I’ve been very absent from this site recently (holidays and too much work!) but am going to do a cheeky plug for a training day I’m running for NALD in a couple of weeks….

The course is aimed at literature professionals who are thinking about setting up a literature project in a regeneration context. The day will introduce you to the world and language of regeneration, and show how writers and literature organisations can develop projects that engage with regeneration and urban change.

I’ll be joined by guest speakers: Anita Nadkarni, a trained architect, and experienced arts and regeneration professional, and Kate Cheyne from Architects in Residence.

As well as presentations and group discussions, there will be the chance for you to think about how your own work could fit into regeneration contexts and agendas.

Course attendees will be supported by online activity in the 6 month period after the workshop, allowing you to continue to access expertise, advice and support while you are developing your ideas.

10.00-16.00 Thursday 24th September

Venue: The Poetry School, Lambeth Walk, London

£30 NALD Members £60 Non members To book a place mail admin@nald.org

Last week I went along to Xpress Yoself, a monthly poetry night in Georgetown which is held at Upscale, one of the swankier venues in town.

The night has been running for a couple of years now under the direction of Yaphet Jackman and features poetry and story-telling from a cast of regulars, clips from the Mos Def-hosted Def Poetry and an open-mic section.

1 August was Emancipation Day, with celebrations across the country – the biggest of all being held in Georgetown’s national park – so it was inevitable that Emancipation was to be the theme of the evening.

There was a decent turnout, although the hubbub occasionally obscured the poets’ words. The first-timers struggled to command attention, but the opportunity to gain stage time is important for anyone starting out. The crowd didn’t ignore the performers and were generous with their applause, congratulating anyone brave enough to step up and express themselves.

It was hard to catch many names, but the highlights were an impassioned call to action from the fiery-eyed regular Jerome Hope and a lady’s expression of pride for her motherland.

Most impressive, for me, was Kojo McPherson (in the pic above), chief scriptwriter for Merundoi (think the Guyanese Archers) who has also been a student on our web skills course. He read at least three poems, the first a personal spin on Gil Scott-Heron’s ‘The Revolution…’, the last being an open-hearted love letter he’d written as a young man.

Xpress Yoself have a Facebook group and a YouTube channel with videos from previous evenings. This is an earlier recording of Kojo McPherson’s ‘The Revolution’.

If one’s RP and one knows it clap one’s hands.

Listening to the poets performing their work on a site dedicated to concepts of place, I’m struck by the fine accents on display as well as by the fine words, the different poetic voices in both senses of the word.  For example, there’s Byron and Emma’s accents which are separated only by a county line and a million miles. Then Charlie and Rukus pumping such different beats from the same heart of England. Poets in Resonance, indeed!

 At one time that wouldn’t have happened, of course.  Access to the airwaves was the sole preserve of people with cut glass accents, not broken glass accents like from my place. (Or yours?) Everyone at the BBC sounded like Brian Sewell and even the “lower orders” were portrayed by upper class actors, as lampooned here by Harry Enfield’s Mr Cholmondley-Warner.

In this country, of course, accents are irretrievably inter-woven with concepts of class with, in reality, dozens of gradations rather than the simple lower, middle, upper class system portrayed by these familiar faces.

Thinking about it though, concepts of class and inter-class cultural embarrassment form a huge part of UK TV comedy folklore – Keeping Up Appearances, Reggie Perrin, Rising Damp, Monty Python, Pete n Dud, Alan Bennett, The Office, Royle Family, and innumerable sketches all spring to mind.  From America, of course, The Beverly Hillbillies is built on that entire premise. Much so-called reality tv thrives on lighting those social touch-papers then inviting us to stand back and watch – Wife Swap being a case in point, and whatever the latest one is called – “How Clean Is Your Big Brother”, is it?

Whilst the very word “prejudice” in itself means to pre-judge, research alleges that  we all carry a mental pecking order of qualities which we subconsciously ascribe to a speaker based on their accent – qualities like trustworthiness, attractiveness and intelligence. Plus, of course, the converse which pins different judgements around levels of street-cred, toughness, criminality, lower intelligence or worse to those of us who speak with an industrial or rural accent. 

Sometimes comedians find humour in subverting those prejudices, as in this Monty Python sketch where the Tyke-toned dad is a luvvie playwright and his be-suited and well-spoken son is a coal miner.

