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.

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.

I’ve been thinking about our memories of places and how we ascribe emotions and relationships to place which may not be accurate and often conceal truths we’d rather forget.

I was born in Halifax and my Grandparents lived there until fairly recently.  I was excited to hear about Channel  Four’s new drama Red Riding.  I hadn’t read the books and frankly can’t have read much of the pre-publicity.  Oh a drama about my homeland, rolling hills, heather, a pint of good bitter, the Bronte sisters and Winifred Holtby, think I.  http://www.librarything.com/author/holtbywinifred

Oh but no, Yorkshire in the 1970’s was tough and Red Riding didn’t hide this.  It was really well written but extremely dark and disturbing.  My parents left Halifax for the South Yorkshire countryside for a reason, and they didn’t stay there long!

http://redriding.channel4.com/

I wonder, what is the history of the places that you know?  How is that represented now and what do you think about that representation.  Cornwall and the Lake District have similarly sugar coated images that conceal poverty and deprivation – Anna and Emma what do you think?  What was in the places that you are in residence and what will be there in the future?  Who occupied these places before us?

Geraldine

When we started thinking about this project I realised that I love the idea of place.  I can recall memories by where I was rather than who I was with or when it was and one of my favourite things to do is to explore new places or to discover unknown things about familiar places.  I have spent many happy hours reading poetry about place, from Wordsworth to Linton Kwesi Johnson, it’s a familiar and successful theme.  One of my favourite contemporary writers is Alice Oswald whose poetry is so rooted in place.  I’ve posted some links to work by these writers and a few other good resources on my delicious page – http://delicious.com/tomandgerry

Much performance poetry is about the individual and their response to situations, feelings or politics.  The work that Apples & Snakes has commissioned over the past few years has often involved a personal story such as in Lemn Sissay’s Something Dark, or has dealt with responses to personal emotions such as in Exposed or Things that can’t be said.  I am really excited about work that now looks at place and how our poets relate to that in their work.  I recently commissioned new work from four UK based writers and five writers from South East Asia and commissioned them to write on the theme of freedom of expression.  The work is all posted on the blog http://speechlesstour.wordpress.com/ if you want to read it, or more about the discoveries of a group of poets on the road.   One of the most interesting things of that commission was how the different poets brought in their sense of place and how that shaped their personal idea of freedom of expression.  By poets being in residence in different places I think that the writing they produce will be different and the very inspiration of the place itself will bring new influences.  I see it as an opportunity to stretch the writers involved to create their very best work and to set a challenge for the future of performance poetry.  This isn’t about creating work with participants in places but about a residency and a chance for poets to have time to write in a new setting.  It jumps off from the Poetry Society’s Poetry Places project but has an entirely different dimension, the online one.

The residencies will all be shared online through the My Place or Yours site which will track the experiences of the poets and others involved in the project and will then host the work created by the poets as we do it.  One of the things that I like most about performance poetry is its democratic nature, the sense of ‘I can do that’ that you get from shows and the fact that you can go to a local open mic and participate for free.  To me this is the same online (I concede you need to get online which isn’t yet universal) and I think performance poetry has an opportunity to explore this shared democratic space. 

We want our audiences to be part of this process.  To read, comment and add to the work as it is posted, to share your experiences of place and what it means to you.  If you had a residency where might you go?

I realise we are asking poets to do something daunting to share their work as they develop it and I don’t under-estimate that.  Neither do I underestimate where that sharing of work might take us and what possibilities it opens up.

Geraldine Collinge

“O Little Town of Bethlehem”…”Once in Royal Davids City”…”High Street braced for Christmas Sales Carnage”

We (Naomi, George & I) were wondering how the festive season influences your thoughts on place? Some of us will spend time celebrating with family or partners, some of us will spend the Christmas period alone, working or trying to ignore this pressurizing commercial occasion – which is perhaps defunct of the meaning placed upon it so many centuries ago.

In any case, Christmas must put a rather different spin on our attitude towards place. It’s interesting to consider how our thoughts on place change in relation to the time of year…

What will you be doing for Christmas and what are your thoughts on Christmas and place?

Jen

I just stumbled upon ‘Place’ by Tim Cresswell. You can preview a generous amount of the book here.

Description

This text introduces students of human geography to the fundamental concept of place, marrying everyday uses of the term with the complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it.

• A short introduction to one of the most fundamental concepts in human geography.
• Marries everyday uses of the term “place” with the more complex theoretical debates that have grown up around it.
• Makes the debates intelligible to students, using familiar stories as a way into more abstract ideas.
• Excerpts and discusses key papers on place by Doreen Massey and David Harvey.
• Considers empirical examples of ways in which the concept of place has been used in research.
• Teaching and learning aids include an annotated bibliography, lists of key readings and texts, a survey of web resources, suggested pedagogical resources and possible student projects.

About the author

Tim Cresswell is Professor in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He is the author of In Place / Out of Place (1996) and The Tramp in America (2001). He is also the co-editor of Mobilizing Place. Placing Mobility (2003) and Engaging Film (2002).

