Michael Symmons Roberts: "Antarctica Is Sleeping Now..."

Harald Sohlberg, Fisherman's Cottage, 1906. Art Institute of Chicago.



A few days ago I went to a poetry reading in Notting Hill which featured Clare Pollard, Fleur Adcock and Michael Symmons Roberts. Pollard read from her powerful versions of Ovid, Fleur Adcock was funny, sharp and touching, but I admit I had come mainly to hear Michael Symmons Roberts. His collection Drysalter, which has won the Forward Prize and the Costa Poetry Prize as well as being nominated for the T S Eliot Prize, is among my favourites of recent years. It features 150 poems of 15 lines each - they have been called "super-sonnets". The poems are technically very impressive, but mainly I found that they pack an enormous emotional punch. Some images made me draw a sharp breath:


Then one day the world drops into your hands
like a bruised fruit, a-buzz with what you take
for wasps but is in truth all human life.

(from 'Something and Nothing')


O pilot cast as smithereens, navigator lost
in pine straw. God of rescue, withhold not.
O come. We are waiting for our future.

(from 'Orison')


It is a very interwoven collection: certain images and themes return, grow, expand, turn in upon each other - the Hotel Splendide, personified darkness, booths, psalmists, prayers. Drysalter is just a very powerful, solid collection with few if any weak poems.

I asked Michael Symmons Roberts afterwards if it would be ok to reproduce one of the poems here and he kindly agreed. Among others, he read a poem called 'Antarctica'. I knew the poem already from reading the collection - it was pretty much a predictable instant favourite because of my obsession. It also reminded me quite acutely of P K Page's great 'Stories of Snow', one of a relatively few poems which have been truly life-altering for me. This had to do with the images and juxtaposition in both poems of ice and snow with flowers and tropical landscapes, but I think there is also a sense in both poems that we try to complete something missing within ourselves through mental and emotional leaps originating in places and needs which may be hermetic - sealed off - even to ourselves. At the end of the poem - which, curiously, feels almost like a beginning - the mysterious inhabitants of this "alter-Antarctica" attempt to read the future. I see this as an attempt at greater self-knowledge, to get closer to the beautiful and maddening paradoxes that we create for ourselves, even unconsciously.

Symmons Roberts mentioned that his family had a fascination with Antarctica and that they had discovered a distant family connection to the McMurdo who travelled on the HMS Terror and gave his name to Antarctica's McMurdo Sound and other landmarks. Readers of this blog will probably already know that I'm obsessed with Antarctica, and they might know that my family has its own distant, degrees-of-separation connection; my grandparents knew Kathleen Shackleton, the artist sister of Ernest Shackleton, and we own her portrait of my grandfather. So I sort of understood that, too.


ANTARCTICA


Is sleeping now, its bright fields intercut with suburbs,
ordered rows of clapboard homes, pin-sharp backyards
all ablaze with jasmine and magnolia.

Its citizens are freer than the rest of us,
living off starfruit from the ice forests, bleached quails
that ripen in the milk-orange groves.

No one sleeps alone here, and only fishermen dream
of wax-white orcas, blind and red-eyed, circling
under ice-sheets swept by katabatic winds.

Of course, this is not true Antarctica, where clutches
of tough scientists cross dates off charts. No,
this is alter-Antarctica, home to sibling-selves.

Once a month they send a greyhound to the brink,
where ice peters into water. Then the dog pelts back.
The time it takes gives them a reading of the future.



'Antarctica' © Michael Symmons Roberts, 2013. Taken from Drysalter, published by Cape Poetry (Random House Group). Used by permission.

Antarctica, Shackleton and Penny McCarthy's 'Endurance'

Statue of Ernest Shackleton at the Royal Geographical Society, London. Photo by Michel Wal. Used under GNU Free Documentation License



It has been a beautiful, sunny, warm bank holiday weekend in London, and my choice of reading matter has been Antarctica by Gabrielle Walker (which I don't like as much as Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita - but it is still excellent.) I suppose that this is fairly typical for me, though I have no desire for London to return to Antarctic conditions.

A few years ago in 2010, I went to the readings of the prize-winners in the Poetry London competition. It was a lovely evening as the great Michael Longley had judged the competition, and also read some of his own poetry. He very generously said of the various poems that anyone might have been proud to have written them.

There were several exceptional poems, but this one about Antarctic hero Ernest Shackleton, Penny McCarthy's 'Endurance', particularly struck me. It is a very subtle poem which metaphorically interweaves Shackleton's life and exploits with the complexities of human relationships.


