Garyswordz

With just two sessions left there is a sense of being on the home straight now. On the one hand the site is now quite familiar, on the other there always seems to be something new to write about or explore. One aspect of the Dig had been troubling me – how to convey the length of history which has been associated with the place. The Abbey itself dates from 827AD, the settlement predating that. A dress pin dating from the 8th century was discovered last week . Thinking about all the things which had not happened when it was first made, and worn, stretches and defies the imagination. Trying to write a poem which reflects that, taking in some one thousand three hundred years, concisely, is no easy task. I made a number of attempts, but all were swamped by the scale of time I was trying to encompass. Then good fortune intervened.

A poet whom I have met, and rate, Kim Moore, mentioned that she had met Julia Copus who had created a specific poetic form, the specular, which requires that from the mid -point of the poem every word contained up to that point must be used in the reverse order, although the punctuation may be varied in order for the structure to make sense. It is a hybrid of the musical concept of the cancrizan, but in literary form. Its ability to start at a point, go backwards, or forwards, and then return back to the start had obvious potential when it came to writing about an archaeological find which inevitably takes you back in time, but demands to be considered in a contemporary context.

My first attempt involved devoting a single line to every century that had passed between when the pin was made, and had then been found again, each line representing a line of historical strata. The result was satisfactory but suffered a few drawbacks. Firstly it became a list poem, secondly, as a consequence it was a bit dry and boring. My solution was to produce rhyming couplets which offered some specific advantages. The rhyming couplets became more interesting, and became linked, as time and events are linked. They also offered a sense of pace and rhythm. Last but not least it creates a brand new form of its own – the rhyming specular!

By common consent the specular is not an easy form to write in, so finding a subject for which it offered a device solution was most welcome. It works.I suspect it also has potential for dealing retrospectively with relationships, but that is for another day. For now, here is the world’s first rhyming specular:

Upon the Exhumation of an 8th Century Dress Pin .

The Anker’s flow slips and slides
Osanna’s nunnery kissed by the waterside
The Vikings storm Lindisfarne to pillage and take
The end comes for Alfred the Great
Bears in Britain are now no more
The walls of the Tower of London soar
Notre Dame dominates the River Seine
Genghis Khan’s Mongols rise again
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales unfurled
Christopher Columbus discovers the New World
Leonardo Da Vinci dies
Guy Fawkes fails and pays the price
American War of Independence
Queen Victoria’s Empire gains pre-eminence
Two World Wars resound
A bronze dress pin appears in the ground.

The Abbey itself positively oozes stories, some tantalisingly hinted at. A highly polished bronze plaque commemorates Lieutenant W. R Hill who died in World War One in 1918, but on the sixth of November, just five days before the end of the war, in Straslund prisoner of war camp, on Danholm island in the Baltic. How, and of what, is not clear. He also was the holder of the Military Cross, with bar, but again the circumstances are unknown. He attended Oakham School and won an exhibition to Corpus Christi college in Cambridge, so he came from a wealthy family was clever and brave. Intrigue and mystery is not exclusive to turned ground.

Day six was led by novelist Maeve Clarke, and for the first time we were given a guided tour of the gatehouse . The porters lodge was both cramped and cosy, his sense of power, determining who gained admission to the Abbey grounds, and who did not, was palpable.

Maeve tapped intot he spirit of story by asking us to create a back story to some of the items found in the “finds” box. Charlie Jordan and I were fortunate to have a partially damaged floor tile, and soon our imaginations ran wild:

Tile

It smells of nothing
No trace of the stench of revenge
Disfigured, the broken image of a cross
Rests uncertainly
Flaking edges eroding its purpose

Only one workshop remains, that of poet and archaeologist Jo Bell. It promises much.

I had not intended to blog on just one day at the Dig , but day five produced so many poems that it made sense to do so. This session was led by Jacqui Rowe and any fears I had that the creative inspiration emanating from the site would be sapped by over -familiarity were soon allayed by Jacqui’s enthusiastic and different approach ,which was to build the session around haiku.

I have ambivalent feelings towards haiku, reservations which I was pleased to hear Jacqui share. The Japanese haiku and English language haiku are not the same at all, the latter being a hybrid . In my experience, as a performance form, its brevity offers little lasting impact. Furthermore I find joined haiku in sequence rarely satisfying. However they are very good at two things. Firstly they enable simple ideas to be conveyed in condensed complete form, and the discipline of doing so often provides the seed corn for other writing.

