Interview – Brevity

Q. You recently conceived and led a compelling series of outdoor, hands-on workshops for young people aged 16-25 on the West Wight. Tell us a little more about that project?
A. Yes, my partner and I drafted an Arts Council Project Grant last Summer and completed the workshop series over a 4 month residency over Autumn and Winter. For me, particularly in photography which is often gate-keeped with expensive equipment and overly technical
processes, it’s hugely important that the sessions I run are affordable and accessible to anyone. The series we conceived consolidated these ideas with the incredible source of local natural materials available in the west wight to create workshops that worked alongside nature and eco focused processes. These sessions included things like developing 35mm film with seaweed, or making natural dyes with the gorse flower found on the downs.

Perhaps even more relevant, particularly to the 16 – 25 age bracket we focused on, was creating sessions that allowed participants to work with their hands and on something new, whilst creating comfortable spaces to network and communicate. Though I’m not from the island, it was evident quite quickly that there is a lack of creative and social opportunities for young people on the Island (particularly in the West Wight), and for me it’s important to have exclusive spaces for certain demographics and communities. The issues different demographics face are often exclusive to that community, and so to create an environment where we can talk openly and relate to each other on those issues is hugely important.

Q. You’re a visual artist, a photographer – who are your influences, who moves you?
A. Including possibly fiction writers who inform your creative practice.
Though I’m a photographer, it’s pretty rare that I’m hugely influenced by other photographers. There are photographers who I admire and respect, but they’re generally not the ones who influence my practice. If I look at the work that gets me excited to create it generally follows more performative pieces, written work (often analytical but sometimes
fiction), and music.

My themes change fairly regularly, at the moment I’m finding myself asking a lot of questions around masculinity within urban spaces, and the relationship between my own understanding of gender and sex with the physical infrastructure and buildings around me.

As I think through these ideas of emotional man made landscapes, particularly in London where I currently live, I’m drawing back to a range of creative influences. I find Burial’s music, particularly their album ‘untrue’, reflects a lot of my feelings and thoughts on the topic, as well as books like ‘Alone in Berlin’, ‘London Belongs to Me’, and ‘Last Exit to Brooklyn’, which all explore different personalities and stories in direct relation to the physical and political contexts they exist in. Their methods of written description are exactly what I look to
convey visually in my visual work; delicate and beautiful with heavier theoretical undertones.

Q. How do you imagine the Queer in Nature walk/talk might inspire the work of new and experienced Island writers?
A. Coming to a writing workshop from a photographic education, I hope my guided walk helps to give a new perspective on creative writing and our influences. Often I find myself stuck creatively, particularly when I’m trying to overthink or over engineer an idea, and generally the best solution to that is to give yourself an instruction or visual task completely separate from your natural way of working.

I hope the session helps to introduce a new way of thinking around descriptions and identities, and by the end of the session participants could have a new set of ‘building blocks’ of writing which can help us describe certain values and identities.

Q. You’ve talked about ‘finding infinite ways to describe and identify ourselves’ – give us a hint how examining and considering plant life makes that possible.
A. Particularly in queer identity, written language often fails us. There are literal examples of this in latin based languages, where everything is gendered and words for certain identities simply don’t exist yet; but also more complicated issues around strict labelling and language when trying to convey our very-much-fluid identities. By illustrating what we
relate to and identify as through abstract ideas and objects, like plants for example. I hope participants feel they can be as nonspecific and uncommitted to these ‘labels’ as they like, whilst still conveying the ideas of an identity.

Q. You’ve led a number of workshops and projects; do you have a top tip for fashioning creative spaces and projects that are safe, welcoming, inclusive and inspiring?
A. Primarily there are practical things I tend to do in all of the sessions I host and facilitate, as well as the queer party I work on. Making it clear that by attending the sessions you are agreeing to a respect and no-discrimination rule, by introducing my pronouns at the beginning and inviting others to do the same (again pushing that these are trans and NB
friendly spaces), and reiterating that if anyone needs to take a break or leave there is no pressure to stay; its generally important at a workshop to allocate a separate quite space away from the session as a break room, particularly when working with neurodivergent participants.

On a deeper level; I don’t run classes, I run workshops, I’m showing a process but certainly not telling anyone how to use that process. There is a natural power dynamic between the facilitator and the participants, and the workshops I see work the best tend to try to neutralise this power dynamic from the get go. Understanding that all the participants will be able to bring their own ideas and practises to the session, and holding those ideas as of equal importance to your own. By doing this we unlock beautiful sessions of skill sharing, experimentation and communication between the participants.

As part of the Hear Me Now project George Budden, a London-based photographer, will lead an inspirational walk entitled Queer Nature starting from The Red Lion pub in Freshwater on 25 May, 12.30 to 2.30pm. The walk is FREE of charge thanks to support from Arts Council England. To reserve your place on the walk, email caroline@stonecrabs.co.uk

Q. What is the best advice you can give a new reader of poetry?

A. Try to be still, silent, undistracted. Try to be open and receptive, like royal ferns (osmunda regalis) in waiting elegance, awash with early spring light and completely present. Try to leave any notions of ‘meaning’ at the door.

