Secret Spots
Abandoned railway tunnel in Dulwich & Sydenham Woods
Time Out asked me to select five secret spots in London for their readers.
this is yogic
I am the island
March 12, 2013
That an Horse hath no gall
A horse in a field is worth two in the hand Applejack is a reliable and hard-working pony, although headstrong about doing things on her own[1] take horses for an example, if you look closely you notice that all horses have exactly the same face[2] Glueing coconuts to your dogs feet so people think you have a horse[3]
Hi-yo, Silver! Next to the running horse pub on Davies street in london under an orange cone I left a signed ten pound note[4] A galloping horse gathers no moss crushed white chalk[5] a glittering glass eye, formed from bottles pressed neck-first into the ground[6] they also create snowflakes and rainbows in special factories[7]
A horse in need is a horse indeed hooded and faceless, mounted on a huge snarling black horse with insane eyes![8] Swing Bill 9-1, Stewarts House 9-1, Barrel of Laughs 11-2[9] Cannon to the right of them, Cannon to the left of them[10] Black horse hooves… snarling horse mouths… a fleeting black cowl[11] A horse paints a thousand words Enfants, faites manger vos chevaux de guerre[12] the Earth ponies who are seen bucking trees and hauling heavy ploughs[13]
HELLO , MY NAME IS AMIR SYAFIQ. I AM BLACK BEAUTY. MY SECOND OWNER GAVE THE NAME TO ME BECAUSE I HAVE A BEAUTIFUL COAT[14] HELLO , MY NAME IS TAJUDDIN. I WILL BE ACTING AS GINGER IN THIS CHAPTER. I AM A TALL HORSE. MY COAT IS BROWN[15]
Good horses make good neighbours Eddy Waller [...] once told of Lane making unpublicized visits to children’s hospitals[16] (on an unidentified horse)[17] a little sticky in the early stages[18] Cannon to the left of them[19] they soar among the clouds, they rain down jellybeans We had to wear knee-high rubber boots IT`S NO USE. THERE`S NOTHING I CAN DO ANYMORE. EXCEPT BEAR IT. I WISH I DEAD. DEAD HORSE DON`T SUFFER.[20] I fucking told you horses are ignorant cunts[21] A horse walks into a bar
An Englishman, an Irishman and a horse walk into a bar I know a horse from a handsaw a large, odd-toed ungulate mammal The horse orders a drink and a packet of dry roasted peanuts by means of optically stimulated luminescence dating[22] During the Iron Pony Competition, she resorts to using her wings in many of the contests, which Applejack regards as cheating since she does not have wings herself[23] DEAD HORSE DON’T SUFFER they rain down jellybeans Useless horse![24] on a horse![25] never got a Charlie horse[26] Chaucer loved this kinda stuff overbearing horses they have a special magic only humans can access[27]
Once a horse, always a horse Once upon a horse
[1] My Little Pony, http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Applejack
[2] Abigail Oborne, ‘Portraits of a seaside town no.3’
[3] @iSpeakComedy, 11.11.11
[4] @flea333, 10.11.11
[5] Uffington
[6] Cherhill
[7] My Little Pony, http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Pegasus_ponies
[8] Lord of the Rings film script, http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Lord-of-the-Rings-Fellowship-of-the-Ring,-The.html
[9] Cheltenham, 13.10 11.11.11
[10] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’
[11] Lord of the Rings film script, http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Lord-of-the-Rings-Fellowship-of-the-Ring,-The.html
[12] Prosper Mérimée, Lokis: Le manuscrit du Professeur Wittembach, http://www.pitbook.com/textes/pdf/lokis.pdf
[13] My Little Pony, http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Pegasus_ponies
[15] Ibid
[17] Ibid
[18] Will Hayler, Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/nov/11/live-racing-cheltenham-november-11-2011
[19] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’
[21] http://ifuckinghatehorses.com
[22] Uffington
[23] My Little Pony, http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Rainbow_Dash
[24] @IleKara, 11.11.11
[25] @_Hollymd_ 11.11.11
[26] @JuiceCOURTuree 11.11.11
January 25, 2013
Dear World & Everyone In It
Delighted to have four poems in a new anthology from Bloodaxe Books, launched last night at the Poetry Library, followed by a session of hard-drinking around Waterloo from which I am still recovering. Edited by Nathan Hamilton, Dear World & Everyone In It is described as
the first British anthology to attempt to define a generation through a properly representative cross-section of work and a fully collaborative editorial process [...] this anthology represents more effectively and appropriately a new generational mood – hybrid, playful, collaborative, ambitious, inclusive, cooperative.
