Prac Crit

Sandylowper

by Katrina Porteous

Interview

by Jake Campbell

Katrina Porteous and I sat down for the following conversation in the basement of Newcastle University in mid-July 2016. We had hoped to meet by the sea – at her home in Beadnell, Northumberland – but things didn’t work out as intended.

However, that didn’t prevent the coast from being central to our discussions. Katrina’s Two Countries (Bloodaxe, 2014) is organised around a selection of her radio work, documenting, in her own words, poems which ‘don’t properly belong in books’, but which nonetheless give voice to an array of coastal creatures and communities, as well as those more rural enclaves of England’s most northerly county.

Although much of what we discussed seemed to capture the zeitgeist, it is testament to Katrina’s career as a writer that she has been writing rich and evocative poems about Northumberland, often thought of as England’s last wild land, for decades. Her work speaks of and for fishing communities and traditions threatened by the forces of globalisation and climate change, but it also documents the minutia of wildlife within landscapes, of which human settlement and industry is only a shared part.

It was to be this shifting focus – between the micro and the macro, the human and the more-than-human – that would thread through our conversation.

While the interview begins with a look at Katrina’s new poem, ‘Sandylowper’, we also dwell on early work from her first collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe, 1996) and look forward to projects she is currently working on in collaboration with the electronic composer, Peter Zinovieff. Again, in her own words, Katrina is ‘nothing if not ambitious’, and it was a real pleasure to share a few hours in her company.

JC

It strikes me that this new poem, ‘Sandylowper’, is a negotiation between the micro and the macrocosmic: from the ‘chitin’s curl’ of the sandylowper’s cells to the ‘deepest strata’ and ‘oldest rock’, the poem seems poised between these two poles and attempts, I think, to navigate a course between them. Does that sound right?

KP

I think that’s a good insight. I think that’s true of a lot of my work. I’m really interested in scale and perspective. So, micro and macro as different sorts of focus. I’ve always tried to take a long view. I’ve lived by the sea for thirty years; I’ve got a fantastic view of it from where I work, so every day I look out and see the tide changing. There are rocks in front of my house, and I often go down onto them and it strikes me that it’s an incredibly ancient place. It is nearly as ancient – and as wild a place – as anywhere you can go: the rocks and the intertidal zone are not very much changed by humans. I suppose there’s been quarrying and so on, but they’re basically quite raw. I’m very interested in that. That landscape places the human in a much wider perspective than we’re generally accustomed to.

My background is as a historian, so I’m by nature and education interested in time and change. I suppose, looking at the geological timescale, these rocks are carboniferous, so they’re about 300 million years old. How long have human beings been on the planet? Well, at the outside: hominids, about 2 to 3 million years, and here are all these creatures of the intertidal zone, things like lobsters, which are cretaceous, around 100 million years old. I’m not sure about sandylowpers, sandhoppers, but the family to which they belong is incredibly ancient, much older than the rocks themselves. The point is that, from a macro/micro point-of-view, human beings are so recent on the earth’s time scale, and the poem is partly about that. I’m interested in getting beyond the anthropocentric.

JC

Yeah, that’s definitely the reading I got initially, but just looking back on it there now, there’s almost a sort of tying, or an attempt to tie, that ‘deepest strata’ to this apparently-minute – well, actually minute – life form, but in this society that we live in which seems to be all about speed and moving on to the next thing quite quickly and not really contemplating very deeply, your poem opens with the line ‘Not so bad to belong / To the deepest strata’. That has a real significance, doesn’t it? To really ground down in to something ancient?

KP

Yes, and about connectedness as well. We talk about ‘connectivity’ in our superficial human lives, but everything is connected, in the sense that these incredibly insignificant things – to us – are part of what is fuelling these enormous processes. I can tell you exactly how the poem started. I was walking down the road last year on a high spring tide and the sea was washing up onto the road, and these creatures, these sandhoppers, were literally bouncing on the pavement, trying to get away from the high tide. Now, sandhoppers burrow into the sand when the tide comes in, but because they were on an alien surface – tarmac – they couldn’t burrow down, so there was this sense of them as individual living creatures, wanting to save themselves. That sounds as if I’m making them conscious in a way that they’re not; but there’s this desperate desire to live, even in these things that we think of as being so insignificant. So there’s a sense of the individual life simultaneous with the wholeness of life, as well as of macro and micro.

