IN SIGHT OF THE TIDE: In Search Of The Light

I have a confession to make. An ironic one for a writer:

Sometimes, words aren’t enough.

One great gift my MA course has given me is the courage to experiment. As a result, I have discovered that I am visual poet, and sometimes a hybrid poet.

Visual poetry is poetry that needs to be seen. It uses layout, fonts, all sorts, to say or suggest more than the words alone do. We had the owner of Guillemot Press speak to us this week and they have some beautiful examples of this. Check out their website. https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/ Start with Astra Papachristodoulou’s Constellations. https://www.astranaut.co.uk/ Or have a look at the wonderful https://www.poematlas.com/.

Hybrid poetry goes one further and mixes text with any art media. It’s a little like conceptual art, I suppose, and certainly blurs the lines between writer and artist, or in my case, craftist. Roger Wagner https://www.rogerwagner.co.uk/and Paul Hobbs https://www.arthobbs.com/conceptualare worth checking out. I love Wagner’s book The Nearer You Stand and Hobbs’s Sabbath Rest in particular.

My background, especially as an occupational therapist, is more in the craft side of art. So that’s what I use with my poetry. So far, I’ve combined words with paper weaving, quilting, sewing. But occupational therapy also emphasises purposeful activity so I branch out further from defined crafts, including jigsaws, genealogy, astronomy, recipes, even gardening. Whatever seems most appropriate to what I am trying to say.

I can see that sounds a little weird. It’s hard to explain in words. (Back to that theme!) You’ll have to come to the exhibition I’m hoping to hold.

I don’t pretend to be an artist. Art was a subject I struggled with at school. Looking back, I wonder if that was because it seemed aimed at those with natural talent. I was an adult before I realised there are actual techniques that can be learned.

So my newfound courage to experiment has also led to a decision to learn to draw. Just the basics. I bought a book called You Can Draw In 30 Days. And here, to my delight, are actual logical techniques and principles I can learn and apply. But the biggest lesson is how enjoyable it is as I see my skill improve, or find myself in that mindful place of ‘flow’ when I’m doing it, or producing recognisable objects on paper. I’ve even drawn the odd extra piece for myself after the set exercise.

Yesterday morning, having done an exercise on complex cylinders, I drew some of the many plants pots in our garden. Perched on a hillside in a steep sided river valley, I spent a long time trying to work out the direction the light was coming from. It’s easier when the sun is lower in the sky and reflections in wet paving don’t confuse the issue. The trick is to look which way the shadows are pointing.

Isn’t that a topsy-turvy idea? Shadows – the darkness cast by obstacles – point to the light. When I think about the pieces I’ve written (poems, a script, the beginning of a novel), much of my inspiration comes in hope found in or through dark times. Shadows pointing to the light.

It reminds me of the Leonard Cohen lyric: “There is a crack in everything/It’s where the light gets in.” Or another quote I read recently: “Jesus promised us a full life, not an easy one.”

When I draw, I notice how shading, and different depths of shading, makes an object look more 3D; how it reveals its shape, its fullness.

Maybe darkness isn’t something to be afraid of. If we use it to seek fullness and the light.

IN SIGHT OF THE TIDE: Mothering Sunday then and now

It’s Mothers’ Day tomorrow and with the recent news of our nephew and his partner expecting the first of the next generation in our family, it’s taken my memory back to Mothering Sundays of the past.

I remember, six months into a difficult first pregnancy, making it with relief to the service at the Anglican church we attended then. It was the tradition to give posies to mothers on the way out after the church and I smiled expectantly (pun intended) at our rector at the door. He smiled and made a light hearted (no doubt to his ears) remark about how next year it would be my first time to receive the flowers. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing but he was insistent – I didn’t qualify for the gift yet.

It was, at best, a thoughtless comment but a hurtful one. And, thinking about it now, a ridiculously rigid definition of motherhood – that only someone who has given birth counts as a mother. I am reminded of the poem I wrote a couple of years ago querying similarly rigid definitions of womanhood (SHE | thestufflifeismadeofblog (wordpress.com)).

With two grown sons I now more than qualify for my old rector’s flowers but I know that I am not the only woman to have mothered them over the years. Their grandmothers, their aunts, their godmothers, my best friend, church and Boys’ Brigade leaders, teachers – all have played a part in that. As their biological mother, I have no problem with sharing that joy and responsibility. We all have women, not tied or obligated by blood or marriage, who love us. My faithful Roget’s Thesaurus reminds me that ‘motherly’ can be a synonym for ‘loving’. And my Bible reminds me that the origin of these qualities is God.

At our old Hampshire church, the tradition this weekend is to give flowers to all the women in the congregation. That seems to me to be a much more loving, motherly thing to do. Especially as Mothers’ Day can be painful for so many people.

I know. These days it’s more of an ache than a gut punch, the loss of my own mum. For my husband and his siblings, being more recent, the wound is fresher.

So tomorrow, Mr M and I will Facetime with our boys (they visited last weekend for their dad’s birthday and two of us have imminent university deadlines looming). And then we’ll go down to the beach to lay roses in the waves, overlooking where my mum’s ashes are scattered, but remembering both with gratitude.

IN SIGHT OF THE TIDE: The Song Of The Western Men

Last Sunday (5^th March) was St Piran’s Day. He’s not exactly a saint of global renown but he’s big here as Cornwall’s patron saint (one of three), even though he was probably an Irishman.

