Taking a stance

Like the chicken and the egg, it is often hard to determine whether the words or music come first in my projects. In my string quartet Whispers in the Woods I imagine what a day on the hill for 19th-century squatters would have been like. I imagine they might have heard birdsong when gathering water from the well, worked the fields listening to the thuds and sharp sounds of the quarry, gathered at night to share tales, songs and music. Last April I started writing a number of sketches for treble recorder to capture my initial thoughts, and unravelled and recomposed these into a string quartet in May and June.

Though I usually write poetry before putting any notes down, this time round I felt unable to write anything  for quite some time. This writing block only faded when I realised that I hesitated making the broad feelings and atmospheres in the music explicit and was struggling to find a way to do this truthfully. The story of the hill is highly political. Though perhaps not as violent as elsewhere, the story of The Colony is one of a Clearance: some people for whom the farming communities could no longer cater moved to the slopes of the commonty, after several decades landowners divided the land between them and forced the squatters to pay rent, the crofters eventually felt forced to leave. To be truthful I not only had to understand my own response to what happened at the hill, but I also had to visit the Bennachie Centre, walk the Colony Trail, and read books. Rather than regretting this clearance, I wanted to tell the story of what life on the hill would have been like and what would have happened if the hill had remained a commonty. Whereas the music allowed me to stay with broad atmospheres and emotional responses, the poem's inherent need for being explicit meant that I was ureged to investigate the history and take a stance.

Art – be it music composition, writing poetry or drawing – can be seen as a way of engaging with the world. For me, it doesn’t stop there. Art is also a way of making sense of that world and my own response towards it. Often, as in Three, I use creative writing to capture an image or atmosphere to guide my composition. In Whispers in the Woods, however, I have used my recorder sketches for the composition to identify the focus on my work and used poetry to generate content.

Cherry

On the gritty slopes

saws rasp, grind, rage

clearing one tree, another, then another

until all are razed.

Left at the edge of the path

two cherry trees, some holly, laurel

stubborn survivors of evictions, clear fellings

once blossoming in a garden

of the lodger who

when he lowered his bucket in the well

explored the echoes of the fertile valleys

that were not his.

You can listen to me talk about Whispers in the Woods on the Literature Show at shmuFM on Saturday 6 September at 6 pm.

The project Whispers in the Woods has been generously supported by The Hope Scott Trust, Forestry Commission Scotland, sound and The Bailies of Bennachie.

Copyright text, poem and image Petra Vergunst

Letter to Alice

Two poems have influenced my project Sharing at the Shoreline in particular. Alice Oswald’s poem Dart presents a sound-map of the river Dart based on the language of people who live and work on along it. On our journey from source to mouth we meet a walker, a fisherman and bailiff, a waternymph, a dreamer, a stonewaller, a ferryman, a sealwatcher. What excites me in this booklong poem is the way Oswald creates a rich experiential image of the river by letting many different people – and mythical figures - speak.

The second poem is Solway by Kenneth Steven, published in his collection Iona. In this poem, ‘The sailors climb aboard the land / The voices rise and fall along the road’ while ‘Long across the bay is England / Lying still at anchor, far and blue’. It is a poem I often return to for the different kind of experience it offers, it contains a perspective I had not thought of myself.

To create a similar dialogue and to open myself up to perspectives I would not otherwise think of, I have held a number of poetry workshops and walks. During the workshop in the Tolbooth Museum in Stonehaven a fisherman told me that what drew him to the sea was the challenge. During the walk at Forvie we spoke about seals and one participant wrote about a seal's feelings and thoughts when a person approached her: ‘What do you want, what will you do?’. During the workshop with the Stonehaven Writing Group a participant spoke about his experiences of the coast as an RAF pilot whilst other participants wrote about lighthouse-high waves and put on a seal skin of to become a sea mermaid.

Gradually, I have come to realise that my poems reveal my dialogue with the landscape and and my responses to what I read, see and hear about the Aberdeenshire coast. In Johnshaven, for example, I was struck by the symbolism of a collection of anchors lying in front of the disused lifeboat station. When I started my walk I read a newspaper story about a sea angler who had drowned. The week before I had been watching a sea angler whilst a seagull on a rock on the opposite site of the cove was angling for the same fish. The article put this image in perspective. Likewise, a chance viewing of a film at the Aberdeen Maritime Museum about coastal salmon fishing around Forvie provided the storyline for the salmon nets I had passed between Aberdeen and Newburgh.

