presented on March 29, 2026 as part of
The Factory Lecture Series, VERSeFest: Ottawa's International Poetry Festival
My thoughts are as fragmentary and
clamorous as the urban spaces I wander around. I wanted to start with the
process of walking, with the idea of an encounter. I wanted to start with Roy
Fisher, with Alice Oswald, with Steve Eely, with Donna Stonecipher, with
Stephen Emmerson, with Annie Ernaux, but they all collided in my mind before I
could pin them down.
Who was it said if you know the local,
you know the world? If you write your street, your own particular environment,
in a way you do write everything; by sharing your own part of the
universal you enter into a dialogue of generosity and understanding. I
underlined it. Somewhere.
I wanted to explain how I make a poem.
How I’ve been walking around the towns and between-spaces of post-industrial
Northern England looking for a way to consider, for example, a roundabout, or
the ruination of a closed supermarket and the spread of its atmosphere throughout
the neighbouring streets and towns. What closed sites and their ongoingness can
do to a mood, and what those moods can do to politics, and therefore to our
future landscapes, that is, future closed sites and future moods and politics
and on. And what poetry can do, in perhaps the opposite direction, by attending
to such moods, to such ruins, by inhabiting and pulling at the currentness of our
spatial habits.
During the last couple of years of walking
and reading and looking and writing, I’ve seen a lot of depressed urban
environments, and during this time, and through this attention, what I have
needed to make a poem has lessened. What is obsessing me has localised via my
experience of its repetition. What I have needed to make a poem has distilled
into the small-scale manifestation of the world that is my one high street and
the little side roads that rib off it. It all starts from there.
Like Roy
Fisher, when he writes:
I have begun to see the city, and my
life in it, only in the last few months. Every so often now, while I’m walking
along, or reading, I feel a jerk, a grating contact with something firm. This
is electrifying. It is happening in the places I have inhabited for years; yet
now the story is different, the models in the shop windows begin to tell the
histories of their lives. At last I have been here long enough.[i]
Or when he
writes:
I am becoming known by sight.[ii]
And I’m immediately struck by having
that same thought yesterday – in what was then yesterday – in the greasy-spoon
café with my mum and her friend, and it was me, not them, who had six people
say hello to me, like that scene in Groundhog Day, which, when I watched
it with my children not long ago, I told them was not too far away from
parenting. Me, who spent so long running away and only recently came back again.
And my 5-year-old son, in London in the
holidays, he said stop making friends with everyone, on the train, in
the restaurant, at the bus stop, before someone sat at the table next to us and
I smiled and they started talking to me. If you love the landscape, whatever it
is, you can start to exude that. It can start to love you back. To offer you moments.
What my particular landscape has
offered me recently is this tiny crack between two terraced shopfronts that
join at the back, and its full of litter, an avalanche, but it’s a between-space
and I like it. A little secret I can smile at. And before which I access a
certain communion. A communion that passes through the sensory un-sentient.
Which connects me, in feeling, with anyone else noticing at any moment in time
this same crack.
The landscape allows us to connect with
people through it. It acts as transmitter, as transient object, and if we give
ourselves to it, it yields.
Roy Fisher
again, because I’m talking to him. He’s walking around his lost future the same
way I am mine. The way he says it is:
You’ll know this ten-yard stretch
of suburban tarmac, where something
shakes at you; this
junction-place of back lanes, rutted
gullies
with half a car
bedded in half a garage,
this sudden fence-post that breaks step;
the street, the chemist’s shop, the
lamp;
a stain in the plaster that so
resembles – and that body of air
caught between the ceiling
and the cupboard-top, that’s like
nothing that ever was.
And I
remember my valve that resembles a mallard. How I say to my children doesn’t it
look like a mallard, on the way to school sometimes. Or how I stop them by the
horse-feed buckets in the window of the horse-riding shop where the three
buckets say Pegasus, Frosty, and Tony, and I cry with laughter at the juxtaposition
of lofty and lowbrow prospective horse names, while my children point across
the road to the charity-shop window where one of the mannequins’ jumpsuits has
fallen down.
I find a newspaper article that says of
Roy Fisher’s landscapes:
Such places demand to be escaped from,
and then strenuously demand to be re-found. Uninvited, their numinous
shabbiness enters our dreams.[iii]
Through looking, the landscape gets
thicker. And through this thickness, I speak to my children, and they speak
back to me, about the litter, about our given processional names for things,
for ginnels and closed shops and specific crevices, and the immediate
environment gets thicker still. Some of our non-places are named after things
that have happened there. One of the shutters is called Sorry About This.