What’s hiding in this place?
Is my place better than your place?
If I drew a map to this place would you be able to find it?
Is there an invisible dimension here?
Where do we go to if there’s a fire?
Will there be discounts on tea if you spend a few hours there?
Does this place change radically in different weathers/times of day/seasons?
Does this place impose a certain mood on you?
How does this place connect to other places like it?
When is this place at its best? What season? What time? What elemental condition? And conversely?
What book would you like to read lying in a hammock in your place?
Who’s never been welcome in your place?
Where’s the fridge?
What refreshments can be provided?
Can you sleep safely knowing it exists in the world?
Who would wear a hat in this place?
Where can I go for quiet time/meditate?
Have the people shaped this place or has the place shaped the people?
Does this place have any hope for the future?
Where do I sleep?
How do I get in?
What happens if it’s the wrong place?
Does it have a wi fi connection?
What’s on the local radio?
Do you have public phone access?
Where’s the heating?
Who would never feel safe here?
What’s underneath this place?
How many people can we fit here?
Is this place on the rise, or the demise?
Who lives here?
Why is this place called what it is?
Have any major incidents happened here?
What was this place like ten years ago?
What is it like in when it’s dark?
What is the floor made of?
Any Olympians?
Did the Slave Trade ever visit?
Has your mother ever been there? Why?
How many lone children have you seen?
Are there any freaky insects?
What’s the most interesting house you’ve peered into?
Are the streetlights in working order?
Will it flood?
Do you sound local?
Have you dreamt about your place?
How does this place make you feel?
What does this place feel like?
How would you destroy this place?
Who made it?
What happens if you multiply the effects of this place across the world?
Has this place been loved/abused/both?
What’s here that we can’t see (behind doors/under the ground?)
Has this place been shaped by concepts that we no longer understand/care about?
Does my place have wings?
Do you want to come on over to my place?
Could I fall in love here?
Could I stand naked here?
Could I kill someone here?
Who’s walked there before you?
What’s buried beneath you?
What would Simon Cowell say if this place auditioned for X Factor?
What would Barak Obama say standing in this place?
Is it smelly?
What’s underground?
Do any international activities take place in my place?
How do the postcodes break down my city?
What is the birthrate and the mortality rate of my place?
What is the general cultural make up of my place?
What film would you shoot on this location?
Does my place have boundaries?
Where is your place?
What if it were decimated tomorrow?
Would anyone find you if you were murdered and dumped there?
What is the journey like to that place?
Has anything historical happened there?
Could I eat my dinner in this place?
Whose blood, sweat and tears made this place?
Is this place for me?
Who is the place for?
Who was this place for?
Who will this place be for?
Who owns this place?
Can I buy this place? How much?
Any films located in this place?
Would Neanderthal man have survived there? i.e. water – firewood, shelter etc?
What do you feel you should drink in your place?
What do the cloud shapes above remind you of?
Who is allowed in to my place?
If my place was a fruit what would it be?
How do the locals feel about My Place?
How do outsiders feel about my place?
If you could sum this place up in one word, what would it be?
Is this place haunted?
If you were going to propose to someone, would you do it in that place?
How many methods of transport could be used in that place?
Are there weird references to your place in dusty history books?
How would you improve your area?
Would you live there?
What would you write in a tourist guide?
A bit of personification: if your place was single and unloved, what other area would it like to go out with?
Have you gone digging?
Is your area safe for going around on a skateboard, on your back?
What was this place like before humans came along?
What can you hear here?
What is the difference from when you were last here?
What would your mum say about my place?
How big is my place?
Who is my place twinned with?
How many football teams in my place?
Does this place look the same to everyone?
Is this a good place?
Where do my target audience dwell?
What is the history of my place?
Where are the ladies toilets?
Who’s missing from this place
What is the name of the place?
Is it twinned with anywhere?
Where is the kettle?
Can people visit me here?
When will I leave?
What happens if I set off the fire alarm?
How will I know my time there is finished?
Who will I talk to?
When did this place start?
What did this place start?
What if the whole world was made up with this place?
Which insects live here?
What are the colours of the place?
How does it sound?
What does it taste like?
Tell me what you smell in this place?
What is this place now?
Will this place be here in the future?
What board game would this place be?
Who runs this place?
Who controls it?
Who has power in this place?
Does a gorilla/monkey/lion look good in this place?
Where’s the exit?
Where’s the mirror?
Can you escape from here?
Would you be imprisoned here?
What would Rapunzel have to say about this place (or other imagined characters)
Does it cost to get in?
What does it sound like?
What is the landscape?
Who/what lives here?
What times can you go there?
How long does it take to get there?
How big is it – what are the boundaries?
Is there an age restriction?
Is there a dress code?
What behaviour is expected there?
What has happened there before?
Is there another place like it?
How tall is it?
Can we be loud here?
Who else will use this place?
Can we bring people with us?
Can we dance there?
Is there a kitchen?
Is there space outside?
What is the height restriction?
What accent/language/lingo do people speak there?
Does the space move?
How do you get out of it?
What can you do there for fun?
Which Muppet would it be?
How drunk is it?
Does it know who it is?
Has it ever killed a man?
What is its texture?
What does its smell remind you of?
What sex is it?
If it were a myspace emoticon which would it be?
Who do you wish fo physically extrapolate from it?
What sense of music represents it best?
Which newspaper would it read?
What bodyshape does it have?
Where do you want to visit the most? Why?
Where is your favourite place to celebrate?
What do your friends think about your place?
Where would you most recommend to someone?
Where is your inspiration place?
Where do you feel you belong? Are you there?
Where is your favourite place to go?
Where do you hate going?
What place makes you feel like you’re at home?
Where do they have the best food?
Where is your happy place?
Where do you feel lonely?
What is this?
What is this?
What is this?
John, Paul, George or Ringo?
What connects your place to mind?
Are you safe in your place?
When is your place open for business?
Five things that rhyme with your place?
Where is your shadow falling?
How warm is it?
When did you get there? When will you leave?
What type of sail are you standing on?
To how many decimal places can you work out pi?
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
What’s the history/heritage?
Does this place make your soul sing/sink?
Is this place physical? Literal? Virtual?
How do you feel in this space or place?
What impact do you have on where you are?
Has this place changed significantly over a period of time. If so, how?