A form of poetry that I feel particularly attracted to is dramatic monologue. Spoken, and addressed to someone else, I value the opportunity it provides to construct an argument by letting the speaker respond to (implied) actions and reactions from the addressee. A letter can be seen as a specific form of dramatic monologue. In my poem Letter to Alice I have juxtaposed my own experiences of the coast as a walker against those of a salmon fisherman.

 

Letter to Alice

What is sand and salt water to
The bodies of a walker, a fisherman, a bird?
I have been asking myself this question ever since
I started walking the coastline north.
The knife I spoke about is blunt,
Its edge softened by sand and salt.
My feet not cut
But massaged by sand, rasping and raw.
You walked the riverbanks, heard the currents gather stories.
I walk in the turbulence where your stories
Meet horizons that won’t alter
Until I face the afternoon sun past Fraserburgh.
Sand and salt water are in my step
But never will I return to the same grain of sand,
The same rock pool, the same gully.

How different sand and salt water are to
The salmon fisherman whose path I crossed this morning!
He knows the movements of the moon, the waves, the wind.
His feet tell him about the depths of the sea,
The shapes of sandbanks, the pull of currents. He can
Read the tides from the sway
Of his nets between the poles he staked.

Like your path, my path follows the edge of the water,
The salmon fisherman crosses the beach
And enters. The water pulls
Around his ankles, his calves, his knees, his waist – deeper still
To check his nets for migrating salmon.
My gaze cuts out a narrow path between land and sea, but
The eyes of a salmon fisherman
Cannot affirm a safe pathway.

What is sand and salt water to
The bodies of a walker, a fisherman, a bird?
I am learning, Alice.

Copyright text, image and poem Petra Vergunst

Bennachie

The crofting history of Bennachie is fascinating and over the summer I will use this as inspiration for a string quartet and poetry to go alongside this string quartet. Funded by The Hope Scott Trust, Forestry Commission Scotland and sound, and as part of of surround-sound, the works will have their first performance by The Dee String Quartet at the visitor centre of Bennachie on Saturday 13 September.

For me, the project Whispers in the Woods is an excellent opportunity to explore how music composition and poetry can sit alongside each other creatively and how this can be presented in new ways. Rather than giving a pre-concert talk, I hope to take the audience on a preconcert poetry walk to share some of the history and places that have inspired the string quartet.

The Bailies of Bannachie have worked closely with Forestry Commission Scotland and archaeologist and anthropologists from the University of Aberdeen to explore the hill’s crofting history. I have been fortunate to follow their work for several years now and the wooded slopes have gradually transformed into a place in which people lived and made a living. My poem Pottery and Claypipe was originally inspired by some of the findings at one of the archaeological digs at Bennachie last summer.

Bennachie not only has a very rich social history, it has also inspired several folk tales. As part of surround-sound, Forestry Commission Scotland will also premiere the opera The Maiden Stone composed by Joe Stollery and with a libretto Catriona Yule which will be performed on the hill on 5 and 6 September. It is exciting to present my work next to this opera as it reveals the rich repertoire of stories related to the hill and different ways in which music and words can reinforce each other. Thus far I have made good progress with the composition of the string quartet and will soon start looking for ways in which the storyline of the string quartet can be presented through poetry and may well end up using dramatic monologue to do so.

See also:
Taking a Stance
Whispers in the Woods
Poetry walk pictures

Copyright words and image Petra Vergunst

Poetry walk at Forvie

If there is one theme that recurs in many of the stories I have gathered during my walk along the Aberdeenshire Coastal Path thus far it is that of the sand and sea ultimately determining human activity along the coastline. In my workshop in the Tolbooth Museum in Stonehaven in the end of April, I met a fisherman whose boat had sunk twice. The first time it had done so after a trip to the Northern Isles, on return in the harbour of Stonehaven. Yet, this fisherman went on, it was exactly this challenge that drew him to the sea. To harvest the mussels and prawns from between the rocks he has to position his boat carefully above the rocks that lurk just below the surface, all the time avoiding actually damaging his boat. On return from one of those trips, however, a wave cast his vessel on the rocks just outside of the harbour.

