Colloquium on the work of Bill Griffiths - Jan 27th 2012

Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne.



January 27th 2012

1030 – 10.45 Arrivals and coffee




10.45 - 11.00 Welcome and introductions




11.00 - 11.45 Allen Fisher: ‘The idea of Sequence.’


Jeff Hilson: 'Binaries - Bill Griffiths's Not-Sonnets.’




12.00 - 12.45 Sean Bonney: 'Prison as Prosody'

Peter Barry: 'Three ways of reading a poem by Bill Griffiths’




12.45 - 1.30 Lunch





1.30 - 2.00 Alan Halsey: ‘Abysses & Quick Vicissitudes: On Editing Bill


Griffiths’ Collected Poems.’




2.00 - 2.30 Bill Lancaster: 'Bill Griffiths, the Northern Years'




 2.45 - 3.45 Panel discussion (Mendoza, Juha Virtannen and Luke Roberts)




4.00 - 4.30 Will Rowe: ‘Bill Griffiths's negative system'

Conclusions



5.00 - 6.30 Poetry reading.


Readers include: Peter Barry, Sean Bonney, Clive Fencott,


Allen Fisher, Alan Halsey, Jeff Hilson, Ann Matthews, Mendoza,


Will Rowe, Rhys Trimble and Juha Virtannen.




The colloquium will take place in CPD1 in Squires Building (opposite the civic centre). See http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/brochure/visit/campus_branch/ncle_cmp/city_campus/ for a map. The CPD1 room is just off the foyer of Squires.




The poetry reading will take place in Northumberland Building LT149.

Bill Griffiths and Seaham

 Visited Seaham today, where Bill Griffiths used to live. This is the Seaham of which, according to Wikipedia,  Lord Byron said:

Upon this dreary coast we have nothing but county meetings and shipwrecks; and I have this day dined upon fish, which probably dined upon the crews of several colliers lost in the late gales. But I saw the sea once more in all the glories of surf and foam.

Byron’s time there is now commemorated in the Byron shopping centre. The pub, The Lord Byron, is boarded up and derelict. So much for poets and poetry. Either selling themselves or gone to ruin. Couldn’t find Alfred Street, ran out of time, but walked down to the harbour. It was Bill Griffiths’ Gloucester, Bill Lancaster had told me earlier in the day. Looking down at the harbour with its double entry I can see why he said that. Bill Lancaster ran the Centre for Northern Studies at Northumbria University through which Bill Griffiths did all his dialect work up until his death in 2007.

Bill Lancaster was warm and generous with his time, talking to me for over two hours in his light and airy living room, and again I was staggered at the sheer breadth of Bill Griffiths’ capabilities and interests and at Bill Lancaster’s depth of knowledge and enthusiasm for North East language and culture.  I knew Bill Griffiths had written on Seaham, but not so much, and didn’t know he’d written on the history of the Northern Sinfonia or the extent of his archive work. 

I’ll be talking more about Bill Griffitths soon, as I’m planning a colloquium in January in an attempt to pull together different aspects of his work and try to open up new avenues of scholarship. And I’ll be going back to Seaham. In the meantime one  introduction to Bill Griffiths is through Tom Raworth’s tribute at http://tomraworth.com/bgsea.html. I said what I wanted to say about the poetry there.

On the way to Glasgow on the train the next day I passed Carstairs prison hospital. And if I’m going to write a sentimental poem for Bill Griffiths something about a prison hospital will have to do. He was interested in prisons, Bill, and spent some time trying to get people out of them who should never have been in there in the first place.

By Carstairs and under the clean fence

In the ploughed section Hereford

Cattle bent white faces to the grass.

No kindness in these fences or the

Earth shorn of all vegetation, no meadow

Flowers or ornament in Carstairs,

No beauty to distract the criminally

Insane.  I too would go mad in a place

Like that, or make friends with the

Brown cows that nuzzled the outer

Fence. Hard to live without beauty

And harder still to have no distractions

Particularly if your outside life incuded

Axe murder. Only seeing  yourself

Reflected back in the shiny surfaces of

The smooth walls. Bill might have played the

Piano for them or standing on his toes

Delivered a line of such delicacy it made

your heart sing and for a while anyway

patterned the smooth walls with sound or

brought the white faced Herefords a little closer.