I enjoyed playing with Polesworth haiku nonethless. The opportunity to have fun with homophones in Refectory Hearth, The Roofers’ Dog and Sandals was too good to miss, as was the opportunity in Water Course to artificially play with the punctuation in the same way that the course of the Anker has been altered by man.

The Roofers’ Dog

Paw prints from the past
Baked frozen by midday sun
An unwelcome feat

Pit Tip

Giant thistles sway
Wild sentinels of the past
Hover restlessly

Lost Foundation

Dormitory walls
Whispering prayers and secrets
In stony silence

Fleur de Lis Tile

Fading glazing now
Still bearing witness to those
Who worked fought and prayed

Line Call

Grey ash packed strata
Hears, no longer takes, service
Echoing above

Refectory Hearth

Stone fireplace keeps watch
Poets’ words flame and flicker
Their work not yet Donne

The Dig

Nights’ shadows draw in
Dancing like crazy mourners
Over opened pits

Oak Lintel at the Stables

Your shoulders still strain
Under the weight of centuries
With well seasoned wood

Water Course

Wrenched this way and that
To suit, human caprice, the
Anker meanders

Bone Fragments

Reborn to light’s glare
Exhumed from dark interment
Cruel resurrection

Shattered Pottery

Random broken shard
Irregular memento
Your sharpness cuts deep

Font

Stone Baptismal font
Defaced by fragment’ry loss
Unquenched by water

Effigy

Osanna lies still
Hair smoothed by pilgrim’s touch
Bible tightly clasped

The star find of the week had been a dress pin estimated to date from around 700 AD. Trying to grasp what had not happened or been discovered over 1300 years ago is mind stretching. An era before the Viking raids , and when Aethelbert of Kent and Edwin of Northumbria dominated as the threats to the local Mercian Kingdom, a time when Beowulf was being written, and this artefact emerges untouched since then.

Dress Pin

Bronze dress pin dropped lost
Cast adrift from flowing robe
Recovered in awe

Ironically, ideas which I explored in haiku form I found I could express more completely and rewardingly in Cinqaine form, an example of which will follow. The cinqaine only offers an extra four syllables and two lines but I find is a killer vehicle to deal with place writing.

I like cinqaines. I like the way they look. I like their brevity and their capacity to say just enough, Twitter is self indulgent by comparison. A particular feature is the ease with which cinquaines can bolt together five subjects. It works. Do places need more than five pints of interest in a poem? I don’t think so, and the symmetry of five lots of five lines covering five subjects appeals. When you have finished, it feels like the end. Six cinquaines in sequence would simply not feel right.

Polesworth Abbey

Ancient
Stones linger still
Held in forgotten walls
Amongst earthy robber rubble
Waiting

Egbert
Mercian king
Rested, then settled here
His divine, precious legacy
A saint

Ora
Proud devotion
Returns, a heard unheard
Whispering in lavender leaves
Once more

Fireplace
Still burning bright
Drayton Johnson and Donne
Whose omnipresent oration
Endures

Abbey
Weathered and worn
Closed enclosure now breached
Dissolution could not dissolve
Your stones

The second exercise of the day was to decorate tiles and then place a selected Haiku or phrase onto the tile. A few things emerged from the exercise. The first was how little of the written word survives in archaeology, the second was the sense of value that decorating the word bearing tile affords. In the modern era of computer blogs , e mails and texts how much of what is written will survive ( or deserve to)? Just maybe we should bury these tiles to be discovered in another 1300 years time. I wonder what the world will look like then?

This is the haiku which adorns my tile the bottom centre one with the newspaper images of religious figures praying.

Sandals

Lost just underfoot
Simple sandals tap softly
But now there are none

The workshop leader of Day One, David Calcutt has written a fine poem on Polesworth called “Dig”. I frequently find inspiration in reaction to the writing of others. David’s take is essentially a naturalistic one, mine explores a different perspective, that of the destruction that is required to recover the past in archaeology.