Other stories are quite similar. At the start of my walk, in St. Cyrus, a storm had eroded the dune-top path to the point of inaccessibility. Six hundred years ago, in the dunes of Forvie National Nature Reserve, a storm covered the village of the same name in a storm that lasted nine days. The shifting sands have now revealed the kirk. 

 Map

Inked in your ways, unmovable

A stained glass mosaic in yellows, greens, blues

Printed on weather-proof paper

You lull the walker in a legend

Lead her to negotiate

Streets, fields, beaches

Fiction may be your tale

Footings dissolve, fences surface

Itinerary cul-de-sac

Dunes shift in the hourglass

Paths wander off on the wind

Re-stain the glass legend

Etch new lines in lead

Though the above suggests that the environment conditions opportunities for human activity in the coastal landscape on a large scale, I strongly feel that on a smaller scale this interaction with the environment is mutual and subtle. As part of my walk I have started to pay attention to my own interaction with sand and sea and am comparing this with the daily practices of fisherman. This will be one of the themes I hope to take up during my poetry walk at Forvie National Nature Reserve on Tuesday 27 May. The walk, to the cursed village of Forvie and the beach, will start at 10 am at the Waterside Car Park just north of Newburgh. The walk is free, but you’re asked to register your interest with Scottish Natural Heritage at 01358 751330.

Copyright text, poem and image Petra Vergunst

Dialogue

Art can be about dialogue and art can take the form of dialogue. The online Oxford Dictionary defines dialogue as a discussion between two or more people which is often directed towards exploring a particular subject or resolving a problem. In many ways, negotiation goes a step further by suggesting the focus is to reach agreement. Community arts usually are based on the premise of dialogue, but how such dialogue unfolds is rarely elaborated on. In her PhD research Chu Yuan conceptualised negotiation as a process of engagement which brings new understandings for both the artist and those engaged with. In this way, negotiation can be seen as a process of actively getting to know the world, others and what is unique about one’s own position in it.

Such dialogue and negotiation can be mediated through poetry. In the act of publishing a poem, the poet opens up an opportunity for communication with the reader. Take Julian Dobson’s poem For Tony Benn. Reading this poem one may find oneself soul searching – what do I know about Tony Benn, what were his views, did I agree, how will I remember him? Yet, this poem draws attention to something more. Written just after the death of this politician, the poem positions itself firmly in a specific society and time. Chu Yuan would say that through engagement with the poem the reader becomes more aware of the world he lives in and his or her relation to it.

The above observations have informed Sharing at the Shoreline. Yet, this project will take this idea of poetry as dialogue a step further by deliberately creating spaces in which this dialogue can take place face-to-face and enables this conversation to be multi-directional. The Sharing at the Shoreline workshops will thus provide space for those attending to share stories and experiences, personal or conjured up by the poems. Naturally, these conversations will resonate in subsequent poems and, as a result, this dialogue will transcend individual workshops by generating dialogue between the different groups of people I meet on the way. The central element in Sharing at the Shoreline is the dialogue I create through my poetry and readings - between myself and participants and between different groups of participants.

The next Sharing at the Shoreline workshop will take place on Saturday 26 April at 2 pm at the Tolbooth Museum in Stonehaven. Participation is free and prior registration is not required. For more information, please email myself at petravergunst@hotmail.com.

Copyright text and image Petra Vergunst

The art of walking

Walking is nothing new for artists. It is the backbone for the work of Richard Long, an artist who often makes stone sculptures during his walks and  exhibits photographs of these sculptures alongside textworks in galleries. His art is about mobility, lightness and freedom, the simple creative act of walking and marking that draws attention to place, locality, time, distance and measurement. The appeal of the walk for Long is the human scale at which it unfolds in the reality of the landscape. Likewise, Hamish Fulton considers himself a walking artist. Suggesting art is a way of viewing life, he takes art beyond the mere production of objects. Although only Fulton experiences the walk itself, the  photographs and textworks he presents in his exhibitions and books allows the public to engage with his experience. Long and Fulton use their walks to generate art objects to express their experience of, and reflections on, their walks. By extension, one could argue that the walk itself is a form of art. The Walking Institute founded by Deveron Arts explores and celebrates journeying and the human pace and argues for the walk to be seen as a point of departure for both invention and intervention.

