I can’t explain why it’s taken me so long to ask Christopher to be a guest, but I suppose the trigger was that this year he was one of the winners of the 2018 Poetry Business International Pamphlet Competition, a prize that he adds to the dozens he’s won over the last 20+ years. There’s a synergy here, because I’ve no doubt that the residential courses he runs at the old olive press are one of the two main reasons why I wrote poems that eventually won the same pamphlet prize in 2016. So be warned….this will not be an impartial review, but an enthusiastic ‘thank you’.
I met Christopher at a coffee shop in Alicante Airport in 2013, where he told me that the guest tutor for the residential course I’d enrolled on was forced to cancel at short notice, and that I could have my money back and fly home, or take a punt and stay, and that he’d try to take over the tutoring duties for the week. I chose to stay, and it was one of the three best decisions I’ve ever made..we drove along the coast, and, just short of Benidorm, turned inland into a landscape I’d not imagined and which I’ve come to love. Big uncompromising limestone mountains, a blue reservoir, huge views. Places I learned to walk in and find the bones of a fox, among other things.
Christopher has quietly introduced me to a dried up 17thC dam, prehistoric cave paintings in a stifling remote valley, the best paella bar in Alicante, another which is a shrine to the Civil War and left wing revolution, a Stanza group in room decorated with crumbling late-renaissance frescoes, and, memorably a steep shale hill below a cliff where we went to find shards of Iberian pottery and where he ripped the arse out of his trousers. I wrote a sort of prose-poem for that
We’re climbing this hill
a shaly slope ,a broken spine of stone, the tilt of strata, all levels and layers , silicas, sandstones,
blue, green, grey muds, coral flowers, when he says : from here we have to bushwack.
CUE:
long shot from a winding canyon rim, mesquite, stallions, bitter dust, rawhide quirts, and stetsons, cactus, creek and willow, mineshaft tailings, clapboard stables, saloon and whorehouse, Colt repeaters, pianola, mirrors, scrolled mahogany, sleeve bands, tight black bowler hats, tooled leather, spit, unshaven desperadoes, shifty mexicans and crooked sheriff, dark Apache , in his birdbone breastplate, three crow feathers pushed into his blueblack hair, a wired up Commanche on a piebald horse, contempt like a scalp on the tip of a lance, the sage chief of the Black Hills Sioux, with the eagle bonnet, the softest buckskin fringe, plumes of smoke in the lodge by the oxbow’s quiet shadows, and thin dogs doing nothing in particular, the hero carefully turned out, the rancher’s daughters prim as prayerbooks , careless dancehall girls, their knees and tucked up skirts, their buttoned boots and ribbons, ah, so many ribbons, the double door that swings both ways, a silhouette, a shadow bringing conversations to a stuttering halt, like traffic, that exact moment that the piano stops midtune, a pause like a burial plot, just waiting on its allotment of words.
And from here, he says, we have to bushwack.
Whatever that is.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
This year is the first in six years that I haven’t been to one of the writing weeks that he and his wife Marisa host. It’s been like a year without Christmas. At the old olive press I’ve met so many writers and made lasting friendships. Tutors Mimi Khalvati, Jane Draycott, and Ann Sansom. Fellow residents Jane Kite, Shirley McClure, Wendy Klein, Carole Bromley, Fokkina Macdonald, Martin Reed, the photographer Ton Out, and, especially, Hilary Elfick and Gyula Friewald. Most of them have been guests on the cobweb, and you can find them easily enough.
I’ve checked today, and established that of the poems I’ve written in workshops there 22 have been published, four have won prizes in competitions, and one, surreally, has been read to a bilingual audience in the frigid air-conditioned basement of El Corte Inglese in Murcia.
So there you are. The people, the friendships, the amazing places. I owe him so much, this urbane, companionable, erudite, entertaining man. Time to meet him and his poems. He’ll introduce himself better than I could .
“Through the seventies and eighties I worked as surveyor doing structural surveys, mortgage valuations, court work and some house-building I was in private practice with an expanding firm – and though I read a good deal of poetry, (to keep reasonably sane), I wasn’t writing it. I did keep a journal and the odd phrase or observation suggests that there was a spark of creativity in my writing. I sold my business in 1988 and was thus contracted to a corporate. I no longer had the weight of responsibility I carried before (I had five partners and about 30 employees) so I was freed up somewhat. By a mischance I attended week long writing course in Provence run by John Fairfax, of Arvon fame, and the poet Sue Stewart, who I believe later held a creative writing fellowship at Stirling University. It was a week that changed my life. John Fairfax was particularly encouraging.
