Feeling a bit like this mackerel, not exactly of my element. I spent last week on a Poetry Residential in St Ives, with star tutors Kim Moore and Carola Luther. I loved it, and simultaneously still have that odd feeling of dissociation or dislocation when I travel. It’s an eight hour drive there and eight hours back, and at either end I have that weird sense of not belonging, as though I’m in a country whose customs and language are a mystery.

I felt a kind of kinship with the mackerel, which was lying on the road down below the station on the way down to Porthminster beach. It was bright and fresh but pulled into a fixed and rubbery curve. There was not a clue about where it had come from, or why. Out of place, that was us. Which is a tenuous enough link with today’s post. It’s a reposting of the post I wrote for Write Out Loud last week; I’m still juggling the business of running two blogs, and as I promised some weeks ago, I’ll occasionally post items on the Cobweb for those of you who aren’t linked up with WOL. It’ll all sort itself out. And so to our guest:

Poetry, place and identity: Elizabeth Sennitt Clough

Some politicians are inescably linked to things they said, often without thinking, or because they were poorly advised. Or plain stupid. JFK could never shake off the ‘ich bin ein Berliner’ thing, however well-meant was what he thought he was saying. Margaret Thatcher was famously ‘not for turning’ even though she delivered the line as if discovering English for the first time. Her ‘no such thing as Society’ is more problematic since you could probably find a Marxist linguistics buff pointing out that she might well have been aware of the business of reification and false consciousness. Personally, I doubt it, but there you go.

The one I’ll go with, however, is our current PM’s shrill and unpleasantly jingoistic assertion that ‘a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere’. It’s a narrow and parochial thing to hang your hat on, isn’t it? On the other hand, it raises questions of how our identity, our sense of self, may be tied to the landscapes, the places we think of as ‘home’. Which is, as with most important things, more complicated and troublesome that we might like to think.

A month or so ago I was writing about my own uncertainty about what it means to ‘belong’, to feel part of a culture, to inhabit its language and ways of seeing.

I wrote, then, 

that for the last 30 years I’ve been living in a small town less than 10 miles from where I was born and grew up. More or less in the same valley. And I still don’t know the street names, which tells me that somehow, unconsciously, all this time I’ve been thinking of it as temporary. So if I’m from ‘a place’ I think that place is ‘North’ and my thinking and imagery is ‘North’…….. I find myself speculating on ways in which language (and therefore, our writing) is shaped and informed by the landscapes where we feel we belong. How we come to feel secure in one landscape or another…..Place isn’t just topography. It’s story, and where you place yourself in the narrative.

Which is why, when I was doing some background reading to help me introduce today’s guest poet, I was drawn to an extract from an interview she gave to Paul Stephenson for his blog (here’s the link for the full piece; it’s well worth a read: https://paulstep.com/2017/11/11/interview-with-elisabeth-sennitt-clough/). A bit of background is useful at this point…especially in relation to that ‘citizen of the world’ bit.

Elisabeth Sennitt Clough is a dual-nationality British/American poet who grew up in the Fenlands of Cambridge. In 1998, she studied English and Sociology at Anglia Ruskin University (formerly APU) for her BA. In 2001, she went on to complete an MA at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik. She obtained her PhD from the Open University in 2010. In 2013, she returned to study, undertaking an MA in Creative Writing with Teaching at Manchester Metropolitan University.

Elisabeth has lived and worked in Jakarta, Indonesia; Panama City, Florida; Fresno, California; Reykjavik, Iceland; and Maastricht, Netherlands, where she was a member of the Maastricht Writers’ Group.

Now living in Norfolk with her husband and three children, Elisabeth is a member of a local writing group and regularly attends poetry readings and launches. She runs long distances (which seems to be de rigeur for what I think of as younger poets) and co-edits The Fenland Reed (of which more later).

Paul asked her about place, about growing up in the Fens and its influence on her poetry. She replied:

I’ve heard that living at or below sea level can have an effect on a person’s physical/mental state. I don’t know how true that statement is, but it interests me, as does the fact that the Fens were once underwater. Growing up, I didn’t even question why there were so many freshwater snail shells in the soil. 

I have travelled a lot, since my late teens with my own work and later with my husband’s job. I wanted to escape the Fens (all teenagers do), but I kept returning. I was once away for four years though without coming back to the UK and it started to affect me. …Perhaps I was homesick? When I did return, I found that I had ‘re-membered’ a lot of the places in my mind; they looked entirely different and I’d only been away for four years! 

That interested me, the idea of growing up in Graham Swift’s waterland, its big skies, dark soils, its low horizons. Totally alien to a valley-dweller like me. The other thing I took from the interview was its reference to the darkness you’ll find in some of Elizabeth’s poems..what was highlighted in a comment on her Paper Swans pamphlet Glass. its:

unflinching look at a world of darkness, violence and unhappiness. The repeated use of water and glass invites the poems’ speakers to reflect on their past, to recount the cruelty they have experienced in precise and straightforward detail; they loosen the glass collar and find a way to speak.