As the human pace encourages rhythmic reflections and detailed observation poets have taken to walking as well. Perhaps the most celebrated example in recent years is Simon Armitage who walked the Pennine way as a modern troubadour and gave poetry readings in exchange for a bed for the night. Armitage did, however, not extend this idea and present his work in the form of poetry. A more exciting poet who uses walking I find the Scottish poet Lesley Harrisson who, in her project Making Space for Water, walked along urban rivers in Aberdeen and Dundee to write a series of poems that explore those rivers as lived and living places.

 

My project Sharing at the Shoreline is based on my walk along the Aberdeenshire Coastal Trail. This walk is in no way as adventurous and demanding as the walks by Long, Fulton and Armitage as family commitments mean I walk the route as a number of daytrips, but the activity of walking is reflected in the poems I write. Walking the entire Aberdeenshire coastline implies that I visit not only the beauty spots but also perhaps the more mundane parts of the coastline in between. Sometimes my walks take place in glorious sunshine, but I am as likely to face wet and windy weather. What I found this far is that the repetitive movement of my feet helps me to focus my observations. Last week, for example, my walk led me from Newtonhill and Cove over minor roads past fields. What struck me was that the cold wind determined what I observed during the walk, but that this in the end did not determine how I felt about walking this part of the path in this weather.

Walking the coast in March

Heavy the leaden clouds weigh down the waves

Heavy the slanted rocks wade

Heavy the brambled war defences overlook the scene

Heavy the saturation of gorse

Heavy the burn overruns

Heavy the death-yielding grasses

yellow the verge

Heavy the voice of plastic caught in the wind

Heavy the herring gull balances, heavy its cry

Heavy the droop of the snowdrop,

the daffodil buds

Heavy the fragrance of gorse

Lightness

The tread of the walker

Moving along the path.

Copyright text, image and poem Petra Vergunst

Sharing at the shoreline

The Aberdeenshire Coastal Path follows the North Sea shoreline between St. Cyrus in the south and Cullen in the north, passing sandy beaches, cliffs, river estuaries, harbours small and industrial, ruined castles, lighthouses, limekilns and salmon stations. Where sea and land meet, people create livelihoods and spend time for leisure. On this edge the walker finds a natural environment with little shelter to the sun, wind and rain, but which might be compensated by a bird and sea life that has adapted to, even makes the most of, these circumstances.

During spring, summer and autumn 2014 I hope to walk the Aberdeenshire Coastal Path from St. Cyrus to Cullen and express my experiences, observations and reflections, and the many stories I gather en route, in a series of poems. As part of my walks I hope to hold a number of what I would like to call, sharing-at-the-shoreline workshops, informal meetings over a cup of tea or coffee in which I share some of my coastal path poems in return for stories, experiences and reflections from others around the table. If you live or work along the Aberdeenshire Coastal Path and would like to host one of those meetings, please contact me at petravergunst (at)hotmail.com to arrange details.

I Feel

Slowly advancing the coastline north

Weighed down by my shell. My trail

Marking heavy in the sand

I offload excess cargo step by step.

The movement a meditation of muscles

Forward-urging, transcending distance. The walk

A ribbon perforated

For provision and pause.

Forthcoming Sharing-at-the-Shoreline events:
Thursday 12 June, 7 pm with Stonehaven Writing Group.

Tuesday 27 May, 10 am to 12 noon at Forvie, Newburgh. Please register your interest Annabel.Drysdale@snh.gov.uk.
Saturday 26 April, 2 pm at Tolbooth Museum, Stonehaven. Participation is free and prior registration is not required.

Tuesday 1 April, 10 am at Starfish Studio, Johnshaven. Please register your interest with Kate MacKenzie at 01561 360118.

Links to other blogs about the project Sharing at the Shoreline:

The art of walking
Dialogue 
Poetry walk at Forvie

Letter to Alice

Copyright text, image and poem Petra Vergunst