The Dig

Nature’s fine weave lies breached
Brutal hands scour below
In ghoulish exhumation
In ground at rest no more

Each day the pits grow
Earth’s belly spewing its guts
Half, barely digested
Splattered over tables

The Anker washes silently by
Salving, cleansing its wounds
Of the twisting distorting agonies of centuries
Its course only now restored

A holy site, visited by saints
Gouged and disfigured
For us to read its entrails
In detached curiosity

Where nuns once keened
Where oblations once soared
Now the dull thud of spade in dirt
Now the shrill trill of trowel on find

Around the borders, patient trees watch
Boughs bursting with leaves
Waiting for their moment
They will not be denied

Dig the Abbey and Dig the Poetry continues until 1st September. An exhibition will take place displaying the story of the dig and finds, and the prose and poetry which resulted a week later between the 7th-9th with readings on Saturday 8th in the afternoon. Workshops are still to be run by Maeve Clarke and Jo Bell For more information:

http://www.digtheabbey.co.uk/dtp2012.html

Polesworth Abbey, Polesworth,North Warwickshire near Tamworth, is enjoying a two month “time team” style dig in which part of it is being excavated and investigated, before the ground is reinstated again. Running parallel with the dig are a series of poetry workshops to give the forensic cataloguing a voice, a project I gladly signed up to. With over a thousand years of history behind it there is no shortage of inspiration for a writer, as Donne, Drayton and Ben Jonson were inspired on site centuries before.

Day One

David Calcutt

David Calcutt led the first session with the aim of giving a voice to artefacts which have been discovered, from shards of pottery, to medieval floor tiles. David loves myths and legends and revelled in the opportunity to operate in his milieu. By means of stimulation, he placed lines of prose and verse authored by Donne, Drayton and an unknown monk in front of us to respond to, seeking to draw the historic voice out of us all. The resulting intertextualisation was far more effective than I supposed it would be.

Initially I felt uneasy about plagiarising half a poem, then I remembered Eliots’ Wasteland ,and all those pop songs which happily borrowed lyrics and musical phrases from elsewhere, and reconsidered my position, adopting the critics basic maxim. Is it any good? To my surprise I ended up with a piece which I found satisfying , as a narrative emerged from the line fragments I was offered. To what extent I was fortunate in being inspired by the first fragment allowing me to mould what followed thereafter, and to what extent, by serendipity, the fragments offered a random framework, I am not sure, but the result was something I would never have written on my own, nor was it overtly the work of a third party.

There were three trenches. The first quite shallow, behind the refectory, but in which medieval floor tiles had been recovered in situ, the second deeper and closer to the river, a third , “Area A”,in front of the Abbey by the old stable block had unearthed a mysterious bored fragment as we visited,later believed to have been part of a gaming board.

Daybreak

A clear light brightened the dark water
Promising warmth to frost bitten stone
Teach me to hear the mermaids sing
The flapping beat of a dragon’s wing

Innocence is closing up his eyes
As clenched hands deal the final blow
Now at the last gasp of loves’ latest breath
Her farewell lingers on the morning breeze

I have completed what you desired
The deed is done, to be judged by God and eternity

My first experience of a dig was fascinating. The male archaeologists sported beards and Indiana Jones style hats in joyful stereotype. Excavating apparatus ranged from mechanical digger through to hand trowels. What surprised me was the volume of historical detritus that was being uncovered, and how it all had to be meticulously catalogued, irrespective of obvious value. A roof tile with a dog’s footprint on it delighted as did a floor tile with a fleur di lis motif which certainly predated 1542, the latter of which I was moved to write about:

Floor Tile ,Circa 16th century, Polesworth Abbey Dig

Solitary in kiln baked symmetry
Your underside bears the wounds
Of mortar roots, roughly torn from its bed
Sunlight sparkles over fractured veins
Remnants of green glaze, defiantly glisten

A fleur- de- lis splays for those
Who have fought, worked and prayed
In service to regents, long gone and yet to be
Exhumed to daylight glare
In fragmentary reveal

Your ridged recesses betray
Uncertain colours, long lost, in matt surround
An abused, bruised corner reluctantly flakes
But precise smooth sheer edges define your purpose
Your subterranean russet clay cries

To be interred, once more
From whence you came, in place.

To wrap up the day we were invited to submit a limerick. I was surprised to discover that for archaeological purposes the present starts at 1950, which prompted the following:

The Archaeologist

Ask the time- and they look somewhat shifty
It could never be simply ten fifty
With their hats, beards and boots
In search of old loot
To them it is always 1950.

Day Two

Jenny Hope

A week on, I was interested to see how much progress there had been in physically excavating the site, and it had been considerable. This time Jenny Hope from Worcester was leading the day, and her focus was on experiencing the site using senses other than sight.Her poetry is at its best in celebrating the pastoral and the senses, and she brought those skills to the workshop. Each trench offers a geological, as well as an historic section of what has gone before.

