Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Katrina Porteous is a poet and historian, born in Aberdeen and now based on the Northumberland coast. She has been Writer-in-Residence in the Shetland Islands and at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, has written many long poems for BBC Radio, and is President of the Northumbrian Language Society. Her publications include The Lost Music, The Wund an’ the Wetter, The Bonny Fisher Lad, Dunstanburgh, Longshore Drift and The Blue Lonnen.

Much of your work seems concerned with that which is passing away – occupations, way of life, language: how important is it to you that these things are recorded in poetry as well as in history books?

I should say that I’ve chosen my subjects – primarily inshore fishing (The Lost Music,The Wund an’ the Wetter, Longshore Drift,‘The Blue Lonnen), but also coal mining (in Turning the Tide), hill farming and other threatened or vanishing industries of the North East – because they are the industries which have created the culture of the people and places I love. We live at a time of accelerated social and economic change. The cultural distinctions of 40 years ago – class, identity, belonging – have altered beyond recognition. I am not nostalgic or sentimental about this. My mother’s family came from a Durham colliery village and I would not wish to return to the conditions of that community in the mid 20th century, nor to those of a fisherman or his wife at the time of the long-lines. But I am also deeply aware that rapid change in the lives of people and communities can leave a sense of loss – of direction or identity or political will. It is to this sense of loss, in the people among whom I live, that my poems are addressed. I write for them primarily, and not for a ‘poetry’ audience.

Having said that, I can answer your question very simply. Poetry is more important to me than history books.That is true in spite of the fact that I chose to study history at university, and in spite of the fact that I’ve written prose history books as well. Prose history is a record of something past or passing; a signpost to experience, to which it is more or less faithful. But because poetry is, to me, primarily spoken and heard rather than read on the page, it is alive in the present; at its best, I believe that it has the power to invoke its subject – to bring something of its subject into the presence of speaker and listener.

That is not to say that poetry has any immedate power to change the world or, in Auden’s sense, to make anything ‘happen’; writing poems about vanishing fishing communities cannot prolong their life. But I do profoundly believe that the shared act of speaking and listening to poetry, itself creates a communality in which something of the subject can be made present. Perhaps it is simply a matter of taking the listener for a moment into the fisherman’s consciousness; how he feels, how he thinks, insofar as I can understand those things. That is done through primitive and largely unconscious means of sound, rhythm and relations of likeness and unlikeness, familiarity and surprise.

Poetry is an act of concentrated listening, not only for the person who hears the poem, but, more importantly, for the poet. If the poem is to work, the poet must really listen, with every sense, during the act of writing. It is a matter of being as true as possible to the subject – a complicated matter, as I’ll try to explain later, but at the same time an intensely simple one. The result is that if the poem is true, if it is faithful to its subject and to itself, it will invoke its subject in the presence of its listeners, and keep its subject present in a way that no history book ever could.

There is also the simple fact that a poem, unlike a history book, is portable in the head. It belongs to whoever claims it. For this reason, in spite of its reputation, poetry is actually potentially less ‘elitist’ than prose, and more subversive. I think of it, at least partly, as belonging to the tradition of popular song. I like the sense of the poem as a living germ which can be passed on and spread, creating its own community. This is, I believe, in the deepest sense, a political act as well as an aesthetic one. A poem can act upon people’s consciousness, help us think about who we are, where we have come from, where we are heading.

Writing in dialect is undeniably challenging: it often results in an unintentionally comic effect or can seem patronising; the fishermen poems in The Lost Music are neither of these. Can you say something about what made the dialect work for you?

I was extremely lucky to catch a generation of fishermen and women among whom the Northumbrian dialect still had its full expressive range and integrity. I spent years immersed in their conversation, listening to them for several hours every day, and it was only as I began that total immersion that I began to write properly in dialect. Twenty years later, I hear much less dialect spoken around me. I can still write in it when I try, but I have to get back to that place in my head where I hear it; and that takes considerable concentration and effort now that I no longer hear it outside.