JC

I’m interested that the poem’s genesis was made in a walk around where you live. You note at the bottom of the poem that ‘Sandylowper’ is the Northumbrian term for the sandhopper. I wondered how you came across it, because it links in to your wider body of work – this use of dialect terms and really specific, local phrases – I wonder what the thought process was there about titling the poem ‘Sandylowper’, as opposed to ‘Sandhopper’?

KP

How I came across the word was that I spent probably about ten years, much of the 90s, hanging out with fishermen in Beadnell! I was very lucky to know them, because they were proper dialect speakers, really the last generation to speak in that way. That’s what they called them. I don’t know how widespread that term is: dialect varies from village to village, so maybe it’s the Beadnell word for them, rather than the Northumbrian word. Why I gave that title to the poem? I only use dialect now, really have only ever used it, where it feels right. I don’t use it as a conceit. To me they are sandylowpers now, because that’s expressive of what they are, what they do. That’s the first reason for using it: it feels as if it is saying something true about them, perhaps even at a musical level. It’s got that sort of spring and earthiness. Secondly, I wanted to honour the fishermen, honour the place; the word is very particular to that place, so I wanted that particularity. Thirdly, there’s also a sense of wanting to preserve that word; although I doubt that it will be preserved. But I wouldn’t write the poem in dialect because I’m not hearing that dialect very much now. I tend to drop dialect words in where they feel expressively and musically right. There’s the word ‘ware’ in there as well, which is the fishermen’s word for ‘seaweed’, which links with it.

JC

The second impression I got of this poem, and maybe it’s because it’s nearly impossible not to think about these things at the minute, was being put in mind of the refugee crisis. Maybe it’s because words like ‘migration’ have become such hot topics, or tabloid buzz words, but I think going a bit more deeply into your poem, there is a comment not just on the current refugee crisis, but broadly on migration, or place and placelessness. I wonder if you could see that in the poem?

KP

Oh…

JC

Am I just reading too much in to it?

KP

I think you have to be a little bit careful. I’m essentially trying to invert that, in a way. Because I’m trying to get beyond the anthropocentric, rather than bringing it back to the human. I’m trying to rescue that word ‘migration’; bring it back to the connectedness of everything in nature. You know, the idea that we, as part of nature, our own migrations, our own flux, is part of the flux and process of everything. So, yes, of course there are these creatures trying to rescue themselves on the road, and of course you can make that connection, but I don’t think it was consciously there in my mind.

On the theme of place and placeness, though, you’re right in the broadest sense. We’re all very aware of the pressing sense of globalism. A lot of my work is about the local. You talked about the micro and the macro, trying to negotiate between these two things. The global seems like this huge tide, pressing in on the local, overwhelming it. Somehow we have to have some kind of conversation in which the local is heard on a global level. This is a really difficult and big question, not one that I can answer. I feel that my work is trying to find ways for the local to speak to the global. Human migration is part of that question of globalism, which is the question of our time, I think. Of course it’s precipitated by these ghastly situations – war and poverty, in which we’re all implicated – but it’s also partly driven by the fact that you can see your neighbours in another country on the web: you can get on to Skype and Facebook and there they are. So yes, those big ideas, of course they’re in my head, because they’re in all of our heads, all the time.

Perhaps the question, in relation to this poem, is who is trying to save themselves from what? And in relation to the human, what, as a species, are we trying to save ourselves from? Climate change? Environmental disaster? I think in my head the tide that we’re trying to save ourselves from is globalisation. The economic and technological forces that are driving that – global capitalism and, linked to it, technology, computing power and the web – the changes we’re experiencing as a result of these forces are bigger than we can comprehend. The situation is unprecedented. It is happening so quickly we don’t know how to adapt to it. All I can do is to try to explore in my own work ways to navigate these enormous changes; where the local, the particular and the individual stand in relation to this rush towards the web-based, the global. Perhaps in thinking about it it’s useful to shift the focus; so I try to look beyond the anthropocentric.

