Nancy Campbell

Death Warmed Up

2012-02-01T15:10:00.001Z

The London Art Fair offered predictable delights this year: yet more Ben Nicholson etchings! And did Roger Hilton really paint so many gouaches? One welcome oddity was Bloomsbury Auctions' recreation of the recently deceased Craigie Aitchison's studio in the VIP lounge, designed to promote their sale of his effects on 26th January. (Apparently a success - I see that Lot 20, A Selection of Bedlington Terrier Objects, upper estimate of £120, sold for £700. But will there be tax on terriers?)

On my way to the exit, I turned a corner and found myself staring into the scrunched up eyes of Brian Haw. My first thought was that veteran peace protestor Haw was an unlikely person to encounter at the Business Design Centre in Islington. He was especially unlikely to be there, having died last June.

I hadn't been aware of his death, but the fact that the image appeared to be clipped from The Guardian's Obituary column soon brought me up to speed. However, this was no clipping but a meticulous oil painting by Hugh Mendes.

Mendes's ingenious approach to portraiture is to paint a likeness of the obituary rather than the living individual. These paintings are, like death masks, strangely close to daily experience and deceptively tactile. They are exquisite still lifes: both a representation of the newspaper clipping itself and the equivalent of the skull in a vanitas. One can't help recalling the Cubists' representation of newspapers in still life paintings such as 'Newspaper and Fruit Dish' by Juan Gris, or their use of newspaper as a medium in works such as Picasso's 'Bottle and Wine Glass on a Table'. But Mendes offers very modern perspective - the newspaper is the whole subject matter here, seen face-on (as if on a computer screen) rather than laid among other objects on a cafe table.

Mendes's celebrity portraits capture the quantum character of the media. These paintings, each with its 'Obituary' caption, do not ask us to suspend our disbelief and imagine the sitter back into life, as portrait painters have traditionally done. Yet 'Elizabeth Taylor', for example, does not only present the actor in death, at the moment the obituary notice appeared. She persists as a youthful beauty in the photograph which the editor has chosen to memorialise her life. Mendes's paintings invite us to consider the role chance plays in iconography. Which photograph, we might wonder, will represent us after our death? Do we feel a shiver as the shutter is snapped?

Obituaries by Hugh Mendes runs at Charlie Smith London Ltd from Friday 24 February – Saturday 31 March 2012. One exhibition to see before you die.

Perfectionism is Vanity: Peter Lazarov

2012-01-16T10:34:00.003Z

This interview with wood engraver Peter Lazarov comes from the series I recorded with book artists living in the Netherlands during December. The full series can be read in the forthcoming issue of Printmaking Today.

I first saw Peter Lazarov’s wood engravings in a monograph fromthe Endgrain series published by Barbarian Press in Canada (Endgrain Editions 3: Peter Lazarov, 2003).Introducing Lazarov’s prints, Crispin Elsted described ‘an element of abstraction’and the ‘sheer technical finesse’ which ‘moved the idiom into areas we had notimagined.’

Lazarov’sencounter with Barbarian Press inspiredhim to establish his own imprint in 2002. PEPELpress now has an impressiveback catalogue of titles, and Lazarov revels in the book form, believing that ‘a print within a wider cultural context makes moresense than one seen alone’. Two recent books respond to works in other media: Siegfried’s Passion (after RichardWagner’s opera Siegfried, 2008) and Prospero's Books (2011). Since the Barbarian's homage, he's also been celebrated in the trade publication De prentkunst van Peter Lazarov, available from Stichting Nobilis.

Siegfried’s Passion

NC: When did you first move to the Netherlands?

Imoved here in 1990, knowing next to nothing about fine press books. Insocialist Bulgaria no such phenomenon existed; small presses were alwaysassociated with anti-government activities. . . so although I had almost tenyears experience in wood engraving, it was always hand-printing, not using a press.

WhenI arrived I got acquainted with a group of ex libris collectors and, making engravings for them, I came in contact with printers. My first illustrations for a fine press bookwere for Arethusa pers in Baarn, in 1991. Many more followed in the nextdecade.

Siegfried’s Passion

NC:The binding structures and paper of your recent books appear to be influencedby Japanese traditions.

The phenomenon of ‘paper’ was barelyknown to me before my first encounter with Japanese papermaking during aworkshop on mokuhan (Japanese watercolour woodblock printmaking) in 2000. I made my first pieces atthe studio of Okuda-san, near Nagasawa.

Three years later, I applied for anartist’s residency at Awagamy Factory, Awa-Yamakawa, Tokushima. There I got thechance to learn the craft in the traditional way from the late Fujimory-san. Myresidency was dedicated to making paper for my first two PEPELpress books –RubbingRoads and Shoji. The covers of both books are two-layered kozo withwatermarks related to the images in the books.

The difference between my creative life beforeand after Japan was like ‘knowing and not knowing’. Learning a new craft opensso many possibilities of a practical nature, but it also enriches theimage-making process. Non-European concepts of fragmentation and ‘seemingmisbalance’ entered my work, and I still employ them today.

NC: I see you’ve developed a closeconnection with Guanlan Printbase, Shenzhen, China.

The artist printmaker Hao Qiang invited me to workin the newly established printbase a year ago, when we met duringthe 32^nd Congress forex libris and small prints in Beijing.

The studio setting is a former industrial plant situated betweentwo small villages (old Hakka-style houses dating from c. 1700), surrounded by a wall. I felt as if I was living inthe Forbidden City in Beijing, protected from the outside world and destinedfor glory.

I have not words enough to describe the visitingChinese artists, whose generous friendship has been a real gift: Mr Zhao (who had been studying in France in the 1960s - I had to revive my school French again),Mr Woo (with his cheerful and generous Mongolian spirit), and Professor Zhan (agreat karaoke talent) with whom we plotted an exhibition in Shanghai ... Theyrepresent the generation growing up in the turbulent times around the CulturalRevolution. Their preference is for figurative work, landscapeand still life, but their trust in tradition, their genuine emotion and superbcraftsmanship makes looking at their prints an engaging experience.

Guanlan was more than ‘yet another artist-in-residence programme’for me. I had two memorable months filled with positive energy, newfriendships, productive work for which I got total support, and last but notleast excellent food every day. I call this place ‘printmaker’s paradise’.

Half-waythrough my stay I took the place of a Chinese artist who was sharingstudio with Hong and that was the beginning of a 'karaoke-bar-like'working process, which lasted till the very end of my stay there. We weresinging his Korean Pop songs all the time while working and our long hoursof sharing music, smoking, Tsingtao beer, mosquito bites, laughter,late-night-spicy-noodles and funny/serious conversations turned out to bean unforgettable experience for me.

NC: Do you generally work with music in the background?

I value music higher than any other form of art because of its innocence. Visual art employs images which need to be deciphered and understood and not just perceived. Music goes directly into our bloodstream. I like the music of Wagner and it is inevitable that my books andprints will declare this. After Siegfried’s Passion, another one, Parsifal, will be ready for 2013,the Wagner year.

NC: Is Guanlan Printbase equipped with facilities for printing woodengravings? Has access to the studios there changed your work?

Wood engraving is one of the few printmaking techniques which falloutside the rich Chinese tradition. Chinese artists and collectors find it notonly ‘exotic’ but appealing because of the intricate detail. Despite the fact that nowadays the Chinese have become ‘the lordsof fake’ (mass producing or faking anything: cars, old masters’ paintings,computers, cell phones, fashion accessories, cigarettes …) they genuinelycherish detailed and technically advanced works. Virtuosity and craftsmanship areamong the oldest virtues in Chinese culture.

The Printbase is equipped with presses for all majortechniques: intaglio, relief, lithography and silkscreen. Butt was not equipped for printing woodengravings in the European sense, with Korrexes or Vandercooks. So they printed everything by hand from the woodblocks or on an etching press when I engraved something on plastic. And this last option is what Guanlan gave to me – theopportunity to experiment with large format engravings on plastic. I engraved two large MDF and plastic blocks ... gosh that was sohard! They were printed by my assistant Liu Li, or Lilly as I called her.It was touching to see this tiny girlprinting my large blocks on sheets of paper bigger than herself.

Prospero's Books

NC: How did the idea for Prospero's Books come about? Does it visually reference Peter Greenaway's film (1991), orhave you used the text as a starting point for your own ideas?

A friend of mine, Sieds deBoer, came up with the idea of making a semi-commercial book with the Dutchtranslation of The Tempest accompanied by Peter Greenaway's text, andcontacted him asking for a permission. He approached mewith a proposal to make illustrations for his edition. I agreed, with therequest that I would make my own limited edition only with his text, whichis absolutely fascinating.

My intention wasn’t to map the images of the film nor toillustrate the books mentioned in the imaginary catalogue of Prospero’s books.It was rather to give a slice of Prospero’s mind… tomake a movie on my own. That’s why the book has a strange binding in themiddle of the pages, leaving the textual part separated from the images.

NC: I notice you mix silkscreen and woodengraving in the book. In terms of printing the text silkscreen, this interests me becausewood engraving is often cited as the ideal 'sister medium' to letterpress - was therea particular reason for not using lead type here?

Why silkscreen? For purely practical reasons. If I wanted thisbook ever to be made, I had to think of affordable ways to do it. I know verywell that if all the illustrations were wood engravings or woodcuts the whole wouldlook much better. The truth is that I didn’t have any more time and resources tospend. The same goes for all my projects. I believe that images are moreimportant than execution. Professional perfectionism is great but it is alsovanity. If I often spend a lot of time on wood engravings, it is not to show off my skills,but because it is the most practical technique for the project at hand.

I am not a letterpress expert – it is too damn difficult and,let’s face it, lead type has outlived its purpose. Any art has only one purpose– to be integral part of the big culture of the moment. Hegel himself pointedout that the living Art could be only contemporary, not historical (this, ofcourse, was a heated debate between Crispin [Elsted] and I… But we are stillgood friends! He wants me to illustrate an edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis for BarbarianPress.

From the Rivers to the Sea

2012-01-16T06:58:00.001Z

If you travel to Newcastle by train, one of the first things you see as you step onto the platform is a caustic yellow sign marked with an 'M' which points the way to the city's Metro system.

The Metro was introduced to Newcastle in 1980. Although planners had the foresight to commission Margaret Calvert to design a typeface for the transport system, none of the Metro architecture demonstrates the decade's flamboyance and extroversion. Most stops are cursed with a determined, squat functionality, and an ominous Cretan gloom pervades the tunnels that run beneath the city centre. In recent years Tyne and Wear Metro have made dramatic improvements to the stations by introducing a number of public art works.

Hilary Paynter was commissioned to produce a work for the Central Station stop in 2004. Paynter is one of Britain's leading wood engravers, and the choice of artist was no doubt inspired by the memory of Thomas Bewick, one of Newcastle's more famous cultural exports, whose 250th anniversary fell in 2003.

Paynter describes the station as 'a fabulous commission to work on'. She was given a flying lesson so that she could get an overhead view of the landscapes and cityscapes through which the river and the Metro pass. The resulting panoramic wood engraving From the Rivers to the Sea does not miss a single historical or geographical detail from the region.

Paynter's work pursues ‘the idea of the Metro as a journey in and out of the past and the richness of historical context’. The progressive panels show ‘changes in the landscape, including those wrought by man and, in their turn, those changes wrought within man’. The work moves from depicting from tiny natural details, reminiscent of Bewick's subject-matter, such as a snail making its way through wild grasses, to monumental buildings and wide Northumbrian views. One panel honours the architecture left behind by 20th-century mining and shipping industries, another the grand sweep of Newcastle's neoclassical streets laid out by John Dobson in the 19th century. Others reach even further back to the city's past.

In the panels shown below, a bird's eye view of the mouth of the River Tyne flowing into the North Sea has a gleeful catfish superimposed on it. Intrigued by this image, I emailed Paynter to ask about the different elements. She replied that her 'ideas entwined and led to related themes' throughout the commission, explaining that this panel refers to the Roman remains at Wallsend (or 'Segedunum' to the Romans). 'The view of the Tyne is from a satellite image. It resembled a catfish, inspiring the next bit of the design. There was an aquarium there, which was another reference. Then, in the reconstruction of the Roman baths at the site, there were murals of fish. ... I love engraving old stone. The statue of Fortuna in the niche was discovered on site.'

Paynter's wood engravings were printed and then the images applied to vitreous white enamel panels. Whether the objects depicted in From the Rivers to the Sea are modest or monumental, what most impresses me is the success with which the intimate medium of wood engraving - usually pinioned within the pages of a book - has been translated onto such a grand scale to form a public art work with a direct and dramatic narrative.

I hope some of the following images, snapped in the seconds before my Airport-bound Metro pulled in, will give a sense of the scale and success of the work.

Happy New Year!

2011-12-28T06:41:00.002Z

Hearty digital new year's greetings to friends and followers

who did not receive this by post!

Art / Craft / Other

2011-12-25T19:36:00.000Z

Image © Mike Nicholson

Ensixteen Editions has been posting assiduously over the holidays. If you don't already follow this droll blog by book artist and illustrator Mike Nicholson, take a look.

This post highlights a project Nicholson has been working on with the printer David Jury which sees both men considering a perennial problem: the distinction between art and craft. Not content with his discussions with David Jury, Nicholson surveyed a group of other book arts practitioners. All of us were invited to consider how we define our work and how the terms affect its reception by the public and collectors.

I should be grateful to Nicholson for giving me another opportunity to fret about where I find myself on the printing/writing scale. His research notes, containing the survey responses, will be published in the Spring edition of the UWE Book Arts Newsletter, which will land here in due course.

Some books are like teapots

2011-12-25T16:22:00.002Z

I've been in the Netherlands this December, working on a series of interviews with Dutch book artists for the magazine Printmaking Today. As a taster for the feature - out in the spring - here’s my conversation with Noor van der Brugge in Utrecht.

Water is a recurrent image in the work of Noor van derBrugge, who runs The Yeats Sisters Press. I take the train to visit her Utrechtstudio, following the route of the Amsterdam-Rijn Canal. Van der Brugge made a book while making the samejourney.