ENDURANCE (Penny McCarthy)


As the poem alludes to Shackleton's sisters, I have to mention for six-degrees-of-separation interest that my grandparents knew his artist sister, Kathleen Shackleton, in Montreal. My family owns her portrait of my grandfather.

New Poetry: 'The Worst Journey in the World'

 

Gentoo Penguin at Antarctica by jan-borgstede. Used under Creative Commons license

 

 

I have had a new poem, 'The Worst Journey in the World', published on Josephine Corcoran's And Other Poems website, here: http://andotherpoems.wordpress.com/2013/05/03/clarissa-aykroyd/

 

The calibre of the poems and poets already published on the site may tell you something about why I am so pleased to be featured here.

 

I wrote the first draft of this poem in a workshop with Sean O'Brien about transitional states and places. I actually did once find myself stopped on the train at Earls Court when I was reading The Worst Journey in the World, and my eye fell on a comment which Apsley Cherry-Garrard made about something in Antarctica which had reminded him of Earls Court - that was a very strange and rather beguiling moment. The poem is roughly fictional otherwise, but it has something to say about a) why I sometimes want to be in Antarctica rather than London (my friends know about this side of my personality), and b) the kind of peculiar inner dialogues which can take place in a pressurized atmosphere such as a slowed-down Tube.

 

As I noted in the previous blog entry about this workshop, the poems produced by many participants tended to be both funny and slightly scary. I don't think this was an exception (although the poems were all very different.) Only after I had written the poem did I realise that there might be something in it of the atmosphere of my first days in London, which happened to be in July 2005, a few weeks after the 7/7 bombings. Unfortunately, Londoners occasionally have reason to feel anxious and unnerved when mysterious incidents and slowdowns take place on public transport. But still, this is a poem which is more funny than sinister, I think.

 

 



P K Page's 'Stories of Snow': "Where Silent, Unrefractive Whiteness Lies"

A non-definitive list of the ten poems which have been particularly significant in inviting me into the world of modern, almost-modern, post-modern and contemporary poetry would likely include the following:

Byzantium (W B Yeats)
The Waste Land (T S Eliot)
Foal (Vernon Watkins)
The Convergence of the Twain (Thomas Hardy)
Homecoming (Paul Celan)
At the Quinte Hotel (Al Purdy)
The Tollund Man (Seamus Heaney)
Bagpipe Music (Louis MacNeice)
The Shadow of Cain (Edith Sitwell)
Stories of Snow (P K Page)

I've written about some of these before, and they could probably all be an essay in themselves. To use one of my favourite over-used words, it is a pretty random list. Poems discovered by chance, poems studied in high school or university, poems which I wasn't sure I liked at the time but which ultimately took on greater meaning, poems I heard read by the poet themself (T S Eliot, I wish! In this case, Al Purdy), poems which led me on to poems I preferred by the same poet...and so on.

I've written before about the modern Canadian poetry class which I took in university and which turned out to be very pivotal in my literary life. Among other significant moments, I discovered P K Page in this class, and that was hugely important for me. 'Stories of Snow' can lay claim to being one of the greatest Canadian poems of all time, and simply a great poem, and you can read it here. (Due to the way the poem is reproduced, be prepared to page over a couple of times - it's a long-ish poem.)


STORIES OF SNOW (P K Page)


The Canadian landscape, the landscape of the West Coast rainforest I grew up in, the tropics, Northern Europe - all of these are invoked. More than this, these are emotional and metaphoric landscapes, snowy and blossoming worlds of poetry.

In that forwards/backwards/memory/premonition way which I've come to recognise, it seems as though this poem ties in with my Antarctic fascination (although that came a little later than my first reading of this poem). In the end, the reader is invited to "unlock/the colour with its complement and go/through to the area behind the eyes/where silent, unrefractive whiteness lies." P K Page was also a talented artist, and her poems are often powerfully visual, so there is an element of artistic curiosity and exploration here.

I feel, though, that these are mainly emotional landscapes and that this has something to do with my metaphoric/semi-realistic desire to escape the twittering and the human difficulty of the modern world and to go to Antarctica - somewhere more peaceful, where access to what is truly important becomes more direct and less encumbered. "Souvenir of some never nether land": this could be ancestral memory, too, or something that I'd pass on if I ever had descendants; again, forwards/backwards/memory/premonition. I'm just waiting to find out that I had an ancestor who went to Antarctica, though I would likely have heard about it by now.

