Poetspeak: a self-reflection
by ALAN MORRISON
| Poem: | The Mansion Gardens | |
| Published in: | Mansion Gardens: Selected Poems 1991-2006 |
Sussex by birth, I'd been brought up since the age of 10 in Cornwall, in a rather bleak hamlet called Trematon, just outside the town of Saltash which looked over the Tamar River towards Plymouth. A series of misfortunes over the years had resulted in my father being in and out of employment, through no fault of his own, and I had grown up in a semi-renovated, rackety old slate and stone cottage, in an atmosphere of powerless love and material hardship, with the misplaced ambition of becoming a writer and poet. As I always say, we had ‘the dreams but not the means'. Perhaps these intrinsic expectations had been seeded a generation or two before in the relative social prosperity and intellectual aspirations of particularly my father's mother's side of the family, the Fabian-inclined Asgills, with whom my father was genealogically consumed. Maturing to a young adult through an almost anachronistic rustic hardship, experienced in a hamlet (not idyllic in itself, but) gifted extraordinary views of natural beauty – a sort of picturesque poverty – and having, in wild contrast, spent my formative years in a relatively comfortable suburban upbringing in Sussex, my character was naturally shaped, or rather damp-warped, along an anomic path. The Cornish countryside, breathtakingly colourful in spring and summer, but dramatically and oppressively bleak in winter, had served to both inspire and depress me over the years. But my exposure to its green timelessness certainly influenced much of the imagery in my earliest poems. An integral theme in many of the poems of this initial flowering was that of the buckling cottage in which we lived, Trematon Cottage, which I first wrote about in an early poem called ‘The House on the Rise of Reversion'; two later poems about it, ‘Overgrown' and ‘Gorgon Stone', were among my first published poems in an anthology called Don't Think of Tigers (Do Not Stop Press, 2001). To this day I still return to it as a motif for impoverishment, its most recent manifestations, ‘The Cottage' and ‘The House of Sadness Past', appearing in my chapbook of 2004, Giving Light (Waterloo Press). But perhaps what the cottage symbolises in me is my inability to let to go of the past, an abstract never more tangible than when living in the countryside.
The theme of poverty then has always run through my work, most epitomised in a piece called ‘Tales from the Empty Larder', which I re-drafted after being inspired by reading the anthemic poverty-ode ‘Thirty Bob A Week' by John Davidson (1857-1909) (interestingly, Davidson's last years – prior to his suicide – were spent in severe hardship in Cornwall). This poem spoke volumes to me about the perennial theme of poverty; of how it is, like the countryside itself (but by no means as beneficially), timeless. In 2004 I published a book-length poem sequence called Clocking-in for the Witching Hour (Sixties Press), which was reviewed by Stephanie Smith-Browne at the time, and very generously I might add; this epic piece traversed in microscopic detail the life and trials of my father, then working as a badly-paid security officer, set as it was in the ‘Trematon period' of my life; it attempted to breach beyond mere empathy with my father to the point of imagining myself literally in his shoes, with his thoughts, beliefs, dreams, regrets. The piece focused much on tangibles and the symbolism in inanimate objects; a metaphorical evocation of poverty furnished with defunct family heirlooms ever preserved from being sold due to their sentimental significance (though most of these inherited relics were only minimally valuable). In particular I remember our chipped Chippendale table, fairly bereft of value due to its damage: it served for me as a poetically tragic piece of furniture considering our circumstances. Clocking-in also focused much on the more illustrious lives of some of our ancestors, by way of further contrast; in particular, the curious incidental story of one ancestor's disinheritance from a Baronetcy; and the remarkably bizarre ideas of another, John Asgill, who believed Christians did not have to die, but could by legal right claim bodily ‘translation' to Heaven before their natural ends; John was posthumously nicknamed ‘Translated' Asgill. What a character. This work was basically concerned with inheritance, disinheritance and spiritual transcendence over mortal trials. It was an ambitious work but one I will go back to sometime and refine for future re-publication. A more recent work on the themes of social, material and artistic obscurity, poverty, the aspirations of Socialism, the punishments of Capitalism, is another long narrative piece called Keir Hardie Street , penned by an early twentieth century alter-ego of mine called Allan Jackdaw, a personified motif of the struggling, socialistic writer/poet, partly inspired by the likes of Robert Tressell (author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists ) and John Davidson (whose ‘Thirty Bob A Week' greatly influenced much of the ‘lyric and grit' of the opening stanzas). In this piece the protagonist imagines he discovers an alternative London along a fictitious Sea-Green Line of the Underground, where he watches the life of Keir Hardie, his rise from baker's delivery boy, through auto-didactic coal miner to Labour's first Parliamentary leader.