‘Vice versa is acollection of ships’ names. I was teaching in Amsterdam threetimes a week. In January I decided I would note down the first ship I saw fromthe train each day, along with the time and the weather. I collected thesenotes for the rest of the year. I was able to do it 70 or 80 times – sometimes I forgot – not often! It completely changed my experience of going back and forth to Amsterdam. I was really fed up with this train and, you know, everyone was going to work, so no one was happy. But for me, it became a moment of reflection. Suddenly – I was working on my collection, I was working on a book – I grew more curious about the ships’ names. Some boats I saw more than once. I noticed that 100 years ago most ships had women’s names.’

Although the information provided is minimal, and purely typographic, there is a strong sense of the ships’ characters. A few words create a concrete poem in a manner reminiscent of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s work. ‘I noticed that when you have so little text, your mind starts making connections. For example, this boat was called Morgen Ster (Morning Star) and there was a snowstorm on that day in January, around ten to five, so in my mind, I start making a story….’

Vice versa is a long, flat book, likethe barges drifting along the canal. ‘I tried to make the binding look as if this was a useful book for people working at the sluice-gates, a fake official document.’

Van der Brugge had been printing for some timebefore the growing use of text in her work led her to investigate letterpress. ‘I’ve always loved printing. I’ve done a lot of etching and lithography.'

She continues, ‘My final project at art academy was a book – and I etched the lettering – but I was not too happy with it. It was hard to find a place to learn means of printing text. Then one day I met a guy on a train, and we started talking. He said, “Oh, you should go to Henk van Lunsen in Hilversum.” So I spent a week with him, learning letterpress. But I’m not a professional –professionals work much faster than I do. On the other hand, professional letterpress printers – not artists, but commercial printers – often say to me, “You do things that we are always told never to.” I’m not hindered by too much knowledge.’

‘In the Netherlands the printers are mostly nice old men. They realise that if no one takes over from them, within 20 to 30 years no one will know how to print, so they are willing to explain things. They’re so helpful – I find it very different to the artists’ world I knew before, when I was making drawings, which was more competitive.’

And why The Yeats Sisters Press? Surely the two women who established the Cuala Press in 1908 had no connections with the Netherlands? ‘I read a biography of the two sisters, Lily and Lolly. I really admire them, because in the Yeats family, there the poet, W.B. Yeats, and their father the painter, and there was another brother who was also a painter, and they all did amazing things… but no one made any money, and the two sisters took care of everything. They printed like mad. They were involved in the Arts and Crafts movement and published impressive books. So I wanted to honour them.’

She continues, ‘Mypress may be one of the smallest in the Netherlands. Now I can do everythingmyself: content, of course; printing; illustration and binding.’

Her latestbook, They ALL of them know, is an ‘experimentto combine letterpress and linocut.’ She admits, ‘I love lino. It is such astark, primitive technique.’ The text is ‘a long poem by Charles Bukowski thatgoes on and on, a repetitive phrase about asking – only in the last line isthere an answer. I’m happy with the form I found because it builds to the conclusion.’ In van der Brugge’s setting (see images above) all the text isvisible at first glance, as in a broadside; however, because the sheets arebound as a codex, the images are hidden until the pages are turned. Thestructure is a good way to underscore the tension accumulating in Bukowski’s poem,which is typical of van der Brugge’s imaginative, yet subtle, approach tobinding. She says, ‘I love the book form so much. For me, the turning of a pagealways brings movement and a little surprise. Some people make books that are hardto see as books – they may be more like teapots, or some other three-dimensionalgimmick. That’s nice enough, but still, I respect the simple book form. I liketo have a book with pages you can turn.’

The suede covers of SombereHonden, a series of etchings of melancholy dogs, feel like a particularly silkypug. Van der Brugge chose to present this sequence in book form, even thoughthere’s no text, because it made sense to collect the prints together. ‘One ofmy recurrent themes is the art of collecting. Some people collect little bottlesor knick-knacks… This is my collection of sad dogs. I like to make the world –in Dutch one says “overzichtelijk” – in English, you have “an overview” – so that all is clearly set out and everything has its place. I grew up in the 1960s, and the education I received, especially in primary school, presented the world as compartmentalised in a certain way. In other words, “If you know all this, you’ll know everything.” Perhaps due to my age, but also, I think, the world around us, it seems like everything has got more and more complicated. I’m still looking for that 1960s simplicity.’

Another book, Voyages, is also about collections – and about ships. This one is purely etchings, too. The images were taken from very small illustrations in the Larousse dictionary. ‘I think these nineteenth-century illustrations are so good – they’re small but they tell you everything you need to know about something.’ The tiny images recall a recent interview with Peter Blake, published in Venice Fantasies (Enitharmon Editions), in which he discusses his delight in using illustrations cut from Larousse for his recent suite of collages.

Van der Brugge has slightly enlarged the images of galleons and submarines, but presents them on a vast page, as if seen from the distance across the sea. The blue background, which covers a whole page. She explains: ‘For me it’s a bit reminiscent of Dutch Delft blue – and there’s a connection there with shipping, because even though it’s typically Dutch, Delftware was painted in China, and then traded across the sea.’

Now Van der Brugge is working on a collection of satirical poems by Piet Meewse, a book which employs linocuts andfold-outs. The latter distort the page by shadowing and then revealing imagesand text. The fold-outs draw the reader in. She says, ‘I like thatelement of surprise – you see something but not everything.’ The next book, Lassie, is a response to a poem by a Dutch poet she greatly admires, Tonnus Oosterhoff, who won the mostprestigious Dutch literature price this month. ‘I like his work because he tried everything in the search for the right style – some people think a writer should have one style from the outset, in order tobe recognised, but I think it’s great to try various things. His poem ‘Lassie’ [about the fictional collie dog, who a featured in many children’s tvand radio shows] fits with my theme of making the world a simple,well-structured place.

I laugh. ‘Lassie finds things, wherever they are!’

‘Yes!’ Van der Brugge agrees. ‘The end is always good – and Lassie’s owner isalways good. The villains are always caught orpunished – although nothing really bad happens to them, like being shot – butthey are punished – they are put into prisonor they fall into the water.’ It is a project imbued with optimism, each page bursting with a lively gouache of Lassie on her adventures. ‘I want to make a colourful book this time.’

Bookbinding Now

2011-12-09T18:03:00.001Z

During my trip to New York in October I chatted with Susan Mills in an interview recorded for her Bookbinding Now podcast series. This interview has just been made available here and can also be downloaded through iTunes.

Bookbinding Now is a great series featuring a different book artist every fortnight. I've listened to earlier podcasts to while away the hours spent sewing or making pochoir prints. Scroll down through the podcasts to find my particular favourite: Barbara Mauriello talking about the early days of The New York Center for Book Arts - when the studio was so chilly you had to wear gloves to set type.

Thank you Susan for giving up your time to keep us entertained in our studios!

Pushcart Nomination

2011-12-02T00:42:00.001Z

The Pushcart Prize nominations were announced yesterday. Many thanks to qarrtsiluni magazine for nominating my translations of Qavak songs, which they published back in January.

Meliors Simms - Living in the Anthropocene

2011-11-26T13:25:00.001Z

This enormous suspended Big Berg is one of many astounding interpretations of ice by Meliors Simms. I was excited to discover Simms' wooly icebergs in her solo exhibition Imagining Antarctica in Hamilton, New Zealand earlier this year, and she kindly agreed to tell me more about her work.

Simms is best known as a textile artist, but her practice also incorporates poetry, book arts and letterpress printing - not to mention blogging. She comes to art with a background in Environmental Policy; she confesses 'it was my frustration with trying to effect change through policy channels that led to making art to try and nurture my disappointed soul.'

Simms describes the theme of her recent work as 'all about living in the Anthropocene'. She explores 'the impact of human activity on different environments; from a speculative future (science fiction) perspective, a deep time (geological ages) perspective as well as from our present moment.'

'Concerns about climate change, pollution, overconsumption, species extinction, etc. infuse my work overtly and subtly. The ideas I explore all relate to these issues (coral reefs, mangroves, mines, oil spills etc.). My materials (e.g. repurposed fabrics and offcuts) and commitment to handwork rather than using machines are chosen in part to minimise the footprint of my work.'

Simms has always liked to make things with her hands, but her identity as an visual artist emerged seven years ago while making artist's books. She explains how she had no choice but to make the bold move away from paper to alternative materials: 'Spending most of 2008 living in Australia's Daintree tropical rainforest put paid to my work with paper and I took up crochet and embroidery as a medium more compatible with that environment. Returning to New Zealand led to a transition where I was making books as well as stitching, but these days the textile work is my main focus.'

Meliors Simms with My Antarctica (155x122cm)

Simms has been thinking about how to represent the snow and ice textures of Antarctica for many years, and it seems that in textiles she has found the perfect medium. She says: 'I developed a new textile sculptural technique in order to realize my vision, cutting up old woven wool blankets along the contour lines of a map of Antarctica and embroidering them into a layered landscape relief. I started with a small(ish) representation of Ross Island and then immediately began work on a large scale map of the continent, My Antarctica, which ended up taking eight months of hand-stitching to complete. I spent another year making Antarctic-themed work to fill out a solo exhibition with my big continent at its centre. Imagining Antarctica was my most successful show to date, and utilised a range of textile techniques to explore the history, present environment and future threats (of oil spills) to Antarctica.'

But it's not just Antarctica that interests Simms. She has two other, closely-related projects under development: 'I'm making clouds, or rather representations of intangible phenomena including nuclear radiation, aurora borealis and volcanic ash clouds. Crocheting delicate spheres is a nice counterpoint to the weighty, grounded subjects and dense layered materials I've been focused on. I'm also getting ready to transfer my energy to the other pole, specifically the ocean floor of the Arctic Circle, a large-scale work that will probably pair with My Antarctica in a polar diptych of layered felted and stitched blankets. I swore after My Antarctica that I wouldn't make anything that size again until I had a bigger studio but I'm rearranging the furniture right now to make room for an Arctic the same size.'

I asked Simms whether any particular artist or writer had influenced her Antarctic work. She wrote back: 'The greatest inspiration is Kim Stanley Robinson's speculative fiction novel, Antarctica, which I read and reread regularly. I turned to his writing again and again for the lyrical descriptions of snow and ice as I was attempting to make my own interpretations in wool. It's also a rip-roaring environmental thriller with a strong female lead character.' The New York Times review is equally enthusiastic - this is one to add to my reading list!

In addition, Simms was generous enough to point me in the direction of other New Zealand artists who feature the polar regions in their work. 'New Zealand's proximity to Antarctica and significant activities there mean that Antarctica is a common theme for NZ artists,' she says. 'My favourite interpreters include Colleen Ryan-Priest (cast glass ice), Gabby O'Connell (delicate huge paper iceberg bases), Jane Ussher (photographer of historic huts in Still Life) and Claire Benyon (multimedia artist and poet).'

You can support Meliors Simms' future projects by buying her work or follow her on Twitter @meliors for updates on all the ideas mentioned here.

With the Scottish Arctic Club

2011-11-16T18:51:00.009Z

Thanks to the Scottish Arctic Club for inviting me their annual gathering in Fort William last weekend, to speak about How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic and The Night Hunter. I spent a few days at the base of Ben Nevis in the company of distinguished polar explorers and naturalists. It was great to meet such knowledgeable polar enthusiasts, including the first woman to ski across the Greenland icecap (now in her eighties), and the team who completed the first circumnavigation of Greenland in the year 2000.

Ben Nevis in hiding

My lecture was followed by dinner and great quantities of merlot and malt. Out came the Society's map, a large, multi-section American military chart of the Arctic region ('It's not very accurate, but it's a decent size', one member apologised). Several coffee stains from previous festivities were posing as islands.

The Kaffemik Archipelago

As the evening wore on, intrepid members crawled across the map to mark the furthest points they had reached that year.

I was invited to mark up my residency in Upernavik, and I was intrigued to read the names of those who had been there before me.

Under the Glacier

2011-11-13T15:38:00.008Z

I found this beautiful description of the Snaefells Glacier in Halldor Laxness's novel Under the Glacier (first published in Iceland in 1968). I particularly like the closing lines which describe glacial ice as looking like a print - a nice reversal of my daily attempts to make prints which look like glacial ice.

"... The undersigned began to contemplate the glacier. In actual fact the glacier is too simple a sight to appertain to what is called beautiful, which no one knows the meaning of and by which everyone means something different from everyone else: one of those words it is safer to not use about a glacier nor anything else.

"The undersigned has never before seen this mountain glacier except from too far away, but was now about to become acquainted with it for a while. The mountain reminds one of an upturned earthenware bowl, the glazing a little bluish at times, but sometimes like gold-rimmed transparent Chinese porcelain, especially if the sun is low in the west over the sea, because then the rays play on the glacier from two directions. From here the glacier looks somewhat coarse-grained like a print that isn't good enough; the ice is rain-sullied in many places in the lower regions, and has developed streaks like a smudged print."

(Translated by Magnus Magnusson)

There's more on the novel itself in a great review by Niranjana Iyer over at the blog Brown Paper.

Poetry Beyond Text Exhibition

2011-11-09T23:30:00.002Z

Collaborations between poets and artists will be on view in POETRY BEYOND TEXT at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh from this Friday. Dinner and a Rose will be there, plus exciting new work from John Burnside, Thomas A. Clark, Deryn Rees Jones, and Helen Douglas of We Productions.

The Mystery Is Solved

2011-10-22T14:40:00.011+01:00

How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic opens with a description of a card game. I had forgotten (if I ever knew) its name - and no one, not even the V&A Museum of Childhood, could enlighten me. This was discouraging, but I decided to write about the game regardless of my ignorance - after all, the whole book is about verbal loss.

There is a card game which differs from pelmanism in that every card is different and from solitaire in that there can never be a conclusion to it. As a child I was given a shabby nineteenth-century deck; down the generations the packaging had been lost and the cards were held together with a rubber band of comparable antiquity. Lacking its original case and any rulebook, to this day I have been unable to discover its name, or whether I played it as the maker intended.