The story goes that he made himself so unpopular in Ireland with his Gospel preaching that he was thrown into the sea tied to a millstone. But the millstone miraculously floated him all the way to Cornwall, where he built a tiny oratory and carried on his evangelism here instead.

St Piran’s Day was originally a tin miners’ holiday (he’s patron saint of that too) but became a Cornish National Day at the turn of the 20^th century. It’s celebrated with processions, dances, music, and some local councils give their staff the day off.

It’s also associated with another tradition: the Trelawny Shout. Now a ‘shout’ in Cornish terms isn’t a load of blokes yelling but the informal singing in the round in pubs that has been going on for centuries. Cornwall is rightly proud of its singing. Not only do we have modern events like the annual Looe Music Festival but shanties (which remind me of other folk songs like the Irish Rover) are popular, and not just for the tourists. You’ll have heard (or seen the film) of the Fishermen’s Friends from Port Isaac. More locally to us, we have the Polperro Wreckers and Miner Quay – the latter sing regularly in our local pub, the Jolly Sailor.

For the St Piran’s Day Shout, it’s the protest song Trelawny, also known as The Song of the Western Men and seen as an unofficial Cornish National Anthem. You’ll hear it at Cornish rugby union matches, where followers of the county team are known as Trelawny’s Army. It was written in the 19^th century about a squire from our nearby parish of Pelynt, who was imprisoned in the Tower of London. There’s a bit of debate as to whether it was Sir Jonathan Trelawny, Bishop of Bristol, imprisoned by James II in 1688 or his grandfather, Sir John Trelawny, a Royalist leader, imprisoned by Parliament in 1628.  The song’s chorus asks:

And shall Trelawny live?
Or shall Trelawny die?
Here’s twenty thousand Cornish men
Will know the reason why!

In fact, there’s no record of any march to rescue or protest and Sir John was acquitted at his trial after only three weeks of imprisonment.

The Trelawny Shout is a 21st century tradition where groups get together on St Piran’s Day to sing the song and fundraise for charity. If you’d like to hear it here’s a link to it at the Jolly this year: https://www.facebook.com/jollysailorlooe/videos/1384303568997565

The history of the Trelawny Shout has made me think about protest. Most of us these days probably do ours online. But the right to protest peacefully is an important one. And the current UK Government’s plans to introduce a bill that will grant our police the power to ban marches and demonstrations that they consider to be “seriously disruptive”, even too noisy, is a disturbing to say the least. Especially for a country that prides itself on its democracy and fairness.

Maybe we need a new version of The Song Of The Western Men for all of us.

IN SIGHT OF THE TIDE: Art, Light, and Help

Another short trip back to Hampshire last weekend – two year waiting lists for a dentist here in Cornwall so needs must. But it also meant I could do some specific research for my dissertation with a visit to Watts Gallery near Guildford.

If you’re in the area but have never been, do go – if only for the fabulous cakes and Welsh rarebit in the café! It’s a Victorian Arts and Crafts house, gallery, chapel, and studios where GF and Mary Watts used to live. He was a painter and she was a ceramicist.

I wanted to visit the De Montford Decoration or Devotion collection because the theme fits with my dissertation, where I’m using visual poetry to explore how faith sustained me through a particularly difficult few years. In the end, it was other works that gave me ideas to mull over. For instance, how Mary combined a variety of influences and experiences to create the crazy but glorious clash that is Watts Cemetery Chapel; or how GF Watts takes a famous scene but comes at it from a different angle, such as his depiction of The Great Deluge is The Forty First Day, showing without ark, dove, or any other familiar figure from the story.

Cornwall is well known as a mecca for artists, attracted by the light to places like St Ives. I can understand that.  The light is different here. Perhaps it’s the combination of being further south and west as well as so close to the ocean.

It reminds of the African light I encountered when I worked in Rwanda. Cornish light isn’t the same. Rwanda’s was more white and gold; Cornwall’s is silver and blue. But the skies in both are much bigger, as if we are simultaneously closer to heaven yet firmly sited in our small place in the universe. It feels like there is more light here, both physically and maybe spiritually too. I think Cornwall is one of those Celtic thin places, where the barrier between earth and heaven is almost transparent.

No wonder you find art galleries and studios studded across the county. In nearby Polperro, an old chapel is a hub and exhibition space for the East Cornwall Society of Artists. Laura Loves is a wonderful potter who has her studio on a smallholding not far from here. Here in Looe, the local arts and crafts society has a monthly display in a small room squeezed between and ice cream/doughnut vendor and the main car park. Local artists’ works dot the walls of local cafes. And the original Lifeboat Station on the beachfront is a thriving gallery of all sorts of art media from furniture to jewellery.

And exhibition space is very much on my mind at the moment.

My poetry has developed during my MA into visual poetry, where I include all sorts of other media, such as quilting, audio, conceptual art, because sometimes (and I know how ironic this sounds for a writer!) words aren’t enough. So I’ve been recommended to look beyond traditional publishing and look for places to physically exhibit my work: art centres, community spaces, churches.

This is a whole new area for me. But maybe you, my lovely blog readers, can help? Any suggestions or contacts for places that might be willing or interested in hosting an interactive exhibition of combined poetry and arts on the subject of how faith, hope, and love can sustain through difficulties, please let me know. Feel free to contact me directly or put something in the Comments.

Because one thing I have learned so far this course is how writing, especially poetry, is a collaborative experience.