Place is very important to me. Without sounding OTT, geography’s the thing we’ve got in common. We inhabit space. We breathe in it. We fight over it. We shape it, and share it. And then we learn to share it better.

I grew up in a place called Herne Hill, South London. An in-between zone; no-man’s land. Not quite Brixton, not yet Dulwich, but with elements of both. I have lived either side of the Lambeth/Southwark borough divide that splits the hill like a seam. And I have lived on the north and south banks of the Effra, submerged stream that carves its way from the hills of Norwood through the villages of Dulwich, Brixton and Stockwell before meeting the Thames at Vauxhall. A long, thin poem I produced in 2001 about the river became a turning point in my writing. The river as an invisible, underground energy force we underestimate at our peril. It seeps into basements, up from manholes in the street. Harbinger of greater floods to come.

HERNE HILL. The very name a mystery. Competing visions trace the etymology to Old English hyrne (’the corner of a hill’) or an obselete surname, landowners from way back. Or, more conveniently, a contraction of ‘heron’? I remember herons basking in the park three streets away as kid. The poet Eric Mottram, I later discovered, had lived on Half Moon Lane: his local, my local. I quickly found and bought Mottram’s A Book of Herne (1975-81), which draws from that primal, sinister myth of Herne the Hunter, the antlered spectre. Forest god whose name enshrined in the urban landscape remembers when the Great North Wood stretched from Croydon to Camberwell (where I was born). I spent formative moments wandering (and wondering) its remnants, at Sydenham Hill. Once home to woodsmen, gypsies and a hermit, or two.

South London is my home. I’m proud of where I’m from (remember chanting “South London la la la” on the terraces of Selhurst Park). But ‘home’ is such a complex, problem word. ‘Place’ seems kinder, more humane, less fraught with notions of identity – who belongs where, who owns what land. I share this city with eight million others, many of whom will call it home, some birthright, some just passing through, and for many it’s a home of sorts, but other places call on them. London is a city of strangers, and always has been. It sucks you in and spits you out. That tension makes it strong, exciting and relentlessly new.

As a writer, remembering Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘make it new’, I aim to capture that strangeness, the inherent violence of success. Or rather, not to capture, but to immerse myself within the fictions the urban landscape throws up. The city demonstrates civility – notions of etiquette, human behaviour. And the city has been made a blank canvas for utopian ideas. The great council estates of the 1960s, for instance. Or Wren’s geometric masterplan of London. But always, in the background, is the forest, the river, dark forces seeping in. The urban fox, scavenging at night. We bury metaphors, like we bury the past.

There is so much land in Northumberland. The sea
Taught me to sing
the river to hold my nose. When
it rains it rains glue.
Chatterton’s eyes were stuck to mountains.
He saw fires where other men saw firewood.
One step ahead in recognising signals.
And leapt into the fire.

I have recently returned from the North East – hence my absence from this blog – where I have been recording a documentary for Radio 4. It’s called The Poet of Sparty Lea: In Search of Barry MacSweeney. The quote above is taken from his poem ‘Brother Wolf’, republished in his posthumous Bloodaxe volume Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems.

Barry MacSweeney reading in the 1970s

Briefly then, MacSweeney was a Newcastle poet associated with the British avant-garde from the late 60s (when he published his first book at the age of 17 and was nominated for the Oxford Chair in Poetry) through to his premature death in 2000. His poems are sudden, terrifying and beautiful; darkly political, both extravagantly lyrical and harshly stripped back. He was a master of the long line, the breath beyond breath. I was present at his last ever reading, an extraordinary and moving event – I was 17 or 18 then. I have been a huge fan of his work ever since. In fact, I would say he is the presiding presence – if there is one – over my own poetry. In many ways, he would be an attractive figure to any teenage scribbler: a Romantic, haunted by the visions of doomed youth, like Rimbaud, Jim Morrison and Thomas Chatterton, the forger of mock-medieval poetry who committed suicide by arsenic poisoning at 17. Strange how these numbers keep coming round.

Although Barry lived all over the place, and drew his influences from many sources, he was always a poet of the North East… not an officially-prescribed “poet of place”, but a shamanic figure whose poetry is invested and infected with the landscape of Northumberland. In his stunning sequence, Pearl (1995/7), he returns to childhood memories of Sparty Lea – a remote hamlet an hour’s drive from Newcastle where his grandmother lived. These poems are lyrical invocations of an idealised landscape:

Up a height or down the dale in mist or shine
in heather or heifer-trampled marigold
the curlew-broken silence sang its volumes.
Leaning on the lichen on the Leadgate Road,
Pearl said: a-a-a-a-a-, pointing with perfectly poised
index finger towards the rusty coloured dry stone wall
which contrasted so strongly with her milky skin.

Barry remembers a childhood romance with a local girl he calls “Pearl”, whose palate is cleft: she cannot speak. The “a-a-a-a-a-” in the poem becomes an agonised utterance in the powerful theatre of Barry’s live readings.

Sparty Lea, Northumberland

The Pearl sequence is more than mere nostalgia for place. Much more. It is memory passed through the gauze of lived experience, the demons that taunted the poet’s psyche. The demons of drink that would eventually catch up with him, mouths rustling with knives. Innocence crushed. Spoilt beauty. A broken landscape, populated by ‘the turbo-mob, weird souls dreaming of car-reg / numbers and mobile phone codes’.