The fifty cards, slim and furred with age, depicted not hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds but whimsical landscapes. One showed a magnificent medieval fortress; another, boats on a lake bordered by palm trees; and still others, sublime mountain ranges. Yet whatever the scenery, there was always a road on the horizon, along which a tiny carriage was driving.

These views were not self-contained vignettes. I could join each card to any other, because, however unpredictable the inclines and settlements at the centre, the road reached the edges at the same point on every one. Aligning these extravagant geographies, I made a cardboard continent. The passengers in the little carriage can scarcely have felt a jolt as they crossed from Alpine pass to desert dune; however far they travelled, they never had to fear dropping over a precipice or reaching a closed border, for there was always a card in my hand, ready to lay down to prevent their vehicle rolling into annihilation.

And, sure enough, there the carriage was, pictured on the next card.

To my delight, the game has now been identified. One of the guests at my reading at Florisity in New York last week had also played it as a child, and her subsequent research revealed it to be commonly known as a myriorama. This link offers an opportunity to play a reduced version of the game; both it, and the image above, are courtesy of the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture at Exeter University.

You can buy a modern reproduction of the game for only £3.25 (+p&p) from www.toypost.co.uk. Or you could put the money towards a copy of How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic.

The Night Hunter in New York

2011-10-18T19:58:00.017+01:00

The launch of The Night Hunter and How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic in the United States was a double-bill of Arctic-themed events hosted by The New York Center for Book Arts and Florisity (see pictures below).

Between the festivities I saw a solo exhibition of sculptures by Peter Schell, one half of the creative team behind The Night Hunter. The purity of these forms reminds me of layers of glacial ice, although they were begun long before our Greenlandic collaboration.

Emily Martin was also in the city celebrating her solo exhibit Theme and Variation at The Center for Book Arts. We made cookies to serve at the private view iced with her trademark stick figures from the 'Crime and Romance' series. Emily's show continues until 3 December. It would be criminal to miss it.

Theme and Variation at The New York Center for Book Arts

Emily Martin working with icing bag

Emily Martin's work also features in the exhibition The Book As Memorial: Book Artists Respond To and Remember 9/11 at the Haas Family Arts Library at Yale University. The library has also added both The Night Hunter and How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic to its collections.

Thanks are due to the New York Room With A View establishment by the waterfront on Staten Island, which provided a place to sleep in between all these activities.

The Night Hunter:

Book Arts Lounge at The New York Center for Book Arts

7th October 2011

Roni Gross (proprietor of Z'roah Press) demonstrates how to print on the Vandercook

Participants take turns to print flashcards with words from How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic.

On the left, bookbinder Ana Cordeiro, who made the box that houses the deluxe edition of The Night Hunter, welcomes me back to The Center for Book Arts after a three-year absence. It was good to find Natalie McGrorty (in purple) in town too.

Reception and Book Launch at Florisity

16th October 2011

The Night Hunter

Roni Gross's flower arrangements referenced polar themes

How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic

Thanks to Sarah Nicholls, Roni Gross and Emily Martin for the photographs used in this post.

New York Book Launch Double Bill

2011-10-16T17:46:00.002+01:00

Poetry Cafe at The Flying Goose

2011-10-03T15:31:00.002+01:00

The Nottingham Poetry Series hosts a regular Poetry Cafe at The Flying Goose. I just received their beautiful flyer with details of the forthcoming year's events. I'm scheduled to read in April, but that's a whole winter away - I'd like drop in on one of the other readings, and see if the sofas really are that inviting, before the spring.

A Dealer On Either Side of the Pond

2011-09-29T18:11:00.013+01:00

The launch of How to Say 'I love you' in Greenlandic was celebrated at The Poetry Society in London on 22 September. The edition is now available for sale. Bookselling is a slow business, so I am very grateful to two venerable dealers in fine press and illustrated books for adopting my book and sharing the dirty work with me.

In the UK, my Arctic alphabet can be found on the shelves of Collinge & Clark, just down the road from the British Library in London. Oliver Clark has featured the book on his sparkling new website, which offers the undisciplined browser an endless distraction of paper delights. Customers can sign up for the erudite newsletter and benefit from 10% discount on all current stock. Collinge & Clark have been providing bibliophiles with works on printing and typography since 1989, but the shop (above) will be best known to many as the set for cult comedy Black Books.

I'm delighted that the work has also been featured in Catalogue 70 from The Veatchs, also specialists in the history of the book. Bob and Lynne Veatch's shop in Northampton, Massachusetts, stocks examples of book-making from all periods, early and modern fine printing, historical and publishers' bindings, and designer bindings. Catalogue 70 focuses on the genre of the alphabet book - the compilation is 'a fabulist's wishlist' (Maureen Cummins), with alphabets ranging from Aphid to Zebra (Beo Press), Aqueduct to Urinal (Parrot Press) and - for the more arcane - a set of Ohgam characters by Eileen Hogan. I hope a few American collectors will find their way to the Arctic through the Veatchs' doors.

Horizon: The Art Of Losing

2011-09-19T21:12:00.006+01:00

Photographs hanging in Scott’s Expedition Hut, Ross Island, Antarctica

(Photo: Velvet Android/Flickr)

The latest issue of Horizon, a review of literature and art, is now online. The offerings selected by editor Katy Evans-Bush include my essay 'The Art of Losing' on the artist Emma Stibbon's Antarctic Series.

Udkant: On The Margins

2011-09-10T16:40:00.007+01:00

Doverodde Book Arts Festival IV

Limfjordscentret Doverodde Købmandsgård, Hurup Thy, Denmark

Plans are afoot for the Doverodde Book Arts Festival at Limfjordscentret in Denmark in May 2012. This year the theme of the festival will be Udkant which can be translated as 'on the margins'. Mette-Sofie Ambeck, book artist and the Festival's Project Consultant, says that Udkant may mean 'being on the edge of what is allowed – being furthest away from the centre – or on the edge of a remote place like a forest'.

Those visiting the Festival to experience the exhibitions, workshops and book arts symposium will be sustained by music performed by cellist Regina Brunke and cakes baked in the 'book cafe'.

This year the Doverodde Book Arts Center will appoint a writer-in-residence to produce a body of work in response to the nature and culture of the Limfjord. I'm excited to have been invited to fill this position and I look forward to working in this beautiful and historic area of north-west Denmark in the month leading up to the Festival.

Illustration

2011-08-14T06:52:00.003+01:00

The summer issue of Illustration is full of drama. It appears that the Pre-Raphaelite illustrator formerly known as Florence Harrison was not the true Florence Harrison at all, and that there were hidden depths to two of the earliest illustrators of Pickwick Papers, Robert Seymour and Robert William Buss. While Oliver Messel’s reputation rests primarily on stage design, his distinctive illustrative work is no less entertaining. There's also a reconsideration of the work of Thomas Bewick prompted by Nigel Tattersfield's monumental new study. At the contemporary end of the spectrum, look out for 'Letters from the Arctic', a feature on How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic.

The magazine can be found at a number of venues including the British Library and Tate Britain bookshops; the feature on How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic can also be accessed online, thanks to Cambridge University.

The Cemetery

2011-07-20T17:48:00.004+01:00

'The Cemetery' - a pantoum from my Arctic series - has just been published in the online magazine Ink, Sweat and Tears.

News from New York

2011-07-12T11:36:00.003+01:00

The Night Hunter

Roni Gross - a longtime friend and more recently collaborator - has put up some amazing images of recent work on her website. Here you can see a generous spread of the Zitouna offerings that Gross has printed biannually for Valentine's Day and Hallowe'en since 1989. To me, who only gets around to making a Christmas card every other year, this output seems phenomenal. Especially when the rest of Gross' work is taken into account. More of that here, too: a selection of poetry broadsides, and for those curious to see more images of The Night Hunter than have appeared on this blog to date, there's a slideshow of sorts, with the artist's commentary.

Tertulia: 14th July 2011

2011-07-06T21:31:00.008+01:00

A Tertulia? The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie, Luis Buñuel

‘Tertulia’ is a Spanish word ordinarily applied to social gatherings with literary, artistic or bohemian overtones. "One would speak of ‘going to a tertulia’ as in ‘going to a dinner’," explain Phil Owen and Megan Wakefield, founders of Bristol’s Tertulia - a salon for people working with or interested in language from a range of different disciplinary and methodological perspectives.

Tertulia is held in the Reading Room at the Arnolfini. The next salon falls on Bastille Day, 14th July, 7.30pm (free entry). Responding to a gauntlet thrown down in Cambridge last month, I’ll be presenting How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic through performance rather than print, re-imagining it as a sound work that befits the oral culture it documents. I’m looking forward to seeing the other contributions, particularly Rachel Flynn’s analysis of Graham Sutherland’s writings on the landscapes of Wales and Mary Crowder’s subversion of medical texts. Not to mention the coda: ‘Sam Playford-Greenwell will attempt to balance a banana on his head.’

Andrew Lee's London

2011-07-01T11:58:00.004+01:00

Andrew Lee explores the darker side of London signage. Regular readers will remember his work Gangland Caff, the menu board featuring some gruesome Cockney morsels. This macabre humour is also evident in Lee’s recent photographic work, including the topical NHS Cuts at the Throat, Nose and Ear Hospital (above).

Visit Lee's website for more photographs, as well as graphic work on urban life and urban nature - some favourite subjects being 'birds' nests, geezers, pears, and bull terriers.'

Canapes in Cambridge

2011-06-18T14:56:00.010+01:00

Is there a collective noun for icebergs? I am casting around for one worthy of the silver platters of edible icebergs which appeared in Cambridge on Thursday evening. The canapes, made from frangipan - yellow raspberries - cucumber - white asparagus - shrimp - sea salt pearls - and what appeared to be nothing less than gold dust itself - were the inspired creation of Jaqi Clayton-Church of CuisineJacqueline. Many thanks to Jaqi, the World Oral Literature Project and all at The Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities for making the preview of How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic such a resounding success.

Doverodde Book Arts Festival 2011

2011-06-13T12:27:00.010+01:00

Photograph: Ahlrich van Ohlen

At the beginning of June book artists from across Europe met on the Limfjord in Denmark for the annual Doverodde Book Arts Festival, where I launched How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic.

The festival was accompanied by a juried exhibition '... in the air ...' held in the magnificent nineteenth-century Pakhuset. Anne Bossenbroek interpreted the theme to create Bruits - a unique Georges Perec doily of a book - that chronicles noises heard in the Netherlands. Alf Bjork exhibited a set of three bicycle tires, bursting from their boxes in various states of inflation. (I had the opportunity to discover more of Bjork's work when we took off for the North Jutland coast one evening with new friends Katriona and Eva. We were moved by Lamningar, Bjork's installation on the theme of ancestry.) Mette-Sofie Ambeck's installation They came, they flew (inspired by Hitchcock's film The Birds) occupied a building all of its own - a thirteen-story vertigo-inducing turret that looks out across the waters of the Limfjord. Ambeck is interviewed on the work and gives a tour of the exhibition here.

After Light (Nancy Campbell and Paula Naughton, 2009)
... in the air ...

Ghosts and Apparitions

2011-05-27T08:23:00.019+01:00

a butterfly, a breath, a nothing - Zoran Music

An unexpected follow-up to Music's words (quoted in the previous post) came at a special meeting of the Magic Circle at the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, today, where the topic under discussion was 'Ghosts and Apparitions in the Field'.

Piers Vitebsky, in a talk which carried forward themes from his research on loving and forgetting ancestors among the Sora, considered why Baptist ghosts in tribal India behave differently to pagan ones. Physical death - by tiger or smallpox, for example - is only the first of several stages of death among the Sora. The final stage, which releases the dead person's spirit from its duty to torment the living, comes when no one on earth survives who retains any memory of the dead person. Only with this liberation from memory can the individual die a final death in the underworld and the soul appear - as a butterfly.

The coincidental reference seemed worth considering in relation to the nature of creative work too. While some may aim for nothing less than immortality and consciously impose their ego on their art, Music's work achieves its (equally unmistakeable) character through its elusive style. Dull tones merge into one another and the viewer's attempt to focus on the equivocal forms depicted (faceless horses seen from behind or distant mountains, for example) is foiled. At their most extreme, these works might be paintings on linen turned to the wall, so that one only sees the bleed of paint through the cloth... was Music aiming for something or 'nothing'? Is his work a double bluff? And how is his painting technique related to his conflicting desires both to remember (and to testify) and to forget?

Other presentations, all splendidly stimulating, included Dr Shane McCorristine on the role of psychic messages obtained through mesmerists and clairvoyants in tracing Sir John Franklin's Arctic Expedition during the 1840s (a perfect complement to the work I've been doing on the actual correspondence this expedition attempted to send back to Britain). Dr Olga Ulturgasheva spoke about how young Eveny Reindeer people make their dreams come true by predicting the future (above). Dr Kostas Zorbas served Turkish Delight, which became less palatable once he began to tell the macabre tale of a Siberian albys who sliced off chunks of her own flesh to feed her lover. Dr Gilly Carr provided an eerie and very personal account of hauntings in the German Bunkers of the Channel Islands.

Music and Barbarigo

2011-05-22T00:20:00.018+01:00

Zoran Music, Grey Figure (1998)

After a quick tour of Tracey Emin’s cluttered and confused retrospective (love is what you want) at the Hayward Gallery, I retreated to the calmer Estorick Collection on Saturday afternoon.

I’m slightly suspicious of the ‘His and Hers’ concept show, but Double Portrait is a fine introduction to the work of two strong artists: Zoran Music and Ida Barbarigo. Music (1909-2005) and Barbarigo (b. 1925) are very distinct in their handling of paint, but elements in the work of both make sense of this double hanging.