But it’s much more common for advertisers and film-makers to use accents as subliminal short-hand for what they want us to think of a character, or as a short-cut to how they want us to feel about a product – homely, urban, classy, whatever.

So I find it interesting that – in the Heineken advert that I started this blog series with – the advertisers gave William Wordsworth a posh/RP/southern accent when, of course, he was from Cumbria with an accent to match.  An accent which, presumably, he was proud to retain despite accusations of being “unintelligible” at Cambridge and which is intrinsic to his work – some of his rhymes like water/matter and note/naught only work with a reet northern accent. But a quick internet search finds loads of audio and video clips of people like Jeremy Irons (a caste of thousands?) intoning Wordsworth in posher-than-thou tones and Ye Frightfully Serious Poetry Voice.  Leeds-born poet Tony Harrison rages about this sort of thing in his poem Them and Uz.

Now either, as is likely, the advertisers didn’t know of Our Willie’s dulcet tones, or they chose to gloss over the issue and not cause the accent to jar with the viewers preconceptions, prejudices in fact, thereby detracting momentarily from the message that their fizz-watter is the answer to all your problems.

Similarly, I was in London recently and spotted Wordsworth’s poem “Upon Westminster Bridge” as part of the Poems on the Underground series.  Here it is on’t'internet again read by another posh bloke.  But isn’t there a layer of meaning lost from the poem when it isn’t read by an out-of towner?

So, accents and speaking voices – some questions please.  I’d be grateful for your thoughts on:

What other poets of yore are known to have had strong accents?

Can you post some audio or video links to current/recent poets whose speaking voice or accent you consider to be intrinsic to their work? 

Whose dulcet tones do you admire and would wish for yourself?

How do you feel about your own speaking voice and accent?  Does it influence your work?  Have you written some pieces for a specific accent?  Have you heard someone else reading your work aloud and how did you feel about that?

‘Ow d’ yer feel abaht it when t’writers or th’editors feel t’need to trah ‘n gerraccents across on t’page wi’ strange fookin’ spellin’s?

Are you proud of your accent or wish that you could change it?  Are you conscious of it when reading out-of-town or at the widely different gigs that poets find ourselves at?  Does the saloon voice work in the salon?  And voice versa?

Is an accent a boon , a curse or an irrelevance in the world of spoken word? And is your answer the same for circles more concerned with the printed word?

Say what?

I’ll leave you with Linton Kwesi Johnson reading “If I Was A Tap Natch Poet” on American TV.  (Genius moment at 3.12-ish.)

But why have I seldom seen LKJ on UK television?

Why is it so hard to make a living, even as a “Tap Natch” poet?

And who decides what a word’s worth?

Innit.

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.

Okay, okay, “Guest Blogger.”  Let’s do this thing.

Deep breath. Check flies. Remember to smile. Aaaand….

“Hi! Welcome to My Place.  My name’s Tony and I’m going to be your Guest Blogger for the next two weeks. Across my blogcupancy, to coin a phrase, I hope to open discussions on, not just the influence of place on poets and poetry, but also for us to discuss what the place for poetry is in the modern and virtual world. (Other blogs are also available.  Warning – may contain poetry, nuts and mild peril. In case of drowsiness do not drive or operate heavy machinery.)”

I’m very pleased to be involved actually as I’ve been really enjoying this site over recent months.  I’ve made a few postings and comments already and, in recent weeks I’ve been delighted to be asked to act as mentor/buddy/fluffer to the very talented Mr Byron Vincent. I’d like to think that’s been going pretty well behind the scenes and Byron and I will go public on how that’s been working in the next week or so. Meanwhile, there have been loads of interesting contributions and it’s been fascinating to watch the writers’ work emerging.  I’m really looking forward to meeting and hearing everyone at The Big Chill and, as my stint as guest blogger includes the festival itself, no doubt I’ll be offering some reflections after the event.

But along the way, and in the hope of getting some discussions going – I’m going to take my inspiration from this, a half-forgotten Heineken beer advert from the 1980’s. I remember this well and still think it’s a work of genius.

Are you old enough to remember that? Seen it before?  It makes me laugh every time!  So….

….across my next few blogs I’m going to pose several questions which the above clip raises for me.  These include:

The poet and accent.

The poet and intoxicants.

The poet as loner.

The poet and The Great Outdoors – an exclusive report from behind The Big Chill’s frontline. And…

The poet and “The P word.” Can poetry shake off its baggage?