I’ve not got my copy yet, but the list of contributors is extremely wide-ranging. I’m looking forward to discovering some new voices.
You can buy it direct from the publishers here.
January 12, 2013
Poetry and the boundaries of plagiarism
I’m fascinated by this recent story. Christian Ward, a 32-year old poet from London with whom I’ve communicated occasionally on social networking, has been found to have plagiarised a poem by Helen Mort (whom I also know – in the real world). Christian’s poem, ‘The Deer’, won a local poetry competition in Devon, where the story was broken on 5th January. Save a few words, it’s identical to Helen’s poem of the same title.
Today a statement, by way of apology, has appeared from Ward. It’s not exactly unequivocal though, and that’s what interests me.
I was working on a poem about my childhood experiences in Exmoor and was careless. I used Helen Mort’s poem as a model for my own but rushed and ended up submitting a draft that wasn’t entirely my own work.
I had no intention of deliberately plagiarising her work. That is the truth.
It’s that phrase ‘I used Helen Mort’s poem as a model for my own’ which I find so intriguing. He seems to think that’s a fair explanation, that this mode of working is acceptable. But for me, this raises two questions. Firstly, what does using a poem as a model really mean in practice? Do you start with a source text and then start make edits to it? Do you just copy the theme, or the movement of ideas, or the formal techniques? Secondly, at what point in this process does the text become your own?
Perhaps we’ll never know with this work, because Ward claims he ‘rushed and ended up submitting a draft’. Is there another draft, where we might discover how he has transformed Helen’s text into something original of his own? I’d be fascinated to read it!
The wider debate that this minor scandal might provoke is where artistic inspiration and/or appropriation becomes plagiarism. Which in turn asks us to consider what can and cannot be owned by an individual author or creative artist.
Of course this debate is as old as writing itself. TS Eliot had something to say about it:
Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.
In the past, perhaps poets were less desperate for the original, the authentically inspired, and more content to situate their work in a dynamic with the past. Only two of Shakespeare‘s 37 plays have original plots. At the end of Troilus & Criseyde, Chaucer commends his work to ‘subgit be to alle poesye; / And kis the steppes, wher-as thou seest pace / Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.’
David Shields, in his provocative book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, argues for a mash-up culture where everything is remixed, appropriated, open source. This is a somewhat radical position, but also one which has its roots in the Dadaist practice of collage.
Only recently, I published an anthology of poems that included a collage piece by Jon Stone. Jon had collaged reviews by the sci-fi critic David Langford, which caused some embarassment when David came to review the book for The Telegraph. In this instance, the problem – in my opinion (I have no idea about the legal status) – was not one of plagiarism, because the collage process had created a text that was utterly different in its appearance and effects, but of etiquette: Jon had simply forgotten to credit his source.
So perhaps we might say there is: deliberate plagiarism, accidental plagiarism (e.g. Ward, if we believe him – he has also confessed to plagiarising a Tim Dooley poem), deliberate appropriation (e.g. Stone), and finally accidental appropriation.
However we define it, I can’t help feel that Christian Ward’s misdemeanour is a symptom of a wider problem in British poetry: the dominance of creative writing courses, competitions, workshops, and their cumulative dissemination of a derivative and usually conservative poetic. Editors like me often complain of reading lots of poems that sound the same, that share a similar form, tone, turn of phrase, even subject matter. But isn’t cliche just a collectively agreed definition of plagiarism? Ward’s mistake wasn’t sending the wrong draft of his poem – it was thinking that ‘working from a model’ was a process that would lead to anything worth reading in the first place.