The press release, which in places might be mistaken for a HELLO! feature, informs us that Music and Barbarigo married but continued to lead independent lives: ‘They maintained separate apartments, meeting to dine together and to discuss the day’s events each evening.’ I'd love to have eavesdropped on those conversations. Did they analyse his penchant for painting horses? The fact that chairs symbolized all human life to her? Did they discuss their obsession with light – especially the way it occludes as much as it reveals? Did they argue about the progress of yet another double portrait, those great canvasses with tiny, faceless figures representing the artists themselves, slumped lonely and far apart in the shadowy corners of the frame? Did they live apart long enough to justify Music’s grand pronouncements about solitude and silence?

The couple owned studios and apartments in Venice and Paris. Judging from the photographs on show, the Venice studios would not look out of place in a Hollywood film. (The gallery attendant and I compare notes on how green our jealousy.) The handsome couple appear alternately in evening dress and louche dressing gowns. But I welcome this new insight into Music’s life: my previous encounters with his work had been informed solely by my knowledge of his internment in Dachau in 1944-45. (A book on Rembrandt’s etchings, borrowed by Music from the library at Dachau and never returned, is on display.) Many of Music's paintings, such as We are not the last, continued to testify to his experience of the Holocaust. Yet his marriage to Barbarigo indicates another dimension to his life and painting in the years after 1945. Displayed beneath the portrait he painted of Ida soon after they had met, his words on painting are celebratory, if a little nihilistic:

A painting will only work if it is spontaneous, joyful and light. I think that work is like a butterfly, a breath, a mere nothing.

Ida Barbarigo, Portrait of Zoran (1946)

The Third Thing

2011-05-21T12:24:00.006+01:00

The poem above, by Lu Yu (in a translation by Arthur Waley) is paired with a woodblock print by Ralph Kiggell. The page spread is from Leading the Cranes Home, a selection of Chinese poems published by The Old Stile Press.

Kiggell, a British artist based in Bangkok, studied traditional woodblock printing in Japan. While working respectfully within this traditional process, he has a thoroughly contemporary vision - exemplified in a recent series of prints depicting pylons and water towers. Perhaps the 'mountain rain' that pours through the hat of the ox-minding boy in the image above was an omen, for Kiggell's next venture with The Old Stile Press, The Third Thing, will be an anthology of poems about water. (The title is drawn from a poem by D.H. Lawrence.) Kiggell is well qualified for such a subject, having recently completed a remarkable swimming pool mural in Hong Kong. One of the older poems in the volume will be an Anglo-Saxon riddle from The Exeter Book, in my translation. I'm looking forward to seeing how Kiggell responds to the equivocal words through wood and ink.

An Arctic Evening in Cambridge

2011-05-12T12:20:00.000+01:00

BABE 2011

2011-04-28T08:55:00.002+01:00

The town where ducks never go hungry

2011-04-13T21:20:00.016+01:00

So farewell Abingdon, my home for the winter. With the arrival of spring I'm packing up my kit bag and hitting the road again. But I'll miss this town, where there's always someone feeding the ducks:

and the doors are amazing:

even if they must be kept shut:

There are ancient almshouses with equally ancient residents who have indulged in some extraordinarily morbid but beautiful grafitti:

I think most of the aged poor have disproved the author of Ecclesiastes:

Some of the almshouses are named in honour of their benefactors:

With names like this, it is no surprise to read (on Wikipedia) that one of Abingdon's more famous residents is Gerald Charles Dickens, the great-grandson of the novelist. Finally, here's more on the great Mr Twitty, in the fine stonecutting that he deserves:

Now I aspire to be one of Twitty's 'honeft and induftrious poor' in order that one day I may be maintained in 'Meate Drinke and Apparrel and all other Neceffaryes of Life' in Abingdon, with enough crumbs left over to feed the ducks.

Wish you were here!

2011-04-02T16:08:00.015+01:00

I've just returned from Picture This: Postcards and Letters Beyond Text, a fascinating conference on the epistolary form in literature and art organised by Bethan Stevens and Katie Reid at the University of Sussex.

The presentations ranged from a discussion of how Twitter can be seen as the new picture postcard (Esther Milne) to the process of creating an interactive novel and website between Wales and the Southern Cone countries of Uruguay, Argentina and the Falklands (Des Barry and Diego Vidart). There was a strong emphasis on curatorial practice, archives and the visual aspects of letters. Ann Dumas spoke of the challenges of displaying Vincent Van Gogh's letters to art-lovers at the Royal Academy and her talk was later complemented by Bethan Stevens' readings from a novella in progress, composed of letters between a fictional museum curator and collectors at the beginning of the twentieth century. My own paper 'Corpses, Cairns and Carrier Pigeons: The Polar Post' was delivered safely, unlike its subject matter.

Belle Mellor and I snapped in the 'Creativity Suite'

The illustrator and animator Belle Mellor and I were asked to deliver a workshop session for conference delegates on image and text. Drawing on the theme of the illegible or lost letter, which had been raised by many papers, we looked at the poignant and poetic qualities of partially destroyed messages, such as the manuscript found on Swedish Polar explorer Salomon Andree's body, thirty years after his death (see picture, top). Belle and I challenged participants to make their own postcards using found texts - in this case resorting to some ancient copies of the National Geographic from a dusty corner of Belle's studio, which contained plenty of exotic destinations.

While the group sent surreal postcards back and forth, building up some interesting epistolary narratives, Belle and I even had a chance to make a card of our own, pictured above. We hope that all the postcards from the workshop will be displayed on the Picture This website in the not-too-distant future.

Many thanks to Dana Brass-Hague for the photographs.

TOAST: A Night on Weevil Lake

2011-03-30T11:10:00.006+01:00

Staedler Print by Helen Allsebrook

TOAST: A Night on Weevil Lake is now complete. Sarah Bodman has made a riotous film charting our tribute to Douglas Coupland’s novel The Gum Thief on World Book Night. To see the inevitable visit to STAPLES stationery superstore, the discovery of a weevil in the pancake mix, and the necessary last-minute recourse to Chinese takeaway… click here.

In addition, an artist's book has been published, incorporating verbal and visual toasts from each of the dinner guests (as well as some satellite participants).

A New Publication - The Night Hunter

2011-03-24T23:39:00.019Z

Without any doubt the most exciting project I’ve participated in over the last year has been The Night Hunter, a work now available from Z’roah Press in New York. Roni Gross, book artist and founder of Z’roah, produces limited edition artists’ books with the sculptor Peter Schell. Gross spotted my poem ‘The Night Hunter’ when it was awarded a prize at the Norman MacCaig Centenery celebrations last year. It is an honour to be added to Z’roah’s panoply of poetic works, which includes the exquisite Radiance and Repose by Geri Gomez Pearlberg.

It has been intriguing to see my work taking on a new imaginative form. Explaining the design decisions, Gross writes:

‘The structure of the book, a palm leaf, is of east asian origin, as is the form of the poem, a pantoum. The requirements of the pantoum are that the lines repeat in a specific pattern. We felt that the reader could be cued into this pattern visually, using drawn lines whose colors repeat as the language repeats. In the abstract quality of the lines is the suggestion of a remote landscape.

‘Historically in Greenland, the lack of ordinary materials like wood and metal, and even fiber for cordage, has made materials found on the beach or acquired through trade of great value. For this work, the sculptural vocabulary was chosen from primarily found material: wild harvested dogbane for cordage, driftwood for covers, scrap metal and horse bone, scavenged wood for the game board.

‘The objects, making abstract reference to the poem, allow the reader to re-experience the poem tactilely, and also participate in the telling of the story by arranging the objects on the game board.’

These elemental materials – the stone, the steel, the bone – even the driftwood and the dogsbane cord – are a perfect physical expression of the austere Arctic environment that I had tried to capture in the poem. In Greenland, driftwood washed ashore from other lands or shipwrecks was once a valuable commodity, a means of sustaining survival. What is discovered at the harbour finds a new incarnation on unfamiliar land.

Everything about Roni Gross and Peter Schell’s production improves on and enriches the original, one-dimensional poem. I am amazed by how close they have come to expressing the unspoken intentions of the work. It has been a wonderful experience to have the words taken out of my hands and see them develop and deepen in this way.

The Night Hunter
Words by Nancy Campbell
Sculpture, design and production by Roni Gross and Peter Schell
Z’roah Press, New York, 2011
Edition limited to 28 copies, signed and numbered by the artists and writer. The deluxe edition (pictured) is priced $2,500 and the standard edition (in a Cave Paper Case) $750

Siglufjörður Residency

2011-03-17T18:20:00.021Z

Siglufjördur 1905

I have been awarded a residency in the Herhusið studio, located in Siglufjörður, North Iceland. This month-long residency is a wonderful opportunity to travel north again and consider the Arctic from the boundary where it meets with the temperate zone.

Siglufjördur is a lively coastal town, caught between ocean, rock and glaciers. It was the capital of the North Atlantic Herring Fishery from 1903-1965, and is now home to the enticing 'Herring Era Museum'. I've been hoping to bring a fishy element into my work for some time (I grew up close to the Border harbour towns - St. Abbs, Eyemouth, Craster and Cullercoats - and have always been partial to mackerel). Now, with the economic and environmental challenges facing the fishing industry, it seems a more intriguing subject than ever.

Siglufjördur 1946

I'll be accompanied on my investigations of the Herring Era by photographer Mark Walton, whose work has already appeared on these pages, and writer and broadcaster Carinne Piekema will contribute some sound science to the verbal/visual mix.

One of the good things about the residency is that it has already introduced me to the work of the fantastic artist Julia Lohmann who spent a month at Herhusið in 2009. Her kelp structures and maggotypes are extraordinary. Thanks to Julia for letting me use the images above from her blog about her residency.

The finished article

2011-03-12T12:53:00.010Z

Here's a preview of pages from How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic, which has just been sent off to the Red Bone Bindery, Ottawa, where designer binder Natasha Herman will make cases for the prints.

Creating the images using the pochoir process has been an adventure: it's a new process to me and I've found it demands a very different approach from relief printing using a hand-press. While it is no less meticulous than wood engraving, for example, there is far more room for experiment and improvisation within each print - whether in the sweep of the sponge through the stencil or the colour of gouaches mixed - and equally, far more potential for a small slip of the hand to write off a print completely. I had to revise my expectations, both of the aesthetic unity of the project, and the practical matter of time. It takes me about fifteen minutes to create one print, and I can't work for more than two hours at a stretch before needing to refresh the paints and wash out the mylar stencils.

I'm particularly pleased with the design for an iceberg pilcrow to accompany the Weiss Roman typeface, just visible on the first page of the introduction above. Strangely, Weiss never saw the need to create an Arctic pilcrow. I wonder if this oversight will be addressed in the forthcoming monograph on the artist and designer from Incline Press, The Book Work of E.R. Weiss by Jerry Cinamon, which my library is eagerly awaiting.

Poetry Beyond Text

2011-03-01T10:47:00.007Z

I celebrated World Book Night with Sarah Bodman and friends in Bristol. Last year Sarah lavishly recreated every meal mentioned by novelist Patricia Highsmith in The Talented Mr Ripley as source material for our book Dinner and a Rose, and the sinister feast was so splendid we decided to make the fictional dinner party an annual event. This year the featured book was The Gum Thief by Douglas Copeland... and a full report will follow when I am completely recovered.

Meanwhile the book that rose from the ashes of last year's dinner is being exhibited this month at Dundee Contemporary Arts. The exhibition is organised by Poetry Beyond Text, an AHRC funded project to investigate 'vision, text + cognition' in literature. The exhibition travels to Edinburgh where it can be viewed at the Scottish Poetry Library in May and afterwards at the Royal Scottish Academy. If you can't make it to either venue, there are images at the Poetry Beyond Text online gallery.

Picture This Conference

2011-02-23T09:14:00.007Z

The programme for Picture This: Postcards and Letters Beyond Text conference at the University of Sussex is now online. Dorothy Parker's telegram to her editor (above) reflects my own feelings about my paper but Corpses, Cairns and Carrier Pigeons: Polar Postal Systems should be ready to deliver by 24th March.

I'll be investigating how the correspondence of eighteenth-century polar explorers was subverted by the environment, as indeed were their expeditionary goals. The letter is commonly defined as an object that travels over distance to a named recipient, but explorers frequently cached their correspondence in fixed locations, addressed to a general reader, while they travelled on. When stasis - death - became inevitable, farewell letters were composed and concealed on the writers' freezing bodies. Readers had to travel in turn to hunt for the caches or corpses which spelt out the narratives' conclusions.

I am studying the correspondence of two Arctic explorers: Sir John Franklin (1786-1846), whose disappearance while seeking the Northwest passage caused a Victorian sensation, and S. A. Andrée (1854-1897), the Swedish scientist who perished in his attempt to reach the North Pole by hydrogen balloon. Their communications will be compared to the culture of the indigenous people of the Arctic.

As documents originated by European authors but heavily influenced by polar landscapes these textual fragments are an interface between 'civilisation' and 'wilderness'. My poetic and ecocritical reading views these letters as temporal and spatial performances which resonate long after the text (SOS) has become illegible or obsolete.

I'll also be providing a workshop on image and text with the wonderful artist and animator Belle Mellor at the conference. All are welcome to join us at the University of Sussex for the weekend, which promises much interesting discussion on the art of letter writing.

How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic: Day 3

2011-02-13T08:48:00.002Z

How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic: Day 2

2011-02-11T11:22:00.002Z

London Valentine Event

2011-02-10T18:04:00.008Z

I'll be revealing How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic and discussing the role of a writer in residence in the Arctic in Stoke Newington Bookshop on 14th February, organised by N16 Readers & Writers.

No polar bears will be harmed during this talk.

8pm Monday 14th February

Stoke Newington Bookshop

159 Stoke Newington High Street

London

Free (I think)

How to Say 'I love you' in Greenlandic: Day One

2011-02-10T16:41:00.004Z

Poems in three dimensions

2011-01-31T14:16:00.016Z

Wallace Stevens as seen by David Hockney

Thanks to all sixteen poets who came to the workshop on 'Poetry in Three Dimensions' - an introduction to book arts - at the Poetry School last weekend. We had some fascinating discussions about the relationship between poetry and design, and it was great to witness everyone's enthusiasm for getting stuck in and making their own books.

