‘Walking, observing, listening’: an interview with Nancy Gaffield and The Drift

Earlier this month, Longbarrow Press published Wealden, a collaboration between poet Nancy Gaffield and The Drift (musicians Darren Pilcher, Rob Pursey and Amelia Fletcher), inspired by the marshes, woodlands and shingle of southern Kent. This interview (conducted by Longbarrow Press editor Brian Lewis) took place in November 2020.

BRIAN:  Wealden is the first release from The Drift, and it also marks a new collaboration (with Nancy Gaffield).  How did you become aware of each other’s work, and how did the collaboration come about?

ROB:  Amelia, Darren and I had been making music together for a while as The Drift.  It was an ongoing experiment, but it was always focussed on the local landscape for inspiration — metaphorically, and literally.  Our experiences of the empty spaces of the marshes, the dense woodland and the deserted beaches were in our minds as we played.  We thought of the deep loamy bass as the subsoil, the loops of abstract sound as the rugged flora, and the occasional higher-pitched elements — like the fiddle or the harmonium — as fleeting glimpses of wildlife, weather events, or other people.  On a literal level, Darren was bringing bits and pieces of bracken and shingle into the rehearsal room as the ingredients of his sonic loops.  (He should explain how that works!) Perhaps flippantly, we referred to the music as ‘Marsh Dub’.  Original Dub Reggae has a spaciousness, and a repetitiveness, that becomes mesmerising and immersive.  A lot of this music was made with very basic equipment, and sonic effects were created using analogue sources and very basic pre-digital reverbs and delays.  That’s what we were doing too.  We would improvise sections of music, play them and then throw them away.  We weren’t too bothered with the idea of trying to make any of it permanent — like I say, it was an ongoing experiment.  So, this was the strange little world that Nancy was introduced to!  I had met Nancy because I was trying to find a way of getting US poet Stephanie Burt over to the UK for our Words and Music at the Skep festival — there was no way we could afford it on our own.  Nancy was able to get the University of Kent at Canterbury (where she was a lecturer) to come on board — Stephanie would also give lectures at the University, and the costs were shared.  This was great.  But even better was the discovery that, as a poet, Nancy was exploring landscapes too, finding ways of expressing them — their ecologies and their histories — in poetic form.  We decided it would be good to see what happened if she took a closer look at the landscapes we’d already been inspired by.  And to see what happened if the two expressions — the verbal and the musical — were combined.

NANCY:  Composer Matthew King, with whom I’ve worked on various music/poetry projects, introduced me to Rob Pursey.  As Rob said, we met in the first instance to discuss how we might combine resources on a words and music festival in order to bring Steph Burt to Kent.  We started talking about our respective interests and discovered we had so much in common.  A few days after that meeting, Rob contacted me to ask about a possible collaboration.  Of course, I said yes!  I have worked with musicians previously, but not in this free-form way.  What intrigued me about The Drift was that the music does not proceed from a written score, but begins with sound phenomena that are shaped into a composition in tandem with the words.

BRIAN:  What was it about this particular landscape — or landscapes — that suggested a collaborative and creative response?  Was there a sense of collective exploration and discovery as the project developed?

NANCY:  Nearly everything I write is concerned with landscapes, from Tokaido Road (CB editions, 2011) to Continental Drift (Shearsman, 2014) to Meridian (Longbarrow, 2019).  I had just finished Meridian, a poetic response to the landscape of eastern England where the Meridian line crosses (N/S) from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in Yorkshire, and I was eager to explore more closely the area where I live (Kent).  Despite having lived in Canterbury for 30 years, I had never explored Romney Marsh or Dungeness.  When I heard that this area was described as ‘the only desert in western Europe’, I was sceptical, and yet there is something desert-like about this landscape.  It has to do with the way the light bends and reflects, and the deceptiveness of distance.  My recent writing concerns deep time and ecological matters, and it’s all there in that place: the strata — geological, cultural and historical — that have been laid down over the course of one brief millennium.  The history of the Weald and the marshes is a microcosm of human history and of climate change.  It was so exciting to share our discoveries as the project developed and to learn about the way a musician responds to landscape.

