Poets and Spies at London's City Lit

City Lit, London, 1940


Earlier this year, I took an InDesign course for my work. It was at City Lit college in central London, near Holborn station. I hadn't thought much about the type of institution where I'd be brushing up my InDesign skills for a few weeks - but when I arrived for my first class, I was impressed at the range of classes taking place at the same time as mine, and also a little jealous of the people who were taking Basic Danish or Biblical Hebrew. The floor where my classroom was located seemed to have a good deal of painting and sculpture going on.

When I looked up further details about City Lit (mainly in the history section of their website) I discovered that they had originally been established in 1919 by the London County Council as a "literary institute", along with several others around the city. Essentially, these were non-vocational colleges (but not universities) where students could take humanities courses and the like, without committing to something like a degree program.

The website provides more details about the fascinating history of this institution, but I was very taken with the fact that their teachers and lecturers included the likes of Edith Sitwell, TS Eliot, Cecil Day-Lewis and Dylan Thomas, among others. When their new building opened in 1939, John Masefield (then Poet Laureate) did the honours.

The moral of the story is that in London, if you scratch just the tiniest bit beneath the surface, you'll probably receive disproportionate rewards, and they might include poetry. I also ran into a bit of synchronicity at this point. Around when I was taking the InDesign course, I was reading A Colder War, the second volume of a trilogy by spy novelist Charles Cumming. The trilogy features disgraced spy Thomas Kell, who desperately wants to "get back in the game" but has found himself with some time to kill. At one point, he thinks "of the long afternoons he had spent brushing up his Arabic at SOAS, the solo holidays in Lisbon and Beirut, the course he had taken at City Lit in twentieth-century Irish poetry." In other words, when all you think you're doing is taking a desktop publishing course, there are probably some bored spies just around the corner in the same building who hope that poetry might help to fill the slow hours. It also turns out that Thomas Kell enjoys reading Seamus Heaney's The Spirit Level and that he especially likes the poem 'Postscript' (so do I).

Alberto de Lacerda at the Poetry Library

The Poetry Library at London's Southbank Centre recently had an exhibition about Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda and his relationship with London.

Alberto de Lacerda lived in many countries in his lifetime, but London was his greatest love and he lived here for years, also working as a BBC presenter. His friends and colleagues included Edith Sitwell, TS Eliot, Alec Guinness, Christopher Middleton and many others.

His work was new to me, but from the handwritten manuscripts and short poems displayed at this exhibition, it was extremely beautiful, personal but with the breadth of the light and the sky. Southbank was one of his spiritual homes, and apparently he was living a lonely existence in Battersea (my area) when he died in 2007 at the age of 78.

Looking at the exhibition, I felt as though I were shaking hands with this poet across years, or as though he were someone I could have smiled at or chatted with on one of my many visits to Southbank. There is something special about writers who loved the places you love.

Here are some photos from the exhibition:

Justin Wiggan's 'Our Moment Has Come': Apocalyptic Inner and Outer Landscapes

Artwork © Justin Wiggan, 2012


I haven't actually met Justin Wiggan in person yet, but he is a friend of friends and in recent months we have been occasionally corresponding about publishing-related matters. (I'm pretty sure he thinks I am more of an expert than I actually am.) Working as a visual artist, sound artist and writer, he strikes me as one of those people with the enviable capacity to perceive the world in an endless variety of artistic mediums.

Justin gave me permission to reproduce one of his poems, 'Our Moment Has Come', on my blog, and it appears below, along with his biography and artistic approach in his own words. I had to wait a little bit before I realised which poet his work reminded me of; it was Edith Sitwell, author of 'Still Falls The Rain' and 'The Shadow of Cain'. The latter had an enormous impact on me when I stumbled across it in university. Sitwell wrote about events such as the London Blitz and the use of atomic bombs in language which was apocalyptic, violent and perceptive about the two-edged nature of scientific progress. To me, Justin's poem similarly evokes a poisoned earth whose physical symptoms indicate the moral and emotional decay of society.


OUR MOMENT HAS COME (Justin Wiggan)


A decade after killing by fire, lightning and gravity,
The power of the permanent plague has been observed by soldiers and scientists,
In legendary forests broken and discarded.

Here they study dead fathers cloned,
Here they discard the map of their youth, a youth sacrificed on black needles in slow streams.
Their dogs howl and bark with nose-bleeds at the transmission of a delayed and promised light.

The "Wish Machine" holds them dying in a finite part of the lower order.
These greatest scholars deny the sun across the sky,
These greatest scholars deny the phases of the moon,
These greatest scholars deny the swing of a pendulum,
And the beat of a heart.

Their guilt is dragged through meadows,
As rain falls where a ceiling once was.
Their dialogue is crippled, and cannot walk unaided and falls to the floor.



Justin Wiggan was born in Burnley, Lancashire and studied Fine Art BA at UCE. He works in a variety of guises, predominantly as a sound artist with Darren Joyce as Dreams of Tall Buildings, and also as a visual artist. Wiggan is currently completing his first book of poetry, Of Bulls and Mathematicians.

The works are artefacts and documents of his reaction to the shouts, screams, shrieks, wails, hoots, howls, death rattles and sobs that are all soaked up by his surrounding unfinished structure of space. His body of work engages with swollen cityscapes, human moral struggle, and discovering the links between the internal tourist and the external explorer. One cuts the path through conviction and belief, the other gnaws on the path for convenience. These investigations embrace a sense of evolution and eradication of a problem that goes way beyond cultural breakdown, addressing the problem with an end of a system.

Our culture is reduced, our hands are tied.

Wiggan employs a method of "encasement", a writing philosophy developed from cut up techniques, where the text is generated on the meaning of the title and mapped out via research and shaped organically. This method allows the rich meaning encased in each word to dominate the narrative of the piece at times revealing shockingly solid truths through chance. He is fascinated by the noise in the reader's head.

More of his work can be found on these websites:

www.dreamsoftallbuildings.com
www.cottoncandyhousefire.tumblr.com
www.justinwiggan.moonfruit.com

 Poem and biography © Justin Wiggan, 2012

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.