We looked at different presentations of Wallace Stevens' work by the artists David Hockney and Helga Kos. As a young man Hockney produced a print series in response to Stevens' long poem The Man with the Blue Guitar (itself inspired by a painting by Picasso); Stevens' late poems, set to music by Ned Rorem, feature in Kos' artist's book Ode to the Colossal Sun. Kos describes her three-volume work as 'a third, visual stratum to Stevens' poems and Rorem's music' and I've no doubt that in time this setting - which won the accolade of Best Dutch Book Design in 2004 - will be considered as iconic as Hockney's.

Wallace Stevens as seen by Helga Kos

The class drew inspiration from these artists' books to make three hand-bound volumes to present their own writing. As the binder Keith Smith writes:

'Bookbinding at its ultimate realisation is not a physical act of sewing or gluing, but a conceptual ordering of time and space. It is not sewing but structure of content that ties together the pages of a book. Binding must begin with the concept of text and/or pictures.'

You can see images of Anne Welsh's beautiful setting of her poem 'Arran Jumper' over at her blog Library Marginalia, and the photos below show work-in-progress on Elizabeth Bell's poem on the sea deity Sedna, and Zakia Carpenter's ingenious thread-typography.

Pochoir stencilling

Reflections in a Field of Heaven

2011-01-22T11:42:00.002Z

I'll be reading recent work at 'Reflections in a field of heaven' at the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford. This night of poetry and performance has been curated by Brian Catling to mark the close of Matthew Luck Galpin's wonderful exhibition Anvilled Stars.

Reflections in a Field of Heaven

Sunday 6th February 2011, 7pm

Museum of the History of Science, Oxford

Free

Qavak Songs Controversy

2011-01-14T20:19:00.027Z

There's been some controversy on the use of language in my 'Qavak Songs' published in Qarrtsiluni's 'Translation' issue last week, notably at the NCC Woman’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO). As I wrote in response:

I’m glad there’s debate on the matter and I’d be interested to hear more opinions from both sides. I’m particularly proud of qarrtsiluni for publishing the songs, as I had expected publishers to shy away from the language and subject matter. Translation is about entering and respecting other, often unfamiliar, cultural spaces as much as linguistic exchange. Often the former is more of a challenge for us.

Of course, translation also has to work in the host culture, and I am sorry that these songs have offended any readers. Since some people doubt the wisdom of my linguistic choices, and others have asked for more information, here's a brief explanation the rationale behind them.

The three characters speaking in these songs are powerful shamanic figures. As one reader aptly put it, they possess ‘implacable strength’. The language is confident, not defensive. The songs are powerful incantations, which are used within the larger narratives from which these translations are drawn to emphasise the shaman's superiority to, and control of, the universe around her. The sexual and gender politics of the traditional Arctic societies in which these songs originated is very different to that in which I grew up in the UK at the end of the twentieth century. These women are speaking within a culture that does not shy from graphic physical reference, either with regard to the human or the animal body; nevertheless, as shamanic shape-shifters they can leave their bodies behind and exist on a purely spiritual level. What seems a contradiction is a strength.

My objective was that of most translators – to remain faithful to the original (you can read a little more about the demotic of the latter here). During the translation process, as so often when relating Greenlandic words in English, I realised the paucity of my own language.

The English words I chose to translate nalikkaataak and uvijera - 'cunt' and 'clit' - seemed to me, both in sound and sense, the most fitting for the task. I avoided any exotic words or terms deriving from metaphors, which I felt would introduce impurity into the diction. These songs are not intended to be sweet or easy on the ear. One reason these shamanic figures fascinate me is their irrepressible queering of so many gender stereotypes. I sought language that would contain a contemporary resonance of the shock that their actions provoked.

I am all too aware of the complex issues surrounding terminology for the female genitals. I do not believe any words are free of cultural baggage (including, alas, even those such as 'yoni' or 'pussy' which are preferred by some readers of WOMPO because they are currently deemed inoffensive). I do not deny that the words in these songs have been used, and are still used today, to shame and oppress women; I have been on the receiving end of such abuse. However I stand by my usage in this context. Language is not static, unless we refuse to play a part in its transformation.

Qavak Songs

2011-01-05T20:40:00.008Z

A selection of my translations of songs from the South Greenlandic Qavak dialect have just been published in the online journal qarrtsiluni (follow the link to read or listen).

All three songs, sung by female shamans, are from tales of great daring that have become legendary in Greenlandic culture. I discovered the original transcriptions of these versions in an obscure journal in Upernavik Museum; I believe this is the first time they have been made more widely available. The Song of a Wicked Woman whose Knowledge Knew No Limit is especially notable. Like Beowulf's sword or Achilles' shield, the arrow used by Qasapi to kill his enemy Unngortoq in the legend has a prominent role in all versions of the narrative, but no other account has identified the origin of the weapon, perhaps for reasons of delicacy, as the shaman's 'uvijera' (an obscure term which derives from the word for mussel, 'ulioq').

I've had some great feedback on them already, notably 'Aunt B' of Tennessee in the ravishing blog Tiny Cat Pants. Thanks also to Brooklyn's David Cooper and Jane Rice.

Print Club London

2010-12-29T09:46:00.010Z

Icebergs in waiting

I've heard some exciting rumblings about happenings at Print Club London and decided it was time to take a look. Any excuse for a trip back to Shacklewell Lane, where I once kept my own press. This part of the east end boasts a remarkably cheap hamam, very convenient for getting rid of stubborn ink stains, not to mention Mangal II, the excellent diner frequented by Gilbert & George, which is just up the road.

Print Club London is dedicated to screenprints. I wanted to experiment with this notoriously quick'n'easy process to see whether it would be suitable for printing the 700 icebergs needed for How To Say 'I Love You' In Greenlandic, since it's unlikely that any relief print will give me the colour saturation or subtlety I am aiming for.

I had a great day in the studios. Compared to letterpress, screenprinting is such a doddle. But it's also more flexible, and less brutally mechanical than I expected - I enjoyed playing around with half-tones and adding to sketches at the transfer stage. The glossy, immediate results seeped through the screen like a dream - no need to crank iron levers or worry about platen pressure. I am a convert, and it is exciting to have discovered a means of realising several small books that I've had on the back-burner for years, because they seemed follies as letterpress projects.

Fred Higginson, Master of Ceremonies, with squeegee

But I won't be printing the icebergs at London Print Club, after all. The devil in me has also been considering using pochoir, but hand-colouring 700 prints would have been madness if the effects could have been achieved equally well with a squeegee. Hand-colouring 700 prints may be madness, anyway, by most people's standards. However, I know now that it's the only way I will be able to evoke the watery, volatile nature of the Arctic skies. It's time I found myself an intern!

Ukiortaami pilluarit!

2010-12-26T20:09:00.006Z

Hearty digital new year's greetings to friends and followers

who did not receive this by post!

On the road to Doverodde

2010-12-23T11:48:00.004Z

The Doverodde Coast

I'll be at the Doverodde Book Arts Festival in North Jutland from 2nd to 5th June 2011, where I'll be launching How to say 'I love you' in Greenlandic, and displaying earlier publications. The festival promises to be a great way to start the summer, with an exhibition of books on the theme of 'Air', a book cafe, music and workshops. More details nearer the time... Meanwhile, there's a nice series of shots of last year's festival over at the Centre for Fine Print Research Book Arts site.

The Sugar Mouse Examines The Writer's Books

2010-12-03T22:46:00.010Z

Borrowed Bookshelves: 5

2010-12-03T20:12:00.005Z

An collection of fine early printing found beside the Thames in Oxfordshire. The curious sugar mouse is provided courtesy of Abingdon Women's Institute.

The Old Stile Press ... the next ten years

2010-11-18T16:03:00.016Z

In January I visited Frances and Nicolas McDowall in the beautiful Wye Valley in Wales. And I was unable to leave - for the snow fell deeper and deeper around the house. But as the electricity petered out, and supplies of gin depleted, I was not short of reading-matter. I hunched by the fire, carefully cradling enormous hand-printed folios of works by John Donne, Dylan Thomas and many other writers. The purpose of my visit was to catalogue the prodigious output of the MacDowalls’ Old Stile Press during the last ten years.

The press was founded in 1979, and an earlier bibliography, The Old Stile Press in the Twentieth Century (compiled by Dorothy Harrop), covers publications up to the millennium. Since then the press has continued to issue titles prodigiously: the artist Rigby Graham notes that publications have grown ‘larger and more lavish’ with the passing years. The latest instalment, The Old Stile Press … the next ten years, surveys this recent work. It includes the stunning edition of Arthur Waley’s Chinese Poems with wood block prints by the wonderful Ralph Kiggell; the libretto of Benjamin Britten’s Christmas Sequence with woodcuts by Angela Lemaire, and The Abstract Garden, a ground-breaking collaboration between printer Nicolas McDowall, poet Philip Gross, and wood engraver Peter Reddick.

Frances and Nicolas McDowall are adamant that art is inseparable from life. These books arise from conversations with friends and shared enthusiasms. The wide variety of works collected together in this bibliography demonstrate what can be achieved when books are approached with passion and perhaps, on occasion, slight folly - qualities which are rarely glimpsed within the limits of commercially-driven corporations. Once my fingers had recovered from frostbite, I wrote a brief introduction to the work of the press, which is presented here alongside Nicolas' revelations about each book's genesis, and Frances' feature on the state of book collecting.

Above is the wonderful painting of the Old Stile Press demesne by Clive Hicks-Jenkins which graces the cover. The edition is limited to 1000 copies, and the first 250 come with a jeu d’esprit printed at the press, ‘Welcome to Spring’ by Gavin Douglas (c. 1510) illustrated with a border decoration by Eric Gill. The Old Stile Press … the next ten years is priced at £45 and is available (plus £4 p&p in UK) from the Old Stile Press.

Here’s to the next ten years!

Lochinver Library Swoop

2010-11-12T19:19:00.015Z

Norman MacCaig was an avowed 'two-fag' poet. I wonder whether The Itinerant Poetry Librarian would have let him smoke even one while browsing her collections. One of the Bye Bye-Laws of the Itinerant Poetry Library states, with characteristic precision, 'No person shall smoke or strike a light in any part of the library set apart for the use of the public without the permission of the library officer, and except in any part thereof which is for the time being used as a smoking den or in which, when it is being used for an educational, cultural or other event under Section 20 of the Act, the Library Authority allows smoking.'

Such are the curious legalities that have been preoccupying the Librarian since 2006, when the Itinerant Poetry Library began 'travelling the world with a library of "lost & forgotten" poetry, installing the library and librarian and archiving the sound, poems and poetry of the cities, peoples and countries we meet'. No wonder the Librarian's back is a little stooped, or that her brow displays more lines than Milton's Paradise Lost.

Last Friday found the Library sharing the premises of the Highland Mobile Library Service, itself somewhat itinerant, but temporarily parked opposite the SPAR on Lochinver's main street. It was raining. As if taking a fashion cue from the gung-ho shooting parties in less metropolitan parts of Assynt, the Librarian's grey pin-stripe suit provided camouflage against the damp tarmac of the parking lot.

The rain-streaked doors slid open silently at my approach with institutional rectitude. I found myself signing up to the Library Bye Bye-Laws, without having read them, and then committing several infringements while perusing the day's display of books on the theme of 'Poetry In Languages That Trip Off The Tongue.' Did I dare to confess to not speaking Hungarian? I did not. Volumes of Modern Russian Poetry lay alongside Ancient Greek Love Poems. The Librarian looked a little flushed, having just delivered an impromptu educational session based on the latter to three young visitors.

While the books laid out to trip the tongues of Lochinver were relatively conventional in format, I was intrigued to read in the Bye Bye-Laws that the Library defines 'book' as 'any and every book, poem, journal, pamphlet, music score, manuscript, picture, print, poet, photograph, engraving, etching, deed, map, chart, plan, cheese sandwich, gramophone record, cassette, compact disc, mini disc, web page, pre-recorded tape, floozies, film and any other article of like nature.' What did the Librarian have in her suitcase?

The Library website details in full the complex and worthy aims behind its existence, the essence of which is 'the idea of poetry as a unique form of human communication, and thus a unique form of knowledge; and the idea of the public library as both recycling-knowledge space and civic space – concepts which we believe can also be used as models for sustainable growth in order to oust ourselves from the current cul de sac that is consumer-led, maximum profit-centred culture.' Hear, hear!

Norman MacCaig Centenary in Assynt

2010-11-09T09:11:00.020Z

'And so you and me, David, can sit down and eat a bite, and breathe a bit longer, and take a dram from my bottle. Then we’ll strike for Aucharn…'

...Or Assynt, for the Norman MacCaig Centenary celebrations. Aliens landing in the small coastal town of Lochinver could be forgiven for thinking that Norman MacCaig was Scotland's greatest fisherman, for his fishing exploits have received almost as much media coverage as his poetry this week.

There are many poets in town for the celebrations, and poems by schoolchildren are tacked up in every shop window. Last night we celebrated Remembrance Day with 'Poetry, Peace and a Pint' in The Caberfeidh. Such warmth emanated from the twenty poets and artists around the pub table that it seemed we might indeed 'reconstitute the world' as Adrienne Rich writes in 'The Dream of a Common Language'. Rich's poem was read by a local artist who told how she had scratched the verse on the door of a Dumbarton police cell with her zip while locked up overnight following a peaceful protest against Trident. Other readings including a hearty dose of Edward Thomas, a fragment from Kenneth White's long poem 'Labrador', and Mandy Haggith's beautiful rendition of a poem by Iyad Hayatleh, a Palestinian poet born in a Syrian refugee camp who is now living in Glasgow.