AMELIA:  When Rob and I moved to the edge of the Weald around 7 years ago, from central London, we started to explore our new surroundings, and were genuinely bewitched by the landscape, and its history and geology.  A few examples: how the entire shape of the land changed with the great storm of 1287; how much of the land sits behind a sea wall, threatened by rising sea levels; the beautiful concrete sound mirrors, tributes to ambitious failure; the nuclear power station at Dungeness, lasting beyond its expected life, framed by sea, sky and shingle; Fairfield Church, standing alone on the Marsh, the village that once sat alongside it now long gone.  Nancy writes about these, and more, in Wealden, and I think we have all deepened our connection with this place.  Even Darren, who was brought up here!  Rob and I have been in bands for years, but we have been more used to writing songs than creating ambient textures.  For this piece, we did experiment with a few different approaches, but the music we have developed just seems true to the place.

BRIAN:  Wealden was first performed in May 2019, and the studio recordings were completed in March of this year, shortly before the first lockdown.  How did the work evolve and change over this period — from the initial discussions, drafts, and rehearsals?

DARREN:  Initially we shaped the music very quickly.  It was an instinctive, very human process. Nancy’s words brought structure and we soon created musical parameters in which to improvise and expand.  Much remains in flux.  The journeys are fixed but within every track / poem are scenes left open for improvisation with the scenario of each performance space influencing our choices.  I have a bank of existing audio samples from the landscape that are at my disposal throughout; these can be manipulated and executed in infinite ways, informed by the mood in the room, audience or occasion.  Textures and ambience, unique to each performance, are also added live.  Recording and looping a mix of organic percussion, foraged natural materials and traditional folk instruments on-the-fly adds new layers. Instrumental expression from Amy and Rob circulates fresh variation on melody.  All of these factors see Wealden continue to evolve and change through each performance.

AMELIA:  It’s true.  As a semi-improvised work, it is slightly odd to have a particular version now preserved in aspic, via the recording, when it was just the variant we happened to play that day.  I’m very glad we managed to do it just before lockdown though!  I also really enjoyed the process of developing the piece, with such great lyrical ideas to react to musically.  I don’t think I’ve ever previously listened and thought so hard while creating music.

BRIAN:  Nancy, you’ve adapted existing work for musical settings, including reworking your Tokaido Road as the libretto to Nicola LeFanu’s chamber opera.  Could you say a little about the experience of starting from a ‘blank page’ with this project?

NANCY:  That’s an interesting question.  Adapting an existing work to fit the requirements of an opera was a real challenge.  Although there are some similarities between poem and libretto (emotion, compression, sharp imagery), there are more differences.  In Wealden, I am writing primarily in the lyric mode, my natural mode.  There was no requirement for the words to be set to the music.  For the libretto, narrative and dramatic modes were also required, for example, characters acting in powerful scenes along a narrative arc.  Essentially the libretto exists to inspire the composer, with the poet being in a secondary role.  I was very fortunate to work with Nicola LeFanu, as she is very experienced.  I learned a lot, but I do prefer to start with a blank page.  Wealden started with walking, observing, listening, opening up all the senses to this landscape, then noting down impressions, creating a word bank, pages and pages of notes and phrases, reading about the area (its history, geology, flora and fauna), talking to people, more walking and exploring, determining a form, and then beginning.  I arrived at our first session with the seven poems of Part I, but the other two parts evolved more organically in line with the music.

BRIAN:  Amelia and Rob, your interest in — and engagement with — poetry, and its intersections with music, closely informed the programming of last year’s Words and Music at the Skep.  Is this kind of collaboration (between poets and musicians) a new experience for you? Were you conscious of any precedents (and/or anything you wanted to avoid)?

