All entries for Tuesday 22 April 2008

April 22, 2008

‘Lazering through a Blizzard’: at Stones Barn #1

‘Lazering through a Blizzard’: at Stones Barn #1

For me poetic forms are like living forms, the forms of life I studied as an ecologist; and recent serious illness has reminded me that life itself is a form to which we write our own poetry, even if that poetry takes the form of actions and relationships between people and with the natural world - as well as words. To that end one of the first courses I have taught since becoming ill was informed by mortality, sure, but more sharply by the mortality of aspects of the natural world; and by the inverse – by sheer life, by exuberance, rebirth and play. This course was set in Stones Barn.

Stones Barn is an artistic retreat set up and run by the folk and roots singer Maddy Prior. At her side, a small team of serenely efficient friends help with everything from making delicious lunches to running students to and from Carlisle railway station. The stone barn itself is across the farmyard from Maddy’s own house near Bewcastle. Bewcastle hides among the bracken-moors of the marches between Hadrian’s Wall and the Scottish borders. This was a no-mans land of rievers and covenanters - some of the farms are built as castles and peel towers. Bewcastle itself seems a slip of a place, almost a turn in a road on a moor. You could pass it by simply by looking the wrong way for two seconds. The whole area still feels liminal but tough.

Bewcastle was the site of a major Roman camp - a thousand soldiers once lived up here - and then a castle belonging to Richard III. A rather beautiful stone cross dating to the 7^th Century stands in the yard of a restored church – there is a good exhibition about its history in a nearby outhouse. And that’s it. But that’s a lot, especially when you bring in the weather which, last week, decided to be everything. It is hard not to believe in miracles when you see the sun lazering through a blizzard; when hard hail turns to rain as though somebody had thrown a switch in the sky.

Maddy Prior is one of the most gifted folk singers of our time. Her Stones Barn programme concerns itself mainly with the experience of singing and folk music – experience as teaching. In collaboration with The Poetry School, Stones Barn put on its first poetry courses this year and thanks to a confluence of circumstances and goodwill (thank you, Tamar Yoseloff) I was the first poetry tutor to make my way into this engine room of British folk/roots traditions (and British folk/roots experiment: remember that Steeleye Span were ground-breakers in their time).