An Introduction
I was born in the mid-1950’s in industrial Lancashire,
the north-west of England, the cradle of the world’s first
industrial revolution. Brought up on the edge of a cotton-spinning
town, I was caught between two cultures, two histories: behind
us the smoke-blackened brick of houses and mills, ahead the half-ruined
countryside that the town was slowly colonising. I spent my childhood
birdwatching, playing cricket in a farmer’s abandoned field,
damming the local river and collecting strange stones that were
really the glassy slag from industrial furnaces. At night I still
dream of that polluted childhood river, that it might one day
run clear.
Both my parents had been forced to leave school for work at the
age of 14, but they encouraged their children to study for a University
education. We had few books in the house, certainly only one poetry
book – Palgrave’s Golden Treasury – but we had
a local library, which I visited twice a week from an early age.
Then my older brother returned home with boxes of books from his
university English Literature course and I began to read in earnest.
I started to write poems at about the same time. I went to university
to study English for myself, but ran away after one stifling term,
a fish out of its element. I worked for a year, went back to university,
graduated, then worked at a variety of jobs – postman, gardener,
mill labourer, psychiatric nurse, teacher – before becoming
a freelance writer. For eighteen years I worked in a variety of
settings, running writing workshops and collaborating with a range
of other artists. Now I work at Lancaster University as the director
of postgraduate studies in Creative Writing; it seems an odd reconciliation
with academe!
When I look back at myself beginning to write, I look back at
another person. My first poems were an attempt to escape my industrial
roots, to make my way into the countryside that lay so tantalisingly
close. The sense of spoliation and post-industrial ruin I grew
up with, the urge to escape its exploitation, were very strong.
From my bedroom window I could see a horizon of moorland, dusty
green under sunshine and plum blue at dusk. That was where I wanted
to be. I now live in rural North Yorkshire, close to the vision
I had then of the natural world. All utopias become complicated
or false and I realise now that the rural landscape is just as
much the product of human activity as a slagheap or factory. Machines
defined my roots: my grandfather was a mule spinner, my father
repaired pianos – a kind of musical machine - my mother
was a nurse attending to the complicated workings of the human
body.
Machines held generations of my family in mills, workshops and
mines. To the Romantic imagination, they can seem alien, without
feeling or volition. Or they can be seen as inspirational expressions
of the human imagination, exploiting and adding to the power of
nature. Poems, too, have working parts, an integral mechanism
of a kind. And the human spirit has been seen as a ghost in the
machine of the body, just as gods are ghosts in the mechanics
of the Universe. The poem I’m presenting here brings together
some of those thoughts and feelings about how we co-exist with
things – and my own fascination and tenuous reconciliation
with machinery.
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