The painting is by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, the magnificent Finnish artist.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner': Coleridge Goes To Antarctica and Gets Back In Time to Ruin One Out of Three Wedding Guests' Day

From THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)


And now the storm-blast came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong;
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.

With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.

Listen, stranger! Mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice mast-high came floating by,
As green as emerald.

And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken--
The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!


'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' is possibly Samuel Taylor Coleridge's most famous work, although personally I probably still prefer 'Frost at Midnight' and especially 'Kubla Khan'. This is only a very brief excerpt from the very long original poem, which appeared in Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads. It has variously been interpreted as a parable about the sanctity of nature and all living things, a Christian allegory, or simply a great story which warns the reader not to randomly kill an albatross or stop for an Ancient Mariner while en route to a wedding.

'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' may also have taken some inspiration from some of the earliest Antarctic exploration of the eighteenth century, including the voyages of Captain James Cook through the Pacific Ocean into the Antarctic Circle. Coleridge obviously never went near the Antarctic, but "ice mast-high...As green as emerald" is pretty spot-on. The picture which I have posted above is of Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance, which was trapped in the Antarctic pack ice in 1915 - leading to the failure of the expedition, but even greater acts of heroism and the safe return of all of Shackleton's men. It could be an illustration for this passage from the 'Ancient Mariner'.

I have Antarctic dreams and have had them for several years now. Not dreams while I'm asleep, usually - but sometimes it feels like a vast white expanse, translucent ice castles and heroic beard-encrusted men wandering amongst penguins are all a constant part of my mental landscape. It has actually been well over ten years since I first read Sara Wheeler's Terra Incognita and that was when my long walk into the ice fields of this southern desert - for Antarctica is considered a desert - began. I picked up the book a bit sceptically, intrigued because it was shelved under "travel" and at the time I was reading any and all travel books. I did think there was a pretty good chance that it would be boring. How much can you say about ice?

I was completely captivated by Wheeler's account of her trips to Antarctica, the eccentric characters she met at McMurdo Sound, her South Pole journey, her time at Scott's hut. She writes with humour and charisma but also offers moving descriptions of the peace and serenity she found there: a "certainty" which she calls "something that put everything else - everything that wasn't Antarctica - in true perspective." She continues: "I felt as if I was realigning my vision of the world through the long lens of a telescope. It emanated from a sense of harmony." I have not yet been to Antarctica, but I have had very short sojourns in the Moroccan Sahara and the Western Desert in Australia - as well as a part of the Okanagan in British Columbia which I believe is considered a desert ecosystem. The sense of peace is almost overwhelming. I remember that as an experiment, during my overnight with a friend in the Sahara, in a Berber camp, I made the experiment of trying to worry. Usually this is something that I find all too easy. Here, I was unable to do it. I felt as though the top of my head had opened up and the worries were floating away into the darkness. I imagine that Antarctica would be similar - but on the flip side.

I chase this particular fascination in various ways. Antarctica also fits in well with my hero complex, although I will probably never stop debating whether Scott was a hero or a selfish fool, or both. But who can forget the words of Oates, one of his companions who met the same death: "I am just going outside and may be some time"? Currently I'm reading The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard, also one of Scott's men. Shackleton trumps Scott, with his extraordinary voyage in the James Caird from Elephant Island to South Georgia, and the saving of all his men (many of whom then went off to die in the war.) I recently saw a wonderful performance by LAMDA Drama School students of Terra Nova, about Scott's expedition and his relationships with his wife and with Amundsen - very moving. I have been revelling in the BBC's new series Frozen Planet, with some of the most incredible footage ever seen of penguins soaring in a graceful but slightly ridiculous manner through the air to belly-flop on the ice; killer whales and their frightening phalanx manoeuvres to create a wave that will wash a poor seal to its eventual death; the incredible, perspective-defying walls of ice. Frozen Planet is also about the Arctic, which has a more wonderful variety of animal life, including wolves, my favourites. But Antarctica is - Antarctica. There is no other place like it on earth: hostile, overwhelming, blindingly beautiful.

Whether or not I ever go there - and I hope that some day I will - I know that for me Antarctica is above all a kind of spiritual landscape. My friends have grown used to me posting "I'm moving to Antarctica" on my Facebook status updates. In a sense, that's not usually a good thing. It means I want to run away, that life is overwhelming, that people in particular are exhausting and selfish and I'd prefer the company of penguins, scary whales, and ice. But at the very least it comforts me to know that it is there; another place, perhaps even more beautiful than the Sahara, where I would find myself completely unable to worry.