An artist’s depiction of the poet
January 8, 2013
Silence is golden
I’m not blogging much at the moment, but there’s plenty going on over here at the ADRIFT tumblr.
November 15, 2012
New Cartography
Chuffed to have an essay in the latest incarnation of The New Wolf – New Cartography.
Have a read (my contribution is on p.53).
October 2, 2012
Random Acts
Tonight – Tuesday 2 October – my poetry made its TV debut on Channel 4′s Random Acts. My poem ‘The Event’ has been turned into an animated short film by the horrendously talented New York-based artist Julia Pott. Here it is above, on Vimeo. I think she’s done a great job of bringing the poem, with its apocalpytic romance and hints of climate catastrophe and banking crisis, to life. Thank you, Julia. And thank you also to the producer, Carrie Thomas.
If you’ve arrived on this blog after watching the film, thank you for your curiosity. You might like to get hold of my first book How to Build a City (Salt, 2009), my pamphlet The Terrors (Nine Arches, 2009), or find out more about the project I’m currently doing about climate change and the city. Cheers.
And here’s the poem, in full. (Please don’t reproduce without permission.)
Tom
October 1, 2012
London’s Golgotha
Last night I was letting my eye wander around the late sixteenth century Agas Map (as reproduced by the London Topographical Society in their handsome A to Z of Elizabethan London). I’m pretty familiar with the Agas, but I came across a mysterious feature I’d not noticed before.
See that hill to the right, directly underneath ‘CIVITAS’? It’s identified by Prockter & Taylor of the LTS – and subsequently by the online project MoEML – as Mount Calvary. I’ve never heard of this, or even of a hill being in that location.
Its location, if you believe the map, is between present day Goswell Road and Central Street, just north of the City. I guess you’d call this area Finsbury. If you look carefully, you can make out a windmill on its summit.
Some internet research on this mysterious hill comes up with the Chapel of Mount Calvary without Aldersgate, identified by John Strype in his 1720 updating of John Stow‘s famous 1598 Survey of London. As follows:
There is (at the farthest North Corner of this Suburb) a Windmil, which was sometime by a Tempest of Wind overthrown, and in a Place thereof a Chapel was builded by Queen Katharine (first Wife to Henry the Eighth) who named it the Mount of Calvary, because it was of Christ’s Passion and was in the End of Henry the Eighth pulled down, and a Windmil newly set up as afore.
Calvary, of course, is the Latin name for the hill outside Jerusalem on which Christ was crucified (Wikipedia). Its Aramaic name is Golgotha, meaning Place of the Skull. Its site, at least according to tradition, is underneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and is a major pilgrimage destination. Calvary is a common enough name for a church or chapel, especially in the Catholic tradition and especially on hilltop locations, such as the tiny chapel in Pollenca, Majorca.
Climbing to these high Calvary chapels is a form of pilgrimage, tracing Christ’s last journey. On Good Friday, Pollenca becomes a theatre for el Davallament, the Descent from Calvary, when a statue of Christ is carried from the chapel down the Camina del Calvari to the town.
There is evidently no Chapel in our Mount Calvary by the time of the Agas Map, but the name seems to have stuck. Nearby, to the east, lies Finsbury proper, and Bunhill Fields, with its famous nonconformist cemetery (where Blake, Defoe and Bunyan lie). Blake, no doubt, would have loved the London-as-New Jerusalem vibes of Mount Calvary. Bunhill is a corruption of an earlier name, Bone Hill, which appears to have been acquired after the deposition of bones on the fields in 1549 – to make room in St Paul’s charnel house. But it’s also worth noting that Finsbury Circus, to the south-east of our hill, is the site of a Roman burial ground, described by archaeologist Natasha Powers as an ‘odd cemetery’ with its marsh conditions, and its burials in crouched position and decapitated.
So… Bunhill is Bone Hill, and Mount Calvary – the Place of the Skull. This landscape is getting pretty morbid.
The clearest mention of our site I can find is a City of London deed for the block of land between Goswell Road, Seward Street and Central Street which corresponds with our hill (summary here). The deed appears to trace the City’s ownership back to 1530 and states:
Former names of this property were No Man’s Land, The Mount & Windmill Hill, & it was in the parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate up to 1733, & St. Luke [Old Street], Mx thereafter
Now, at least, I have some more names, some more leads.
