for me that kind of rare memorability that, paradoxically, has the reader going back to the poem over and over as if they're scared they might forget its essence.

It set me thinking about the way a poem can immortalise its subject or, to take a bleaker view, keep the subject trapped in a kind of purgatory, separated from the real world, occupying the mirror-world of the poem forever. In April this year, I published my pamphlet 'Parallax' with Forest Publications; a series of poems about bidding leave and the secret lives of inanimate things, dedicated to the memory of Justin Wand who died in April 2009. You can never adequately capture somebody's memory in a poem, so I suppose the best the poet can do is to reflect on that - the poetry book becomes a kind of strange, Pandora's box of memories. In a sense, it could be seen as a selfish act, creating a character within the confines of the poem to keep them there, a dull imitation of the person you once new, a kind of Coppelia.

As Seamus Heaney says - far more eloquently - in an interview with Dennis O'Driscoll, memory occupies a strange place in poetry:

"You end up dropping back through your own trapdoors, with a kind of 'they-can't-take-this-away-from-me' feeling. There's a paradox, of course, since the poems that provide the recompense are the very ones that turn your private possessions into images that are - as Yeats once said - 'all on show'. Yet a poem saves as well as shows."

For some far less eloquent (but hopefully interesting) musings, you can buy my new pamphlet, 'Parallax' here.

The Last Barman Poet

I'm growing mildly concerned that 'A Pint for the Ghost' has been a bit heavy on the 'ghost' recently and a bit light on the 'pint'. Relish that sentence - it's probably the only time you'll hear me utter the word 'light' in relation to beer drinking. To redress the balance, I considered going for a heavy session down at Tweedies, (which, incidentally, has my nemesis, Old Rosie on tap again today) but instead I thought I'd plug a fantastic ongoing pub-themed poetry project, organised by Ross Sutherland.

'The Last Barman Poet' is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the piss-poor poem Tom Cruise performs at the end of the 1981 film Cocktail, gyrating his way around the bar and proclaiming the superior quality of his Sex on the Beach. If you were lucky enough to escape that episode the first time round, you can watch Tom in all his Youtube glory here. Ross has been inviting poets to contribute homages, covers and remixes of the Cruise poem for a special 'Homework' event in London on September 29th.

The idea for the event originally came from the Aristocrats joke. To quote Ross' site, this is "a (pretty unfunny) joke that US comedians use to show off their stagecraft. The joke itself is a test pattern; it’s down to the comic telling the joke to add their own brand of flair, and hopefully make it funny. The organisers of Homework wondered—is it possible to create an Aristocrats for poets? A poem so bad that the writer would have to use all their ingenuity and talent to make it worthwhile?" Only the evening of the 29th will tell...

So far, the project blog has seen an enticing array of poetic cocktails, from poets such as Luke Kennard, Tim Wells, Niall O'Sullivan and many, many more. There's even a Last Barman rap. I couldn't let the opportunity to write about a bar pass me by, so I've contributed a few verses too. My piece is about the Last Poet Bar, narrated in the voice of a grumpy Yorkshire drinking establishment. No idea where the inspiration for that could have come from.You can read my efforts here. And if you're in London on September 29th, you can attend the Homework extravaganza!

What are you waiting for? The bar is open...