But the poem of mine which best captures the almost Lewis Carol-tinged ‘picturesque poverty' of which I alluded to earlier (cue the Mad Hatter's timeless, somewhat austerely cake-less tea-party, the character being arguably based on the 17 th century social idealist Roger Crabb, who gave all his possessions to the poor and thus ended up destitute*), is the poem included above, The Mansion Gardens, which I first drafted back in 1994, when I was roughly twenty years old. It's a piece which I feel now more pithily and lyrically distils much of the themes I have pored over more lengthily in later works. It started life in a fairly conventional verse structure but some years on, I returned to it and chiselled it down to the bare bones now on display. Pruning off all unnecessary verbiage I ended up with a scanter but more emphatic piece. Its conversational style, whether actual spoken dialogue or a sort of telepathy between the two protagonists, was partly shaped from my reading of Harold Monro's The Silent Pool (circa 1930s, Faber ); there's a particular poem, ‘Bitter Sanctuary', which uses scripted prompts such as He: and She: to convey some sort of thought-dialogue between a couple, and I also used this later more blatantly in a piece called ‘Infatuation: The First' ( Giving Light , 2004). My protagonists are based on my parents, both of whom used to enjoy weekend visits to stately homes, afforded them from free National Trust coupons off the back of tea-bag boxes: ‘Come on, love, we've cut the coupons,/ let's see those shouting flowers/ round grounds of ivy towers.' I usually accompanied my parents on these day-trips, which is where the idea for The Mansion Gardens stemmed from. My poem rather impertinently guesses at their thoughts – though ones no doubt my father in particular would empathise with – as they walk humbly around the ‘baize on baize' of gardens, one more prone to resentment and social-indignation at the unobtainable grandeur of the setting than the more humble other. The slant of the questioner's thought processes, or words, are more tinged with rebelliousness than his partner's, but not on a conscious level: ‘ I'm not envious: simply a dreamer: /those lawns seemed so much greener… '
[* though the most popular assumed source of the Mad Hatter is the generic mercury-poisoning of hat-makers of the past]
The ‘mansion gardens' themselves were meant consciously to act as a metaphor for the state in which most of us live: scrimping out our lives in the struggle to make ends meet in life's seasonal ‘gardens', while under the grand glare of the ‘mansion', that perpetual and inaccessible impunity of the comfortable and prosperous state which forever eludes our grasp; ‘the ivy towers' as a pun on ‘ivory towers' of course. You might read into this a metaphor for imperfect existence and aspired-to heavenly/Utopian perfection, but what I intended consciously was a more Marxian Us and Them metaphor; nothing more complex than that (but then what does my opinion matter? Once a piece of writing is created, it exists completely separately from its creator, and is whatever a reader projects into it). The sense of inaccessibility to what one finds pleasing to the eye and potentially to the mind and spirit is further emphasized by the ubiquity of ‘blue ropes' (‘pasty-plaited' to evoke the crust of a Cornish pasty) cordoning off the couple from the mansion's beautiful rooms; the look-but-don't-touch gloating of the class divide; the unprivileged person's almost masochistic infatuation with the arguably undeserved wealth and celebrity of those partitioned-off – in all their material gratuity – from their own struggling lives. One thinks of blue-rinse grannies lining their council flat mantelpieces with mugs adorned with the faces of the Royal Family. I don't think that my poem tries to justify any type of envy, only righteous indignation at the glaring unfairness of the class divide.
But in truth I think my poem is more garbled than this. I am more inclined to think that on writing it I had in mind, perhaps unconsciously, not a couple conversing (whether verbally or telepathically), but a sort of inner-dialogue, a mock-conversation which is actually the almost schizophrenic interchange of two contradictory chains of thought and perception in one person's head. I think this is the real shape of the poem; what its style, hopefully, implies. And just as two people in a relationship are bound in contradictions, so too are the thoughts and opinions in one person's mind; after all, what are relationships really but the perennial inter-projections of each others' consciousnesses and identities. On another level of the gardens then, we see perhaps a couple ultimately morph into one at the resolution of the poem, into one opinion possibly, after the exchange of differing viewpoints which forms the main body of the piece. The visit of the impoverished couple (or person) to the rich permanence of a mansion and its gardens, in order to briefly escape the drudgery of (his/her or) their lives – that is arguably perpetuated by the hoarded monopolies of others who are unwilling to share their prosperity – in turn perhaps proffers another contradiction to fit the overall theme. Again, I hope so. But I never have been a great interpreter of my own work.
About Alan Morrison
Alan's latest collection, The Mansion Gardens,
can be obtained from Paula Brown Publishing.