One of the things which struck me was the physicality of the operation, trenches, trowels and trousers smeared with mud which prompted my first poem of the day.Normally any contact with the rare, unfound or undiscovered, is the cry “Don’t touch” but Jenny urged us to do the opposite, to touch- nice!:

Don’t Touch

The ripped surface drops in sheer sondage
Cloying clay smearing my outstretched palm

Tough and tantalisingly moist unyielding
Its secrets held absorbed congealed
A slippery residue resists exploring touch

Brittle flaking sand flickers
Disintegrating from casual brush
Escaping my flaying grasp
To rest again

Light ash cushions tennis ball bounce no more
Unnatural vertical smooth rough textures teeter
Precipitously clinging

In varying degrees of decomposition
In abandonment

Whilst I was there a visitor had complained that the dig was desecrating the site, an odd charge. Firstly, areas of known human burial wre not being touched this dig. Secondly any dicovery of human remains is treated with reverence and respect. And I suspect that if they could talk to us, they would be quite pleased to tell us their stories, stories which can be extrapolated to an extraordinary extent just by their remains, and their context.

Jenny Hope asked us to consider the dig in metaphor, as undressing the past, emphasising the tactile intimate nature of the task, a valuable interpretation of proceedings. Initially i was prompted to prompt the sensuous, sensual dimension of this approach. However as I did so, I was also struck by the visceral aspect of the dig which was reflected in this:

Stripped

Exposed to brutal light
Soft layers stripped in stripes
As cruel steel tears at healed ground

Delicate roots dangle, ripped
A torn comfort blanket, rumpled
Ruptured, crumpled

The disturbed interred
Shrinking and blinking
Glanced at in curiosity
In startled exposure

Defiled and painted in India ink
Remembered for a moment
In a catalogue, in a drawer
To be discarded ,its decay
Untroubled once more

Day 3

Mal Dewhirst

A non-digging day so the site was physically as the day before. Workshop leader this time was Mal Dewhirst whose angle today was to ask us to attempt to replicate the physical strata of the dig with stratification of our poetry drawing upon writing as recent as that written from the Polesworth Poetry Trail,which he had also led, and as distant as that authored in Medieval Latin. This first piece draws from random words and phrases from several hundred centuries and is pieced together by myself in the same way that finds are extracted from the ground whereupon the archaeologists subsequently try to piece together their history. It feels awkward to me, but then finds are made randomly and awkwardly too, so it had value as an exercise.

Fragments Out of Time

The gabble from behind the Red Lion’s shut door reverberated
Stella clenched in hands rotund and stumpy
Allowing men to forget in meditations of excess
To loose the bonds of the accused , searching for soft peace
The bell tolls for all ghostly and bodily victories
Bringing light to the blind
Robbed of foolish painted things
To still survive in immortal song
Leaving echoes of Welsh hooves
Steadfast in the High Street
By his help and grace it is done

I was starting to become familiar with the site by this time. And as the archaeologist becomes more familiar and confident with the dig so as a poet I found myself becoming more comfortable with my surroundings. To date, the weather has been uniformly good and as I wandered around outside a heron flew by looking down as it flew. Those familiar with the area will know that the river Anker and canal are close by with pools of standing water also present. I wondered what the heron would make of this as herons have glanced down for centuries on changing human development, but a broadly similar landscape. This poem was inspired both by the idea that the heron might mistake the white dig tents for lily pads from above and by the history that the herons forebears will have witnessed.

Timeless Flight

Roughly fired tiles still bake careless paw prints
Eager hands claw tense ground

From above glanced from grey heron path
Pedalling across an indifferent sky

White lily pads flutter in canvas murmur
Hinting at shadowed movement

Walls hunch hidden from Viking glare
Still crouched in silence

Enclosure breached by betrayed vows
No magnificat rises from stubby rubble

Earth which now takes no service only hears it
Absorbing fresh dead

Whilst rent ground lays bare
What we already knew once

Day 4

Matt Merritt

Another hot day, with the workshop this time being led by Matt Merritt who teased us with a mysterious strap line of “The Edge”.Matt is a journalist, ornithologist, historian and poet. Today he kept his curlews and swifts in their roosts and instead chose an original historical perspective on th day.

