Dying Villages: A Conversation with Tom Pow

I first encountered Tom Pow’s dying villages work at the Edinburgh Poetry Library, on a tour with the Poetry Translation Centre. I was fascinated by the Cornell-like collections of simple objects, small shrines to the lives once lived in the villages in which they were found. Very curious about his project, I bought two small books, the letterpress-printed Songs from a Dying Village and the equally beautiful Cean Loch Reasort and Other Dead Village Walks, both printed in limited editions. Shortly thereafter, Tom and I began the email correspondence that eventually led to this conversation.

Tom Pow is very much a multidisciplinary poet and artist, as he explains below, and the photographs that accompany this interview were taken on his travels through the dying villages of Europe, as part of his series “Signs of a Dying Village.”

DS

OOO

Tell me, briefly, about dying villages. What are they?

It is estimated that by 2030 Europe will lose roughly one third of its population, the greatest demographic change since the Black Death. The effects of depopulation will be felt most acutely in rural areas, as a result of high levels of emigration to cities and low birth rates. Europe is home to 22 of the world’s 25 lowest birthrate countries, so there are many areas where villages are dying. I travelled to northern Spain, central France, southern Italy, eastern Germany, Bulgaria and central Russia. In Russia, for example, according to recent statistics, 11,000 villages and 290 cities have disappeared from the map of the Russian Federation. 13,000 villages remain on the map, but have no inhabitants. I came across a village there with one surviving inhabitant. This is not unusual.

How did you hear of them? How did that initial impulse—the spark of interest in the dying villages—evolve into the project it now is?

I was in Edmonton for the 30^th anniversary of the University of Alberta’s Writing Program for which I’d been a visiting fellow in the early 90s. There was an article in the Edmonton Journal, with the title Withering Heights. It was about a village in northern Spain called Villabandin which had a handful of inhabitants all in their 60s and older. I learned that the phenomenon of the dying village is widespread in Europe and the subject gripped me—history, memory, loss, identity: very Scottish themes, I think! I was given a Creative Scotland Award, which funded my research trips and I began at Villabandin.

 

What do we stand to lose with the death of so many villages? Do you think dying villages contribute to a larger cultural attrition?

I’ve just read that 84% of people in Sweden live on 1.3% of the land. That is a sign of the increasing urbanisation that exists throughout the world. Villages die. Villages have always died, when they can no longer find reasons to exist. What  is undoubtedly lost with the deaths of so many villages is a myriad of ways of looking at the world. But what is perhaps more  concerning is the future of our relationship with the natural world—a world more and more people are distanced from and with which fewer and fewer have an intimate relationship.

You do more than just write poems, right? You also take photographs, collect artefacts, and more. How does your poetry interact with those other forms or disciplines of remembrance?

The photographs and the sound recordings were part of the research—they are a kind of noticing. But they also reflect my interests: for example, there are many photographs of doors and windows (thresholds), of what is worn and decayed; the recordings reflect an interest in the texture/the impossibility of silence. The website makes much of this material available. The artefacts grow from the poetry. I see them as physical embodiments of the poems. For example, one of the signs of a dying village is fruit lying unpicked. I came across an arrangement of apples that reminded me of the French game of boules. I showed the photograph to a sculptor and she made three apples on the edge of decay which were then cast in foundry bronze. I call then Boules from a Dying Village. They are beautiful to handle. After they were made, I discovered Gustave Courbet’s still lifes of apples which he painted while in prison. They are acknowledged as rustic memories of the village where he was born and spent his childhood. Each of the artefacts has similarly rich resonances.

People love to bemoan the state of poetry; I hate listening to them. Tell me about how the medium of poetry worked (or didn’t) for this project?

John Berger writes, in And Our Faces, My heart, Brief as Photos, that prose is a battle and that poetry moves through the battlefield tending the wounds. Poetry can still the narrative, so that something can be looked at and considered—given due attention. Some of the pieces I wrote were very short—poems of three or four lines. They are sequences with, I hope, a cumulative power. But each of them offers a threshold into the world of the dying village:

She’s sitting on the old green bench
by the side of the lilac tree.
Oh, the songs she once sung here!
The thought of them still makes her blush.

OOOO(from Songs from a Dying Village)

Did the project—and especially the travel portion of it, actually visiting these communities—affect your writing? What did you learn?

Of course. The small poem above is part of a sequence that drew on the Russian folk poem, the chastushka, a short lyric that was sung and that reflected village life. So common was it that the Soviets high-jacked it and used it as a way of spreading propaganda. My poems drew on what I read, but also on field work in Russia, listening to old women singing these songs.

What’s the future of the dying villages project?

