Entry, 06.05.24 . Spring . 'Voicing the Beck' Workshop with Tom Branfoot and St Nicks nature reserve, York
On a Friday lunchtime in York with the rain still deciding whether or not to fall, I pack up the day’s teaching materials and drive over to St Nicks to meet Tom Branfoot ahead of his ecopoetry workshop on the grammar of water with Tang Hall beck. By the time I arrive at the environment centre it is raining, as if the water wants to be heard. When Tom arrives, already a little sodden, we make straight for the tea that St Nicks’ staff have kindly put on, already needing to warm up.
Tom’s is the second of a series of poetry workshops entangling students, researchers and local creatives with St Nicks nature reserve in Tang Hall, York. With the guidance and support of Anthony Capildeo we tested a ‘prototype’ workshop in November (you can read about it here), using the responses from this workshop to apply for funding for a further four workshops throughout the Spring and Summer of 2024. These workshops explore our relationship to water in a city that is historically prone to flooding, our role in water management, and how we learn to live with and understand our place in a landscape that water can alter drastically. In today’s workshop, I am keen for Tom to bring his experience in poetic research into the urban environmental and socio-historical pasts of Bradford, which he explores in his debut collection Boar (Broken Sleep Books, 2023), to help us understand water at St Nicks. One of the aims of this workshop is to find ways of gathering and archiving the nature reserve through found poetry, repurposing archival records of flood and St Nicks’ site history.
We begin the workshop by asking everyone there what they understood by ‘ecopoetry’. A mixture of local poets, undergraduates and researchers from the University of York, and St Nicks staff, their responses vary: ecopoetry is poetry about nature, poetry that places the human/urban alongside nature, poetry that explores the politics of human involvement with nature. We ask, what has been their experience of St Nicks? It is a place of recuperation, wellness, an escape from the city. This introduction is followed by a brief history of the nature reserve site from its Victorian brickworks, to landfill, to nature reserve, led by St Nicks’ David. Tom then asks us to read Zaffar Kunial’s ‘Ings’, from England’s Green (2022). We think about how you capture a sense of place through poetry, the way Kunial captures the town of Ings in the poem. We ask who accesses nature, and whether the urban or anthropocene interrupts or enhances our interaction with nature in the poem. Following this, Tom picks up on the concept of -ings as a way in to thinking about a grammar of water. This must be movement, an opposite of stasis, a way of creating openings through which to think water. He leads us down to Tang Hall beck (it is still raining). To begin encountering the nature reserve through poetry, Tom gives us a set of instructions to practice the grammar of water. These are almost spell-like: first listen, and write five ‘-ing’s to record the water; then walk five steps; then listen again, and write five more ‘-ing’s; and so on…
whiting
breaching
rusting
whistling
blotting
warping
sickening
pricking
weightening
furring
rooting
bogging
shuddering
singing
absorbing
resting
unmoving
trolleying
encountering
existing*
breaching
rusting
whistling
blotting
warping
sickening
pricking
weightening
furring
rooting
bogging
shuddering
singing
absorbing
resting
unmoving
trolleying
encountering
existing*
With these watery gatherings, we return to the environment centre to write and reflect. We take archival flood reports, and text from St Nicks' website, using our -ings to write into these and to recreate a version of the reserve voiced through the grammar of water.
How has my understanding of water changed, having thought with this grammar of water? In the week’s preceding the workshop itself, I took Tom to St Nicks to show him the site – the ‘text’ he would be working with. As we sat in the pouring rain by Tang Hall beck, we reflected on the strangeness of nature writing that excludes the urban, or the built human, from ‘nature’. St Nicks is neighboured by residential streets, busy roads, and working yards. It is as much a listening bowl for bird song as it is for cranes, diggers, and electric white noise. On the day of Tom’s workshop, the water level in the beck was lower than I had seen it before, despite the rain; emerging from the receded surface was a rusted, warped shopping trolley. As a group, we joked about this large act of littering – could we see which supermarket it belonged to, and did Asda, Tesco, or Aldi want it back? But the trolley is present in the notes of almost every workshop participant, rooting itself in the working of each poetic line of enquiry, a shadow of the noisy city we have come here to forget. The becks of St Nicks are as much formed of these human shadows as they are of ‘nature’.
*With thanks to the attendees of this workshop, Sián, Mia, Rebecca, Arabella, Fran, Eithne, and David, for their permission to use extracts from their work.
Entry, 12.12.23 . Autumn . 'Voicing the Beck' workshop with St Nicks nature reserve, York
The following post documents the first in a series of workshops aimed at exploring and archiving St Nicks' environmental history, past and present, through poetry. If you are interested in being involved in future workshops, please email [email protected].
On a rainy morning in November, the River Ouse had flooded its banks. It had completely submerged Dame Judi Dench walk at the bottom of Museum Gardens, rising up past the elaborate stonework of the arches by Lendal Bridge. Keeping close enough to the river to observe it, I hurried in my raincoat through town, along Walmgate then Lawrence Street and turning off at Bull Lane – past the mosque and the backs of brick terraced houses – to St Nicks Nature Reserve. From one flooding waterway to another, I had come to this layered place to listen to two becks where they meet, as part of a Water Poetics workshop led by poet/researcher Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Green Corridors officer Maria Gill, and myself.
*With thanks to the attendees of this workshop, Sián, Mia, Rebecca, Arabella, Fran, Eithne, and David, for their permission to use extracts from their work.