The sound of a poem is a living, direct, unmediated communication of something we can never describe. It’s intuitive, not an intellectual exercise. To paraphrase DH Lawrence: the imaginative experience is a movement of vivid association which involves the whole body and soul. So, it’s important to read the poem aloud, hear the poem, memorise poems that speak to you. Engage with all the poets from the past.

Q. Similarly, do you have a top tip for new writers of poetry?

A. I have never written a single poem – and poems always arrive joyfully unexpected – by sitting in front of a blank page with the intention of writing. They find me. I’m always surprised – they’re gifts. I think that’s important. As Derek Mahon said ‘the poems flow from the hand unbidden, and the hidden source is the watchful heart.’

Go outside. Try to pay undeflected attention to where you are. Try to listen to the music of wildness, the music of silence. We’re part of them; they’re part of us. Real poetry is born of this relationship. As Thoreau said, ‘in wildness is the preservation of the world’, and I’d add that poetry is part of the preservation of wildness. When I pay attention enough to see goldfinches playing in marsh thistles, or if I am clothed in quietness enough to hear sea wind passing through the foliage of Tasmanian Blue Gum or Whitebeam trees, then wildness is encountered. The appearance, in all its mystery and wildness, of poetry, is a similar kind of encounter. I think the poetry that comes out of this is an immediate response to unknown, beautiful moments, a way of revering the intimacy of their mysteries, and of saying thank you.

There’s a line in Thoreau where he says that for all of our pretence of ‘knowing’ things, places, selves, others, most of the time our engagement is superficial. Poetry, on the contrary, deepens, allows a space in which mystery may cultivate this attentive way of looking which enables one to recognise the poetry of place, and ultimately the beauty of being alive. Try to follow ‘the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen’ (Thoreau).

Learn from other poets, from their lives and poems. Read poems every day. Be devoted to your own personal vocation or calling. Try not to have any intentions or preconceptions about what you’ll write. Try to keep faith all day with the incomprehensible demand of poetry, as Jane Hirshfield says. Remember what Robert Graves said about examining your conscience in relation to the White Goddess who demands, after all, full-time, not part time service.

Q. Do you read your poems aloud to yourself? Must poetry be read aloud?

A. Always. I memorise some of them. I carry them with me all the time. When reading poems I think the living sound, the personal voice, is crucial in experiencing each poem. It’s a meeting between our present and the present of the poem. It’s intimate. I’m moved when I hear the late W.S. Merwin talk about this. He said ‘I believe that poems begin with hearing and listening. One listens until one hears something.’

Q. Is there a contemporary poet you’d highly recommend reading, one-to-watch, so to speak? And is there an older, possibly departed poet who you feel has been overlooked, deserving of recognition and readership?

A. There are two contemporary poets in particular I’d like to mention. One is Lydia Fulleylove, another Island poet. I recently found a copy of her book Estuary. Much of it resonates. I love the last poem in that book, which imagines ‘if all days / might bring / long shining walks / in high places.’

Sam Davidson is the other one, he’s from Hythe. I was fortunate enough to read alongside him a few years ago now at Quarr Abbey. Like me, he’s a former intern there. His book Love’s Many Names is wonderful.

As for departed poets, I’d like to mention a holy trinity of mine: G.M. Hopkins, John Clare, Ivor Gurney. I love Hopkins for the intensity, the honesty, the spiritual integrity. Hearing Clare’s work aloud is among the most beautiful things in the language. And Gurney’s lyric passion for his native Cotswolds, his intimate sense of the skyscape and of looking through trees across the horizon – it’s inspiring.

Q. How does living on the Isle of Wight influence your work?

A. It was in Ventnor, beside a whitebeam tree, looking across the bay, that I first had an inkling of poetry as my vocation. My poems often sing of the sacramental beauty, as I experience it, of the Isle of Wight’s south-eastern corner. When I walk the Downs or the Landslip, the cliff paths or Chines, I find myself unexpectedly a guest at the wedding feast of its beauty. The ever-present wedding of the natural and the sacramental, it’s this that entered and granted almost all of the poems in my recent work The Shock of Silence.

Q. If you weren’t writing poetry, what might you be doing instead?

A. I don’t know. Working on a kiwi farm in southwestern France, perhaps. I did that during last year’s harvest. It was beautiful to be outdoors with the fruit-filled trees, the soapworts flowering on the river bank, and the spiked manes of daneworts shining in November rain and sunlight. I wrote a thesis on Samuel Beckett and used to ‘teach’ literature in a university, so maybe something like that.

In these last few years poems have been finding me almost every day, and I’d rather not imagine my world without them. As it is, I am grateful that ‘what I do not understand leads me to wait / for the shy wildness of coltsfoots / trusting, trusting only / the miracles they have touched.’ It goes back to William Blake, who said: I know of ‘no other Gospel than the liberty both of mind and body to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination.’

Blake Everitt was born in 1989 and lives on the Isle of Wight. His most recent book of poetry is The Shock of Silence and his work has also appeared in a range of periodicals, including Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics, Open: A Journal of Arts and Letters, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts, Hawk & Whippoorwill, Harbinger Asylum, The Dawntreader, The Poetry Village, and Drawn to the Light Press. His work has also appeared in Brevity Issues 4. & 7.