But I’m hoping this will be a dialogue not a monologue, people. These things work best when they’re a conversation not a soliloquy. So all you cyber-lurkers out there.  You!  Yes you!  Do please join in.  Let’s refresh the old parts a bit, prove that August is not a wasteland but the coolest month and, whatever happens….

….please don’t leave me “walking about a bit on my own.”

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.

I’ve been in Guyana for a week now and, as I come to terms with my surroundings, the extra is being knocked off the extraordinary. A friend recently suggested that while long experience can provide a useful guide to an area, descriptions are often best when they come from newcomers – newbies are more likely to remark on the remarkable.

It’s true and I can see that I’m starting to adapt. The humidity and mosquitos bother me less than they did a week ago and the constant noises are sinking into the background. I’ve just travelled the road from the airport to Georgetown again and was less gob-smacked by everything this time.

The drive from the airport into the centre of Georgetown was filled with sights – colonial-style wooden buildings (usually on stilts – this place is below sea level and liable to flood), fields of sugar cane, beer and rum distilleries and a minibus nose-down in a ditch with a crowd (all seemingly unharmed) surrounding it.

It was pretty obvious I wasn’t in Birmingham anymore.

Since settling at the apartment it’s the sounds that are the most distinctive; there’s always something making noise somewhere. After only a few days I’ve realsised I’ve started to tune out many of the most common sounds. Before I start to ignore them completely, here’s what’s been filling my ears:

The car horns that are used almost as frequently as indicators (and for the same purpose).

The dogs that erupt at night if you let the door to outside bang shut. I’ve learnt my lesson now.

The crickets that chirrup with a metronomic rhythm; at first I wondered if their noise was being made by a generator.

Chutney’s a new one on me – an uptempo mix of soca (think souped-up calypso) and Bollywood music. They seem to like it at the rum bar just over the road.

My shouty neighbour who, at 6am every morning, has an impassioned conversation/argument with someone on the phone. Still, the early starts mean I can get a little work done before I go off to teaching.

We’re off to an open mic poetry night at a place called Upscale tonight. Or tomorrow. Reports seems a little confused. Either way, it seems pretty apt, so I’ll try to make it along and report back.

(Pic – Station Street, Georgetown by Chris Unitt)

Actually, I don’t write poems for performance although because I have a theatre background my work is sometimes performative. In my verse novels I try to capture the voices of various characters, to inhabit them as an actor would a character for the stage. ‘Lara’ and ‘The Emperor’s Babe’ are told in the first person. In the former there are many voices, in the latter, mainly one.

I digress. The 4 poems I’m showing you here were, unusually for me, written for performance. In the summer of 2003 I had a writers’ residency with the City of London Festival. It’s historically (some 40+ years) a classical music festival but they were broadening its scope. My remit was to write some poems about the City of London (as in the Square Mile) which would then culminate in a performance with the pianist Joanna McGregor and the saxophonist Andy Shepherd and a multi-media artist (name?). In the event, we met a few times, threw some ideas around and then I went away and wrote some poems.

Facing a sea of faces from a stage can wrack the nerves. Writing your first post on someone else’s blog can too.

My name’s Chris Unitt and, if I’m feeling slightly fraudulent posting here then it’s because I’m certainly no poet. In fact, although I often write professionally, I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself a ‘proper’ writer either.

I’m a blogger. To get all metaphorical about it, Wordpress is my stage, Delicious and Evernote are my notebooks and Twitter is the chat in the bar afterwards. Here’s me with a computer, see?

I’ve been doing a little work with the good folk of Apples and Snakes and they’ve kindly asked me to provide some thoughts on this blog over the next couple of weeks.

I suppose, because the aim of MPOY is to explore real and virtual space and given my profession, I should concentrate on the virtual. However, what interests me are the places where the on and offline worlds intersect – hopefully (but not always) for the better.

In any event, real and virtual spaces are both going to play an important part in my life over the next few weeks. As far as the real world is concerned, I’m about to go and catch a plane to Guyana – I’ll be staying in the capital, Georgetown, for the next four weeks.

I’ll be there to teach web skills to youth groups and charities – that’s where the virtual comes in. You can read more about the project on the Digital Guyana blog.

There should be plenty for me to write about. In the meantime, I need to finish packing.

(Photo by Lee Allen)