ROB:  Since Amelia and I moved out to Kent I’ve been very aware that we have enough space here to invite people in — for social events, to work on creative projects, or to hear musicians and poets perform.  We are quite a long way from London, and there is a lack of live music, or theatre in the area.  At the time, we were also looking after Amelia’s elderly mother, as well as our two kids — so if we wanted to watch or participate in anything, it needed to be very local.  I was impressed that the folk musicians down the road in Tenterden kept up their culture in a local pub once a month — they were people who just got together to sing on a regular basis.  Not really my kind of music (though I am getting keener on it), but it was inspiring to see that all they needed was a half-decent venue.  Me and Darren converted an old barn at the bottom of our garden (now known as ‘The Skep’) into a scruffy, rugged venue.  We put in a decent PA, Darren created a bar and a stage out of old wood, and acquired stage curtains that were being chucked out of a nearby village hall.  He’s got a really good eye, and the Skep is a lovely place to be.  One of the benefits of being in the middle of nowhere rather than in a city is that local people will come and see things out of curiosity.  They don’t see themselves as members of an exclusive cultural tribe — liking only this kind of music, or only that kind of art.  If something is happening, it’s worth checking out.  So, the ambition with ‘Words and Music’ was to bring together musicians and poets, but with a view to entertaining locals as well as any poetry and indie aficionados who might turn up.   And that’s how it turned out — we had a nice mix of people.  Some people heard poetry performed live for the first time in their lives.  Meanwhile, some poets got to taste the excellent local beer for the first time in their lives.  In terms of mixing pop music and poetry, I’ve always been equally keen on both.  The former sometimes suffers from dismissiveness: it’s not seen as proper Art.  The latter suffers from perceptions of aloofness, difficulty and exclusivity.  Both attitudes are absurd, but very entrenched.  At Words and Music we got the musicians to play quietly, so their lyrics were audible — and appreciated.  The poets performed in the same relatively informal space as the musicians: I like to think that this helped the audience feel at ease with an unfamiliar art form.  And this was the environment where we performed Wealden for the first time.  Amelia, Darren and I had not ever worked with a poet before, and I think it’s safe to say we were nervous when we had to perform Wealden live.  Was this combination of elements going to work?  Would the audience be confused?  Would Darren be able to create his sound loops under pressure in the live environment? There was a lot to be anxious about.  Anyway, it worked.  Maybe it was the influence of the local beer, but the audience really liked it.  And perhaps most pleasing of all, some local people, for whom the topographical references in Wealden were very familiar indeed, really loved it.  I felt that we had succeeded in making a song about their landscape, and it rang true for them.

AMELIA:  We should mention that we do hope to hold Words and Music at the Skep again.  We had booked a festival for May this year, with a really amazing line-up of poets and musicians, but of course it had to be cancelled.  The performers kindly recorded short performances on video, so we could hold a mini online version.  Which was great, but not the same.

BRIAN:  Finally, how have the landscapes of Wealden changed for you as a result of creating this work?

NANCY:  If anything, I am even more excited by this landscape than I was before.  Each time I visit, I find something new.  Also, the season, the weather, the time of day, events in the wider world, all of these affect the way you view it.  I am not finished with this landscape yet.

ROB:  During the second lockdown I went back to the marshes and to Dungeness and shot some material to create a film that accompanies the poetry and soundscape.  (Making the film was a way of compensating for the fact that we can’t currently perform live.)  Down there on my own with a camera, I think this was the occasion I really fell in love with the place — I was looking at it more clearly, with our music and Nancy’s words ringing in my ears.  I felt immersed in it.

All photographs by Rob Pursey.

Wealden is available from Longbarrow Press as a pamphlet and audio CD; click here for further details and to order. It is also available as a digital download here (via Skep Wax). 

You can read a further interview with Amelia and Rob of The Drift (conducted by Glenn Francis Griffith) here. All four Wealden collaborators — Nancy, Darren, Amelia and Rob — discuss their relationship to this corner of England in an interview conducted by Marie-Claire Wood for the Alternative Stories and Fake Realities podcast series. Click here to listen to the podcast.

Join Nancy Gaffield and The Drift for an online film screening of Wealden, followed by a Q&A, on Thursday 3 December (6pm – 7.30pm). The event is free, and booking is essential: click here to book (via Eventbrite).