After several years away, and after
mapping myself explicitly onto the streets of Amsterdam – during my initial
navigation phase, during the birth of my first child, during a pandemic, during
repeated migratory lonelinesses – I returned to the place of my childhood and
was forced to map my new self onto it again, and to narrate that place for my
children who were now living it with me.
Recalling formative influences such as
the Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, Victor E. Frankl’s Man’s
Search for Meaning, and Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other
Pieces, and their tragi-optimist wrangling of their environments – as
material, as muse, as confidant, as playmate, as method of survival – I follow
the landscape. Or, for example, the work of Annie Ernaux – her attendance and
commitment to the everyday, to every experience, every space. Her trips to the
supermarket over the course of a year in Look at the Lights, My Love,
whose title takes a simple sentence from mother to baby and abstracts it, lifts
it, lifts us, until we are all new little people gazing up at the spoils of the
illuminated megacity and naively marvelling. I have to find a way to love where
I am because I’m here and, while I am, the time of my life is passing – and
what is a place or a life without love in it?
Annie Ernaux says supermarkets “are
part of the landscape for everyone under fifty”[iv],
that she puts herself in “idle mode”[v]
when inside them and takes a walk around. When I lived in the Netherlands, I spent
a lot of downtime wandering the largest shops with my baby, the ones I could
get most lost in. And my friend, in Berlin, said of her time in the UK, also
with a baby, that mostly she missed the supermarket. And myself again, when I
was visiting home, I wandered the same megastore over and over with my mum and
my then-baby daughter, three generations of shoppers, bargain hunting –
gathering, providing, in the newest of the old ways. On Reddit, people are
saying if you shop with a basket rather than a trolley it shows people you are
single, like a modern mating ritual.
A place that doesn’t reject you becomes
a friend. A place with enough room to wander, to think, to be left alone yet
not be alone, not entirely. It’s not just the supermarket. This extends to the retail
park, the car park, the abandoned factory. I walk along the lines with my
children. I climb over walls. A place that doesn’t reject you lets you play
with it. A place no longer defined, or whose definition you, by playing with
it, can question, also broadens who you are, what you could be.
I digress. That’s okay. I do this too
while walking. I make my poems that way.
Annie Ernaux says the journal is “the
form most in keeping with [her] temperament … partial to the impressionistic
recording of things, people, and atmospheres”. She calls it “a free statement
of observations and sensations, aimed at capturing something of the life of the
place.”[vi]
The journal, to me, is like long-form or large-scale poetry, the way it
fragments, the detailed noticing. The life, the supermarket, the city, they all
continue between journal entries, which are themselves poems. Each vignette
just an expanded line of verse, carefully juxtaposed between vibrant unrecorded
silences.
Donna Stonecipher mentions the “speech
act of pedestrianism”[vii],
which is a form of touch, which is embodiment, which is knowing, however we may
perform it. Our being in a place. In a chapter called “Gaps”, she
considers the line break. I find my line breaks in the city, jammed together,
collaged, between the assonance of old and new build, the metaphors urban flux uncovers,
and the friction and flow of spatial and mental juxtapositions.
The city is prose poetry; it wraps me
up and I’m cosy in the onslaught. In its complicated human messiness.
My poetry jumps around like poetry, but
it walks like prose. Much like this talk. It goes where it goes and I follow my
instinct until I don’t. Space is a luxury[viii].
Calm is a luxury. I’ve learnt to dissociate while I associate, to make a kind
of frantic art from my environmental wrangling, playing in the hot core of
colliding pasts and futures, where structures rise up as others burn down. I’ve
learnt to find the gaps and enter them, in which I dream of numinous shabbinesses.
I write my poetry on the bus, on my phone.
Roy Fisher
again, on the something he’s narrating:
Something’s decided
to narrate
in more dimensions than I can know
the gathering in
and giving out of the world on a slow
pulse, on a metered contraction
that the senses enquire towards
but may not themselves
intercept. All I can tell it by
is the passing trace of it
in a patterned agitation of
a surface that shows only
metaphors. Riddles. Resemblances
that have me in the chute
as it meshes in closer many modes
funnelling fast through one event,
the flow-through so
dense with association [ix]
My own flow-through is forty years
later; that is, both myself and the landscape are forty-years faster, sunk in
the stop-start rhythms of communicative capitalism. I like it best when the
line walks like I do, when it keeps going on – stable, predictable. It can say
what it likes, as long as it keeps going on. Like Beckett’s prose, Kafka’s –
just consciousness and rhythm, and then the familiarity. That dark humour looking
after me again. I rest in the movement, as in a gently swelling ocean. It’s
terrifying and we might die, but the voices are like music. The kindness is in the
staying with me. The supermarket is open, the cafés. The lights of the city
stay on all night.
