Recently Bridgnorth Writers were privileged to enjoy a four hour workshop with Katrina Porteous – all the way from Northumberland. Though the subject was ostensibly “Poetry and Nature” what she said and showed us could equally be applied to prose writing as well as to any subject matter (not least to Human Nature, which I’m beginning to think is my own real interest). With exercises – responding, for instance, to a tray of beach-found objects – Katrina emphasised the importance of close first hand observation clothed in as fresh a language as one can summons. I especially enjoyed her choice of exemplary poems, most notably by Alice Oswald and Kathleen Jamie, neither of whom I had paid much attention to until Katrina’s recommendation. Here are the last 4 stanzas of Jamie’s “Basking Shark”. Lying on a cliff top, she sees, becomes mesmerised, by a dark shape below…
“… precisely that its ore-
heavy body and head –
the tail fin measuring back,
forth like a haunted door –
could come to sense the absolute
limits of its realm.
While it hung, steady
as an anvil but for the fins’
corrective rippling – dull,
dark and buoyed like a heart
that goes on living
through a long grief
what could one do but watch?
The sea heaved; fulmars
slid by on static wings;
the shark – not ready yet
to re-enter the ocean
travel there, peacable and dumb –
waited and was watched;
till it all became
unbearable, whereupon the wind
in its mercy breathed again
and far below the surface
glittered and broke up…”
Aren’t these verses full of wonders? Not just Jamie’s precise, entranced observation of the creature from above (that sense of weight and gravitas in its patrolling movements!) but also the very accurate observation of her own ecstatic preternatural state of observation becoming “too much”, needing to be dissipated by that final glittering dissolve… SUPER! I was fascinated by Jamie’s deployment of line breaks over a series of short lines (and made a mental note to try and write in shorter lines myself – generating a more tightly stretched tension?) Look at the way the line breaks mimic the to and fro movements of the great fish in the first 2 quoted stanzas, for instance. Also inseperably part of the total magic are the deft, apt yet always surprising metaphors and similes – that movement of the fin “like a haunted door”, the grey mass “steady as an anvil”, and, most unexpectedly, the likening of that presence to a heart that “dark and buoyed, goes on living through a long grief”…. comparisons that open doors to further dimensions of thought and feeling? I was reminded of Elizabeth Bishops’ close observation of the “Fish” as well as by mystic elements in Emily Dickinson’s natural observations. Aren’t we blessed to enjoy such treats in the West Midlands?! (And thanks especially to our friend Nadia Kingsley for conjuring up and managing Katrina’s visit).