Meridian: The Last Step | Nancy Gaffield

October 2017

I finished walking last month, and now the writing’s done. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau claims that the act of “walking is a space of enunciation”. The word “enunciation” means declaration, assertion, elucidation, a setting forth. Meridian is all these things. Charles Olson’s spatial poetics—“I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America”—both grounds and alienates me. I will insert myself.

Most of what I write is written through research, and Meridian is no exception. Part I opens with an epigraph from Robert Moor’s book, On Trails: An Exploration: “The key difference between a trail and a path is directional: paths extend forward, whereas trails extend backward.” This helps establish the context in terms of presence and absence, of moving forward whilst remembering backward.

My first book, Tokaido Road, was informed by ekphrasis and research into Japanese woodblock print art, and particularly the artist Hiroshige. Continental Drift includes the long poem “Po-wa-ha”, which was informed by Susan Magoffin’s Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico, as well as Essays in Landscape Theory, The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb, and books on New Mexico’s history and geology.

During the writing of Part II of Meridian, I discovered For the Time Being, a book of poetic journals edited by Tyler Doherty and Tom Morgan. As these authors define it, a poetic journal literally means “a making from the day” or “a day’s making”. Poetic journals are not reportage, but embodied experience, comprising descriptions of the environment (sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches) along with gazelle leaps and associative connections in sound or sense. Journal writing can consist of poetry, fiction, non-fiction. Weather, season and time of day are essential elements—as are place names. Procedurally, it is documentary in both senses of the word: it documents first-hand experience in a specific place at a specific time, but it also incorporates and manipulates found text. It’s meditative and reflective, in the same way that walking is. It doesn’t know where it’s going or how it’s going to get there. It is a physical, emotional and intellectual engagement with the day. Meridian arises from the poetic journal.

I chose to write Meridian as a long poem. Various forms are employed: the epistolary poem, the acrostic, the prose poem, but mainly, an open field poetics predominates. In a similar way to Tokaido Road, the poem is arranged in the sequence of named places along the pathways and trails that are situated along the Greenwich Meridian line from Peacehaven to Sand le Mere. But unlike Tokaido, which was a journey of the imagination, this work is based on an actual journey where I walked sometimes a day at a time, sometimes two, and sometimes four. The movement was not east to west, but south to north. I chose a four-part structure, based on the series of guidebooks I used to map the walk, and within each part, the poem is subdivided by an Ordnance Survey Map. The work as a whole contains fragments of song and poetry alongside snatches of TV dialogue, information from guide books, film flashbacks, all gathered together through the act of walking. While I planned each walk, I never planned the content of the poem, which always emerged from the walk itself. Along the way, I made notes, took photographs, recorded sounds including my own voice and footsteps, collected information from churches, museums, local newspapers, the people I met. After each walk, I would assemble this information and begin to write up the day. This would normally take about a week. I started in July 2015, and finished in August 2017. The shortest walk was about 7 miles; the longest 21. I walked 21 miles on two consecutive days in Lincolnshire, where the countryside was so vast, and the distances so great, that I would walk for 6 hours without seeing another person or even a road. I walked in blazing sun, freezing fog, ice, hail storms, rain. Mostly I walked alone, with two exceptions. Kat Peddie accompanied me through part of Epping Forest. And at Waltham Abbey, I actually met, entirely by accident, Graham and Hilda Heap, the authors of the guide book I was using. They walked with me a couple of miles that day. At the end of each day’s walk, I would return home (when I was near enough to do so), but when I got too far away, I would spend the night with a friend or in rooms above a pub or a B&B (in Lincolnshire). I have walked on blisters that bled, and I lost five toenails.

Writers such as Zoe Skoulding (in her book Contemporary Women’s Poetry & Urban Space) and Donna Stonecipher (Prose Poetry and the City) consider the city as a space of experiment for women writers, but there has not been much attention paid to rural space. This relates to another aspect of psychogeography that remains critical to my work: the desire to raise awareness of the natural, ecological and cultural environment around the walker, and thus the act of walking is enunciation/declaration as political and critical response to the status quo.

