RAH! Podcast Episode: A Short Introduction to Poetry of Place and Episode Transcript

This is the fourth episode in our new RAH! Podcast mini series – A Short Introduction to…
In this episode, Emily Oldfield will be giving us a short introduction to Writing Poetry of Place.
In particular we will explore:
• What constitutes place poetry?
• How writing about place can give representation to often under represented places and start a new narrative
• Winter Hill and other edge-land spaces
And we will also get a reading from Emily’s new poetry collection, Grit, which was published in March with Poetry Salzburg. Find out more about Grit and buy your copy here: www.poetrysalzburg.com/
Episode transcript available soon.

Read along while you listen! Find the full episode transcript below.

Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the RAH! Podcast belong solely to the speaker, and are not necessarily reflective of the views of Manchester Metropolitan University, or to the speaker's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.

RAH! Podcast Episode Transcript: A Short Introduction to Poetry of Place

RAH! Opening Jingle

Lucy: Hello, and welcome to the RAH! podcast at Manchester Metropolitan University and to our fourth episode in our new mini series. In this episode we'll be speaking to Emily Oldfield about place poetry. We will explore what constitutes place poetry, how writing about place can give representation to often underrepresented places and start a new narrative and Winter Hill amongst other edgeland spaces. And we will also be treated to reading from Emily's new poetry collection Grit, which was published in March with poetry Salzburg. So let's get into it.

RAH! Mini Jingle

Lucy: So I'm here today with Emily Oldfield, and we're here to talk about poetry of place. Emily, would you like to introduce yourself?

Emily: I'm Emily Oldfield. I'm the editor of Haunt Manchester at Manchester Met. And I'm also a writer and a poet, and it feels weird introducing myself, I guess, as a poet because even though I've always written poetry for a long time, and it was only since sharing my work with people who live in particular places that I've written about I started to really get a sense of myself as a poet.

Lucy: I think that's really interesting, because my next question was going to be about what is place poetry and what does it cover, but I guess that would be different for each poet of place and the kind of places they cover and then the kind of people who are kind of in those places. So I mean, what would it kind of mean for you, I guess?

Emily: I find that an interesting definition and I'm often - I mean, place is such a broad term isn't it constitute so much. As I say like perhaps location would be a good word for it, you know, it's located it has a ground, it has a root perhaps somewhere that's started the creative process. When I think isn't so much poetry poetry of place in one way or another, whether it's a mental place, or a physical place, part of place is the people that constitute that place. I think as much of my writing is geographical and concerned with landscape, it's also concerned with people. it's very based in the whole kind of experience of being in location. And if that's what constitutes place poetry, then I guess that's what I describe my work as.

Lucy: So a kind of poetry that does kind of explore a particular location where a particular kind of person lives. So I guess it has to be specific to place in that kind of way.

Emily: Yeah, it's like the layers almost in a landscape, both sociological and geographical in a way. That looking at the variety of people, the variety of the history there.

Lucy: Who would kind of be your key inspirations?

Emily: I mean, there's such a variety, as I said that place is a varied term and it could constitute, you know, a lot of different things, a lot of different people. I think I alluded to experience and there are some writers are, to me anyway, my experience of reading them, they really capture that raw experience, you know, their body, but also the awareness of the landscape and that the location is so much greater than them. And I really like Kathleen Jamie, a Scottish writer who wrote Findings and that's a collection of reflections on location in in Scotland, particularly coastal areas. And coastal areas of what often fascinated me, I guess it's a kind of edge land space. And also Helen Mort. Her poetry has been really significantly influential on me. Especially like a collection like Division Street. A grounding in the history, the layers of Sheffield. Just the layers of location that unfold and the trauma of time in it.

Lucy: So you also, as well as being a writer, you work on Haunt Manchester as the editor, which is obviously based in place as well. And I know you've recently stretched out to Bristol. So how does your work on kind of Haunt Manchester relate to your place work in terms of kind of creative writing and poetry?

