Rob Cowen

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Rob Cowen is an award-winning journalist and writer. He received the Roger Deakin Award for his first book Skimming Stones and Other Ways of Being in the Wild, and read for us this week  from his second, Common Ground. He began with a reading ‘from the beginning, which is a very good place to start.’ His reference to Alice in Wonderland set us burrowing into his own wonderland that was to follow, of March Hares (male and female, not male and male), Tarka the Otter, anthracite hills and silvergold sunrises.

Reading One

One

Common Ground is a book about the liminal, circling around Bilton, a patch of edge-land just outside Harrogate. It also seeks the subliminal, excavating layers of existence:  the human layers of railways, royal hunting grounds and redundancy in the recession, in a ‘world where fractions of other fractions being bet against other fractions by guys in a glass tower in Canary Wharf’; of watching a fox and documenting its smells, movements, and motivations; of lying in a hollow, senses alive to sunlight and sound, eroding the distance between human and nature in a visceral, fragile moment of connection with a roe deer; of discovering, through becoming a father, that the distance between the green of ‘nature’ and the pink and red of flesh and blood is non-existent.

Fox Reading

Two

Seeking a place of retreat, Cowen ranges off to ‘relentlessly’ explore his edge-land; not to journey as a pilgrim, nor as the writer of a field guide, stating the density of hair follicles on an animal’s fur, Latin names for plants, or specifying species, but as a forensic investigator of place, as if divining by sense and words what had flowed through there before. He wrote, he said, 150,000 words of notes before even beginning the book. In this next reading, we hear him tracking a fox on a cold January night.

Huntsman

Three

Following the fox, the map became ‘cluttered, complicated and different.’ Cowen talked with enthusiasm throughout, from comparing the paired “Twit” and “Woo” of Tawny owl calls reverberating around hills to ‘something from a Phil Spector record’, to seeing the land as a ‘prism’ through which to view ‘different times and human conditions’ of life past and present, whether it be animal, shrub or person. This merging of of viewpoints draws ‘new maps’ of connections between people and nature, and Cowen finds these by going through the edges, whether psychological, geographical or historical.  His final reading enters the realm of humans-as-animals and animals-as-humans, while rejecting a ‘Disney’ anthropomorphism; he enters the mind of the deer that jumped his body, and then allows that deer, in turn, to embody the man that hunts it. The book goes beyond the classifications of genre (something of a running theme in this term’s Reading Series), blurring the bounds and edges between memoir, fiction and non-fiction.

Afterwards there was time for questions and Cowen explained how, in Common Ground, he was looking to ‘pull about’ the dividing line between man and nature. He pointed to plant pots, paintings of landscapes, and nature television programmes to demonstrate a need to be close to nature and of how the line is not finite and concrete, if it even exists. He repeated his desire to write a ‘sense of place’ rather than a guide to viewing it. He went to extemporise on Hares, Easter eggs, land legislation and the birth of his child.

Cowen described the difficult process of reducing words down, of chiseling at them with hard work to make them into the final book. He finished by talking of the metre of a line of text, and of how if it doesn’t deliver a sense of the place it is describing, it has no purpose. This desire to communicate a rich and textured sense of a place is what energised his prose and his energetic, informed and passionate discussion of the book.

 

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Spring Reading Series: Open Mic

A change to the line-up of the last Spring Reading Series from a poetry double-bill to – well, a slightly different poetry double-bill, with side dishes. As Jane Monson was unable to join us, Patricia Debney joined forces with fellow Kent poet and tutor Nancy Gaffield, followed by an open mic featuring staff and students.

The premium spots of the evening gave us five minutes apiece of poised, polished poetry Patricia Debneyfrom experienced readers. Debney began, offering a change from her prose poetry (as seen in collections How to be a Dragonfly and, more recently, Littoral) with some works from her ‘newish collection’ Baby. Here were open planes of poems, free verse forms with the odd catch and hook of internal rhyme and assonance. Within each frame, microcosms of emotional relationships and the hovering presences of parental figures. ‘I can’t see your face’, we were warned, ‘it is some kind of horror space’. Seeing and not seeing: vastness and minutiae. The ‘I’ of the poems charted ‘water of biblical proportions’ and the rolling fog that ‘settles into valleys’, obscuring the view through a windscreen. Under the same scrutiny came a litany of material objects, ‘coral, gold pendants needing chains, kaftans’, the stuff of tasteful but empty riches that prove ‘hard to live with’. And as if a piece of trumpery can pass judgement on its wearer, the ‘single eye’ of a silver pearl ring ‘stares right at me…until it closes’.