Part III begins in winter. It’s titled “Hardwick to Boston” and is located in the Fens. The poem begins with December 5: “the day of fracture / time & everything / is out of joint”. It starts with a walk through the Fens in fog so thick that, in the absence of any visible landmark, I had to use a compass to find my way, and it ends in the spring with a hailstorm. The reading which lends this section cohesion is Paul Celan’s The Meridian essay, which I discovered at Christmastime. This is a complex and elusive text which is Celan’s manifesto on what poetry is after the holocaust. It was delivered on the occasion of his receiving the Büchner Prize in Literature (1960). Pierre Joris recently undertook the mammoth job of translating its four parallel versions from German to English. There are so many things to think about in this essay; you cannot exhaust it. For example, it seems to say that the poem lies in the future of remembering, where remembering occurs across specific coordinates of time and place. Thus, Part III is a haunted text. It ends with an ode to Celan’s Meridian and juxtaposes some of the phrases from his essay into my poem and its thinking about poetry in time and place. So Part III is both a walking poem and a statement of poetics.

As I was walking and writing Part IV (Boston to Sand le Mere) I discovered two more remarkable books. Tim Ingold’s Lines: A Brief History is a fascinating meditation on the multiple meanings of the word ‘line’ which takes in everything from forest tracks to genealogies. I preface Part IV with a sentence from his book: “The line, like life, has no end.” The other writer, Rebecca Solnit, I had known about, but had not read A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Both of these writers took me back to the start of the project, which was motivated, in part, by a fascination with lines.

In the beginning the poem originated out of the fear of getting lost. Solnit helped me to view this from a different perspective: “One does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.” She illustrates this quality with reference to the Pit River Indians who refer to a certain man as “wandering”. Under certain conditions of mental stress, when someone finds their life too much to bear, they will start to wander around the country aimlessly. She compares this to Virginia Woolf, who also knew despair, and it led her to fill her pockets with rocks and walk into the River Ouse. “It’s not about being lost but trying to lose your self.” Wheels within wheels. In Tokaido Road, there is a poem about Woolf. It is poem 50: Tsuchiyama. The River Ouse passes through Sussex; I walked along it during Part I. There is another, different River Ouse in Cambridgeshire; and yet another that empties into the Humber Estuary. This word “Ouse” derives from Celtic and means “water”. From now on, my pathways would be watery ones, leading me to the Humber Estuary, where several rivers flow, draining one-fifth of England. At the time I was walking, several disturbing events were happening, and these were weighing heavily as I walked, and so Part IV opens with a lament.

The trouble with ending a project like this is the reluctance to let it go. As I neared the end of the walk, I could hardly bear to finish it and both literally and figuratively kept dragging my feet. Should it find a publisher, that will be a final kind of letting go.

N.B.: this essay was first drafted in October 2017 (at the close of the Meridian project). Meridian was published by Longbarrow Press in February 2019 (see below for further details). ‘The First Cut’, a recent post for the Longbarrow Blog, reflects on the early stages of the project’s development; you can read it here.

Meridian, the third full-length collection by Nancy Gaffield, is available now from Longbarrow Press. You can read an excerpt from Part II here and a poem from Part IV here. Visit the Meridian site for further details and to order the collection; you can also order the book by clicking on the relevant PayPal link below.

Meridian: £12.99 (hardback)

UK orders (+ £1.85 postage)

Europe orders (+ £5 postage)

Rest of World orders (+ £7 postage)

Nancy Gaffield’s first collection of poetry, Tokaido Road (CB editions 2011) was nominated for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and was awarded the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize that year. Her second collection, Owhere (Templar 2012) won a Templar Poetry Pamphlet Award that year. Subsequent poetry publications include Continental Drift (Shearsman 2014), the chapbooks Zyxt (Oystercatcher 2015) and Meridian (Oystercatcher 2016), and a libretto, Tokaido Road: A Journey after Hiroshige (Shearsman 2014). Meridian is her first collection with Longbarrow Press.

Click here to read ‘Mirror Image’, Brian Lewis‘s recent survey of the poetry of Nancy Gaffield (by way of Eratosthenes, Solnit, Muybridge and Hiroshige) for the Longbarrow Blog.