Emily: That's a very interesting question. Say from working as a - in a kind of journalistic capacity in Greater Manchester to look at the layers of the Gothic and the hidden histories, which is a key focus of haunt, I kind of tapped further into like hauntology. And looking at the kind of past and present and the potential for the future coexisting in a landscape. And the sense that when you step into a place, that generations before you have passed through that place. And even though you're aware of that, that sense of someone's being before you, you can't quite connect with it. And so my work then became almost like a translation of that sense of loss and abandonment, but also that sense of there being the potential for connection. And I think that's become more apparent in my work.

Lucy: And Haunt Manchester is a kind of exercise in creative place-making. So I guess it relates in the way that you're kind of - you are making those connections with people throughout the city.

Emily: And I suppose, yeah, drawing people to perhaps reconsider or re-conceptualise the place in a different way. We're digging like, under and to the what already exists, and tapping into what already exists, brings up lots of different, you know, stories in its own right. And I think that's what a lot of place poetry has the capability of doing. Language is a tool to dig.

Lucy: So what is your kind of process of writing and what advice might you give to people who might be interested in trying out writing poetry of place for the first time?

Emily: I'd say it’s - I think the greatest shackle to throw off - I felt like an imposter. I felt like what gives me the right to write about this place. I think it's just to experience it. You know, you don't have to know the history you know, to write about it, you have to be qualified. It’s your experience of a place, your account of a place. If you're conveying experience, you can, especially in poetry, you can often surprise yourself and reveal more to you about place. Going to the place, obviously, significantly helps, so that's interesting at the minute because we're limited as to where we can go with them the measures for COVID-19. Which has been interesting because I've written some poetry in the kind of longing for place. It’s writing almost like in the heightened awareness of a place because it's not possible. You can't reach it and you're going off previous experience, and that's like hauntology in itself or adding to the layers of a place.

Lucy: Why do you think then that writing about or studying poetry of place is important? And what do you think it can tell us?

Emily: I think it can tell us so much. It's the human histories. It's the geography. And in my view it’s acknowledging our part within it, especially environmentally. Place writing and place poetry is a great avenue to recognise our part in place, but not our superiority in it. We can experience it, but we don't rule it. We don't control it and we have to contribute in a meaningful way. It can really have an importance in terms of connecting people with place and having a respect for location, for the environment, for the human histories in place and not erasing what’s already gone by acknowledging it and knowing how to move forward.

Lucy: And that sense, I guess, then it's able to kind of provide different voices about different spaces and maybe then represent spaces that wouldn't usually have been covered in a particular way or kind of showing different voices who also might not have kind of traditionally been represented or given that kind of voice, I suppose.

Emily: I think that's what we've really tried to do with Haunt as well. To celebrate the perhaps under celebrated or under covered. And there's a lot of places that have, especially through both poetry and journalism have a very set narrative about them. And then I think breaking like set narratives around place equally, that Manchester is just football and Madchester music and rain. And looking beyond that is can be really, you know, helpful and eye opening.

Lucy: What other projects are you working on at the moment?

Emily: I've been working on a project that's been commissioned by Penned in the Margins and their commissioned project was titled Edgelandia and I loved the sound of that. And - and basically, it's an investigation into the edgeland spaces of the UK. And Winter Hill was the place that I chose. Because I think it's an edgeland space to so many of us living here in Manchester and Greater Manchester. Because transmissions with a lot of TV signals that we get into our homes comes from if you have a TV, radio. So there’s this place that we’re all largely interconnected to and yet, so many people haven't visited it and it's an amazing Hill to walk. The layers of history on it are incredible. From Bronze Age findings up there to - there was a tragic air disaster in the 1950s. There was a travelling Scottish packman who was delivering goods who was murdered over there in the 19th century. There are so many layers to this place, and I thought even if I can just tap into those layers and write about them. That's on the Edgelandia website, which can be accessed through the Penned in the Margins website.

