Way with Words Festival, Dartington Hall 2018: Day Four - Finding Home

Poetry and the church go together like a finely aged cheddar and a bottle of red - at weddings and funerals especially – so it was unsurprising to hear that the speaker of today’s first talk, Why Be Poetic? was led by Canon Mark Oakley. A large, balding, smiling man, Oakley married (will the puns ever end?) humour and profundity in a talk which amused as much as it educated his audience on the finer points of poetry. His most profound image, for me, was the idea of poetry as the voice of a mother to an unborn child, a ‘soul language’ which we instantly recognise, even amid the distractions of everyday life. Regarding what makes a good poem, Oakley remarked that it should be like a rock thrown into water, its ripples having a wide-ranging (and ultimately positive) effect. This was rather appropriately balanced by his response to my later question regarding a quote by Iain Sinclair. For Sinclair, poetry is that ‘splinter of bone that is left when the rest of the skeleton has been devoured’¹ (enduring yet indigestible like a fish bone), to which Oakley remarked that poetry can also be like a fish: if it’s bad, it stinks. And considering how few words one often gets for their money in a book of poetry, that can be an expensive stink too! But when, as Oakley rightly continued, our poetry is very often dictated by the natural rhythms of our own bodies – our heartbeats and breaths – so we fall back into the ancient tradition of oral poetry, of creative listening, and of reconnecting with a voice that is so wholly home.

From one talk of finding home to one of losing it, I transitioned to Raynor Winn’s Walking Forward in the blissfully cool Barn. Having been given a week to vacate her home and the news of her husband Moth’s life-limiting illness all in the same week, Winn decided to walk the South-West Coast Path (as you do!) She described how surprisingly freeing and enlivening this decision was; how there, among the magical wonders of nature, Moth defied the consultant’s odds of survival. With it came the obvious financial problems which led to living off a single packet of instant noodles per day, and the bizarre realisation that she was ‘that sort’, the kind who scrounged pennies from a drain because it was all she had. When meeting people along the way, she explained how she and Moth always received the same uneasy reaction to the story of having ‘lost their home’, so she changed it; having ‘sold their home’, they became the ‘lucky bastards’ who could go wherever the wind took them. Yet not all encounters were as acidic, as she remarked that they’d met a homeless man who had embarked on the same journey after reading Winn’s article in The Big Issue. He claimed that being on this path had given him a sense of purpose. A second anecdote, however, made me smile as Winn recounted the time Moth was mistaken for the poet Simon Armitage who happened to be walking the South-West Coast Path at the same time. He and Winn were invited for dinner with a stranger who asked for a quick poem. All I could think was, I wonder how perplexed this stranger (and indeed Armitage himself) must have been when the real Simon Armitage came by? I couldn't quite muster the courage to ask, but I was at least pleased to hear that now, as Winn explained, things were looking better: they are renting a place, Moth is still alive (and was in the front row), and more writing (and walking) is definitely in their future.

¹ Sinclair, I. (ed.) (1996) Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology. London: Picador