Meridian: The First Cut | Nancy Gaffield

February 2016

In her long poem Drift, Caroline Bergvall says, “Eventually one comes to a point where being lost can signal a starting point.” She refers to this process as “to north oneself”. This statement is an accurate description of my own long poem, Meridian. I am following the Greenwich Meridian line along public footpaths and bridleways from Peacehaven to the Humber in order to investigate the way that landscapes are disturbed and reordered by history and memory. Meridian is a long poem about time, walking and lines: lines, both real and imaginary, in all their forms. It is also a walking practice, walking in the Wordsworthian sense of “a mode not of travelling, but of being”—a process that implicates both mind and body on equal terms. I want the shape of the poem to be determined by the rhythm of walking—the measure of the step to shore up the measure of the line, alternating long Whitmanesque lines with the shorter, stepped lines of William Carlos Williams, undulating like the contours on the Ordnance Survey maps. On my walk I am in dialogue with a number of companion poets: Lorine Niedecker, Helen Adam, John Clare, Iain Sinclair—to name but a few.

I chose to write Meridian as a long poem. Charles Altieri defines the long poem as one which desires “to achieve epic breadth by relying on structural principles inherent in lyric rather than narrative modes.” To do this, the long poem incorporates other texts, voices, political speech, bits of memory whilst foregrounding the writer’s role in making her way through such often-resistant material. Indeed, the process of writing of such a text is often part of the material—it is self-reflexive. The long poem itself is a challenge—both for reader and writer, for example: how to maintain a sense of momentum and coherence, how/when to end it; choosing the most effective form. On the other hand, it offers greater space to develop ideas; it can be an ongoing work that you do alongside other projects; it offers the potential for panoramic treatment of a thing; it can bring in other registers, discourses, genres. Since the early 20th century, experiments in innovative, language-based long poems, often disjunctive in form, have been gathering momentum. In particular, I’m interested in long poems by women: Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles; Susan Howe’s The Europe of Trusts, Sharon Doubiago’s Hard Country, Lynn Hejinian’s A Border Comedy, not to mention very long poems like Rachel Blau duPlessis’ Drafts. These poems often recover political, philosophical or historical material, and pay close attention to the way language, especially its rhythms, silences, gaps, conventions and expectations, engages with the reader.

In 2015 I was beginning to think about what my next full collection would be, and I knew I wanted the work to be informed by the ideas, concepts and methods of psychogeography. Around that time I was reading books like Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, Peter Davidson’s Distance and Memory—so I knew landscape/geography would once again feature in whatever I was to write, but ratcheting it up a notch by incorporating psychogeographic ideas.

As Guy Debord accurately said, psychogeography is a concept with “a rather pleasing vagueness.” His Lettrist International Group in the 1950s were investigating urban space through desire rather than habit. To do this, they explored different ways of getting lost: for example, by hiking through the Harz region in Germany using a London map as a guide. However, in general, psychogeography studies the affects and effects of the built environment on the emotions and actions of individuals. It embraces chance and coincidence, concurrent with an alertness to patterns and repetitions arising from the collision between the chaos of the urban environment and the personal history of the individual. It involves a range of activities that raise awareness of the natural and cultural environment around the walker; the walker is attentive to senses and emotions as they relate to the environment; it is serious but fun; it is often political and critical of the status quo. One of the key concepts within psychogeography is that of the dérive, an informed or aware wandering through a varied environment using continuous observation. Dérive = drift, aimless wandering through a place, guided by whim and the awareness of how different spaces both attract and repel. The walker attempts an interpretive reading of the city and its architecture by engaging in a playful reconstruction. This turning around (détournment) is key to the situationist agenda; it is a dialectical tool useful to expose hidden ideology.[1]  The psychogeographer is seeking new ways of apprehending the environment, excavating the past and recording it with the present, revealing the nature of what lies beneath.