The documentary I’m presenting is in the form of a kind of pilgrimage, a journey of (re)discovery. From Newcastle, where we had visited the famous Morden Tower and Barry’s archive at the University, we drove out into the countryside to find Sparty Lea. It was as I imagined from the poems. I kept thinking of the language Barry used – the landscape became a fictional universe of curlews, brown trout, ‘the rim of the law’. Barry’s former partner, the poet SJ Litherland, had told of a return journey they had made to the area, to find the land enclosed… this experience is documented in the poem ‘Bare Feet in Marigolds’, where Barry reimagines Sparty Lea as ‘a barbed wire compound. / Wild freedom of Sparty Lea turned into a Nazi camp.’

From ‘Brother Wolf’:

Chatterton knew
you may not return to the source
when you’re
it and
died.
At Sparty Lea the trees don’t want Orpheus
to invoke any magic
they dance by themselves.

For Barry too, the source was ‘it’ – was him. Sparty Lea as a psychological landscape. “North”, as with Heaney in his 1975 collection, was not just a real place: it was a mental state.

I learned in Florence how to poison flowers
& sheath this quill in absolute commitment
to a language going north
without maps.

Responding, at a tangent, to Charlie and Bernadine’s posts, I wanted to say a few words on how the notion of place might be challenged by / reconfigured for the digital age. Appropriately, I am writing this on the 13:00 from London Euston to Manchester Picadilly. The train, that great, heaving technology of the recent past, seems a good place to start. The road trip (the road movie) is really the train journey, bastardized. The railway expanded horizons, offered escape – literal and literary – from home. Adventure. Intrigue and the exotic. Placelessness. Murder on the Orient Express. Dickens and the Staplehurst crash of 1865. Kerouac rail-hiking through America in On The Road.

I often write on trains, staring out the window as anonymous, unmapped countryside flies past. This, from a recent poem written somewhere between London and Kendal: ‘Whisper this to your mauve-faced neighbour: / the ash that rests in the crook of a knoll // is the edge of a managed copse / you cannot see, at speed, from a Pendolino.’ Rail travel – a kind of temporary death, confined in bullet-shaped coffins w/ overpriced buffet car – offers respite from the relentless immanence of geography, our relation to physical space. Railway sidings fill with foxes’ dens, graffiti, sprayed and daubed; the inscriptions of the marginal.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we learnt to think with the railway. In the twenty-first, we will think with the internet.

George Palmer from Apples & Snakes, who is sitting opposite me, has just told of discovering a poem in Poetry London and, via Google and then Good Reads, starting up a conversation with its author, an American writer from the Midwest. Global communication can, and should, be as small-scale as this. A process of telescoping space, building communities of shared interests beyond the limits of geography.

Initially the internet was feared as a dead space for “virtual” encounters. Inhuman. Dazed teenage coders locked in perpetual fantasy. But Web 2.0 has swept all that away, has shown how global communication and local engagement are not mutually exclusive; but can be mutually sustaining. The internet might be about talking to someone a thousand miles away, or organising a meeting in your local community. Digital technology is no longer the preserve of the expert – bottom-up, organic activity is possible through accessible software and the self-education of ‘digital natives’ (those who have grown up with the internet as second nature). Mobile technology and wifi has taken the digital era into the streets. The flash mob: urban terrain reconfigured. The boundaries of social etiquette withdrawn – at least temporarily.

One of the things I’m most excited about – in a vague kind of way so far – is geotagging, which Wikipedia describes as ‘the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, or RSS feeds.’ This seems to be the next stage of integrating digital content within the real world – whether landscape or cityscape. I think there are opportunities for artists, and perhaps particularly poets (as text is the primary driver of online content), to engage with this new technology to reach new audiences and find subtle ways of expressing their relationship with place.

The First Voice by Emma McGordon

I’ve just finished watching Emma McGordon’s unsettling video of ‘The First Voice’ (see above). Beyond some obviously exceptional individual lines such as ‘I was Billy Goat’s Gruff rough’ and ‘bone lonely’, it’s a great piece of writing and videomaking. It reminds me a bit of a short vid I made to accompany my pamphlet of ‘imagined emails’, The Terrors.

I think this notion of ‘voices’ is central to what you might term ‘place-making’ – that expression of space as social, true human geography or pyschogeography. The voices Emma conjures in her poem seem ghostly to me. The poet inhabits the place like a spectre, moving through the shadows (as she does, literally, towards the end of the video). It is a dissenter’s poem, a marginal force. The poem should tell an alternative narrative.

I’m sure we’ve all had those experiences of walking through a city at night and imagining voices whispering behind us, in dark corners, alleyways, the vacant spaces developers forgot. Are these voices pure fantasy or are they in any way real? Do we create reality when we create a poem. Or is this all just sub-Sinclairian bluff and waffle?

We all live in the universe – this we should not forget, but aside from that, we each have a simpler and more definite address: a country, a city, a street, a building, an apartment. The presence of so precise an address is the criterion by which original poetry is distinguished from the pretentious and the artificial.

A provocative place to start, perhaps; but a place to start nonetheless. That’s Russian Futurist poet Samuil Marshak, and it’s a quote that prefaced an anthology I recently edited, City State: New London Poetry. I find it hard to know what to say about place… it infects, and is the foundation for, so much of my work as a writer. There is one tradition of thinking – outdated, in my opinion – that discredits the importance of place in writing, privileging instead that which is ‘universal’… the writing of common, human experience that paradoxically transcends specific, grounded realities.

But I’m not convinced by this. Artists are limited beings, and that limit is where the interest lies. ‘The local is the only universal’, said the American Modernist William Carlos Williams (above, on the dog and bone), whose incredible long poem Paterson captures the character of his hometown in New Jersey, and is a must-read for anyone interested in place and poetry. The notion that a reader/listener would only be interested in experiences they can directly ‘relate to’ is an affront to their intelligence. I’m a pretty Londoncentric writer as this city is the place that infects me, but as a reader I’m interested in all sorts of different places and how artists configure them.