A week on, another shallow trench was underway , some six inches deep and with nothing revealed other than subsoil The trench containing the drain and lavatories had been pumped clear of water. Tim Upson Smith was visibly excited about what analysis of medieval excrement might reveal, as a toddler proudly announces to their parents while sitting on their potty “Look what I have done!.”

An established pattern for the extraction and cataloguing of finds is now clear, what interested us today was what was lying around that in the future might be excavated and pored over. A child’s perspective is always instructive, a plastic football left lying around providing recreation for the diggers is no different from any other find for a child. Was it the very football that Abbess Osanna had kicked some nine hundred years previous? “They are digging for treasure” one child exclaimed. Correct.

I began to look around for what had been discarded now, in the same way that the diggers were looking for what had been discarded before. The front trench was abutted by an old garden tip from which sprouted the largest thistles I have ever seen- at least around nine metres tall, a black nylon tarpaulin was being used to sift through some of the detritus and was wearing already, by the manor house the wheel from a child’s sit and ride toy lay in long grass next to a single glove. That was all good enough for me.

Discarded

Spoil fed giant thistles sway,
Guardian sentinels of the past

Below ,black tarpaulin frays,
Under spewed weight
Its fringe like artificial whiskers
Touching now and then

Hanging off its pink painted axle
A plastic wheel rests
Almost consumed by weeds and nettles
In fading farewell

Palm up, a glove’s fingers stretch
Its ripped fabric partially enveloped

All lie waiting to be discovered

My involvement in this dig has stirred my interest in, and awareness of, all things archaeological. Two stories caught my eye this week.

The first was the story of centuries old seeds being recovered from the sediment of Bristol Docks, the remnants of ballast discharged from ships trading over the centuries and this particular find some three hundred years old. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2184912/World-garden-grown-onboard-barge-seeds-discarded-Bristol-docks-300-YEARS-ago.html

The second was that of the death of the controversial British Archaeologist James Mellaart, a British archaeologist and author who is noted for his discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He was expelled from Turkey when he was suspected of involvement with the antiquities black market, specifically in the mysterious Dorak affair in which a mysterious woman met Mellaart on a train and purportedly took him to see a unknown find of world significance: http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0508/S00224.htm

The former story echoed Tim Upson Smith’s love of delving through dirt, the latter belied any staid image that archaeologists might have for some. The uncertainty of most archaeology prompted:

Tim Upson Smith Gets Down and Dirty

Archaeology

Find or fraud
Inside or outside
Above or below
This way or that
Now or then
It all depends

As the day unfolded the significance of Matt Merritt’s “edge” unfolded. It comes from the Medieval and Anglo Saxon fondness for riddles where you may write around it, referring to it without revealing what the “it” of the title was. It is a useful way to prompt writing from a fresh perspective.

Wheel

Trenches radiate around
In pronounced symmetry

Ground lies punctured
By spade and trowel

The Abbey watches, hub to all
Where nuns seldom spoke

Diggers make inflated claims
For uncertain finds

Watching where they tread
Shoulders hunched and tired

Earth sand and robber rubble
Is turned once more

Whilst those who till the land
Pray for a good year.

What future archaeologists will make of 21st century detritus in a thousand year’s time is an intriguing thought, and one which caused me to consider how much of contemporary culture will survive, and what our future diggers will make of it. I could not resist the pun with the “I” generation and suspect that the windows play will certainly be lost, but who could resist including “Tomb Raider” “ Lara Croft from such a piece?

Found in a Pit

I-phones, I – pads, I –mmac
To be cherished for a moment
For transitory gratification
Before technological stratification
Is assessed

X-Box
Commodore
Game Boy
ZX Spectrum

Whose exact order may be lost
Does Super Mario come before Lara Croft?

Flat screens larger than windows
Windows from which you could see
But not touch
A vision distorted
Of cracked glass and
Broken discordant keys

Part two follows as the second half of the workshops after 1/9. Meantime i should like to record my thanks, appreciation and admiration to the archaeologists, volunteers and Fr. Phillip who have made all this possible with their good humour and hard work.

Dig the Abbey and Dig the Poetry continues until 1st September. An exhibition will take place displaying the story of the dig and finds, and the prose and poetry which resulted a week later between the 7th-9th with readings on Saturday 8th. For more information:

http://www.digtheabbey.co.uk/dtp2012.html

The Dig the Abbey Team