I have begun a series of intimate engagements, using my Suitcase of the Dying Village. These are events/presentations round a table of 12-15 people. I share photographs, artefacts, recordings, read poems and tell stories relating to the project. There is always time to engage with others’ experiences and memories and  there is opportunity for them to write very briefly about their connection with a (dying) village. At one of these events, after the presentation, we served soup, bread and cheese. I like to think I am creating a space for people to engage with the subject in their own ways. And I suppose there is something about the intimacy that fits the subject. On the other hand, I have also given talks/lectures to fairly large audiences about the subject. I am working on a book about dying villages in Europe, which will be published in 2011. The book will contain travel essays, poems and short stories. But I’d like to go on one further dying villages trip.

What do you take with you on the road? Any specific books or albums? Have you picked up anything great recently?

Travelling can be a good time to read things you’ve been meaning to read for some time and never got round to. On one of the trips I took Gaston Bachelar’s The Poetics of Space. It started me writing a sequence of short poems about nests. I’d thought they were an escape from the enormity of the dying villages project. But I came to realise that nests are intimately connected to the themes of home and of abandonment that are at the heart of dying villages.

A nest is a blessing
for a tree and a prayer
upon the water.

December 2010

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Uneven but Enjoyable

Man at Leisure, Alexander Trocchi (Oneworld Classics) $16.95

It’s unusual to read an afterword that admits “the verse collected in this book is of variable quality,” but refreshingly honest, and Stewart Home goes on to contextualize both Trocchi’s poetry on the page and his Situationist “poetry of living.” John Calder, in his preface, accounts for some of the variation of poetry within, explaining it was written over the course of two decades, slightly edited then published by Calder only once it had been illegally obtained from Trocchi’s desk drawer. William’s Burrough’s introduction has been preserved from the original edition; no dount history will prove his comparisons of Trocchi to Donne exaggerated in execution if not vision. Vision is evident in manifold poems. In “A Little Geography Lesson for my Sons and Daughters,” perhaps my favorite poem of the collection, Trocchi gathers his loose (and occasionally dead-on) imagery and ad hoc rhyming with proper names and places:

The wise men came from the east.
its wisdom is dried up,
a fig with its many seeds;
its sayings (deeds)
inscribed on tablets
endures as stone endures,
but they are not precisely statements;
they are elliptical as the thighs of its women.
consult the sufis, the masters of zen.
remember Li Po, Saladin.

The east is a great beast at bay
in the desert, a mongol caravan.
distances are far.
there is snow in China.
there is whiskey at Kandahar.

The west is electric trains
a brass figure on a cross and
supply & demand
profit & loss.   there is no prevailing
colour in the west
unless we speak of that dictated by Schiaparelli
and that is for spring or autumn only.

Elsewhere, as in “Did I meet You in Persepolis?” he more plainly exercises the humor of his considered hedonism:

When you speak of the “cannabis problem”,
he sd then,
placing the wee green-
black ball of hashish
upon her gleam-
ing, creamsweet abdomen,
I take it you refer
to the garden of my uncle, the emir,
where the problem
is the manner in which you prefer
to absorb it…

Burroughs is correct when he says that Trocchi writes about more than just flesh, but “flesh and death and”—this is where I think he is right—“the vision that comes through the flesh.” Trocchi’s poetry suggests a poet much like his “Man at Leisure,” which begins with the indented triplet:

his world picture was
his word picture and
his vocabulary, obscene

Sepulchres, Ugo Foscolo, tr. J.G. Nichols (Oneworld Classics) $13.95

Again, in an unusual display of honesty, translator J.G. Nichols writes in his post-poetry “Extra Material” that “Foscolo’s poetry is uneven in quality.” In tone—and indeed in century as well, having been born in 1778 and having died in 1827—Foscolo is quite distant from Trocchi, much more formal and generously appointed with allusions to the classics. Born on the Ionian Island of Zante to a Greek mother and a Venetian father, Foscolo engaged his passion for the not-yet nation of Italy in his professional and poetic lives, both serving in Napoleon’s army and later writing poems decrying some of his edicts. The poet eventually settled in English, where he made a living writing essays. In his spare time he translated Milton—an excerpt, retranslated into English, is included here—and wrote at least one poem in English, included as an appendix. My favorite poem in the collection, which is certainly not as accomplished as the fragmentary “The Graces” or long title-poem “Sepulchres,” is “Against Lamberti,” which reminds me of the bureaucracy  and opportunism that breeds within government-funded arts initiatives:

“What is Lamberti doing,
That learned man?”
“Printing a Homer
He works hard upon.”
“Does he comment?” “Oh no!”
“Does he translate?” “Oh! Oh!
He is revising his first proof,
And issues every month one leaf;
We’ll see it end with the decade;
Unless Bodini is already dead.”
“That is a work undying!”
“The Government is paying.”