JC

As somebody at the tail end of being a ‘digital native’, I feel very conflicted about some of these things. Games like Pokémon Go, for example, which seems to be sweeping the world right now. I wouldn’t want to tell somebody how to spend their time, but it seems to me quite sad that they’re chasing these virtual creatures when they could be out looking at butterflies, or birds or marine life. I don’t really know how I feel about it all.

KP

I don’t know how I feel about it either, which is why I write about it, to try and find out! I love the web, instant communication. The trouble with poetry is it’s kind of the opposite of all of this. I do really feel that. Poetry is the most ancient. It has an animal function, almost. It’s really physical. It’s really, really old. It’s about the oldest functions of the spoken word: rhythm, sound texture, patterning, structuring, communal remembering. Maybe the web can become its medium! It certainly doesn’t properly belong in books…

JC

[Laughs.]

KP

It’s so physical, it’s the inverse of what goes on in virtual reality, which is in the head. How those two things talk to each other, I don’t know. Almost all of our conversation is going to end with me saying ‘I just don’t know’. I’m happy not to know because it drives me to do the work.

JC

I was in a workshop yesterday with the Indian poet, Arundhathi Subramaniam, and one of the things she mentioned was the space in poetry: not just poets who are using space in lines instead of traditional punctuation, but the metaphorical spaces which poetry opens, for instance for a reader to pause, and as you say, to appeal to a much more ancient… thing, to use it as a point of contemplation.

KP

Yes, that’s right. That is what I mean about poetry being the opposite of the virtual: it’s not just opposite in its physicality. Time is also experienced very differently. The virtual and the web-based world is so instant and quick, you move on to the next thing. Poetry is contemplative because it is multilayered and there’s so much going on within a poem. It’s something which just unpeels and unpeels. That way of experiencing time, I think, is something which perhaps belongs historically to a different era. It’s part of who we’ve always been, but I’m not sure it’s part of who we’re becoming, and I wonder what will happen to poetry.

JC

Yeah. I agree with so many of those sentiments. Like you, I love the internet, but I love being in a quiet space and just thinking.

KP

I love living in the modern world. Here I am: you know, I’m a woman. Is there any other period of history I would like to live in? No! No, I want to live in the twenty-first century, I want modern medicine. I want clean water, education, leisure, every benefit and opportunity technology offers. I love living now, I’m certainly not a Luddite, or nostalgic for the past, at all. I want to make that really plain.

JC

Looking back at your first collection, The Lost Music, there’s a stanza in the penultimate poem, ‘The Marks t’ Gan By’, and the sentiment, or general message, touches upon what we’ve already discussed: the new technology versus the old, modernity versus tradition, and the balance between all of these things. It feels that this poem, and a lot of the rest of your work, seems to be juggling Cartesian rule – that scientific provability matters above all else – with a more innate understanding of the world. The ‘efficiency’ against the ‘lore’, here, for example.

KP

Beadnell is still a fishing village, but the industrial revolution came to inshore fishing very late, so the men that I knew, who were in their eighties (in the 1990s) were essentially not industrialised. They were fishing, certainly up until World War II, in ways that would have been recognisable to fishermen in the 1300s. More importantly, the culture in which they were fishing would have been recognisable to them. Everything they did was passed down from father to son: it was dependent on a kind of knowledge which was a community resource, really. They fished with ‘long lines’: a mile of line with every five feet or so a hook, and that meant that they were touching the sea floor almost with their hands, and they knew every little nook and cranny of it. That knowledge was augmented generation after generation. That intimacy with place is something which is very difficult for most of us to understand, or to realise its value. What it meant was, they had a human involvement with place. The sea floor, that we can’t even see, they could visualise, and they knew it through stories. They knew who had fished where, what had happened there many years ago, because they’d been told about it.

