Philip Davenport & Julia Grime, editors: from Refuge from the Ravens: New Lyrical Ballads for the 21st Century
With an afterword by Jeffrey Robinson
[Refuge from the Ravens: Wordsworth rewritten by homeless Britain is a project by Zwiebelfish CIC, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. Based in Manchester, UK, Zwiebelfish CIC is a new arts organization set up in 2021 to work in collaboration with marginalized people, especially people affected by homelessness. Their self-description reads: “Our projects communicate life experiences that are sometimes ignored, or hidden, like homelessness. The wide variety of artforms we offer helps people to access their own creativity and can help to explore and release difficult memories, or simply find enjoyment in making.”
Now published as a book by Zwiebelfish CIC, the excerpts below are selected from the book’s generous offerings of poems, along with the Preface by Philip Davenport & Julia Grime and the Afterword by Jeffrey Robinson. That they open the demographics of poetry in a vital new direction is surely worth noting – a keystone for a new omnipoetics, still in the making. (j.r.)]
PREFACE
Philip Davenport & Julia Grime
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge walked uncounted miles, often at night. The people they met on the road were usually on the move. Nowadays, you’d maybe say “homeless”. Soldiers returning from war, wounded in body or mind, people struggling with their mental health, people who’d lost jobs or been evicted, others just too old to work or caught in money traps, the spiral of daily living. Many of them traumatised, all of them looking for a reason. And a voice.
200 years ago, in 1798, deeply concerned about social justice as much as shaking up the conventions of poetry, the two poets represented this voice as the Lyrical Ballads. Poetry took a radical turn, but we wondered what Wordsworth and Coleridge would think about the people in today’s Britain, as inequality becomes more extreme and poverty is on the rise. So, we asked vulnerable people, many of whom are currently homeless, to make the Lyrical Ballads anew.
We are Zwiebelfish, a Community Interest Company bringing artists and vulnerable people together, exploring their creativity to make collaborative art. This project, Refuge from the Ravens, includes poems, songs, drawings, calligraphy – an exhibition and a CD as well as this book. A collection of people working together – writing, speaking, demanding their voice. Observations illuminated by beauty, but also by fear.
Time-travelling, we all met with William, Dorothy and Coleridge in the archives of Wordsworth Grasmere, entering their lives and their world through their note-books. We touched what they had touched, wrote with dip pens like they did, made oak gall ink like they did. And we met the people in their book – talked to them, told them all about us. We reached out from our moment, back to them and now we reach out to our own future, asking “When will it ever change?”
These responses to the original Lyrical Ballads are not intended merely to be straight replies, but also a document of homelessness, showing its symptoms and causes. So today, Wordsworth’s vagabond woman suffering from PTSD becomes an ex-soldier with the same symptoms. Now, the Foster Mother becomes a tree offering much-needed shelter, while The Convict, no longer physically locked up, is still imprisoned by social expectation. Goody Blake still struggles to stay warm, even as she suffers the humiliation of a judgmental benets system.
Together we walked into the light of things, meeting people from the past in the people of the present. And we turned the tables – these voices speaking to you directly in their own words, their very graininess adding to their intensity. Through extreme life experiences, they are both damaged and wise.
Open this book and you’ll meet your fellow humans here, the people you share this world with. Slow down to the pace of an old man bumping from lamppost to lamppost. Slow down even more to the doldrums of a military drum. Somewhere deep in- side, we are all slo-worms. Listen — listen to your human neighbours — after all, it could be the story of yourself. And, when you read these poems, perhaps you’ll find, as Wordsworth did, that “we have all of us one human heart.”
POEM EXCERPTS
THE THORN
[“A whirl-blast of broken glass”]
Ulcer in my leg won’t heal
It’s cold inside my
bones
A mass of knotted joints I feel
It’s cold inside my bones
(I’ve got) Old bones and old brain
Peeling skin, rotting frame
I couldn’t do another year by the thorn.
I’m not as wicked as I was
It’s cold inside my bones
Staying in’s my only job
It’s cold inside my bones.
(I’ve got) Old bones and old brain
Peeling skin, rotting frame.
Keep away from certain types
It’s cold inside my bones
Cut to pieces by the Winter Whites
It’s cold inside my bones.
The thorn it pricks me through my skin
Its needle lets the winter enter in
And I am known to every star
And every wind blowing me apart.
A thorn there is which like a stone is o
With jagged lychens is overgrown
A thorny that wants is thorny points
A toothless thorn with knotted
joints. [?] is old & grey & wild
enter in
Anonymous ldhas
January 2022
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SWEET CHERRY TREE (“STAND DOWN”)
Amongst the FIelds and woods, I see
A man standing still by a cherry tree
He shouts, “Excuse me, please can you see
The moon shine on
this sweet cherry tree?”