A little later I went to a Literary festival in Devon followed by a Lumb Bank week (at John Fairfax’s suggestion) and from on then poetry became a major element in my life. When retirement from ranging rods and valuation tables came over the horizon, I had to honour an old promise to my wife Marisa that we would move to her country of birth, Spain. I had long carried the idea of facilitating residential courses in poetry – and ten years mixed up with the London poetry scene, and eight years running my own poetry workshop, we looked for a place suitable for housing Arvon style residential courses. After a number of abortive negotiations we find a derelict industriel building on the lip of a ravine within the ‘casco’ of a mountain village. As soon as we saw the rear terrace with its panoramic view of terraced mountains and a 10thcentury castle, we knew we had found the right place. It was an old olive press with the machinery still there – albeit under mounds of rubble. In two years we rebuilt the ‘Almassera’ always with the view of creating an ambience for creative courses. We had our first pilot week in 2002 .
After ten years, in the nineties, mixed up with the London poetry scene, and eight years running my own poetry workshop, Metro-land Poets, I had the confidence and contacts to engage the poetry elite as tutors and host a huge number of aspirant poets and writers from England, Scotland, Ireland , Wales, France , Germany, Holland along with a dash of Americans. Running these courses has been an intense pleasure for us. I have attended most of the courses as a student, so had the in house perk of five or six course a year with the likes of Mark Doty, Michael Donaghy, Mimi Khalvati, Matthew Sweeney, Alfred Carn Penny Shuttle, Vicky Feaver, Ann Sansom, Tammy Yoseloff, Jo Shapcott., Christopher Reid, Graham Fawcett, James Harpur, Mario Petrucchi and others. As a result my own poetry developed rapidly. We have also hosted retreats in our annexe in a village house.
Poetry grows in the doing of it, in causing it to become organically part of you and part of the day, every day. It is ancient, endless and essential – more so now than at any time, save possibly when the country is at war.”
He chairs The UK Poetry Society‘ Stanza Alacant ’in Benissa, Spain which is now in its eleventh year. He is currently working on a monograph exploring his diary entries during the 25 years of the ‘Way With Words Literary Festival’ in Dartington , Devon, England.
Christopher’s first collection ‘A Mesh of Wires’published by Smith Doorstop was short-listed for the UK’s ‘Forward Prize’ in 1999. He has published two full collections since: ‘Explaining the Circumstances’(2010), ‘The Night Surveyor’(2014) and a joint , bilingual collection ‘Al Otro Lado del Aguilar’(2011) with Terry Gifford – all with Oversteps Books. His pamphlet collection ‘Wolves Recently Sighted’Templar Poetry 2014 was launched in Matlock 2014 and his latest pamphlet collection ‘The Topiary of Passchendaele’was a winner in the Poetry Business competition 2018. Almassera Vellain Relleu, Alicante, Spain. (www.oldolivepress.com) He chairs The UK Poetry Society‘Stanza Alacant’in Benissa, Spain which is now in its eleventh year. He is currently working on a monograph exploring his diary entries during the 25 years of the ‘Way With Words Literary Festival’ in Dartington , Devon, England.
And since that will have certainly whetted your appetites, it’s high time for the poems. Chris has sent me three and I like them a lot.
The Smudge of Andromeda
Counting the trillion or so stars of Andromeda
or persuading others to count the trillion or so
stars of Andromeda — and considering the
apparent impossibility of counting
the trillion or so stars of Andromeda —
or maybe containing them in a dark room
and closing the door — preferably a room
where despite the dark, and the curtained windows,
all the pictures on the walls are shrouded.
They will be going on and being present in the room
beside the trillion or so stars of Andromeda,
also going on and being present in the room
as outside in the evening sky and its first planets,
the wood will be breathing and the last
of the day’s swallows will be flicking through the air
seeking roosts in the darkening trees and roof spaces.
[the German astronomer Simon Marius re-discovered the Andromeda nebulae in 1612 saying it shone like a candle through horn]
What has often struck me in writing workshops with Chris is the way he seems to effortlessly manage poetry (and conversation) that uses long, complex, beautifully constructed sentences without ever losing a rhythm that gives then a musical coherence. I suppose the other thing is an erudition, and encyclopaedic knowledge that ought to be chaotic but isn’t, an erudition that’s lightly worn and which provides a huge source of surprising reference that he combines with lyricism. Which is what this poem does.
