Reflections on composition and reminiscence
It’s a bright January afternoon in 2013. I am with Dale Mackie in his studio and we are warming ourselves on the steaming coffee he has made after our walk along the West Haven… and he is about to say something remarkable.
We have collaborated for Driftnet’s Crossing Lines project, independently producing impressions gathered during a shared exploration of the stretch of the Haven from the Riverhead to Freshney Falls. We’ve done the walk together and alone, and now we are sharing the first fruits of that preliminary journey.
What Dale is about to say will prompt reflections on my own processes and on my personal progress as a poet; on methods of composition and construction, stylistic characteristics, subject matter and inspirational influences. Those reflections will lead to a moment of epiphany, an unexpected recognition of what, on a personal level, I have gleaned from Crossing Lines.
“That’s layering, isn’t it?” he says, pointing at my notebook.
“What is? I ask.
“All that colouring business you do.”
He is referring to the work in progress that I have just shown to him and explained for the first time. The original draft is black. Initial amendments, new phrases, alternative word options are in green. Then there are blue marginal notes suggesting further editing ideas. Other amendments are added in red, days or weeks later, after subconscious examination.
This is where our collaboration proper begins.
He explains this “layering” concept to me in terms of his own methods of composition. How his work always begins with a preliminary black and white drawing often taken from a black and white photographic image. The grey tones suggest colour options that inform his next stage, the laying down of a foundation sketch using primary colours in light tones which he gradually builds up, accumulating depth or merging shades in his wet on wet application. He begins with the sky and works down to ground level detail and character. This process is enhanced with perhaps three or four coats of paint before the completion of final details.
This prompts reflections on what I realise are my own layers of literal, metaphorical, emotional, political, historical, sensuous levels of meaning, not all of which are made consciously during composition.
Dale had taken photographs and worked on preliminary sketches in his studio. I had made an initial draft in my favourite coffee shop, amended and annotated after a second walk, and we had now come together to share and compare developments.
While Dale is looking at my notebook, I study his abstract arrangement of shapes and tones; flora, debris, architecture in states of various disrepair. I have explored ideas of change, describing contemporary scenes while imagining and suggesting the atmosphere of business and everyday life along this historical site of trade. Dale has worked in oil (?) with his palette knife; I’ve drafted a poem marked by images of vision and sound. Dale’s remark about ‘layering’ makes me think about how we seem to employ corresponding processes in our different media. He confirms my speculative observation that he has laid down layers of paint suggesting levels of light that imply reflection while also capturing a sense of depth through representations of natural and manufactured structures beneath and on the surface of the water. He recognizes that both of us seem to be seeing the scene as it is and as it was. I confirm my interest in merging the present with the past in the images I draw in words. There is a deal of shared delight in our mutual recognition of these corresponding processes.
This realization makes me think about the stuff I write…and I realise that layers exist not just in this particular composition but in much of my other work, my ideas, and in my development as a poet.
It’s sometimes in the early 1960’s and the world is bands of blue and gold and the wind is gentler than the sunshine. I am on the seawall that skirts Fleetwood Golf Course, looking across to what I will later learn is Barrow on Furness, Black Combe and the Langdales. The beach is firm and flat and true and the sea is nowhere to be seen. This is Morecambe Bay. More precisely, it is the coast of Fylde. Nearby Rossall Point marks the bend into the bay. Larkholme marsh is behind the great sea wall, and so is the rest of the world for a while.
This is a place to which I will return, religiously, for the rest of my life, drawn by the sound of peewits, gulls and waves, by the smell of the sea, the dazzle of the sun, the buffeting of the breeze; and by something mysterious about this place which I always struggle to explain but hope to express in what has been a continuing Larkholme sequence.
What I don’t realise back then is that there is an old man, just across the bay and around the curve of the coast, who writes poems about his local habitation. I will have already been a teacher for some time when I discover Norman Nicholson in an English text book and feel compelled to write something similar. I have not stopped since and have been frequently and significantly, influenced by Nicholson’s style. Like him, I strive to capture visual, aural, tactile and olfactory sensations in simple but vivid images made of plain words in simple grammatical structures to capture and preserve experience, emotion, and impressions of the place.
It will be over forty years later that I finally recognise that work inspired by these scenes and experiences of this beach form the theme of belonging at the heart of my pamphlet, Larkholme Pilgrim, which has finally reached completion during the Crossing Lines project. Not until that day in Dale’s studio, will I recognize how the content of that work is built upon layers of vital and emotional impressions, of personal and familial memory, that centre on that Larkholme shore.
Sometime between 1963 and 1965, we are in Michael Asplin’s upstairs room at St Mary’s Primary School in Grimsby. Forty two voices of Junior 4 are reading Tennyson’s “The Brook”, aloud; or it might be “Paul Revere’s Ride” by Longfellow. It is the first Friday of the month. It is after Mass and we are enjoying the ritual incantations of verse that always follow our post-communion classroom breakfast. This is my introduction to poetry; to the timeless wonder of the beauty and energy of metre and line, rhythm and image and rhyme. I still recall snatches of these, and of Walter De La Mare and Charles Causley. This is where the first seeds of my love of poetry are sown. Only when I read his obituary, years later, will I discover that his birthplace is Grange-Over-Sands, just across the bay from Larkholme Shore and just around the coast Norman Nicholson’s Millom.
So, now when I stand at Rossall Point, I think on how I create a triangle with the homes of two men with whom I have, unwittingly, shared dazzling sunsets, western breezes, slack waters and flowing tides; and on how their talents and passions have inspired me. And these it seems to me are layers of a kind at work in my lines.
from Crossing Lines: Images and Words. [2015] Ed Nick Triplow. Moonfruit.
Exhibition Catalogue for Driftnet Poets and Abbey Walk Gallery 3-28 November 2015