You’re right that dialect can have an unintentionally patronising or humorous effect. I think that there are several reasons for this. One is the obvious inherited issue of class and power – the assumption that the ‘educated’ speaker is in some way ‘superior’ to the dialect speaker. Dialect speakers themselves, of course, were traditionally made to feel ‘inferior’ at school and taught to ‘speak properly’. Many in the 20th century were in fact bilingual, and used the dialect as a kind of glue within their own community or subversively (when they did not want to be understood by outsiders).

A second reason why I think a dialect might seem unintentionally humorous might be to do with its sounds. Briefly, the sounds of Northumbrian dialect connect very viscerally with the things they describe. There is almost no need to consult a glossary when you hear words like ‘claggy’,‘scaddit’,‘snell’ used in context. They contain their meaning in their own music. We understand them, not just with our heads, but with all our physical senses.

A third problem in using dialect which may give rise to unintended humour is that of juxtaposition. As ‘standard English’ and dialect represent two very different sorts of music, familiar and unfamiliar, they do not sit well together. This becomes a problem when the writer only has a limited vocabulary of dialect words at her disposal, which she has somehow to try to shoehorn into standard speech patterns. It is less of a problem when the integrity of the dialect is intact – when it still has a wide vocabulary and distinct speech rhythms and is, essentially, a separate language. The problem then is to be sufficiently immersed in it to be able to use it consistently.

If popping a few dialect words or (worse) grammatical constructions into a standard English line just doesn’t work, oddly (and probably related to the first point about class), it perhaps works better the other way round. One of the best-known Northumbrian dialect poets was Fred Reed, but when you look at his work closely you’ll see that there is always a pull towards using polysyllabic, non-dialect words and cadences whenever he gets ‘serious’. This does not have the humorous effect that dropping dialect into standard English has; but I think that it could be said to weaken his poetry.

In many of my own poems about the fishermen in The Lost Music I avoided the problems inherent in the juxtaposition of my language with theirs, and that of issues of authority, by deliberately using two separate voices ‘in conversation’ within one poem. Because the dialect speakers were the ones with the knowledge and wisdom, and I was their ignorant student, any comic effect in the dialect was subverted – they were in the position of authority, not I.

A further potential problem with dialect, which I often encounter when judging dialect poetry competitions at Northumberland shows, is the tendency for particular patterns of rhythm to set themselves up for comic effect. It is very hard to express anything serious in a sing-song anapaestic nursery-rhyme meter; much better to listen to the patterns of the speech itself, and to allow those to shape the form of the verse.

Your juxtaposition of natural and industrial imagery in a number of poems creates an effect that is both striking and poignant; where does a poem start for you? Is it with an image, an idea or something else?

A poem for me is an intensely physical thing, which starts from a bodily, emotional sensation of wanting to be elsewhere. It is a feeling not unlike desire, or nostalgia, or yearning; except that the object of the feeling is unknown. So that’s the necessary cause. In order to get there, there has also to be a sufficient cause; and that, to me, is also physical: a pattern of sounds – or more usually a number of these – which take the form of phrases. Often these may be visual or other sense images at the same time; but the important thing is that they must sound – must reverberate in some way, so that other sounds may grow out of them. The key to getting it right is that all these physical elements – the emotion and the sound patterns and the sense images – should converge, strike up unexpected echoes in one another, and transport you to the elsewhere you somehow suspected was there all along.

You refer to a juxtaposition of natural and industrial imagery in my work, which you find poignant perhaps because it contains contradictory or paradoxical qualities. The processes of coal-mining, for example, and the separation and sifting of its waste, so cruelly destructive to nature (and people), are themselves chemical and geological processes dependent upon natural forces. Similarly, an invasive industry like steel production is in constant dialogue with a natural world which it seemingly destroys, but which re-colonises and undoes the human at every opportunity. You’re right that these subtle negotiations between the human and the natural lie the heart of my work. If I have any central, organising belief, it is in the human species as part of nature; often and even principally a destructive part; but ultimately an instrument of nature, which has only one object – to change.

