Pop-up Sculpture at the Dam(n) Hotel

Here's my contribution to the Bruck theme. (You'll want to turn your speakers off.) Hope nobody redds it up... 

Sleep Begins in the Mouth

with kind permission of Adam Dickinson, I'm posting his poem 'Sleep Begins in the Mouth' from his collection Cartography and Walking (which you can get hold of here). I stumbled over it again yesterday, and it resonates with all this breath and bone stuff from the 'Freeing The Poet's Voice' course I've been posting about.

Now I think of it, I think I remember learning this poem while I waited at the bus stop nearest the New Westminster Public Library, and I seem to think it played a part in pressing 'Paternoster' out of me...something in the imagery and shape and rhythm...

Anyway, I love it.

Sleep Begins in the Mouth

We've discussed this half-asleep;
our tongues like piled cottonwood
in the dry, open field.
It's hard to know how to give
yourself to someone.
It's the astonished snow
that returns in May as cherry blossoms;
how for weeks the branches had committed
to a brown indolence.
It's the baritone groan of river ice,
a decision without warning to disband,
to dash its bones.
When you let your eyes droop,
the air comes into you
like into a grassland deep in the neck.
Here the horses eat from your hand.
The lump in your throat is flowering grain.

Adam Dickinson

My Bright Green Uncle

just heard Walter De La Mare's 'Song of the Mad Prince' for the first time and it sounds weirdly kin to the half-conscious chatter I've been collecting at the brink of sleep. 'Who said 'Ay, mum's the word [...]' etc. Love it...

Heogland

as the bog and the plover

and the ebb and the eider

dictated it

to me.

(I've already changed it quite a lot)

OK. Fragments of bone wash up on the shore, on which survive the remnants of a lost language (coded in pigment, gesso, sgraffito).

Fragments of language wash up in the semi-consciousness between waking and sleeping, which the watching brain scrambles into near-sense and non-sense.

Fragments from a lost valley society...that much was clear. Perhaps sea-levels rose to demolish and digest a midden of these mostly inconsequential missives. No, not letters. More, stories...perhaps a coming of age gift would be a bone book of these ordinary stories of the people.

'Tying a ribbon on his shoe – 'well, we're not quite sure about those two.'

'What it's like to be addled with...[lost or illegible]'

'My old lass and my extinction...'

'I'm not as old as I sound I was...if you cut me trunkwise and count the rings.'

'It happened one day, God's country...'

'My bright green uncle...'

'''It happened one day'', I said it screwingly...'

'She must be looked at like a person!'

'It'll be the first one though – jeeez.'

'I don't mind king paper and the calf paper.'

'He needed all the necessary darts.'

'People were lifting that noisy ogg (?) [indistinct/illegible]

Bye Gai-Gai!

Day 4 and departure

I'm missing my Cove Park pals with their newly-freed voices. I'm usually very keen to get home to Shetland but I was prised out of the Party Pod with reluctance on Saturday morning. We'd gathered on the balcony to watch a submarine pass up the loch: exercised our vocal range at it and dispelled its spectre, as much as you can, with pancakes.

On Friday we performed our own poems to the group, with Kristin making a series of challenges to stance, muscles, expression, content as we did. Many of us have never performed a poem hanging over with our bums in the air while being shook out like a blanket, but most of us have now. We heard each other's poems come clearer, sometimes deeper, big messy currents of breath and sometimes weeping passing through...I don't want to dwell on the tears really, which seem to be the natural consequence of removing muscular blocks and tensions in the resonating parts of the body, of relaxing and opening the throat. Having done so invariably changed the quality of the poems we were speaking. Most of us experienced our poems as we had felt about them when we first wrote them and I think most of us shucked off something that had been bowing us down or compressing us. And as an audience we often heard a poem that had sounded 'difficult' or impenetrable reveal itself and become a live, emotional thing...

I've been waking up the last couple mornings with a different face. Maybe I wake with this face every day but it stiffens and clumps throughout the morning. I practised 'throwing my arms away' and 'shaking the flesh off my bones' between Glasgow and Edinburgh and caught myself resettling my weight as I waited on the tarmac at the airport. The week's work has certainly challenged the tendency to body dysmorphia that I think most of us suffer to some degree or other. I'm not really thinking much yet about how Kristin's course may affect my public readings, although I'm slightly more open-minded about giving any than I have been for a long time. But I've got resolutions, of course: to learn more poems by heart, to continue to try and connect imagination and breath and bone, and to test out what I've learnt on singing and speaking and...well, being...

I'm grateful to Creative Scotland for Professional Development funding that allowed me to attend this course. And also to the excellent Cove Park and Bloodaxe folk for administering strategic prods that persuaded me to go through with it...

Well reunions are tricky things, but I figure if it's going to work anywhere it might work in Shetland??