His clothes once military
Are raggy.
In desolation, simplicity
Leaning against a Christmas tree
There’s no joy when his gaze meets me.
Amongst the elds and woods, I see
A man moon-lit and eerie
Dancing on his face are shapes of leaves
This man, who has seen
the Disaster tree.
And
in th
[?]
“My trust is in the god of heaven
And in the eye of he who passes me.”
Is it my skewed sight
Or is this a man made of moonlight?
Face forlorn
Aura war-torn —
Wobbling on blistered feet
Another victim of history.
Amongst fields and woods, he’s
Camouflaged by a Cedar tree
Awaiting his troops to stand down
By this pretty tree
Or under the ground.
Moonlight projecting the tree that protects him
Casting silhouette, shadow of a being
Complicit in the life that supports him
Earthly and steadfast with age-old boots
Decaying roots grown within him.
Amongst fields and woods, I see
Tall and skinny, uniform like me
Couldn’t believe
Couldn’t believe
It’s the oak tree ghost of me.
Astrid, Jamie, Jonathan, Karl, Martin, Maxine, Richard, Tass
tom harrison house June 2022
ANIMAL TRANQUILLITY
It’s a fine line between genius and a mad man,
and yes the voices you carry in your
head are Angels but be careful she said.
They will lie to you.
My mum used to tell me
What makes us breaks us in three
What breaks us is how we are made
And the tattoo on my hand says
All coppers are fucking bastards in a world
Without end
Give me animal tranquillity.
It’s a fine line between Hitler and his war
Van Gogh and his ear
Both got the world to listen
The general and the genius, but whatever
Cutting off your ear ain’t clever.
What makes us breaks us
And when you’re broken
You finally comprehend what
The five dots on my hand say
All coppers are fucking bastards in a world
Without end
Give me animal tranquillity.
If it’s a demon you know it’s a fly
If it’s an angel it’s an ally minds
mends
But be careful, they will lie.
Fences, gates, walls — jail them up
Can’t stop them talking to you but
They don’t get through and
In the end
When a bone breaks it mends and so does the mind
All coppers are fuckers in a world doing time
Give me animal tranquillity.
The voices you carry in your head are
Angels
But be careful. They will lie to you, she said.
.
Anonymous LDHAS December 2021
December 2021
FROM AN OPENING PROSE PIECE, "THE HONOURABLE CHARACTERISTIC OF POETRY
You live temporary. But as soon as you go out that door, they change your locks. You have to squat it, stay put, try to get friends or family to bring you food. I knew a guy who used to hand his dog outside the window to a friend so it could go for walks. He couldn’t leave the building, or he’d never get back in. Wonder if he’s still barricaded in there now, passing his dog out of the window every day? . . .
Under cover of a sentence, repentance. I let go of my past, the friends I made out there decay in solitude in my mind. I have compartments I delve into sometimes, amongst ling cabinets in my head or whatever you call it. The Filofax converges into wilderness. A distant memory now, they’re a piece of thin material not even enough to make a shirt, a coin reminding me of the past depending which way the monarch is facing.
Delyth, Dominic, Jay, Keiron, Kris, Lucy, Roy back on track June 2022
PRETTY PENNY
When I came out the Queen’s Army
Someone boldly asked of me
What happened to my shining
Medals three
Said: I sold ‘em all
To feed my family
For want of a pretty, pretty penny.
Let us walk into the light of things
Medals don’t make the man
They’re just metal bling.
When you serve
Your life’s in other hands
Camaraderie keeps you alive
Orders are how men die.
I did 12 years
Told when to eat, went to get dressed
And when I left
I crashed and disappeared
Into the light of things
Medals don’t make the man
They’re just blinding
So put them pretty pennies on your eyes
And you will see the soldiers every night.
Of a night time I go out and talk
To them —
People I knew from back then
When I was on the streets
They’re at ease talking to me
Let us walk into the light of things
Medals don’t make the man
They’re just metal bling.
I know where I’ve come from
And where I still belong
In the light of things
In the light of things
Medals don’t make the man
We win our own forgetting.
And homeless near 1000 homes I stood
And near 1000 tables starved, and wanted food
Where every eye was blind to me
For want of a pretty, pretty penny.
Danny Collins
Feb 2022
II. ANECDOTE FOR FATHERS (from Metal Man)
Keep a 24-hour open mind
I’m a time travelling alcoholic
Every day a speedboat, driven blind
I’ve got nothing but I’m not defeated inside
Ever haunted by the kindness of
Womankind
Had the privilege of love’s goldmine
A daughter and three sons
Each mum a different one, any fault purely mine.
