Neither Cook nor Kirk?

Both Captain James’ are on my mind this week  for various reasons as the Ek Zuban poetry ronin scoot round from project to project and try to get some editing in, in between.  Sat in the Captain Cook Museum in nearby Stewart Park today looking at the pdfs of a new mag written by young lasses from the Middlesbrough NACRO:Making Headway project in town and the latest schools mythical map of a green place for a project for Stockton Council called Storytrails. Both really involved focusing on place with some hard hitting stuff in the mag including a classic line from an exercise we call “I come from a place where…” based on an improvised live introduction I once saw by the explosive and magical Nigerian poet and playwright Esiaba Irobi at the Hydrogen Jukebox Cabaret which basically involves listing all the things that define your place and your relation to it just by telling your truths  – although its sobering in terms of how luxurious poetry can be in a liberal democray in that no one ever ends their poem in our workshops like Esiaba ended his introduction “I come from a place where these poems can get you killed!”  Some glad and sad stuff in these poems though that reflect the way this place or places around here are in a transitional state between the industrial age and whatever post state there’s going to be with the kids unsure if it’s got anything to offer them to keep them away from crime and hustling – one of them ends with the immortal line “I come from a place where the best thing that could happen would be for a big tank to come and blow it all to fucking pieces” which is heartbreaking for a 16 year old girl to be writing but on the other hand feels just right in its honesty like being 16 and listening to stiff little fingers all over again.Lots of lines about the green eyes of boarded up windows on the estates awaiting regeneration or to be more precise redevelopment by property companies that will see many of the original working class inhabitants dispersed further out in outlying estates where  they  won’t ruin the intended new image of Middlesbrough, a place where techno-yuppies will gather happily in the newly named Tees Valley (sounds like happy valley hey get that – ignoring the fact that the town is in the Tees basin only valley in the world without two sides!) And  our new graduates will prosper protected from the dirty underclass descendants of the dockworkers, chemical workers, iron and steel makers by Talking bus stops( I kid you not – how George Orwell would love this town!)cops with tasers and zero tolerance in Robocop world, ignoring the fact that a lot of the graduates are from here in the first place but hey I’m not cynical we got a new art gallery and cool fountain that’s already broken down and a big screen in the Centre Square  to show local programmes and films supposedly but so far just broadcasts BBC news non stop as far as I can see getting ready for the day Ray Mallon progresses from Mayor to his preferred position as Big Brother himself. But hey we aren’t a Victorian boomtown we are a techno-town for the new age! Just look at the pointy-headed lampposts round the new centre square – they look like something out of the Jetsons or Star Trek don’t they? The statues of the iron master and town mayor stand waiting nearby, cleaned of pigeon shit waiting to boldly go .. . well somewhere, anywhere and it’ll be new and it ll be better than that old boomtown we are knocking down building by building that was the result of of one of the biggest proportional diasporas of the nineteenth century. Still maybe we’ll build a spaceship one day and forget all that nonsense about dead exploited iron miners. I wish we’d hurry up with it – I’m already too old to be Captain Kirk all that only bleeding from the corner of the mouth may have all been for nothing! I could dow ith his corset thoug hafter drinking too much Finnish beer last week.

KIrk’s name and the ships were based of course on Cook and his voyages who of course did come from Middlesbrough – he must have there’s all these signs from the eighties depression as you come in to town declaring we are Captain Cook country – too depressing to claim we are industrial revolution country – why would anyone be interested in the fact that we built most of the world’s railtrack and provided the material  for many of its bridges in a period when the country built the biggest Empire since the Romans – why would anyone in the future be interested in that shit ? Much better to link us to the most famous son of the town  and discoverer of a new country that had people living in it for millenia. Of course this ignores the fact that Boro didn’t exist until long after Cook had gone and that he came from where I live now in the suburb of Marton which was once a bigger village than the little hamlet of Middlesbrough before the iron boom of the mid nineteenth century. And there we are caught between Cook and Kirk, with a few too many people who don’t come from round here dictating a regeneration agenda, as they step up the greasy ladder, that actually underplays our role in the nation’s history. Having said that, the Cook museum not far from where he was born ( in a park later built by the ironmaster Bolckow) is great and most of us who live here have dreamed of being him just sailing over the horizon to brave new worlds at some time or the other ( or was that James Kirk?)  – its inevitable if you grew up on an estate with the dock’s cranes visible from one window and the Cleveland hills from the other. So it strikes me as somewhat ironic as we produce ordinance survey size maps with green spaces mapped by drawing on the techniques of the aboriginals old jimbo was so disastrous for, helping primary school children in writing new creation myths, poems and more indigenous folk stories to help recreate a sense of wonder about reclaimed spaces, woodlands and parks in this post industrial dreamtime but we could do with as much of the magic of the ancestors as possible if you ask me. What do I know though I’m just a poet, I come from a place where…