Spillers Mill

Spiller’s Mill

Cycling past Spillers Mill the honeycombed

Structure once so full of flour and air is now a

Heap of rubble the machines crawl on

For improved purchase. The steel reinforcing

Hangs in the air at the edges of the torn

Down building the ground damp with dust.

What could be more than the

Twisting steel and the chunks of broken

Concrete hanging in the air like so many

Nodes on a circuit breaker. The engine of

Change becomes the pecker on the end

Of a big machine, working at the internal

Logic of a system that has no fault lines

And has to be torn out from the inside.

The rational machine. The irrationality

Of the thinking that says that nothing

Stays forever. Things do, the dust

Falling through the air, clouding. 

 

British Engines

Get it On

For Marc Bolan

Walking past British

Engines again, late and after

The summer sun has set

And where the men had

Shuffled up their feet

As the pram went past.

The forklifts come and go.

Valves big enough

For a baby to crawl

Through are palleted

Through the gates

To a heavy lorry

That cuts through

The dust from the demolition

Of the flour mill, the long arms

Of machinery pecking at the

Honeycombed structure that

Has no inner or outer.

Through the open windows

The Jeepster encourages getting

It on while the men in boiler

Suits get ready for the night shift

Their snap in carrier bags

Their eyes glazing over.

Mary and the Giant

Just finished re-reading Mary and the Giant by Philip K Dick. It's an astonishing book, and probably the best of his non-science fiction novels from the 1950s. It's certainly the only one to have a properly developed sympathetic female character, although young and often compared to a child, who is shown struggling to escape the restrictions of small town life. She tries to do it by replacing her violent and abusive father with older lovers, doomed to failure of course as she discovers, but an attempt all the same.

I'd given the novel less attention than some of the others for this project, simply because it is set in one town and therefore I remembered it as less to do with mobility. It is though, all to do with social mobility, and contains the most detailed discussion of race relations of the time, and a more progressive view of gender relations. The geography of the book is also very clearly imagined.

The town is not a default, or an assumed norm, but set in opposition to the suburbs. The black owner of the car wash where Schilling, who comes to town to set up a record store, first stops, is an example of a non-alienated worker who used to go on a bus to work in an airplane factory but now owns his own business in a small town, which he asserts is 'no suburb; this is a complete town.' It is one that has a 'colored section', but that is 'good enough.'

Whe Mary Anne is planning her escape from the town at the end of the novel one possibility that emerges is to move to 'one of the new suburbs, like Stonestown ... They say its right out of the future ... Some insurance company built it, the whole town.' (p. 201) If moving to a 'swanky new apartment' is one way of avoiding her history then another is through the automobility and independence provided by owning her car. Schilling tries to persuade her. 'There's a lot of satisfaction in owning your own car. You're not dependent on anybody; you can get up and go whenever you want. Late at night ... when the streets are deserted. Sometimes, when I can't sleep, I get up and go driving.' (p. 198).

Schilling's attempts to help her come to nothing. He was simply a stepping stone to something else. A sympathetic character, but one locked into particular gender relationships, he has become used by her, the young small town woman he was going to help, and she must now move on. She finally gets him to understand by kicking him on the shin.

The ending, like In Milton Lumky Territory, seems tagged on in an attempt to make the novel more 'commercial'. While it can be explained away as a kind of two world fantasy, whereparallel worlds exist, it is deeply unsatisfying.

First Post and Introduction

Raymond Loewy Studebaker, as featured in Voices in the Street.

This blog will provide an ongoing record of my current research project, which is examining the relationships between ideas of mobility and writing and writing practices from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

I publish my work in conventional academic ways through research monographs and papers, and you can find a list of my publications here at (http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/sass/about/humanities/englishhome/staff/englitstaff/I_Davidson/ ), but the aim of this blog is to provide something in-between the impermanence of the talk, and the formality of the academic publication.

So this is a bit like me talking, although talk that is independent of the usual constrictions of face to face conversation, and of course the technology allows you, the reader to talk back. So that’s another aim, to see if the ideas can be taken forward through conversation and dialogue.