On Keeping Moving by poet Rebecca Watts (Writer in Residence May 2022)
What is art without imagination – the ability to inhabit other places, other times, other bodies and other minds, without actually going anywhere at all? Art works on us by appealing to our senses; our senses trigger our imaginations, and in a moment we are transported anywhere. The process is the same for the artist, except that it’s the world, rather than the yet-to-be-made artwork, that speaks to their senses and fires their imagination. Their job then is to translate the language, the pictures, the sounds in their head into whichever medium is theirs, in order to pass it on to the rest of us.
When it comes to poetry, there are as many ways of describing what it might be as there are poems to be written – but I have always liked this description by the American poet William Carlos Williams: ‘the movements of the imagination revealed in words’. That phrase always wakes me up, because it captures something I have occasionally experienced as a reader, and one of the things that I love most about poetry. If you have ever encountered a poem, either on the page or in the air, that sounded exactly like the voice in your head or seemed to beat precisely in time to the rhythm in your veins, you’ll understand what he meant.
For anyone aspiring to write the kind of poems that might reveal the movements of the imagination in words, the challenge is to keep moving. An imagination that’s stuck in the mud of familiarity has nothing to reveal, nothing exciting to show or share. If we’re cooped up for too long, or stick doggedly to the same old things, our imaginations can grow stale, sluggish, stagnant, like the surface of a pond in the absence of any weather to stir or replenish it.
Bluebells beneath the trees of the Hawarden Woodlands. Picture by Rebecca Watts.
This is the gift of a residency: it lifts you up and away from your familiar surfaces – the desk, the kitchen worktop where you prepare three meals a day, the flat meadow where you always run – and transplants you into completely new territory. This new terrain may slope (a wooded hillside) or creak (a Victorian library); it may smell of bluebells and furniture polish and a host of other things you never inhale at home and that provoke memories you didn’t know were there. The colours and the textures and the scale of it all will be different from the things you know so well you stopped noticing them long ago. Your senses may begin to sense they are once again required. Your imagination may unstick itself and decide to go a-roving.
Saying this, it makes me laugh to notice how inured we are (I am) to a life dictated by routine. Half the fun of a new situation for me lies in establishing a whole new set of habits by which to navigate the newness. On the first morning of my two-week residency I acquired a local map and walked the boundary of the area I thought I’d want to roam in during my stay. Once I’d familiarised myself with the various paths and loops through and around Bilberry Wood, I felt I could relax into the space – could let my mind wander as I wandered, without having to concentrate on where I was going or make decisions or worry about getting lost. On the afternoon of my fourth day the sun was high in the sky, and I felt compelled to drive west in search of more novelty and the sea, which I was pleased to meet at Talacre. But in truth this little venture into the wider world demonstrated that I had already become institutionalised. After a short stroll along the beach to the much-photographed lighthouse, I found myself hankering after the green and brown of the woods and the lovely, cosy, quiet library I had already begun to think of as home.
Talacre lighthouse. Captured by Rebecca Watts.
I spent several excellent sessions reading, writing and fully concentrating (a rare joy) in the library, but the woods became my default workspace. Images, phrases and ideas drifted easily into my consciousness as I wandered or jogged or just sat on a bench or a tree stump, observing and listening to what moved and what stayed still. Consequently, I wrote more poems in my two weeks at Gladstone’s than I would usually write at home in six months or even a year. Here’s one of them, inspired by the woods’ many signs, which I appreciated for their jaunty bluebell-themed hue, as well as for the way they ensured I always remained on the right path:
PRIVATE NO ACCESS
The animal in me is padding through woods in the rain,
poking her nose in rabbit holes,
forging a channel through the bluebell sea
which quivers in her wake.
The animal in me is rooting out spiders and insects,
scuffing rich dirt beneath a dripping oak,
close and low-down tracking the scent of musk
which spells out the name of her kind.
The birches’ eyes are on her and she does not care,
for she has the world on her side, the green
harkening follow-me world
where every thing alive is permitted
and everything is alive. Her ears prick – momentary –
at the crunch of gravel as someone about-heels
in deference to the sign. She runs
and every wild-garlic star bursts open.
That poem includes many of the things I will miss about being a Writer in Residence at Gladstone’s Library – though of course I will be able to revisit them in my imagination once I’m back at my desk at home. Others include: waking up to the stout bells of St Deiniol’s; the yellow wagtail I saw several times fleetingly down by the old millstream; the many robins I pretended were the same one following me round my pre-breakfast circuit; the left-hand desk under the window in the History Room gallery; all the meals that appeared like magic without me having to lift a finger (special mention going to the homemade orange flapjacks that powered many an afternoon poem); the wonderful acoustic in the chapel where I was allowed to practise my guitar in the evenings; the friendly and kind staff who make Gladstone’s the welcoming and special place it is. And did I mention the scent of bluebells and wild garlic after rain? That too.