A Certain Ear
For his residency throughout March, poet Alun Hughes has been listening to the lake. He blogs about the experience below.
The poet Alice Oswald has described her work as a listening, a way of forcing a poem open to what lies bodily beyond it. In this, the first poem of my residency at Lake 32, I have endeavoured to share the result of a form of listening, a research methodology that I have developed over the last years of writing in and about ‘place’. I am fascinated by the interplay between writer and place, particularly the space in which the two may meet and how they may create work together. But this would require a certain kind of ear to hear what the land might say.
Since 2018, a large amount of my writing has centred around the development of a creative relationship with a well-known area of unused farmland near to where I live in Stroud. It is here where I have explored and developed this method of ‘making a listening’. It utilises techniques of encounter with natural environments that I have learned and taught over the last twelve years of being involved with nature-based practice, sometimes called wilderness work. This involves, via simple techniques, entering into what could be described as liminal or imaginal spaces which can proffer often surprising creative material and experience.
This month’s poem is a product of one of these processes, gleaning initial, formative, raw material for the poem from the place itself. I hope you enjoy it. I’ll be back for my next month in July when I will be leading an experiential writing workshop on the island and making my next listening.
Read Alun’s poem, ‘A Listening at a Lake,’ below.
Image credit: Daniel James
A Listening at a Lake
Numbered 32 @ 51 32 26.04 N, 1 57 33.49W
I am the impression that's left
from another anthropocene landing. Your gravellers
came this time, with your extractive habit, lurching round me,
like dogs on a trapped kill, counting my fields' yield.
In your watery bodies, stoked with bacon sarnies,
girded up in guarded steel, you took the machine to me,
turned me over to a million ton of Cerney ballast.
I was graded, spread, mixed and poured into the holes
of four counties, the foundations of lives.
What stops you slipping away?
When I was fully taken from myself and made missing,
the Thames source that carried me here soothed me home
with its flood. I became the ballast of my own memory,
in five hundred thousand cubic metres of water space,
as your memory of me, as fields, or further back, glacial,
Jurassic; where you touch me now, with your water bodies,
with board or boat bow, paddle and hook, you push
yourself through me, the space I left behind, the space
you've made with water as you return your bodies,
again and again, to deep time and piscine affinity.
That's how you find me when you're done,
my scrape edge softening into this willow fringe, bowing
into me and, on the other side of your path, the hedgerows
spreading themselves into ivy shagged thorn scrub like a crust.
Now look South, from your goosebumped swim skid, you'll see
some of me in my fringe, a once tall willow as a gale-snapped mast,
with broken head and arms thrown wide, I stand;
a twenty foot strawman, teetering at the edge of fire,
beckoning you into my wind pictured water,
towards my arms, raised in the wind currents, north north west.
I lap at your wetsuits, my fallaway bank, a mat of roots,
holding your path and you, from slipping clean away.
East of the swim skid, in this sun, on a planted bench,
shugging in moss and lichen, you can watch the cumuli
make drama across me, as a waveleted lake, at once sun glass,
cloud shades, the wind pushing me into roped rolls,
my lake body as muscle fibres opening over themselves.
Here at your feet, you'll find souvenirs of chancey fires,
half burnt willow sticks, scorched cider cans, chocolate wraps,
your young blood holding to its edge, in the willow fringe,
high and wild remembering.
And out back, through the scrub choke and over the wire, another
lake's being made. You can see past me there, as spoil berms
in digger smooth dykes, to the brick holed beaten barn roofs,
farmyard relics, waiting in line for their planning permission,
as lakeside dream home or empty broker's pad. Now before,
there's the scrape graders and conveyor belts, pulling away,
disappearing round the old field's corner, up to Cullimore's
quarry, tipping, stone by stone, onto heap pyramids of me,
as stacks the shape of sand in a spent hour glass. On my way,
from your rolling road, I see a whole good crowd of ditch reed
waving me on, applauding the sun as it passes this impression
of my turning, going over, going all day long.