At the risk of extending beyond the realms of intelligent speculation, I wonder if there might be a connection between our hill and nearby Clerkenwell (bottom-left of the Agas map thumbnail), where it’s known Mystery Plays were performed at the Skinner’s or Clerk’s Well. Perhaps a perambulatory Passion Play of the kind found in medieval York or present-day Pollenca might have culminated in an ascent of Mount Calvary?
My next steps will be to research those alternative names – ‘No Man’s Land’ and ‘The Mount’ – and of course to visit the site. Are there any traces of the hill left, or has it been entirely obliterated by the modern city? Google Streetview certainly thinks so – the skyline is dominated by the high-rise Thistle Barbican hotel, and the area looks flat at best.
If you have any information that can help identify this enigmatic hill, London’s Golgotha, please leave a comment below or email me directly on info (at) pennedinthemargins.co.uk – I’d be most grateful for any help in tracing this strange London locus.
~
ADDENDA (02.10.12)
Lots of great feedback and ideas on my original post, many via Facebook and Twitter. Thank you all.
Firstly – and I can’t believe I didn’t spot this the first time round – there’s a tiny street called Mount Mills within the bounds of our site (map).
The archaeologist Heather Knight (MOLA) has alerted me to her excavations on Seward Street EC1, from which she identifies the site as a 15th century windmill mound made of dumped rubbish. Her results are published in The Transactions of the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society (59, 2008) which I am going to find and read ASAP.
This webpage has lots of interesting information about burial sites in our area. The author, with some help from Peter Ackroyd’s London, identifies plague pits on Seward Street and Mount Mill.
Finally, Dr Anthony Bale (Birkbeck) runs a fascinating blog about Calvary chapels and late medieval European re-imaginings of Jerusalem.
~
(03.10.12)
John Finn, via London Historians, says:
Tom, I can’t add much to your research from the time of the map, but I’d always assumed that in the next century, during the Civil War, it may have been incorporated into the Lines of Communication, the massive earthwork thrown up around London to protect it from possible attack by a Royalist army. The defence work, built by 20,000 Londoners, was strongest on the north side in anticipation that the attack would be from that direction and the biggest works, ramparts and bastions were on the section in Islington, across Goswell Road and St John’s Street. There was a great bastion at Mount Mill alongside Goswell Road, where today, behind the Ivy pub at Seward Street, the road is still called Mount Mill and leads to a slight though visible rising in the ground. After the Royalist danger had passed, the earthwork was torn down by Cromwell afraid that it might be used against the Parliamentarians by City men who were changing sides, as the War began to eat into their fortunes. So that great landmark might have partly disappeared then. I think I read that it was also later a plague pit and a dung hill!
It would certainly explain why what was a significant hill in the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries is no longer visible.
This webpage from English Heritage backs up John’s suggestion:
Fort Number 6 of London’s Civil War defences was located at what is now the land between Goswell Road and Central Street, north of Seward street. According to Lithgow this was the earliest of the defensive works. The common council resolution called for a battery and beastwork, but Lithgow described it as a central, circular redoubt within a lower, outer earthwork of five angles. A description of this fort in 1643 is the only other contemporary account of the defences. Rocque’s map of 1746 shows that three large mounds still remained in 1746, and indicate that the fort had a side 300 metres long. One of the bastions of the fort stood at the junction of Sebastian Street.
Bloody Cromwell…
August 14, 2012
Edinburgh Festival 2012
I’ve just returned from a four-day trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Fifteen shows, over twenty-five hours of performance. A real mix of the very good, the very bad and the ugly.
My top three shows
1. Thin Ice @ Pleasance Courtyard (Shams)
2. Machines for Living @ Zoo (Let Slip)
3. Comedian Dies in the Middle of Joke @ Pleasance (Ross Sutherland / Show + Tell)
Biggest disappointment
2008: Macbeth @ Edinburgh International Festival (TR Warszawa)
Tweets
I was tweeting throughout @thisisyogic and you can follow my trip below.