The programme of centenary events, organised by Top Left Corner, culminates tonight with a ceilidh at which Liz Lochead and other poets will be reading. (Norman MacCaig was fond of a ceilidh, and best among the MacCaig Trivia I have gleaned this week is the fact that his favourite tune was The Jig of Slurs.) I'll be presenting a new poem about the Arctic, which feels fitting in this landscape which is so redolent of Greenland. I've been told that Assynt and Greenland were both part of the vast land mass 'Laurentia' which was situated over the south pole in the Cambrian Period, before moving north. Thus the Highlands only met the rest of the British Isles during the great plate tectonic collision of the Caledonian Orogeny around 500 million years ago, and have more geological affinities with the Arctic. Perhaps this explains, not only the environmental synchronicities, but also why I have found several people here who have, they say casually, 'just returned from Greenland', including remarkable photographer Iain Roy.

The Raven and The Gull: A Cautionary Tale

2010-10-21T15:54:00.004+01:00

Listen. Do you know why the raven is so black, so black, so dull and black in colour? It is all on account of its obstinacy.

It happened in the days when all the birds were arranging their colours and the pattern in their coats. And the raven and the gull happened to meet midway between land and sea, and they agreed to paint each other.

The raven began, and painted the other white, with nice black blotches showing between. The gull thought that very fine indeed, and began to do the same by the raven, painting it a coat exactly like its own.

But then the raven fell into a rage, and declared that the pattern was frightfully ugly, and the gull, offended at all the fuss, simply splashed it black all over.

And now you see why the raven is black.

Postscript

While reading Lucretius De rerum natura to research my writing on Emma Stibbon, I came across an uncanny echo of this tale in his discourse on colour.

'Since there is no natural connection between particular colours and particular shapes, atoms (if they were not colourless) might equally well be of any colour irrespective of their form. Why then are not their compounds tinted with every shade of colour irrespective of their kind? We should expect on this hypothesis that ravens in flight would often emit a snowy sheen from snowy wings; and that some swans would be black, being composed of black atoms, or would display some other uniform or variegated colour.'

The Way to a Murderer's Mind is Through his Stomach

2010-08-27T08:41:00.026+01:00

The first copies of Dinner and a Rose are bound for Dundee, to take part in Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text, Cognition, an AHRC-funded project to investigate how readers respond to visual aspects of poetry.

Many of the book artist Sarah Bodman’s works conduct dialogues with existing publications. The Flowers in Hotel Rooms series, for example, documents tributes to the books she has read while travelling. So when Sarah was commissioned by Poetry Beyond Text to create an artist’s book, she decided to work with The Talented Mr Ripley and other novels in the ‘Ripley Quartet’ by Patricia Highsmith. Sarah is intrigued by the culinary theme Highsmith employs to chart Ripley’s greed for the good life: ‘his relish – both for killing and the fine food he would have if he could afford it’. Ripley’s character is defined by the food and drink he consumes, from devil-may-care martinis in Mongibello to penitential hot milk in Rome.

The first of many pages in an early listing of Ripley's meals by Sarah Bodman

Sarah asked me to provide poems for the book, and inspired by Poetry Beyond Text’s interest in experiment, we decided to recreate Highsmith’s menus in a live performance. Sarah prepared a delicious, if macabre, dinner, for twelve guests, with a thirteenth place set for the absent Tom Ripley. Every food mentioned by Highsmith was served, from cold chicken in aspic to sole veronique, and every drink mixed (even Dubonnet!). The dinner lasted over twelve hours. The conversations around the dinner table had unexpected synchronicities with the Ripley novels, including the perils of impersonation, the ambiguity of beauty, death by water and passport forgery. All the night’s conversations were recorded and I used the transcriptions as collage material, creating a series of eighteen poems. Sarah photographed Ripley’s setting for each course; these images and the poems partner each other in the finished work.

Collage proved to be a good choice for writing about food and crime. In its visual form, collage has been associated with food and drink since the Cubists’ still lifes on cafe tabac tables, which are in turn reminiscent of earlier, and more sinister, vanitas paintings.
Marjorie Perloff, in a lively survey of collage and poetry for the Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, quotes a caustic review of the Cantos by W.B. Yeats. Yeats claimed that Ezra Pound had ‘not got all the wine into the bowl’. In other words, Pound’s collage technique led to poems as incoherent as the ramblings of an old soak. Perloff writes that ‘collage has been the most important mode for representing a “reality” no longer quite believed in and therefore all the more challenging’.

Above left, ‘Still Life with Checked Tablecloth’ by Juan Gris. On the right, a still life from Dinner and a Rose by Sarah Bodman.

Dinner and a Rose is published in a signed limited edition of 20 copies, priced £100.

Sarah and I are delighted with the project’s success and plan to make the ‘novel dinner’ an annual event. Next year’s book will be The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland.

Accordions and Blue Guitars at The Poetry School

2010-08-23T10:18:00.013+01:00

Writers interested in alternative routes to publication are invited to book a place on the workshop I'm teaching at The Poetry School in January.

'Poems in Three Dimensions' is an introduction to book arts for poets. The session will introduce book arts by looking at collaborations between writers and artists in interwar Paris and contemporary American experiments with the book format. We'll investigate the many forms Wallace Stevens' work has taken, including Ode to the Colossal Sun by Dutch artist Helga Kos and David Hockney's The Blue Guitar. During the session writers will also be guided in constructing a unique book of their own, to explore how illustration, typography, and even the book's architecture can underwrite their message.

The Poetry School is notorious for selling out its schedule overnight, and no wonder – this year’s programme offers some fabulous workshops! Luckily, I’ve just bagged a place on Chris McCabe's whistlestop tour of the Black Mountain poets starting with Charles Olson's essay on 'Projective Verse' in February.

How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet

2010-08-12T10:34:00.017+01:00

puttaarpoq - to leap from one ice floe to another, to dance

Upernavik Museum is the most northern museum in the world, a lonely building on a rocky island in Arctic Greenland. Last winter I was appointed writer-in-residence there, and - as it seemed incongrouous to be writing in English, a language not spoken by my Inuit neighbours - I began to take lessons in Kalaallisut. I wanted to understand the whispers of the hunters as they waited every morning for seals by breathing holes in the fast-ice, and to be able to respond to the shrieks of the children who tumbled past my door in bright snowsuits and mittens trimmed with polar bear fur.

Kalaallisut is infamous for its many words for different kinds of snow. It expresses the intricate Arctic ecosystem more thoroughly than the writings of any climate scientist. I discovered that the Arctic landscape is always present in the vocabulary. The word puttaarpoq, for example, can mean both ‘to dance’, and ‘to leap from one ice floe to another when trying to cross the sea’. Kalaallisut possesses a smaller alphabet than English, only twelve letters which are densely woven into compound words. Rarely shorter than three syllables, the words express concepts which English tiptoes around with a phrase. I was delighted to find signifiers for 'I am leaning on one elbow' (ikusimmiarpoq) and 'I reel with the delirious joy of being alive' (nuannarpoq). English seems finicky and prim in contrast: little words swimming indecisively this way and that way like minnows trapped in a shallow stream. Each Kalaallisut word is sturdy as a whale: a contradictory water-bound mammal that relies on the ocean depths for sustenance but comes to the surface to breathe. When I read that UNESCO had placed Kalaallisut on its list of endangered world languages, I decided to produce a tribute to its beauty.

How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet is an introduction the evocative vocabulary of the far north. From the romantic ‘I love you’ to the pragmatic ‘Make me a hot drink from the old coffee grounds’, a word has been chosen to represent each of the twelve letters of the Kalaallisut language. The thirteenth print in the portfolio, ‘The Last Letter’, is a eulogy for the language.

How to say ‘I love you’ in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet will be hand-printed next spring in an edition of 42 copies. The print portfolio will be housed in a designer binding created by Natasha Herman, of the Red Bone Bindery, Ottawa. To be added to the mailing list for further information on the project and an invitation to the book launch, please email arcticalphabet@gmail.com.

Found Poem No. 9: As Thow Art

2010-07-13T17:24:00.006+01:00

AS THOW ART

SO WAS I

AS I AM

SO SHALT THOW BEE

Found by Dick Morgan

in St Eadburgha's Church, Broadway, Hereford and Worcester,

and kindly contributed by him.

St Eadburgha was the great granddaughter of King Alfred the Great.

Eadburgha achieved sainthood quite effortlessly: as a child

she was offered the choice of jewels or a Bible.

She chose the Bible and dedicated her life to the service of God.

Poet: 0 Wood Engraver: 3

2010-07-07T09:46:00.005+01:00

I can't play tennis. I know nothing about football. And even board games are a challenge ... But since competition is in the air, I thought I'd contribute the evidence of being totally trounced at Scrabble by the American wood engraver Abigail Rorer. Not only can Abbie spot a triple word score in seconds - she's also good at maths.

More Other Mother!

2010-07-05T10:34:00.003+01:00

If today's literary periodicals were to take on flesh and attend a cocktail party, McSweeney's would be the guest who turned up late, having just performed a gig, still wearing stage costume, drunk and a little sweaty but unabashed. It would offend the host, tell hilarious anecdotes, stick canapés in its pockets and abscond with someone else's partner. The older journals, wearing uniformly crumpled suits, would turn from their intellectual sparring over warm chardonnay to eye the departing maverick enviously.

In the decade since its inception McSweeney's quarterly has proved that an experimental literary journal can be an uproarious success and has raised the benchmark for publishing design. As it approaches its 30th issue, Tate Publishing has released a celebratory volume: Art of McSweeney's. That this volume about an illustrated literary journal (and its associated publishing ventures) is published by Tate is yet another indication that the art of the book is moving from the library into the art gallery.

I've travelled around Britain with Art of McSweeney's in my suitcase for the last three weeks, and can testify that it is very heavy indeed. The cumbersome nature of books is one of the few sensible reasons given for using e-readers, but Dave Eggers, the novelist and McSweeney's founder, rejects 'rumblings about the dire future of the book'. He reasons that a work of fiction takes three or more years to write, and so it is only fair to spend a little time on the production of the book itself, indeed to produce a real book. In the case of McSweeney's publications, this volume included, every minute and every milligram is worthwhile.

Eggers boasts that 'McSweeney's is a small company dedicated to these physical books that purportedly have no future'. In order to 'keep people mindful of the pleasures of the book-as-object' inspiration is drawn from fine book designs of the past. The McSweeney's look is a modernist collage of styles: 1890s boys' school stories; pulp fiction covers of the 1970s; letterpress circus posters; and cigar boxes. Yet their graphic excitement is far from being blinkered by nostalgia; it extends to such everyday objects as rubber bands, hotel bibles and plain-text emails (an early four-page email manifesto from Eggers mooting a 'journal [...]not a "zine"' is reproduced here).

The journal's name arose from 'The Real Timothy McSweeney', an eccentric who believed himself related to Eggers' mother, and from whom 'long, tortured and increasingly incomprehensible letters' fell onto on the family doormat thoughout Eggers' childhood. The letters offered the young Eggers 'the possibility of a long-obscured and very dark secret.'

There has not yet been an issue of McSweeney's bound in a doormat, but almost every other process has been conscripted in an infectious playfulness with the book form. After the typographic austerity of the earliest cover designs, McSweeney's began to explore colour printing and parodies of traditional binding structures. The production process is fetishized and the designer's secret tricks laid bare: 'Foil Stamp … $0.22/French Flaps … $0.29/Die Cut (Special Shape) … $0.36'. It's no surprise that authors such as David Byrne testify that 'it was the design that lured me into the McSweeney's world.'

Before long, art began to take over the journal, with a whole issue devoted to visual themes (including a feature on the poet Robert Lowell's marginal doodles). The innovative short fiction that was McSweeney's trademark met its match in irreverent illustration. The young editors' enthusiastic folly is reminiscent of the Victorian boys' school stories they so admire: a whiff of derring-do hovers over anecdotes of book-launches in Manhattan dim sum restaurants; and that most mundane of publishing duties, a trip to the printer, becomes an adventure to Iceland in a snow storm. (McSweeney's used Oddi Printing in Iceland, before the dollar "did a tremendous belly flop". While the editors are effusive in praise of Oddi, the latter's director,Bjössi Vídisson says, more cautiously, "McSweeney Issue 7 is without doubt the most memorable book I have printed. This is the issue with the rubber band, the loose booklets, and the wraparound hardcover piece.")

For the present volume, the McSweeney's team have restrained themselves from punching holes in the millboard covers, binding it in fake fur, or inserting cds with songs composed in their honour by rock stars. Limited to merely making every page spread a delight, they have risen to the challenge. But they have been allowed one little joke: since much of this book's interior deals with cover designs, the fiction element of the journal is introduced onto the cover, a dust-wrapper which unfolds to form a poster on which short stories perform typographic acrobatics. The book is well illustrated with artwork and page spreads from the journal; captions promise curiosities such as an 'Excerpt of a short story written and designed in the style of a comic book without pictures' or 'A short story by Adrienne Miller that invites the reader to cut its pages along the dotted lines to reveal new narratives'. For the mathematically-inclined, a pie chart summarizes the contents of each issue according to the categories 'Fiction', 'Art' and the mysterious 'Other'. Needless to say, there's an awful lot of 'Other'.

The Gourmet Mr Ripley

2010-05-31T12:08:00.017+01:00

Tom made a batch of martinis, and arranged the glasses and a plate of canapes on a tray in the living-room. When he heard the door-knocker, he went to the door and swung it open.

This weekend the book artist Sarah Bodman served up a macabre feast at her Bristol home: a seven-hour dinner party composed of every meal that 'The Talented Mr Ripley' consumes in between more nefarious activities in the novels written by Patricia Highsmith. The meal initiates a collaboration between Sarah and I on Dinner and a Rose, a book commissioned by Poetry Beyond Text.

Tom slid one leg over a stool and faced the door challengingly, yet with a flagrant casualness.
'Gin and tonic, please,' he said to the barman.

The night began with gin and tonics, the drink Ripley orders in the Manhattan bar Raoul's where he meets Herbert Greenleaf - a billionaire whose son he will later murder in the small Italian village of Mongibello, before embezzling his fortune. A whole cold chicken in aspic lay on the table alongside a bowl of celeri remoulade. Guests sipped tentatively at a lobster bisque, and those who had read the novels may well have wondered what devious plots were simmering on the stove in the next room.

Perhaps canelloni to begin with, creamy sauce over delicate pasta, and a good valpolicella to sip while he dreamed about his future and planned where he went from here ...