That recognition of place gave them, I think, a sense of the value of the resource, which has been largely lost in subsequent generations. And that’s not a moral judgement on anybody; people have been forced into this situation by late industrialisation. There has been overfishing by bigger boats from other ports, and disastrously misguided regulation. We never had big boats: it was always small boats that could only carry the amount of gear that couldn’t really do much damage. There was a mixed fishery, each in its own season, so therefore nothing was particularly overfished. That balance had been sustainable. I have researched this so I know it to be true: the fishing was not that different in the 1300s. When trawling came in after World War II, essentially that’s what ruined it. A much more industrial way of fishing: a separation of the human from the place. The older fishermen deplored it. They also deplored landing what they called ‘berried hens’, lobsters with eggs on them, because it was just obvious that if you do that, they won’t be there tomorrow! The old men knew this. They wanted the fish to be there for their sons and grandsons. They didn’t talk about ‘sustainability’ or any of those buzz words, but they knew it in their bones, and I loved them for that.

JC

It’s a remarkable thing to dwell upon.

KP

The trouble is, nobody would want to go back to the way they fished before the War, because that labour-intensive way of fishing was such a hard way of life, particularly for the women, who had to bait the hooks. We cannot be nostalgic or make moral judgements about who’s right and who’s wrong: we’ve just changed; technology has changed us really rapidly. It’s the awareness of that that I think is important. I’ve always regarded fishing as a microcosm for the way we live in the world. We’ve gained so much, but we’ve lost so much. How do we negotiate that?

JC

Rereading your work, I’m reminded of a quote from the writer and marine biologist, Rachel Carson, who has said in The Sea Around Us that ‘If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it’s not because I deliberately put it there, but because nobody can write about the sea and leave the poetry out.’ It strikes me that there are similarities in your approach.

KP

Well, Rachel Carson was a scientist and an important conservationist. I wouldn’t presume to compare myself to her. But perhaps there may be parallels in the way we work. My background as a historian and hers as a scientist probably share a documentary approach: trying to be true to something by listening to it. Not to impose the self upon it, but to allow place to speak, and in some sense to report its many voices. When I write something, I always think of it as being a multiplicity of voices speaking. I feel as a poet my responsibility is simply to listen.

I came back to the North-East in 1984, from a fellowship in America, and I wanted to make a commitment to coming home. What I did was choose a place – Dunstanburgh Castle – and I went there many times a week over the course of a year, and kept a diary, which was simply about being there, observing, being quiet and still. Not at all about myself, but trying to get beyond the self, to observe. That diary eventually became the poem ‘Dunstanburgh’, a radio poem which is in Two Countries, which tells a history of the castle, within the structure of a year; so it’s looking at time. I said at the beginning that perspective was very important to me. It’s several different perspectives overlaid: geological time, human history and seasonal rhythms. That initial year of observation was a kind of apprenticeship: that’s what I did instead of a creative writing degree.

JC

Interesting. We don’t often think of writers and poets having apprenticeships, but maybe we should think more about that.

KP

I have mixed feelings about ‘creative writing’ in universities. Can I say that? I’m the first to admit that I’ve benefitted from it myself. I was fortunate to sit in on courses in America, including Seamus Heaney at Harvard and Thom Gunn at Berkeley. Also Robert Pinsky. Pinsky was a wonderful teacher. So I’ve benefitted from creative writing courses; I’d never disparage them. On the other hand, I’m not sure that university is the proper place for a poet. There’s a responsibility for poets to be outsiders: not to be part of any kind of establishment.

JC

I’m wondering a bit more about this ‘pull’ towards poetry that you described earlier; its ancient gravity, or appeal?

KP

Absolutely. Some people describe it as a vocation, but perhaps it’s more pathological than that. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future people come to identify the part of a human brain which makes somebody a poet.

JC

[Laughs.]

KP

You know, is something wrong with it? Is it some sort of aberration? It gets in the way of living… I hesitate to say, a normal life… living how society wants you to. I can only speak personally. I don’t live among poets, I don’t have a family who are particularly literary. But however odd a life it is, it’s difficult to imagine doing anything else.

JC

I had intended to ask you about the EU referendum but it feels too soon: it needs to percolate still, I think.