You need to read it aloud more than once, realising that the first stanza isn’t actually a sentence but a proposition that’s like an extended title (a bit like the long chapter headings of 18th C novels). I love the way it combines the confusion of ‘a smudge’ with the focussing precision of what we’re being asked to consider…the repeated trillions of stars in a room where all the pictures are shrouded, where the stars are inside and outside in the sky, and the organic rhythmical processes of dusk, the breathing of trees, and the flight of birds coming home to roof. It’s dreamlike (with all the accurate precision of dreams), incantatory and magical.
The next poem is equally magical and slightly unreal, but firmly rooted in what is effectively a narrative, and anecdote. “Remember that night when….’
The Night Surveyor: Dartington Gardens
(For Ben Okri)
After the farewell party we grabbed a bottle
and, on your suggestion, headed into the gardens,
pitch dark, rustling leaves, I don’t know how many came.
Giggling, without a torch we found the Tiltyard,
above us Cassiopeia, a slumped Great Bear.
Now be our night surveyor you said.
I declared to the six (or were there seven?):
‘The Cypress is twenty metres from the twelfth Apostle;
the fountain, two chains, fifteen eleven
Starlit dunes of Devon fields gleamed above trees
as we crossed silvered lawns and I announced:
we are four hundred feet above the sea
then led them up endless steps, finding risers with gentle kicks.
There’s this place of seven echoessomeone whispered
someone counter-whispered: No there’s only six.
Full fathom five.. I shouted from the bastion.
No please not that one surveyor you murmured,
O trees of dark coral made? – ‘No try something else.
Some bow or brooch or braid or brace, lace, latch or catch…
No echo but a leaden voice climbed inside my ear.
Over Staverton, or Berry Pomeroy’s lowly thatch
hung Jupiter, no Venus, or was it Mars?
One shouted: I embrace the universal me,
voice cracked and small beneath shades and stars.
Two melted into trees: We remaining passed round wine.
The town below lolled in sodium as if bathing
and you yawned Get us back surveyor, I think it’s time.
I counted steps. Shadows rose and fell in bands.
Feeling for damp and stone, plotting silhouettes
and shadows, gradually we became a chain of hands.
I really like the filmic quality of this, a film by Peter Greenaway…the draughtsman’s contract. The story of the bunch of tipsy chums stumbling around in the dark under a huge starlit sky, stumbling over silvered lawns, declaiming of bits of Shakespeare, the absurdity of it that gradually comes to its senses, and back to earth as The town below lolled in sodium. I love the way the declaiming poet comes back to the role of the measuring and sensible surveyor and the group of friends who became a chain of hands. The whole thing is witty, elegantly constructed, and ultimately life-affirming, lyrical and loving.
I’ll take a risk with the last poem, the title poem of Christopher’s winning pamphlet, selected by David Constantine. I’ve picked an image of calculated regularities and dreadful repetition.
The Topiary of Passchendaele
Clip the box precise,
make corners a right angle
and thus contain the Cherry tree
in a low wall of green.
Lower the cypressus
to see the horizon file of poplars
flickering in afternoon wind.
Make it horizontal, check
with a spirit level,
always control height —
all needs daily attention
before cheese, fine cheese
and beer, fine beer.
Order these gardens,
contain the beds and herbs,
they must be shielded, neat.
Allow no thistle or spurge,
ground must be raked clean, pure —
cleansing makes for calm.
Be exact in measurement,
correct in the lie of paving,
check privet, manicure the arborvitae.
It is imperative to be uniform.
It needs hourly attention
before cheese, fine cheese
and beer, fine beer.
It’s a poem that makes me think of the kinds of calculation that lay behind the obscene economics of concentration camps, the apparent rationality of the mathematics of slaughter in WW1. It’s done with such precision, the clipped tones of a set of instructions about clipping, the obsessive fact of tidying:
Allow no thistle or spurge,
ground must be raked clean, pure —
cleansing makes for calm.
As though there could be atonement in raking and minutely manicuring; as though we could take our beer and cheese with a clear conscience, conscious of a job well done.
I realise I can’t do justice to what Christopher North has done through his quietly passionate championship of poetry, to the windows he’s opened for so many writers over the years, to his own poetry. But I can say thank you. So I will. Thank you.