We enjoyed a bottle of Margaux with lamb chops and one guest nobly managed a sip of Dubonnet. Then beef consomme, followed by calves' liver and artichokes. Costoletta di vitello, much as it must have tasted from a small Mongibello cafe. Sole veronique. Cold roast beef. Crab sandwiches. Steak with ragout and whiskies.

Tom regretted very much that the main dish was ... a fabulously expensive item on the Italian market.

Sated, we approached the final course: chocolate mousse, strawberries soaked in liqueurs and shortbread galettes, accompanied by champagne and coffees, as fine as if prepared by Mme Annette, the housekeeper at Ripley's French estate, Belle Ombre. With a Bach harpsichord solo playing in the next room, I half-expected to hear the music abruptly stop and see Ripley wander in to mix a last martini.

By midnight we felt much as Ripley had done, sitting in a deckchair on a cruise ship bound for Europe at the start of his adventures, 'fortified morally by the luxurious surroundings and inwardly by the abundance of well-prepared food'. In advance of the publication, Sarah has put together this film of the event.

Word and Warp

2010-05-21T11:45:00.010+01:00

My father's wedding gift to my mother was a wooden floor loom, not unlike the Great Bed of Ware in its dimensions. The gift calls to mind another patient wife, Penelope, who in her husband's absence was instructed by her son Telemachus to "Go within the house and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants; for speech is man's matter."

I spent my childhood playing between wooden treadles, helping to thread heddles and wind wool around shuttle cones. It's no co-incidence that one of my mother's favourite poems is Yeats' romantic fabrication:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet...

Now, each time I hear my mother talk about her process – keeping the tension of each line consistent, the need for restraint in the use of colour – I'm reminded of the old but apt comparison of weaving and writing.

So I was intrigued to find that almost everyone I met in the Netherlands last week was discussing Irma Boom, the great Dutch book designer, whose work Weaving as Metaphor, a book about the weaver and artist Sheila Hicks, won the Leipzig Book Fair’s prestigious designation of the “most beautiful book in the world.”

Boom's trademark tonal austerity is always enlivened by radical play on book structure: perforated slipcases, dovetailed fore-edges, distressed deckles. The design for Weaving as Metaphor is surprising yet inviting. A brick of a book, its pure white boards are subtley textured by a blind-embossed fabric motif, and the paper at the head is rough as a snipped selvedge. Inside, justified lines of type run bravely to the extreme edges of the page, as in well-woven cloth.

Sheila Hicks' work is very different to my mother's. Hicks approaches fabric like an existential argument; my mother was formerly a landscape painter, and weaving allows her to explore colour and line in the abstract. While a horizontal weft may suggest a landscape, it is one built up like geological strata, rather than rolling hills freely expressed with brushstrokes. Of course, the boustrophedon work of the shuttle also suggests the accumulation of lines of text, sewing a narrative in time rather than space, like an epic poem.

But the poetry in my mother's work is quietly spoken; two recent projects began in graveyards. The first draws on the landscape seen from the church in the hamlet of Milbourne, Northumberland, where my grandfather is buried: sheep fields bordered by cow-parsely and hawthorn, green spring grass tempered by dark yews. The last cloth to come off the loom was more equivocal, rust red and yellow, inspired by shepherds' gravestones at a small ruined chapel that we discovered last summer near Hermitage Castle in the Scottish Borders. I admire her bravery in evoking through wool alone these carved letter forms, eroded by weather and lichen, unravelling the stories on the stones.

Sardines sur la Tyne

2010-05-17T11:12:00.005+01:00

I always like to encourage the positive representation of sardines in public life, so I was delighted to find them honoured, albeit canned, on The Blacksmith's Needle, a contemporary sculpture opposite the Baltic on Newcastle's Quayside. The Blacksmith's Needle is a large cone of forged steel, with a maritime bell hanging within (the bell was rung - probably for the last time - when the work was inaugurated in 1997 by the percussionist Evelyn Glennie).

The Needle is divided into six sections, intended to represent the six senses, each designed by a different blacksmith from the British Artist Blacksmiths' Association. Sardines, it goes without saying, satisfy all five human senses. But when Stephen Lunn, from The Forge at Red Row in Northumberland, pulled the short straw for the elusive sixth sense, he admitted, “It was hard work to represent the sixth sense in ironwork.” He finally decided on “beach stones and pebbles, because just as they are worn down by the sea, I wear down metal into the shape I want it to be.”

"Mermaids on toast?"

Not the last post ...

2010-05-10T23:42:00.015+01:00

... but the one hundredth. In the last 100 posts I've encountered empty museums in the Arctic, tried to find the shape of time, faked Nevelsons in West London and snoozed in the Lit & Phil Library. What next?

I'm celebrating my centennial post with the news that the British Library have requested permission to add the blog to their digital archive of UK websites that are 'considered to be of long term research value'. In case one gets big-headed about such an honour, the curator adds that some of the sites selected may be considered 'trivial' and 'basic', but are nevertheless chosen for being representative of particular interests in society. There's no grand plan behind this blog and I'm sure it doesn't represent any broader interests than my own very peculiar ones. But I've always liked talking to myself ...

Messing about with words

2010-05-09T12:25:00.011+01:00

Regular visitors to this blog will have noticed a sharp decline in posts since I returned from Upernavik. It's time to make my excuses.

If only I could plead that I'd been languishing in the American Bar at The Savoy! I've just been ploughing through a phenomenal amount of work. Not just the heavy labour of re-reading Highsmith's Ripley novels. Not just rearranging stray commas in my sestinas or talking about climate change here and there. There are other, covert projects afoot, of which more anon. But yesterday evening I allowed myself out to go to a poetry reading at Greenwich Yacht Club organised by Fiona Moore. Even if I hadn't been under house arrest for the last month I'd have enjoyed the apocalyptic post-election sunset over the river. The glass building sat like an eyrie above the boatyard with Swallows & Amazons pennants draped from its rafters. It was like sitting inside Ian Hamilton Finlay's head. Bits of boat clinked and water lapped, providing an obliging soundscape for writing that ranged from Conradian meditations on the river to ballads echoing Ratty's view that "There is nothing - absolutely nothing - half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

Those of you who found the Arctic posts of interest are invited to come and see me perform new poems at Sketch Gallery in Conduit Street, London, on 22nd May (2-4pm). Then I'm setting off by bus to the Netherlands, to paint Amsterdam a typewriter-ribbon shade of red with the artist Lynne Avadenka, who will be visiting from Detroit (if the volcano behaves itself), and to talk books with binder and writer Anik See and friends at the Meermanno Museum (Museum of the Book) in The Hague. Sometimes work is not so bad ...

Meanwhile, even death doesn't stop some people blogging conscientiously. The Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge has had the wonderful idea of putting Scott's Antarctic journals online, so that day by day you can follow his perilous journey to the pole.

The Bow Wow Shop

2010-05-03T17:15:00.009+01:00

You can read my essay on poetry and the Arctic environment - 'No More Words for Snow'- in the latest issue of the online poetry journal, The Bow Wow Shop.

In Greenland the dogs say "Vaa Vaa Vaa" not "Bow Wow", but the journal is determined not to alienate its British canine readership by changing its name. Next up, I'll be writing a short feature for Huskies Today.

Last Suppers

2010-04-11T07:57:00.012+01:00

Alain Delon as Tom Ripley in Purple Noon (1960).

Sarah Bodman, senior research fellow at the Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol, has invited me to collaborate on a book for the project Poetry Beyond Text: Vision, Text and Cognition, which is commissioning new work as part of an exploration into how readers respond to visual aspects of poetry.

Sarah has long been an aficionado of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley quartet, which takes 'the talented Mr Ripley' from being a small time fraudster in New York to millionaire murderer in the beauty spots of Europe. Sarah is intrigued by the meals Ripley consumes, which are documented in detail by Highsmith as a sign of his growing sophistication. Ripley's victims stand in the ways of his appetite for the good life, epitomised by chicken in aspic, celeri remoulade and sole veronique.

My texts, variations on Highsmith's work, will accompany Sarah's photos in a limited edition artist's book. Meanwhile, we will generate some new responses to the novel by 'curating' a dinner party at which all the meals and liqueurs mentioned in the book will be served.

Spring is Everywhere

2010-04-10T07:43:00.022+01:00

As I walked on Hampstead Heath this evening, listening to church bells pealing across London, I tried to understand the character of this temperate zone. Here joy comes, not from surviving a struggle, but from delight in subtler aspects of experience. The weather is patient. You can walk on the land. You can't walk on the water. The rivers aren't covered with icy skins. But the people are. Even so, every conversation can be understood, and this obligatory eavesdropping is a form of torture.

Although England has had a harsh winter, spring has arrived. The earth is bursting with baroque decoration. Haphazard living things distract the eye: people; trees; birdsong. Branches scribble confusing syllabics over the skyline. Blackthorn blossom and glistening horse chestnut buds blackmail the viewer into admiration. It is disgustingly beautiful, impossibly transient. Having seen the desperate state of the environment in the Arctic, it's clear to me that we have little time left to enjoy this balmy and benevolent climate.

I'm haunted by my experiences after leaving Upernavik Museum. I travelled down the coast to Ilulissat, where I'd arranged to stay with a hunter, Ole Thorleifsen, and his family, in order to gain a better understanding of their way of life. The Thorleifsens own a turf hut which they built near the bay where the Sermeq Kujalleq glacier calves into the sea (above). Here I heard stories of the effects of climate change that were more gruesome than any Inuit legend. Sermeq Kujalleq has been appointed a UNESCO world heritage site, but it seems futile to draw boundaries around beauty spots, which no pollutant respects.

Climate change is causing great economic hardship among the people in Greenland. As the ice diminishes, small communities are trapped without food or clothing. Hunters must shoot and eat their dogs as they cannot afford to feed either the dogs or themselves. The dogs that survive grow dangerous with cabin fever. Women are advised not to breast-feed their children, as the toxins in the sea pass from any fish or seal that they consume into their milk.

In the evenings I sat by the fire and drank tea brewed from heathery twigs collected from the hillsides in the summer, tea that smelt of mint and thyme. We talked about what the ice might do tomorrow, and joked at each other's expense, and exchanged new words in our different languages. Yet beneath the redoubtable Greenlandic sense of humour there was no evading the tragedy of this situation, the slow implosion of an indigenous culture. Ole told deprecating tales of his life, and emphasised how it differed from that of his ancestors. One of his most persistent complaints was the loss of freedom: the freedom to follow a traditional way of life, to earn a decent livelihood. This freedom, or 'liberty' as it is called in Article 3 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, has been insidiously eaten into as a consequence of European lifestyles. Our culpability, and our responsibility for change, has not gone unnoticed. One night, Ole threw his hands up and said to me: 'You must tell the people they must plant trees, and then the ice will not melt, and then there will be fish and seals and polar bears as before and we can live as we only know how to do.' I felt impossibly overwhelmed. As if I could reverse all the deeply engrained habits of humanity ... or even overcome my own giddy greed for the subtle delights of spring.

Left behind

2010-03-15T15:09:00.004Z

A clause in my contract reads 'Visual artists must leave a work behind in the Museum but writers are not required to do so.'

It's liberating to be excused from producing any work during this residency. However, it seems strange that I should be exempted on account of working with language, when Greenlandic has proved such a rich resource to me. (As well as poems suggested by its rich vocabulary, an 'ABD' artist's book is now in the works and a word-a-day short story is being aired on Facebook.)

So I decided that I would break my contract. Following those who believe that we should leave nothing behind but our footsteps, I'm leaving a linguistic trace. I have excised a word from my own language, which I will never be able to use again. I aired it for the last time to an iceberg this morning, and the iceberg shone impassively on, with the glorious contempt for all languages common to its kind.

Fearing the iceberg was not the best custodian, I slipped a small manifestation of my loss between the pages of the old Greenlandic Dictionary in the Museum. I suspect it will remain unread for years. Many Greenlandic words (particularly those associated with Christianity and modern life) are loan words from Danish, and so it is a language that is used to welcoming newcomers.

And what word did I chose? Well, of course, I can't say. It's a small word upon which the future depends. As it's already been done to death by one poet, I don't think I'll suffer by its absence - although I may have to learn to bite my tongue.

Susan Richardson: Creatures of the Intertidal Zone

2010-03-11T14:16:00.004Z

The Welsh poet Susan Richardson is the latest to be featured in London/Nuuk, a blog which charts creative responses to the Polar regions.
Richardson has travelled through almost every country with Arctic territories, which puts me to shame for my sedentary days in a log cabin. You can read her evocative descriptions of the landscapes and a wonderful poem sequence about the early medieval traveller Gudrid the Rare here.

Where in the world

2010-03-06T11:27:00.016Z

At the museum, Beathe is processing applications for the 2012 residency. She's received bewildered enquiries. How do I travel to Upernavik? Should I fly to Iceland or Norway first? This bemusement is understandable. On Google Earth the museum appears to be floating in the middle of Baffin Bay, and the truth is not far off. Very few travel websites make allowance for Greenland in their search engines, let alone this small northern community.

To appease Beathe's frustration we concoct some fantastical replies, describing air routes from Europe via Sydney and Moscow, or journeys which entail taking a flight to Toronto but parachuting from the plane over Greenland. The truth of the matter - a three-day, five-flight ordeal in increasingly perilous craft - might appear equally implausible to most sensible travellers.

One person's north is someone else's south, and to Beathe, who has no desire to travel beyond Upernavik, Thule is still 'Ultime Thule' but also Qannaq, the nearest town up the coast. We may be sitting in the most northern museum in the world, but we are at the centre of our own universe, with a horizon of 360 degrees. I find it as hard to justify to Beathe the cultural and practical reasons for Europeans' confusion, as to pinpoint my own emotions at being so far beyond everything I know, yet still behaving in a relatively rational manner, drinking coffee and doodling. The exotic seems strangest in proximity to normality.