And change, this process of time which I find so endlessly fascinating, comes about by means of contradiction and paradox. The important thing to remember is that it is not the idea from which a poem begins, but the idea in which a poem ends. The experience of writing a poem is itself one of paradox. The first paradox is that, in order to build something out of words, you must first get rid of words completely. The second is that, in order to find the sounds that will do the work of the poem, you have to draw on all your other physical senses.

I will try to give you an example. To write the kind of poem to which you refer, about place, I would, wherever possible, go to that place; walk through it, observe it, touch it, smell it – listen with all the senses. For the poem ‘Blackberries’, I visited the site of Consett Ironworks, which I already knew well. To write the poem, which was a commission, it was not enough to remember it. I had to go there with my notebook, and spend a couple of hours, very quietly, listening; trying to empty my head of the clutter of words and associations, and to experience the small details of the place as if for the first time.

What I mean by getting rid of words is that, instead of looking at a bramble bush and saying ‘bramble bush’, which would immediately stop me seeing it, I looked at it as if it had no name – looked at its shapes and colours, its textures, its smells, the sounds it made – until it became an alien, utterly unfamiliar thing; and only then did I try to translate it back into words.

I did that again and again with many small concrete details of the place. My notebook was full of phrases like:‘they drag their barbed wires’;‘the sky is the colour of cold iron’; ‘the dock rattles its seeds’. There were also a lot of observations which never made it into the poem. Some of them were good observations. But the fact is that when, several weeks later, I felt that sense of yearning, and started to write the poem, I looked in my notebook for phrases, and some of them took me somewhere musically and others did not. The ones that took me somewhere were the ones that made it into the poem. Let me rephrase that. They were the ones that made the poem; because their sounds were the germs of other sounds, and whatever sense imagery they contained set off other associations and reverberated with them and made chords and discords and harmonies.

Other poems have begun with phrases of speech. In the poem ‘Charlie Douglas’, for example, the line ‘Aah’ll tell ye somethin’. Now this is true...’ was something Charlie regularly said in conversation. That and other phrases of his direct speech gave that poem its shape and energy. The most extreme example is The Wund an’ the Wetter, which was built almost entirely out of phrases and words of recorded speech. I was commissioned to write a poem in dialect just at the time when many of Charlie’s generation were dying. I therefore set out to include in that poem as many and much as I could of their words and speech. I trawled through hundreds of pages of transcriptions and notes that I’d made over the years from interviews, and hauled out phrases. My notebook contained lists of real speech expressions:‘Howway doon t’ the churchyard an’ ask the aa’d men’;‘Come wi’ the wund an’ gan wi’ the wetter’;‘By, lad, she’s a reight Taggarine man’s haal!’. I then played around with these phrases until they set up musical associations with each other in my head. It was just like letting them talk to one another. I feel that I contributed very little to that poem, other than, as it were, conducting the orchestra.

I’m sometimes asked about the difference between writing, as in The Wund an’ the Wetter, in a ‘dramatic’ voice, and in ‘my own’ voice, as ‘I’. In my experience, there is little difference. Of course, striving to be ‘true’ is essential to the poetic voice; but the truth, as we try to apprehend it, is by no means the same thing as autobiography or confession. It can be accessed through personae, multiple voices, dialogue, fictions, conceits, contradictions. I am not at all sure that I believe in the traditional distinction between the lyric and dramatic voice. To some extent, the lyric is always dramatic. I write in many voices, all of them in some sense dramatic, and all of them in some sense ‘me’. The relationship of any one of those voices to the self is like that of a snapshot to time. Truth enacts itself in time, and is therefore only accessed through multiplicity, contradiction, the complex relation of parts to the whole.

In the poem ‘Factory Girl’, which is one of the earliest poems in The Lost Music (1987), I use the image of beads threaded on a string to explore the idea of how we make narratives about our lives. That was a poem about making our histories; but it is also oddly descriptive of the way I write poetry, building poems out of scraps of speech or bits of observations, which could be threaded together in a multitude of different ways, but whose form is finally determined by sound association. In a way, that takes us back full circle, to your first question about poetry and history. For me, perhaps the two activities are ultimately the same: trying to find some kind of order, or beauty, within the chaos of experience.