Stephen
Emmerson says:
Driving to work I am lorry and car. I
am grey cloud approaching from the north-west. I am every single lane on the
motorway. What are words for? They are for dreaming.[x]
I dream of labyrinth hotels. Of
four-storey indoor market palaces with trapdoors and narrow passages and
impossible connections. The landscapes of my dreams take the landscapes of my
real life and they sculpt them into what needs to be imagined. I am Brutalist
building. I am boarded-up cinema. By Torres Blancas in Madrid I sat down and
wept. Its amber-glass visor, so casually cool over the main entryway. The cloudness
of it.
I walk to a building and I encounter
it. The almost death of it, the almost life of it.
Donna
Stonecipher:
It was like going to see “The Unbuilt
City,” an exhibition of plans and models designed to transform your city –
grids, towers, monumental ministries, vast plazas – that came to nothing.[xi]
Today it was like walking to the pit
head. It was my boots in mud. It was standing at a crossroad of
is-this-private-land where, after an hour of no one, two women and a buggy, a
man on a bike, and myself, converged at a dirt-track bottleneck. The women
asked is the canal over there, and I asked is the pit over there,
and that moment of noise, I thought, that overlapping, is what a city is like.
I remember once on a frozen sea next to
Poland, a car pulled up on the ice and asked me the way to the lighthouse
before driving off to the frozen horizon. I remember once on a major road in
Manchester, a group of people asked the way to the recently opened sinkhole – we
were all looking for it, going to meet it like a visiting celebrity, a rare
chance to peer inside our built-on urban earth. I remember once, on my own
bike, asking a man with a paper bag if I was yet in Belgium – the tarmac had
changed consistency; it couldn’t still be France.
Stephen
Emmerson again:
As a child I used to collect objects of
interest that were of no interest to anyone else. On one occasion I found a
small metal object about an inch long. … I took it with me everywhere. The
touch the feel the look. Eventually I moved on to another object but I did not
forget about the earlier one. Still further down the line a box within which
the object was housed was thrown away by someone who did not realise the object
was in there and even if they had realised that the object was in there they
would not have been able to understand that it was the most important thing in
my life.[xii]
So with the buildings. The cracks and
gaps in the urban environment in which I house my heart. Forgotten, unwanted,
ugly. It’s not me, not that exactly, but it is kinship. There is a sense
of being somehow alike. I run my hand along the concrete. The future it, like
me, was promised. The house, the car, the job, the love. We’ve so many been
disappointed. Been left stood outside in the weather, in this slipshod future.
Like Steve Ely’s eel who travels from
the Sargasso, through a “sheer-walled stream between the London-Edinburgh railway
line” where “blue shit seep[s] from chemical toilets” and “cormorants dribbl[e]
lead”, where “rats feed from litter bins” and “the little eels slither in the
meal-deal flow”.[xiii]
That’s how we are in the landscape,
adapting, casting off. And I pause by the dying structures, because my own
future is also held in whatever they are telling. The dated buildings, stripped
of function, serve as tombs to an imagined future-past. They promise the things
we used to believe in. Remind us that nothing is certain, apart from this now,
here, ourselves, and what we do with it.
Alice Oswald,
in the river, says:
I’m struggling now to find the really
lovely stones I dream of: maroon stones, perfect ellipses – but it’s not just
stones, sometimes huge bits of wood with the texture of water still in them in
the plane of movement, a kind of camber.[xiv]
We’re all
dreaming, and a city, too, flows like water. Buildings I grew up with are gone,
hated, obscured, or become something entirely other. Our trajectories are the
same, the mysterious processes of capitalism convince us of one thing or
another. These buildings are my neighbours; I must love them anyway. I look at
pictures of when they were younger. How they change by staying the same in a
world that wanes and transfigures; how meanings and associations layer; their
durability, reliance, persistence. How they perform sculpture, imply secrets.
How they invite and contain me. The way they catch the light.
[xi] Donna
Stonecipher, Model City, p42
[xii] Headland,
from A series of tics #2
Lydia Unsworth is a poet from Manchester, UK. Her work has appeared in many journals
and anthologies including Dreaming Awake: New Contemporary Prose Poetry from
the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. She is a PhD candidate at
the Centre for Place Writing in Manchester, looking at kinship with
disappearing post-industrial architecture. She has 6 poetry collections and 4
above/ground chapbooks, and has two new poetry collections coming out in
2026, Stay Awhile (April, Knives Forks and Spoons Press) and This Now Extends
to My Daughter (May, Blue Diode Press).