Gaffield’s recent experiments have been with mathematical poems, employing geometry and the Golden Ratio. Working with the Fibonacci sequence has produced syllabic verse reflecting structure in sound as well as providing ‘attraction of form’ on the page.Nancy Gaffield Gaffield has been working on a sequence of these with fellow poet David Herd for performance at the forthcoming ‘Sounds New Poetry’ festival (see below), ‘but I’m saving these’… Instead we were given a poem inspired by Da Vicni’s Vitruvian Man, exploring the ‘harmony of symmetry’, while other pieces expressed and reflected upon sound and form. These were poems full of atmospheric landscapes, plays of light and natural forces. Wild weather and the wilful elements are not to be shifted with ‘soft syllables’ or ‘antiphonal phrases’. Even the laws of language and abstract mathematics are no match for a proper Kentish flood.

After our scheduled readers, MC Ben Hickman opened the floor to those brave / foolish enough to sign up on the door, whether they had planned to or not. The rules were clear – one poem or one page of prose. Offerings could be rough and raw works in progress or finely tuned and edited finished pieces.

There were plenty of takers.

First up was MA creative writing student Jane Summerfield, whose poem ‘Batteries Included’ – relating the exploits of a hormonal slumber party – has been created under the supervision of Gaffield.  Tutor & PhD poet Kat Peddie followed with a two-line poem in honour of the lost word ‘owhere’ (inspired by Gaffield’s recent pamphlet of the same name), committed to memory but jotted down ‘just in case’. Neelam Saredia, a final year CW undergrad, performed a memorised poem ‘Dress Sense’, a dress rehearsal of sorts for the Gulbenkian Poetry Slam (with prompt notes, ditto). In the only prose offering, I slipped in a page from my recently finished novel Eden (thanks for the cheers at this announcement). Tutor Juha Virtanen gave us another paperless piece, a word explosion extracted from a long sound poem, read from the screen of his phone. Geography and otherness peeped through the poems ‘My Friend from China’, read by Edward Greenward, and an extract from Sam O’Hana’s long poem, also written under Gaffield’s supervision. O’Hana was followed by three fellow final year CW undergrads: Tom Cox, who read his prose poem ‘Citizen’s Advice’, featuring cannibalistic chickens and chronic dissatisfaction; Joe Hill, whose joyfully silly and poignant ‘Much Against Everyone’s Advice’ chronicled a life of bad decisions and loss of body parts, and James Richardson, who gamely read a poem of muddy sinking and slippage, fresh from the clay of a recent seminar, which he titled on the spot ‘Already Stuck’.

after the open micAfter the readings and the consumption of all remaining wine, the talk and drinking moved downstairs to the Keynes bar, where the evening was balmy enough for us to sit outside and pretend it was already Summer Term.

This may mark the end of the Spring Reading series, but there is plenty more to come. Next term the Centre for Creative Writing will host a series of evenings with publishing professionals and readings from MA students. Many staff (as seen and heard above and elsewhere) will appear at the ‘Sounds New Poetry’ festival in May: for more details see the listings at http://soundsnew.org.uk/sounds-new-poetry . Some of Kent’s dedicated CW students, led by organiser Sam O’Hana (also see above), will be hosting the UK’s first Creative Writing Undergraduate Conference, ‘Vox’. The programme will run during the exciting ‘Full English’ literary festival taking place at Kent this June. Undergraduate creative writers from all universities are encouraged to submit proposals to ‘Vox’: the deadline for abstracts is 15th April 2014. For more details and the call for papers see http://voxconference2014.wordpress.com .

Look out for a last spring blog celebrating our students in print, a final flourish over the Easter vacation…

Sonia

 

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