New Forest Writer in Residence: February

Writing at a distance & species-specific poetry

This residency is hosted by the Countryside Education Trust in Beaulieu, supported by ArtfulScribe and funded by the New Forest National Park Authority’s Sustainable Communities Fund.

(A picture from a sunnier season)

My old car failed it’s MOT this month. With help from Jon (thanks, Jon) we replaced some of the suspension parts, but I’m still waiting to repair the hole in the exhaust (precipitated, maybe, by New Forest Potholes and me forgetting I’m not driving a 4x4).

Within the city, I usually travel by bike. It’s quicker, especially at rush hour - and means I get a small bit of exercise before I sit in the University library all day. I really like cycling. Despite drivers trying their best to force me into the gutter, I find cycling really freeing - and I’m especially conscious that it’s liberating for me to be able to cycle home from town at night, for example. Sometimes, I’m even tempted to get rid of my car.

Or at least I would be, if it didn’t significantly cut me off from my favourite spots in the Forest. Ideally, there would be community cars throughout the city that I could tap to access whenever I wanted to pop out to the countryside - but that doesn’t exist. It’s easy to cycle to much of the Forest in summer - but in winter (even if the Hythe Ferry was operating) I’m put off by the roads and the commuters that make them dangerous for people and ponies.

Fortunately (as I mentioned in my last blog), I’m currently editing poetry - and consolidating some of the rough notes that I’ve made so far on the Residency - and for me, as a writer, doing this at a distance is actually really important.

It might be that I’ve always written this way: visiting places, experiencing them - absorbing their essence - and then later regurgitating them into writing. I find it very hard to craft a piece of writing in situ - I can take detailed notes, sketch, capture detail - but knowing how I want to represent a memory, or a feeling requires me to let that raw material stew somewhat - like retting nettles so you can use the fibres, or leaving my rusty nails to soak in vinegar before I use the iron to make ink.

Some of my best writing about place comes years later. In the Map of Leaves, I write about wild gardens that were certainly inspired by overgrown places in my childhood - and the stream that ran between the estates where we lived - and also a visit to Canada several years before. There were also glimpses of Welsh quarries and West Country mines - places that had emerged from distant past visits.

Distance allows you to filter out extraneous detail, I think. As time passes, the most distinctive features of a landscape are what remain with you. The same thing goes for emotions, too - how we feel about a place also distills over time.

So - a year-long residency poses a challenge. How do I filter this place through time? If I were working on a collection of poetry about the Forest I remember from my youth - or from working in the woods ten years ago - I would be able to do that. Instead, I’m curating these poems to represent a place that I’m fairly new to - and don’t have a longstanding emotional connection with. I’m also trying to represent a more holistic view of the woods and the farm - poetry that’s accessible to a wide audience. If it’s too driven by my own emotional experience (for example, my feelings about inequality of access to the New Forest, or returning to a place I cannot afford to live) it might miss the mark in terms of how this poetry can be used or sold.

(Moss, still very green in winter)

One technique I seem to have developed is to focus on small moments - especially ephemeral ones. I’m drafting poems about things like the sounds I heard while the sheep were being sheared and trying to figure out if I heard a curlew from the farmyard. I’ve got poems about insects in the plums in the orchard and individual trees like the chestnut.

At a distance, I can reflect on these moments and memories and try to capture them in words. In some ways, it’s even better to do this at a distance - as retracing my footsteps on the site itself (particularly at a different time of year) sometimes makes me feel like I’m going to accidentally change my perspective - contaminating the original memory with parts of the present that do not represent the initial feeling I had.

I think this is why focusing on individual species, too, can be valuable - and it’s something I’d like to do more of. It means that I can observe that tree or flower in different instances - or create parallels with other times I’ve seen it (I’ve got the beginnings of poems about Hawfinches and Sun Dews and Hen Harriers - other New Forest Species that don’t quite fit with the current project). Perhaps, this kind of poetry is more like painting a portrait - honing in on the characteristics of that creature.

A few years ago in my copy of Mary Oliver’s Collected Poems I began sketching some of the species that she writes about - in pen - directly onto the page of the book. It might have been the poems themselves, or it might have been the species - or other things in my life entirely - that made it feel like I had a huge well of feeling that needed to somehow be represented on the page. It was a reverent experience - I wanted to say something about the Goldenrod, the Goldfinches, the Gannets - but it had already been said in the words of those poems. I wanted to express my kinship, perhaps - or make tangible a feeling that might slip away if I closed the book.

In these last few weeks, I’ve delved into the library and had a look at species-specific writing. Oftentimes, the poets that surface first are the ones I dissected at university - John Clare, Ted Hughes - whose poems about individual creatures are mosaics of observational detail. I do love that detail - it’s wonderful to see how different poets see a feather, or a foot, or the movement of a bird. But I want to look further into how poets capture individual species. Are they painting its portrait, or are they doing something else? Are they looking at it through a hand lens, or finding its place in the wider ecosystem? Do they move between the two?

Interestingly, I’ve never dissected Mary Oliver. I haven’t been able to bring myself to do that. I draw on her poems instead, or send snaps of them to people I love. It is a different experience.

Afterwords: (The thoughts I’ve had that didn’t fit into the flow of the writing above)

On the note of individual species, I’ve had the real pleasure of reading some non-Fiction drafts by Emma Jones, one of two other writers who have been supported by ArtfulScribe alongside this residency. Keep an eye out for her upcoming (species-specific) work on Oysters, Eels and Jellyfish.

Access to the New Forest is a real issue. In the time that I’ve been travelling down to Beaulieu, there have been a number of serious accidents on the Marchwood bypass (a regular occurrance) including two pedestrians left with life-changing injuries. Who can safely access the Forest? Do we prioritise access for people with cars? Why?

When I drew the Goldfinches, I didn’t know that they’re a different species in North America (Spinus tristis) - not the European Carduelis carduelis.