The Arctic carries an exaggerated sense of the exotic, since it has been represented in explorers' narratives from antiquity until the present as the ends of the earth. I try not to fall into this trap, but on my journey here, my amazement completely outweighed my terror as 'twin otter' planes flew low over vast tracts of uninhabited whiteness. I arrived in smaller and smaller airports, the names of the town cut with a jigsaw out of plywood and painted in bright colours. The times, and sometimes the days, of the flights were uncertain, and often I felt as powerless as a toy traveller in the bedroom of a child who had abandoned his games and gone to tea.

I found myself writing sonnets about the foibles of geography. For this uncertainty is expressed not only in the emotions of travellers, but also in the choices earth scientists have to make. There are ongoing debates about where to draw the southern boundary to the Arctic Circle (and whether it should be a real 'circle' of latitude or a wiggly line). Inevitably these have become even more complex as the climate changes. Also, there are several Poles in the Arctic, including the Geomagnetic North Pole and the Pole of Inaccessiblity (now obsolete). The North Pole was decided on as the 'proper' Pole, but even so it is not fixed. It wafts about the Arctic region through a variable known as the Chandler Circle. I'm quite that relieved finding it was not in my itinerary.

Island Worship

2010-03-01T13:58:00.004Z

Upernavik reminds me of another island, which I lived on a decade ago, Lindisfarne in Northumberland. Lindisfarne was one of the earliest Christian communities in Britain, famous for its sanctity and the production of exquisite devotional objects such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and mead. It could not have been more unholy while I was there, but all islands draw lost souls eventually. I was working as a barmaid - perhaps had I been polishing the church brass I would have seen life from a better angle.

Upernavik has nothing like Lindisfarne's claims to sanctity - quite the opposite. I read in the history books that it was the last place in Greenland where the population could be persuaded into baptism. The last heathen soul was saved in 1864, and even afterwards, it is recorded that Christianity was pursued in a desultory manner while belief in the shaman and pantheistic spirits persisted. Finally, the catechist tried to exert his authority by burning all the drums on the island, as these were used in shamanic trances to summon spirits.

The relationship between the fifth-century Brendan, abbot of Clonfert in Galway, and the church in Rome was not quite so critical. Nevertheless, faced with pressure to bring his spiritual practice into line with Christian orthodoxy, Brendan rowed off into the "desert of the ocean" in a wicker carraugh to find a freer contemplative space. An epic account of his seven-year journey exists, an ecstatic work describing incredible spiritual and natural wonders. Brendan was a beguiling traveller who appeared to lack any sense of fear in the Arctic waters. When he encountered an iceberg so huge that it could been seen for three days before he reached it, he decided to row though a tiny hole in it, which in the evening light appeared to be "like the eye of God."

Strangely, even with these two noble religious traditions before me on the island, it is not shamanism or Christianity I turn to in order to make sense of this small place on the edge of the physical world. I'm impelled by the brightness and closeness of the constellations to reread the Greek myths. I find particular resonance in the figure of blind Orion, who appears in November, the season of pomegranates and sea storms, the hunter who walks on water. But that's another story...

Mutability

2010-02-26T12:58:00.009Z

A friend asked if I was enjoying wide horizons here. I can only echo Thoreau: 'my horizon is never quite at my elbows'. The mutability of the light and the weather in the Arctic tease gullible disciples of space and time mercilessly.

Yesterday evening I was at a party (the hunters had just caught a whale) where a boy was playing with an extending tape measure as if it was a yo-yo. The dizzying swiftness with which the centimetres drew back into their roll reminded me of how the horizon comes and goes. Yesterday morning it was unsafe to leave the house because of a blinding blizzard, but by sunset I could see to the farthest reaches of the sea - and further, to an illusory space where fata morgana and rainbows were dancing.

Sunset over the children's playground

Last week, work turned into a perverse game played with the weather. I was writing about ice. One night a storm blew away all the pack ice that I'd been observing the day before. When I woke to the sound of lapping water I began to write about the ice's poignant absence. The next morning I found that a blistering frost had covered the sea again ...

And then there's the icebergs, which each day drift slightly further south and crumble a little more into the water. Usually these changes are scarcely perceptible, just enough to suggest, disquietingly, that icebergs might be living things with minds of their own. This magic lantern show of mountains continually delights and distracts me. I developed a affection for one majestic specimen, which looked like the Taj Mahal, but one night it drifted right away and never came back.

Amongst such unpredictability there are moments of sudden intoxication, when I realise that the ice I'm standing on could very easily plummet into the sea. Snow is equally specious: an apparently even drift may cover a chasm, and for me, not having seen the land beneath in summer, one footstep can lead a long way – as I found to my cost when exploring the cemetery.

Recent arrivals in the cemetery

The one dependable quality of the snow in Upernavik is its continuous presence. I've always regarded snow with advance nostalgia for its imminent departure. But here it remains, crusted and stubborn. Snowdrifts realign the roads. Old men pay their dues by shovelling the wooden steps that run up and down the steep hillside, which incongrously remind me of sunny Pennsylvanian boardwalks. Of course, summer will come even to Upernavik eventually.

Found Poem No. 8: Would you like spice with that?

2010-02-24T12:39:00.003Z

A few weeks ago I grumbled to the poet Ruth Valentine about the lack of cumin seeds in Upernavik. The prospect of cooking soup without them was bleak, and no food supplies were sheduled to arrive by boat until the spring. Life is tough in the Arctic!

Ruth Valentine is a woman of action. A few weeks later, a mysterious parcel arrived by helicopter, and was handed over reverently by the postman. I opened it to find not only cumin, but enough spices to create a whole series of dishes. Seal korma, whale a la mode, and, since there is star anise, I might even manage a watery halibut bouillabaisse. Ruth also pointed out that I could add cardamom pods to my kaffe, should I feel inclined. When I run out of material for poems, I plan to begin work on the first English guide to Greenland's gastronomy.

I love the way Ruth packaged up the spices, with neatly-written labels - found poem ... or artist's book? The jury is out on that issue, but meanwhile the contents diminish.

The empty museum

2010-02-21T17:59:00.003Z

If you were sailing north, the first you would see of this island is the museum, its wooden walls painted blood red, on a promontory overlooking Baffin Bay. It can be difficult to spot, and some days it's completely under snow or obscured in mist.

The interior of the museum is also elusive. From England I found it hard to tell - from the website and a vague briefing - what the museum stood for. I arrived full of questions. How long has it been here? Who uses it? When I asked about the museum's function, people smiled at me as though I was slightly foolish, and began to tell me about Upernavik itself. I felt like a dog barking up the wrong tree, or perhaps a husky howling at the wrong hunter.

The building appeared strangely empty at first. It comprises several galleries, displaying a modest number of artefacts used by the island's earliest settlers: an old barometer and a ship's log book in one gallery, and in another, a tiny cabinet containing infinitesimal archaeological finds – a broken clay pipe stem, a rusted harpoon head. To my disappointment, and probably discredit, I couldn't get excited about these ancient remains. Rather than the numinous and powerful grave goods I had expected, they seemed to be just small, lost, broken things. Was I looking at a significant exhibition, or just a gathering of objects that hadn’t anywhere else to go? Never mind, I thought. There's always the icebergs.

As the days went by, I gave up my feverish questioning, and immediately - of course - everything began to fall into place.

Imagine walking round Joan Soane's Museum with a blindfold on. How could someone adequately describe those convex mirrored ceilings to you? The labyrinths of plundered plaster ruins? Approaching Upernavik Museum with a European mindset is equally unproductive. What might be experienced is completely obscured by an ingrained expectation of visual stimulus, a hunger for intellectual explanation or for a poetic conceit. The Inuit survived through waiting, watching, and listening, and to some degree these skills must be used to interpret the artefacts that survived along with them.

In acclimatising to Greenland, I have learnt never to expect a straight answer, or to demand a definite appointment. I have trained my eyes to see many colours in the snow, and to focus when watching the shifting dance of the Aurora Borealis. I have allowed myself time to be entertained, not by the flight of one raven across the bay, but by the story that unfurls in the moments elapsing between the flight of one raven and the next. With this oblique form of looking I began to notice presences in the empty building.

Upernavik does not need a grand institution with invigilators in branded t-shirts, Corinthian columns and a mission statement. There is a very thin and permeable wall between past and present everywhere on the island. Although the community has adapted to modernity, the objects that are desiccated and displayed in European collections are still proudly worn and used here. The legends are still cached in the memories of the islanders. It is not surprising that when you ask about the museum, people talk of Upernavik. Trying to define the purpose of a museum in such an environment is as complicated as trying to place the soul in human physiognomy.

At midday the museum's white walls reflect the first sunlight of spring, as does the ice outside. The ice is melting, that's for sure. But I hope that the museum walls will stay empty and reflective for as long as possible, and that the traditional life of the Upernavik islanders will not be condemned to the past.

Understanding Umwelt

2010-02-17T12:59:00.007Z

There's a word to describe the way each species perceives the environment around it, a potent mix of sensory perception and personal history that makes an island look very different to a human and a raven. Umwelt. There are as many Umwelten as there are lifeforms. The concept, developed by the scientist Jakob von Uexküll in the early twentieth century, suggests we cannot write objectively about ‘the environment’.

Umwelt explains my presence as a temporary observer on this island, and my subjective response to its people and the landscape. As well as distinctions between species, there are also differences in environmental perception between different peoples. My sense of scale and climate was developed in a temperate region. This means I fall over a lot on the slippery ground, causing much hilarity in the village. On another level, my sensitivity to ice will never be as ingrained as that of the fisherman who steps across the floes every day to catch halibut, a job that must rank among the most dangerous in the world. His understanding of the ice is a means of self-preservation. For me, the benefits (poetic composition) are less vital.

So the working title for the poems I’m writing in Upernavik has become ‘Umwelt’. It reminds me that I am a single observer, poorly qualified to make sweeping judgements about the beautiful landscape, the history of colonialism, and the battles between global industry and indigenous life.

Before coming to Upernavik I read a good deal of poetry inspired by enthnography (I mean by ethnographic science – there’s a case for arguing that all poets are enthnographers, with their deep investigation of object and ritual). Particularly memorable was Tom Lowenstein’s Ancestors and Species. I’ve also long admired Robert Bringhurst’s translations from Haida. Both writers are experts in their subject, which is woven into their life as well as into their work. My knowledge, on the other hand, is cobbled together in a magpie manner, with an eye for sparkle and synchronicity.

A danger of writing about a very different culture is that one gets so lost in the novelty of another’s Umwelt. The poetry – like holiday photographs – relies on the exotic flavour of the subject matter, rather than anything inherently interesting or well-expressed. This literary tourism focuses on facts and names and anecdote – and the numinous quality which characterises a good poem is not caught on the negative.

To avoid complacency, I’m writing in a form that I would not have been able to use had it not been for another colonial history. The pantoum is a derived from the pantun, a Malay verse form that was introduced to Europe by the French (via Victor Hugo) in the nineteenth century. A strongly repetitive and circituitous series of interwoven quatrains, the pantoum has since been employed sparingly by other poets: perhaps the greatest tour de force I’ve read is Ashbery’s Hotel Lautréamont. The fact that I can bring a Malaysian form to bear on this cold climate surprises me almost as much as the fact that I am here myself.

How to say 'I Love You' in Greenlandic

2010-02-12T13:22:00.010Z

The oldest book in the library at Upernavik Museum is from the series Meddelelser om Grønland, a Greenlandic-English dictionary printed in Copenhagen in 1927. During the 1920s the orthography of the language was still being debated and the idea of anchoring words on paper had been practiced for less than 100 years. (While Kallilusit has retained the Roman alphabet, some related Inuit languages have opted for the Inuktituk syllabary (titirausiq nutaaq) adapted from Cree). The dictionary is not infallible; there are contemporary corrections in a beautiful italic hand. So, for example, akiatsianga, which is officially defined (rather awkwardly) as ‘take hold (of it) together with me’ becomes ‘carry me, please’.

Most of the words in the opening pages – those beginning with ‘a’ – concern writing. Agdlak means ‘stripe, spot or pattern’ and the words that grow from this root refer to an act of mark-marking, such as adlagpoq (‘writes’) and adlapalaarpa (‘draws a design’). Since I have been intrigued by the links between poetry and shamanism (there are fewer Greenlandic poets than might be expected, as the angakok’s role covers all acts of inspiration and interpretation), I wondered whether it might be more than co-incidence that the word listed directly before that for writing, describes the shamanic act of rubbing stones together (agiut). But perhaps I should be careful of making these tenuous connections, since the word before that, aggaitsoq, is (i) one who sleeps in his clothes (ii) a stockfish. And surely one wouldn’t want to imply that either poets or shamans might be prone to a slight pong.

The dictionary is a testament to Greenlandic culture, with its highly specific words for harpoon shafts and specific cuts of meat, on which Upernavik Museum holds much material. However, the dictionary is not so useful on daily communication in the twenty-first century. I’ve just downloaded a dictionary in spreadsheet form from Oqaasileriffik, the Greenlandic Language Secretariat, but this is likewise distinguished by never having in it the word in which Beathe, the Museum Director, and I need.

So today Beathe has been teaching me ‘important words’, i.e. those I will need during my time in Upernavik. ‘I love you’, she said. ‘Asavakkit. This is the most important!’ she added, and smiled. Although the chances of me needing to say ‘I love you’ are slim, I agreed, love is important. Over coffee, we spent some time trying to establish whether love only exists as a verb in Greenlandic or whether there is a noun too. ‘As in “God is love”’, I say, wishing these fine distinctions were easier to explain. After a while, we give up, and look at the icebergs. I realise I don’t know the word for ‘iceberg’ yet, but some objects are so far beyond language that the words don’t matter.

TRACEY ROWLEDGE: Arctic Drawings

2010-02-10T16:08:00.005Z

I'd like to invite you to visit London/Nuuk where I'm posting features on artists who have created work in response to the Arctic environment. The latest participant, Tracey Rowledge, has allowed me to feature some of the drawings she made (in collaboration with the sea) while on a Cape Farewell expedition to Disko Bay. We had a long chat about icebergs, mark-making, climate change ... and her latest desk job.