From the medieval period to the present day, St Nicks in Tang Hall has been a site of fluid and straying environments. It has been fishpond, marsh, meadow, landfill, and now nature reserve. At each stage of its history, the site's landscape has been altered by the city's residents. The way we understand our relationship to this environment is also in flux, moving from land management for resource use to land management in conservation. Most recently, as part of their Green Corridors project, the staff and volunteers of St Nicks are rewilding Osbaldwick Beck to restore natural water flow.
In a city that is historically prone to flooding, how do we understand our relationship to water? What is our role in water management and how do we learn to live with and understand our place in a landscape that water can alter drastically? These were the questions we had come to St Nicks to answer, calling to its two becks, Tang Hall Beck and Osbaldwick Beck (called ‘Ozzy Beck’ by its more frequent visitors) for poetic response. |
A collection of local poets, researchers, and students, we met at St Nicks conservation centre. Emerging in drips, we sat steaming by the welcome heat of the centre's stove -- icy rain hung over the trees outside. To begin, we gathered the strands of St Nicks’ environmental history. From Maria, who works for St Nicks as Green Corridors officer, we learnt about its development from monastic land in the Middle Ages, to common land (or ‘stray’), to its use as a landfill site and eventually its reclamation for wildlife under the conservation of St Nicks.
Next, Anthony Vahni Capildeo invited us out into the nature reserve to ‘listen concentrically’ to the becks. We listened for ‘water’ in all its forms: liquid [beck flow, rain drop, mist, breath, mud]; animal [bird, human, squirrel, water vole ?]; plant [tree, leaf fall, leaf crunch]. We wrote its voices onto a map – the borderlines of St Nicks - archiving an echo or run-off of beck voices:
Next, Anthony Vahni Capildeo invited us out into the nature reserve to ‘listen concentrically’ to the becks. We listened for ‘water’ in all its forms: liquid [beck flow, rain drop, mist, breath, mud]; animal [bird, human, squirrel, water vole ?]; plant [tree, leaf fall, leaf crunch]. We wrote its voices onto a map – the borderlines of St Nicks - archiving an echo or run-off of beck voices:
rumble – reversing warning – flowing folding – traffic
gulls calling – crow speaks – Reversing? Reversing?
speaks speaks echoing between trees
…
(by Jessie Summerhayes)
gulls calling – crow speaks – Reversing? Reversing?
speaks speaks echoing between trees
…
(by Jessie Summerhayes)
sounds that sound / move like water
scrunch
crow plop ripple.
caw plop ribble
aah rissle
kraa ribble
(by Anthony Vahni Capildeo)
scrunch
crow plop ripple.
caw plop ribble
aah rissle
kraa ribble
(by Anthony Vahni Capildeo)
Maps and Images
fig. 1, Risograph outline of St Nicks nature reserve, credit Becca Drake and Lily Clementine Orsino
fig. 2, Osbaldwick Beck, credit Google Maps
fig. 3, St Nicks Nature Reserve, credit St Nicks
figs. 4 & 5, Poets at St Nicks, credit Becca Drake
fig. 6, Poem map of St Nicks' environmental history, credit Anthony Capildeo
fig. 1, Risograph outline of St Nicks nature reserve, credit Becca Drake and Lily Clementine Orsino
fig. 2, Osbaldwick Beck, credit Google Maps
fig. 3, St Nicks Nature Reserve, credit St Nicks
figs. 4 & 5, Poets at St Nicks, credit Becca Drake
fig. 6, Poem map of St Nicks' environmental history, credit Anthony Capildeo
With thanks to Dr Francesca Brooks for her generous mentorship in heritage outreach workshops such as 'Wordcraft' which has greatly inspired and laid the groundwork for this work.
Entry, 15.06.23 . an illustration . 'Figures of Wood'
This week I have been on a kind of pilgrimage to 'Florrie's places', that is, the landscapes around Coanwood, Lambley, and Haltwhistle where my Grandmother grew up. More on this family fieldwork in another post. It was a lovely surprise to wake in my tent, groggy-eyed and in desperate need of coffee, to find Layla's email in my inbox sharing her illustration of one of my poems from the Hull Maritime Project. Layla emailed me a few weeks ago asking if she could illustrate one of my poems to submit as her entry for the Northern Illustration Awards. Her beautifully textured greyscale work is so highly evocative of the bleak (but beautiful) land/waterscape of Spurn Point, about which and where Figures of Wood was written, that she seems to have looked inside my head as I was writing it.
© Layla Jabbari, 2023
Figures of wood at Spurn Point, 2020
Leaning on the grog, lines of lives
of women waiting a watch, those wives
of the North Sea, stooped. Some fall,
some crumble, some drown, and some stand
tall, reeling around this finger of land
the spool of hours between the tides.
Leaning on the grog, lines of lives
of women waiting a watch, those wives
of the North Sea, stooped. Some fall,
some crumble, some drown, and some stand
tall, reeling around this finger of land
the spool of hours between the tides.
Layla Jabbari is a freelance illustrator from Hull, UK, longlisted for the World Illustration Awards 2023. She works closely with clients on work that often has story-telling and community at its centre. Her projects have involved a variety of outcomes from prints and zines to community art. Her clients include the University of Hull and the Environment Agency. She has had work published in Artist Responding To magazine and the Critical Fish publication. Her work playfully combines materials, collage, paint and photography layered in the digital space. You can view more of Layla's work here.
Layla's work is published on this site with her kind permission. All copyright belongs to the artist and this work may not be reproduced or shared without her permission.
Layla's work is published on this site with her kind permission. All copyright belongs to the artist and this work may not be reproduced or shared without her permission.