4 March 2011 – Simon Armitage’s thoughts

‘It’s one thing writing poems for yourself, in a diary or notebook, for your eyes only, but once you decide you want to publish or transmit those poems to a wider audience, you’re involved in a different activity altogether. From now own you’re involved in an act of communication and you’re making art. And it’s another thing again to write poetry not for books or magazines or the usual poetry-reading circle but to be carved into rocks in public places, where they might last for centuries and catch the attention of passers-by who might be less familiar with and possibly have no interest in verse.

I’ve spent several days in the hills now between Marsden where I was born and Ilkely, home of the Ilkley Literature Festival and host to the Stanza Stones project, and with Tom Lonsdale, the project’s Landscape Architecture consultant, have identified most of the sites where the poems might stand. We’ve driven, hiked and biked around the landscape, and still have some exploring left to do. Some of the poems will be carved onto existing outcrops, others onto introduced stones. We also made a visit to Marshalls in Elland who we hope to work with on the project. They’re a long-established Yorkshire company who quarry and cut stone. At one of their depots, I watched with an open mouth as letters and intricate designs were incised into marble and granite with nothing more than a jet of water. Admittedly this was water at high pressure, producing a laser-like beam which could even slice through sheet steel, not to mention any fingers which got in the way, but to see this colourless, odourless, shapeless liquid passing through age old, solid rock like the proverbial hot knife though butter (or indeed like rock through water) was a thought-provoking experience. In another shed, huge medieval looking saws powered by great pistons and pumps were chewing their way into lumps of stone as big as houses. Water flowed continually into the cut, cooling the toothed blade, healing the wound.

My first intention was to write a sestina, distributing the six stanzas among six different stones. I liked the idea that each stanza could exist as a separate entity and could engage with a reader on its own terms, yet still be intrinsically connected with the other stanzas through both theme and language. If you know the form you’ll know that the end-words of each verse are reaped in a rearranged, pre-arranged pattern, so choosing the right ones is important. There’s also a shorter, seventh stanza, they mysterious envoi, for which I had a cunning plan…

But like so often with a poem, the plan changed. Every time I went to the moor I collected a bit more language until I had a long list, several long lists in fact, of terms and phrases associated with the territory. I’d choose six and begin writing, but got nowhere. So I’d pick another six, then another six, then went back to the first half dozen, without success. On a couple of occasions I had a vague sense that something was beginning to take shape, but it was rarely more than three or four lines, and never that feeling of being ONTO SOMETHING. The daydream just wouldn’t come into focus. The crystal wouldn’t form. The poet Peter Sansom once told me that it’s sometimes best to forget about a poem for a few weeks rather than wrestle and struggle, so that’s what I did, and when I returned to it with a clearer mind and a clean eye, I saw what the problems were. Firstly I was trying to let the form dictate the content – sometimes that works, but not on this occasion. Secondly I was attempting something too literary, not appropriate to brief. Thirdly, the sestina seemed too inflexible and stubborn to accommodate the different geographies and rich vocabulary of the moor. And lastly, I didn’t know what I was trying to say. I had no idea what the poem was about. A case of putting the cart before the horse, to use a Yorkshire phrase, or letting the tail wag the dog.

Another visit to the watershed and I came back with a very different idea. To let water be the overall subject, and the various forms of water to provide the topic of each individual and self-contained poem. A piece about rain, a piece about snow, a piece about dew….the Rain Stone, The Snow Stone, The Dew Stone…and so on. A bigger, over-arching title came into my head, In Memory of Water, connecting the often commemorative act of monumental-masonry and engraving with our most vital but often neglected necessity, our common gold, our shaping force, our local vintage – water. It’s impossible to say that an idea right. All I know is that no sooner had the notion occurred to me than the poems started to happen, even to the point where I was anxious to get to my notebook, because words and lines and sentences were queuing up in my head, impatient to be written down. To me this is always the most exciting phase, where the internal, abstract concept of the poem is attempting to materialise externally, where the mind is in negotiation with the world through the medium of language. What we call writing.’

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