My own engagement arose initially out of a particular challenge: finding my way. I can’t read a map, or a compass—and, as a result, am always lost. Not only is this a huge frustration, when lost, I am susceptible to panic attacks, so I thought I could learn the rudimentary skills of navigation whilst writing my poem. I also wanted it to have a Kentish connection, so I gradually came to the idea of the Greenwich Meridian as a way to organise the walk in time/place. (Greenwich was part of the County of Kent until 1889.) Happily, then, I discovered the series of guidebooks written by Graham and Hilda Heap, which take the walker primarily on footpaths and bridleways along the Greenwich Meridian from Peacehaven in East Sussex to Sand le Mere in East Yorkshire—total length 275 miles. Around this time, Iain Sinclair came to Kent as a Visiting Professor. I started to read London Orbital and had the opportunity to speak with him about that as well as what I was doing. His process, he explained, always seemed to happen in four parts. There is a statement of place before a stepping out into a quest/journey. That is followed by a dark night of the soul moment that tries to undo the simplicity of the journey and takes you somewhere you didn’t expect to be, then a moving away from what you created and/or segueing into the next section/project. Could this structure then be helpful to me in the way I would move forward? Certainly, there was a synergy: the trail is divided into four books, so I am using each book as a device to section the collection. Part I is Peacehaven to Greenwich; Part II is Greenwich to Hardwick; Part III is Hardwick to Boston; and Part IV is Boston to the Humber. Each Part will consist of approximately 20 pages of poetry, subdivided by the Ordnance Survey Map number which pertains to that part of the walk.

So far I have walked to Epping Forest and I intend to walk the rest of the route this summer. While walking, I record observations and events in real time; these appear on the page using indentations to indicate voice or breath change and emphasis. Before each walk, I do some basic research into the places en route, but I do not plan the content. It is very important that the poem leads me. I stop to take notes as I walk, sometimes record things into a recording app on my phone and take photographs. At the end of the day, I write up the day—and finish the section related to each walk within five days. Inevitably, I engage in “soul-wandering”, so associative leaps and digressions are made, including sensory description, bits of narrative and lived experience, mainly relating to whatever is preoccupying me at the time, the passage of time, what I am reading around that journey, and conversations—both real and imaginary.

Part II has a section called “The First Cut”. This is composed by using the cut-up method. I took every tenth sentence from “The First Walk” in Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory. I cut the sentences up into individual words and phrases, and collaged these into the poem along with my notes and observations of the day’s walk.

And this is where I am now, about to enter Epping Forest, which I’ve been putting off because of all the stories I’ve heard of the woods’ dark reputation. I wonder what will happen further ahead, through Forest and into the Fens? And Lincolnshire?

[1] If there is an application of this concept to Meridian it is that I am trying to break through the paternalistic and geocentric relationships inherent in the L[l]ine.

N.B.: this essay was first drafted in February 2016 (at the outset of the Meridian project). The walk was completed in autumn 2017; the resulting work was published by Longbarrow Press in February 2019 (see below for further details). Click here to read ‘The Last Step’, a further reflection on the walking and writing of Meridian.

Meridian, the third full-length collection by Nancy Gaffield, is available now from Longbarrow Press. You can read an excerpt from Part II here; visit the Meridian site here; and order the book by clicking on the relevant PayPal link below.

Meridian: £12.99 (hardback)

UK orders (+ £1.99 postage)

Europe orders (+ £5.25 postage)

Rest of World orders (+ £8.25 postage)

Nancy Gaffield’s first collection of poetry, Tokaido Road (CB editions 2011) was nominated for the Forward Best First Collection Prize and was awarded the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize that year. Her second collection, Owhere (Templar 2012) won a Templar Poetry Pamphlet Award that year. Subsequent poetry publications include Continental Drift (Shearsman 2014), the chapbooks Zyxt (Oystercatcher 2015) and Meridian (Oystercatcher 2016), and a libretto, Tokaido Road: A Journey after Hiroshige (Shearsman 2014). Meridian is her first collection with Longbarrow Press.

Click here to read ‘Mirror Image’, Brian Lewis‘s recent survey of the poetry of Nancy Gaffield (by way of Eratosthenes, Solnit, Muybridge and Hiroshige) for the Longbarrow Blog.