Talking about her poem Boy she said

This is an uncomfortable poem. As a child, I didn’t want to be female because I’d been conditioned into thinking girls and women were weak/lesser beings by my stepfather (who beat and humiliated my mother). 

 My stepfather passed away a long time ago and has no living relations. Even so, there were times when I felt uncomfortable, that what I was writing was wrong, but I resisted the urge to silence myself, having often been too scared to speak during my childhood.

If that doesn’t draw you in, that three-part tug of conflicted, ambiguous and troubling  relationships with place, family and gender, nothing will. 

One more thing, before the poems; Elisabeth Sennitt Clough seems (to me) to have arrived suddenly , fully formed on the contemporary poetry scene. Just think about what she’s achieved in the last two/three years: An alumna of the Arvon/Jerwood Mentorship scheme 2016 andToast Poets 2017, she was also a Ledbury Emerging Poet 2017. Her debut pamphlet, Glass, was a winner in the Paper Swans inaugural pamphlet competition in 2016. It went on to win Best Pamphlet at the Saboteur Awards 2017. Her debut collection, Sightings, was published by Pindrop Press in December 2016. It won the Michael Schmidt Prize for Best Portfolio. A poem from that collection was highly commended in the Forward Prize and published in the Forward Book of Poetry 2018. Her second full collection At or Below Sea Levelis a Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

As you can imagine, when I finally met her at a Poetry Writing weekend last December, I was already daunted by this, a bit tentative in approaching her. And as is so often the case, she was not daunting at all, and much to my delight said she’d be a guest for The Wider Web. So here she is. Of the first poem she says

‘Herding the Northern Lights’ is from The Cold Store, the collection I’m working on at the moment;

it was published in Mslexia, so it missed 50% of the poetry audience! 

Herding the Northern Lights

After Oded Wagenstein’s photo-essay 

about elderly female reindeer herders in Siberia

who are now living in retirement: 

I’ve turned my back on the glamour of snow

and glaciers, though I once lost myself to their bite.

The days hatch and faucets crack: nothing flows

when all that’s left to herd are the lights.

Beneath the pines, the bear and wolf collide

and in my ears, the tundra winds still blow

and ripple the skins of sleds until twilight.

I’ve turned my back on the glamour of snow.

Yet sometimes I want to return to the tow

of a migrating journey, but my body has no fight:

it’s become a slow creature. Each fibre bellows

loud as glaciers – how I once lost myself to their bite.

When my daughters return, they chase away the night

with stories and rituals I told them decades ago.

They fill my eyes with scenes I put in their sight.

The days hatch and faucets crack: nothing flows,

until I hear the hooves of reindeer echo

like Siberian lullabies across the night

and then I dance like melt-water flow,

but all that’s left to herd are the lights.

My life has become a segment of white

that my family fold neatly and stow – 

all clasps on the trunk snapped tight.

And I tell them, I’m happy. I don’t miss the snow.

I’ve turned my back.

Just two things to say about a poem that speaks richly for itself: first off, it demands to be read aloud; you need to hear the repetitions of the rondeau redouble, it’s assonance and consonance, and not be distracted by how it looks on the page. The second thing, for me, is the business of belonging, the tug of distance and of the rhythms of migration. The fear of stasis. I love the clinching snap of that triplet

My life has become a segment of white

that my family fold neatly and stow – 

all clasps on the trunk snapped tight

The next poems are from At or Below Sea Level.  The first follows neatly from the last

Matryoshka 

Maybe I do want to be a dollsome days,

but never that painted thing  

you often shuck in two – 

where, in every wooden shell,  

there’s a diminutive version,

as you work your way down 

to the final fingertip me:

that tiny bloodless woman,

miniature lips erased

by the heat from your palm. 

It’s this business of identity and self again, and how each can be defined by family, by lovers, by place, and how this simplifies and constricts and denies. I like the compression and clarity of it. The last poem is more expansive, in every way.  I’ve had to do a screenshot to preserve the shape and the line breaks. One day I swear I’ll find out how to overcome WordPress resistance to poetic shape. It’s a bit fuzzy. Sorry.

I loved this, its sensuousness, its texture, its drama. It’s packed with those moments that draw you in. I have a favourite. This is it:. I love the way it spins around that one word: envelope

yet his touch transforms me

into iciness as he leans across 

reseals the thin envelope of my body

his mouth twitches as if in prayer 

when he closes me with his tongue.

So there we are. Another labour of love. I hope you enjoy the poems as much as I do. I hope they’ll send you off to buy more (details below). Thank you Elisabeth Sennitt Clough for being today’s guest. You were great.

Glass.  Paper Swans Press[2016] £5.00

Sightings  Pindrop Press [2017]. £10.00

At or below sea level Paper Swans [2019] £9.99

ps. I nearly forgot I’d promised to say something about the magazine that Elisabeth jointly edits.

The Fenland Reed is published twice yearly, with one themed and one unthemed issue each year.

It’s a handsome journal. If you haven’t come across it yet, then take a look at what’s on offer

https://www.thefenlandreed.co.uk

​