Got nothing, but I’ve had everything
Ever-haunted by the Supreme Being
As good a bloke as any of you
Can in my hand since ‘72
Ektoplasmic meat rack crucifixion machine
I’m an Optimist Conservative with a clever mind
Ever haunted by the middle-class kind
They talk as much shit as
Me. Arses of baboons, fleas fucking fleas
Can’t give money to the peasants
They’d cheat and lie worse than we
Bring us to ruin, bring us to the sty.
Maybe I am bitter
When it’s bitter
I am bitter
when it’s bitter
you get a clear sky
CALL MY NAME TO THE 4 DIRECTIONS
Duddon Valley; there will I weep
Couldn’t ask for more of a miracle
To see —
last farm before Top Fell
That’s my grandpa’s
go through the gate
Make sure you close it, or the sheep will
End up in the living room, mate.
Top of that mountain
— most beautiful place you’ve ever been
Becoming visible, things previously unseen.
Stars will bring a new morning
Thousands of years this has been going
And we still don’t notice — what was and is
And you make a wish:
“Call my name to the 4 directions.”
On the summit, there will I weep in peace.
We’re not alone, don’t have any sparks or doubt
We don’t know what things are
Put them down to shooting stars
But the fountain of all power flows in the heart.
Put them down to shooting stars but the fountain of all
power flows in the heart
alone the heart
Once seen a comet
You should’ve seen it —
Blazing! alone the
heart
Going like the clappers, going like fuck
You’ve got to put your heart in it to see a shooting star
And every now and then
When they go
they fuck off across
your whole field of vision
— like the motion of human blood —
Up through Duddon, towards Torver
through the farm
Through the gate, through all that is and was
Sit there one night, listen and watch
You’ll be fucking mesmerised
Watch them fly across
Honest to God
Who is free-er, the drifter or the driver?
Simon LDHAS January 2022
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AFTERWORD
Jeffrey Robinson
In 1798, Lyrical Ballads injected the voices and language of disenfranchised people deep into British poetry. Reading Refuge from the Ravens: New Lyrical Ballads for the 21st Century, I experience something comparable to the confusing pleasure (Wordsworth’s criterion for poetic success) that the original audience of Lyrical Ballads must have felt. I have encountered writers outside the thresholds of social privilege, and learned their realities and their visions, in what is often a kind of wisdom poetry.
These new poems, while anchored in the tradition of the original book, also break free of it, repurposing and at times wrecking the poems that appeared over two centuries ago, leaving the naked and sensitive voices of the 21st Century homeless to their fate.
Consider the update of ‘The Thorn.’ Wordsworth’s thorn bush is a metaphor for Martha Ray, the tragic hero of the poem, who waits next to the grave of her dead child. In the 21st-century reworking, the metaphor literally penetrates the speaker and becomes the agent of substance abuse: “The thorn it pricks me through my skin / Its needle lets the winter enter in.” Wordsworth says that Martha Ray “is known to every star, / And every wind that blows.” The anonymous 21st Century poet brings these lines home: “And I am known to every star / And every wind that’s blowing me apart.” Wordsworth’s predictable rhyming trimeter blows apart into an unrhymed pentameter — a metrical representation of otherness as vulnerability, wounding, and chaos.
Philip Davenport links poems like this one, and the whole of Refuge from the Ravens, to an “alternate” Lyrical Ballads, not the Lyrical Ballads canonized as part of an establishment lineage of British poetry. Several of the Ravens poems are responses to poems ultimately left out of the 1798 publication — an anti-tradition, a shadow work, analogous to these voices left out of the visible members of society. In this version Dorothy, Christabel, the Discharged Soldier, Kubla Khan and others have been let in as direct influences.
Insisting that country and city belong to the same people, that one person can struggle between them and can represent both together on a single page, the Ravens poems also disrupt the otherwise calm, visible world of unfairly distributed wealth. A person deeply wounded in the city— from broken bones, sleeplessness, shelterlessness, addiction, madness — brings these traumas into the orbit of cosmic otherness: sky, stars, trees, water, and the voices of angels; suddenly the world appears differently, unmoored, freed “in / An upside down sky.”
This alternate world falls with often uncomfortable juxtapositions appearing as hauntings, afloat between the nature imagery of the world of Lyrical Ballads and the urban world in which the 21st Century remixers have been living: “I see / A man moon-lit and eerie / Dancing on his face are shapes of leaves / This man who has seen the / Disaster tree.” “A whirl-blast of glass-breaking.” “Ever-haunted by the Supreme Being / As good bloke as any of you / A can in my hand since ’72 / Ektoplasmic meat rack crucifixion machine.”
Such disorienting and terrifying images force another anonymous poet, heroically, to find a hopeful way through: “What makes us breaks us in three / What breaks us is how we are made.” Reading New Lyrical Ballads, we walk into the freedom of making things anew.
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