Writing ‘Nigh-No-Place’
by and published in Edition Nine of Pomegranate
The poem that lives. What’s that about? More to the point, the poem that doesn’t live. After all your machinations and disciplines – perhaps you are accumulating language About A Rose Hip; perhaps you’ve set yourself the task of muttering to a white page every day; perhaps you have been hijacked by a word that you think deserves celebration in its own right – such as ‘plantiecrub’ (a stone enclosure for storage of root vegetables in Shetland) or ‘slough’, (pronounced ‘sloo’ in Canada, relating to a marshy lake, I think, such as the one I saw in Alberta, sporting an American avocet and crusted with salts). Perhaps you wrote quite imaginatively, perhaps there were some bits you were very pleased with, and yet, if you were honest, you felt the whole thing lacking, and couldn’t work out why. You’d followed the ‘rules’, maybe: whipping out the extraneous adjectives, striving to show and not tell. You worked the music. You tried with all your might to ‘make-it-new’, as Ezra Pound had it, and the clever images sat well-spaced and tamped in the page’s soil, more or less upright, yet somewhat self-conscious. The poem didn’t take, in the end, rapidly wilted. When you read it later on, you couldn’t be bothered. Something missing. That endorphin rush of the living writing. The I’ve-done-a-poo-in-my-potty feeling.
A few years ago I wrote every day. I have box files full of writing from the year I spent travelling in Canada. Heavy-handed accounts of sloughs and rose hips and American avocets, of night-waking, dehydrated by air-conditioning, while skunks, raccoons and coyotes prowled the suburban yards. I have a slough of tortuous notes about 2500km drive into the Arctic Circle, which reads back like the poetic equivalent of digesting your own stomach. Details of how a squirrel is skinned. A encounter with some First Nations people in Vanderhoof, BC, perhaps the Saik’uz First Nation, who thought it was very funny that I was wandering the streets wearing a quiver full of arrows, looking for the sports store. “But you’re not an Indian.” Introducing themselves – first names, and nicknames – “Margaret – Tops. Joseph – Pack Rat.” “You can fire arrows like this” – snapping my bra-strap.
I have sheaves about the Dry Country, the interior of B.C., alone.
A description of a half-skinned coyote with its leg in a snare. Lists of names of places, birds, plants. Jack-pine. Towhee. Whistle-weed. Kinglet. Bunch Grass. Bull snake. Kyoot. And transcripts from that Canadian tradition of tall tales and rapid patter – “Come on – we’ll have a little happy hour and tell some lies.” Looking like the best listener and the worst, taking dictation, panicking when I can’t keep up. “Trying to track him down, it’s like trying to pin a fart to the wall.” “I’m hardly a poster-boy for a married man.” Writing. Present, but absent from the conversation. “All he needs to be happy is a box of wine and a five dollar piece of tail.”
Trying to pin a theme to the notes. This is a poem about the badlands. Trying to work lyrics from the folk song, Reynardine, into my badlands poem. Trying to make it a poem about my uncle. Trying to make a poem about the time of day that the light wears thin. Scribbling against the dashboard. My uncle calling me ‘weird niece freak’, fondly. Me not finding this funny. Beginning to suspect I should try and learn to make speech my first language. Given that I am not writing any poetry – although when I leave Canada, it’s burdened with a Manuscript that weighs at least two pounds, and that doesn’t contain a single poem. Why?
I certainly wasn’t starved of experience, that fifteen months in Canada. The Manuscript consists of a lot of language, a lot of fact, a lot of snapshots, often in short lines and tight rhythms that are utterly confusing, with variously the emotional consistency of gruel or of a clootie dumpling. They are dressed as poems, in desperation, and this makes my ambivalent response all the more confusing. I describe the Manuscript as My Second Book, although it bears very little resemblance to Nigh-No-Place. And I think NNP does include some poetry. So… what happened?
I think it began with the gift of a book, in Shetland, during a writing residency. It is A-P of Fair Isle Words, an incomplete dialect dictionary, for which I gather some of the manuscript has been lost, in which many of the words listed have no definition. A colleague recently described Shetland Dialect (often described as Dialect but not ‘Shetlandic’) as being ‘the language of the heart’. The liver-richness of that language. ‘Gowl’, meaning a dry gale. ‘Gurr – Dirt in the eyes after sleeping.’ ‘Allid – Kept inside all winter as a lamb.’ The hints at a mythology of fairies, too, baldly itemised. ‘Hunter Mellfit – One of the ‘guidficks’ or fairies’. ‘Lucky-minney – One of the fairies, used to keep children quiet’. Precision, myth, poetry. And thanks to a really sophisticated and passionate fight to defend it, a live language. As in so many regions, Shetland dialect has a history of being methodically stamped out in its schools.
The shock of difference, to a ‘sooth-moother’, (one who arrives in Shetland by boat, the entrance to Lerwick Harbour being known as The Sooth Mooth) meant I could not open my mouth without being incredibly aware (and not unpleasantly) of the site and manner of articulation. I had been aware of language in Canada, but for some reason I wasn’t just quoting any more. Heeding language without relief. Being battered continually by Now, scribbling poems good and bad, even the bad ones being poems, as they were honest involuntary speech. Redefining poetry as speech. Thinking on the nature of speech at the same time as simply, childishly, loving the place I had found myself in and trying to work out how, practically and emotionally, I could make it home. In fact, beginning to wonder how any of us make anywhere home. Wondering if speech could inhabit the ecology of the white page.
The poems saying themselves as I walked. Becoming, as other folk often describe it, no more than a mouthpiece – for a draft-horse, in Canada, in the dry country, weary amongst self seeding cactus and wild asparagus. Becoming a poem called Paternoster. Becoming the mouthpiece for a Reynardine who would lead us astray in the badlands and heartlands – the cliff tops, the white page, the kelp beds, the hectic stratosphere.
Jen Hadfield
Jen Hadfield won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her second collection, Nigh-No-Place and is published by Bloodaxe Books.