It is difficult for me to critique the translation of work from this period, but it seems Nichols has done well to preserve Foscolo’s poetic high speech, often employing the Anglicized constructions of the Romance languages to a formalizing effect. While I at first found his capitalization of each line—which Foscolo doesn’t himself employ—annoying, I came to understand and then admire its use as another subtle formalizing device. As an example of Nichols’ translation, as well as a more representative example of Foscolo’s work, the first five lines of “Sepulchres” follow:

All’ombra de’ cipressi e dentro l’urne
confortate di pianto è forse il sonno
della morte men duro? Ove più il sole
per me alla terra non fecondi questa
bella d’erbe famiglia e d’animale…

Shaded by cypresses, and kept in urns,
Consoled by weeping, is the sleep of death
Really not quite so rigid? When the sun
For me at length no longer fills the earth
With such a family of plants and beasts…

DS

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Four Poems by Alice Willington

Cast

X

Our prayers are lines into cold,
to the fish god,
shadow and black scales.

X

She swirls and vanishes,
she is the current

beyond the turn of the river.

X

The hooks snag sheet music,
clarinets, an evening folded
in the drag of a cloak.

X

We must play but first
we reel them gasping

and dash their heads with air.

X

X

Light as itself

X

I lie down and close my eyes.
The snow is inside, a shiver
light as itself, mosquito
flight falling out of the black
softly softly

Uncatchable outside, the blizzard
guest opens his fever quilt,
slips chill over my fingers,
goose-down quiver nestles,

softly softly

X

X

Daffodils

X

I bought them for me, I said,

and offered you a button-hole.

X

I should have worn honeysuckle,
blue drift under starlight.

X

X

Crucible

X

The bunsen’s hiss is clattered china,
the steam and talk of a café,

X

sound which crumbles
to red hot ash in the dish.

X

The espresso cup fills, its spirals
distilling its silence.

X

I let it cool.

X

X

Alice Willington lives in Oxford. A graduate of the University’s M.St. in Creative Writing, she grew up in Scotland, on the boarding school campus where her father taught. Other new work appears in Horizon Review.

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Books Abroad

Despite the wide selection of books I brought with me to review—including, for example, Anne Carson’s incredible New Directions book in a box, Nox—it’s an inevitability that I will find, purchase, and be given books while I travel. This trip is no different, and I’m now in Mombasa reading books I stumbled upon over the course of the Poetry Translation Centre’s Mexican Poets’ Tour through the UK. Several of the titles I’ve acquired will be reviewed at full length soon, including Adam O’Riordan’s Home, for example, but I’d like to mention a few noteworthy titles now, in a more informal summary of what I’ve been reading.

The first is a small book I bought at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, Dreuchd An Fhigheadair/The Weaver’s Task: a Gaelic Sampler, ed. by Crìsdean MhicGhilleBhàin/Christopher Whyte (Scottish Poetry Library, 2007. £5). In his introduction, Whyte describes the pairs of poems this pocket-sized volume contains as neither translations or versions, but as “responses,” describing them rather enigmatically: “A question rarely dictates the answer it gets and yet the answer must necessarily take account of the question being posed.” The collection includes original poems in Gaelic by Maoilios Caimbeul, Deòrsa MacIain Dheòrsa, Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh, and others, with responses by Tracy Herd, W.N. Herbert, Jacky Kay, and their English-language Scottish contemporaries. One of my favorite responses, by Robert Crawford to MacFhionnlaigh’s poem “An Sgìobhaiche Gàidhlig,” articulates the status of the minority writer—or indeed any poet—well. Here in its entirety:

The Gaelic Writer

Like Krusty the Clown from The Simpsons
taking a pinpoint plunge
from a mile-high divingboard thin as a skelf
into a dramful of water

out here in front of a tiny audience
of halfhearted seals applauding.

Others, all deserving more than a passing mention, include Pascale Petit’s chapbook The Wounded Deer (Smith/Doorstop Books, 2005. £3), the sequence of fourteen poems after Frida Kahlo that established her longterm interest in the painter, now more fully manifested in her new collection with Seren, What The Water Gave Me, to be featured here soon; Neil Rollinson’s Amphibians (2007. £5), from the Wordsworth Trust’s limited edition series of chapbooks by their poets in residence; and Andrew Forster’s brand new Territory (£7.50), his second with Flambard Press Poetry, which explores the rainy hinterlands of Cumbria and South-West Scotland, where, as he writes in “You Call This Rain…,” even what would be Los Angeles’ most epic storm  “is a mere shortlived cloudburst/breaking the tension in the air.”

DS

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