KP

Yes, I agree. What I would say about that is that I called my book Two Countries, not because of England and Scotland, but to point to divisions within England itself. In fact, there are many countries. Calling it Two Countries is simply an image for different ways of slicing those divisions. Because we’re symmetrical animals, we tend to think in pairs. But what the referendum did was to show up those bi-polarities.

JC

Yeah, I think I said in our e-mail exchanges that there are now at least two different countries, even within England.

KP

Yes, well, that’s been my sense for a long time.

JC

I’d like to conclude by asking you if there’s anything else you want to raise or ask me or discuss or mention?

KP

I’d like to come back to this idea of the macro and the micro. In the last few years I’ve been working alongside the electronic composer, Peter Zinovieff, and we’ve been writing pieces together for the Planetarium, in the Centre for Life in Newcastle. First we did one about four solar moons, called Edge. Two of those moons have the conditions that could make it possible for them to host very primitive life. That’s not to say that they do, but the conditions there could make that possible. So that made me think about the habitability of our own planet and the uniqueness of that (or otherwise) and the uniqueness of human consciousness (or otherwise). And thinking about those things in the context of space, it’s pretty amazing that we’re here. It’s so unlikely.

Of course, as someone who is not a scientist, it’s ridiculous for me to be writing these pieces. It’s a joke. But it’s also extremely exciting. Learning about science is awe-inspiring. So I’m writing them to try to find a way in, to ask naive questions, then to enthuse others to do the same. The second piece we made last year was called Field. That was about quantum physics. I know! Nothing if not ambitious! But again, I’m trying to find a way into something that’s central to how we now understand the world. Field focuses on the Higgs mechanism, which breaks the initial symmetry of the universe. It’s the thing that gives matter mass, that enables it to come together and eventually form stars and planets. So it makes reality as we know it possible. In 2012 the biggest machine ever built, the Large Hadron Collider, identified the smallest particle, and so proved that the Higgs mechanism exists. Working on Field was wonderful. It took me back to the Idealism of Plato, ideas of aesthetics and beauty: there is a mathematical reality which underlies the physical reality that we experience, and it is incredibly beautiful.

I’m now working on a third piece with Zinovieff, which will be shown at Life planetarium on November 18th. It’s called Sun. My part involves working with solar physicists at Northumbria University Think Physics. The Sun seems so obvious to us; so ordinary. But its reality is completely unlike our image of it. For one thing, it makes a sound. Scientists are able to use those sound waves to look inside it, and through it to the other side. I find that mind-boggling. It’s just incredible, the technology that humans have devised: these telescopes that are able to see wavelengths that our eyes aren’t physically able to see, but that are there, and are real. So when Eliot says human kind can not bear very much reality, he is physically correct! Of course, this is obvious if you have a science background, but to me it is miraculous. Reality is so much more vast and amazing than we can perceive.

So all this technology, by which we apprehend nature, is astonishing; and it’s also integral to the ever-accelerating change which we were talking about, that separation from nature and place and our physical selves, which I think we’re right to fear. I am both optimistic and pessimistic about it all. Whether I’m writing about the solar system or about sub-atomic particles, or about Beadnell or a sandylowper, all the time I’m trying to look at the biggest possible scale and the smallest possible, to try – to use your word – to navigate where messy, emotional, imaginative, vulnerable human animals belong in all of this. And you see, I don’t have any answers.

Sandylowper

by Katrina Porteous

Not so bad to belong
To the deepest strata,
Or to share with the oldest rock
The colour of its armour,

To burrow in ware-stink
And salty tangle,
Or to sleep in the jewel-box sand
Among its stars and spirals

Millennia. Not so
Terrible, to fuel
The migration of millions, millions,
Thousands of snowy miles,

And, billions strong, become
Silica-crystal, feather;
To store in chitin’s curl,
Nerves’ flex and flick, the future.

A shock, then, that each one
Wants not to die,
Popping like corn in a skillet
Ahead of this hissing tide.

  

Sandylowper – Northumbrian word for the sandhopper, a marine invertebrate.

From Place and Belonging: The Seventh Annual New Networks for Nature Event (2015).
Reproduced with permission of the author.

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