Lucy: And part of that project is you're kind of walking the hill with people and recording your chats along the way.

Emily: I think walking through place - because a big element of Winter Hill and a story that - again, an undiscovered story, a hidden history - is there was a mass trespass in 1896, involving up to 10,000 local people walking the hill in protest of the landowner Ainsworth - his attempt to close the public right of way across the moors for grouse shooting. And that's such a massive body of people and yet it's so historically under covered you know. I don't know if it was because it was more of a local working class population who were involved in the Winter Hill trespass. I don't know if it's because it did have socialist origins. And the press perhaps didn't want to give it you know, coverage. I'm not sure but it's just a fascinating history. And so this led me to ground my creative response to the Hill in walking and taking a different person every time for each recording and walking the route with them.

Lucy: I believe you recently published your debut poetry collection, Grit, would you like to read a poem from the collection for us?

Emily: Grit was published at the beginning of March, with Poetry Salzburg, it encounters the Rossendale Valley, which is in Lancashire where I grew up. And it's a kind of borderland. It's like an edgeland space, it falls out of Greater Manchester, and it falls out of Pendle. And it's kind of this suspended area. The first poem in the pamphlet, and I think the poem I read today is called Bacup, and Bacup is the town where I grew up.

Bacup

What makes mud?

The chemical mix of something indecipherable

has no instruction

so I go to the Irwell

and plumb its depth

in two great handfuls.

 

Where Anglo Saxons faced Gaels and Norsemen

I touch, the turn at Broadclough

where earth and water

form the composite mulch

that moves in anger.

 

The river is raw here.

It rolls rocks to ransom,

lashings of white water

whipped up like an animal.

Mud is a way out.

 

It is an answer.

Its tongue thick and red ripe

in the rhododendron flowers

rashed up overhead. Growth

comes in a kind of hurt.

 

There is a difference between mud and dirt

between dirt and silt.

Here lies the flint which cuts and spills

cuts the funding from the mills

cuts the budgets of each street

 

cuts open lines and scores the crease

where the railway was pulled up.

Each wire of track and pulse of Station

in the slow sinewy draw of a drain

from a surgical patient.

 

The sore screams as it cracks

then bubbles and bursts.

The charred naked moors are a ritual occurrence

mud is a salve

to cover the burning.

 

It covers the South Pennines in a sheen

that lodges under kestrel’s eye.

It covers cows and dogs and sheep

it covers the faces of the men

who dance despite it in their clogs,

 

the soles skid and spark the cobbled streets.

It covers adolescent skin

and the nights it screams to be held close.

It covers hands and stops their reach

against headlines and their ‘this is all’.

 

Old English said ‘muddy valley by a ridge’

this English says post-industrial and bleak

yet it is from here the Irwell grows

from vein to artery – a blood

that bonds us in its seam.

 

My hands let it run through

the reminder

-       mud.

 To make it

the repeated action

of stepping on earth

is enough.

Find out more about Emily's debut collection, Grit, here.

Lucy: That's I think that really kind of exemplifies some of the stuff we've been talking about today. So I think that's a really good choice to kind of finish the episode off with. Do you just want to say a quick bit about where listeners could buy Grit if they were interested?

Emily: Thank you, Lucy for letting me read Bacup. I really enjoyed that. And I think the best way for people to buy Grit is to go to the poetry Salzberg website. Hopefully, there'll be plenty more copies available.

Lucy: Thank you, Emily, for joining us on the RAH! podcast.

Emily: Thank you very much. Thank you.

RAH! Mini Jingle

Lucy: Thank you for listening. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter for future podcast updates. You can find us @MMU_RAH. For more information on all the research and events we discussed in this episode, please go to the RAH! website for full links. Tune back and soon for more episodes.

RAH! Closing jingle

Lucy: This episode of the RAH! podcast was produced, edited and presented by Lucy Simpson and mixed by Julian Holloway.