The Rhubaba committee and artist Clara Hancock consider the role of — and need for — public parks and open green spaces. We discuss the ways poetry has a radical potential to transform our experiences in public parks into collective forms of restorative refuge through language and storytelling. In the podcast we look to the UK’s oldest public park, Glasgow Green, as a key example. The Green is a public commons with histories of being a site of resistance for working people: a space for gathering, self-organising, education and protest. Although space and architecture are not inherently political, the ways in which they are occupied and ordered reinforces oppressive systems of power. This is particularly visible in the built, urban environment but also, as we discuss, in the colonial monuments that occupy many of our public parks that perpetuate selective narratives around powerful individuals who ‘built Scotland’s cities’ depicted in ways that omit the violent reality of the British Empire. Clara proposes that poetry could be an alternative monument in public space that creates and remembers histories, thoughts, and feelings through a form of subtle resistance.
CP: Clara Hancock
KK: Khadea Kuchenmeister
LT: Laura Tully
LB: Lindsay Boyd
NR: Natasha Ruwona
NT:Today we are joined by Clara to discuss their research, so maybe we could start off with that Clara, tell us a little bit about what you’ve been working on and what you’ve been thinking through.
CH:It began out of thinking around the ways that public green space can offer itself up to different forms of resistance. I’m quite interested in the ways that power is created and controlled in the built environment and within architecture; so then, what open green space can offer to push up against that and what role parks and open spaces play within the neo-liberal project of the city and this attempt to own and control and manage every area of urban space.
From this, I started to focus on Glasgow Green, which I found interesting, it has this really rich history of protest and mobilisation and resistance in different forms. It’s the oldest park in Glasgow and it has this historical role in the city as a large public commons. I can use that as a point to examine what has been a shifting definition of the commons, thinking about ‘the commons’ as a place where resources and knowledge can be shared democratically. When thinking about this history — thinking about ‘what is political space?’ — space is never inherently political, it’s the way that it’s occupied and ordered that is political. I’m quite interested in teasing apart those histories and the charged nature of the landscape, thinking about how that history filters into how we experience space.
The main thing that I have been exploring through this is poetry, thinking about poetic experience or poetic understanding of existing in the city. I think that poetry is this amazing tool for resisting power and finding connections and location through the body, and also what it can provide in terms of community and commonality and the relationship of that with space and location.
LT:You touched on it a bit when you were describing the project there, when you think of value and how it is inherently linked to commodities. Thinking about that and what the implications of that are; the continued production of public space,either the creation of new ones or ones that already exist…
CH:The idea of commodifiable space and how individuals are expecting to perform in public, in accordance with capitalism. I think it’s really interesting when you get space like open green spaces where the functioning of it isn’t so inherently linked to commodities, so what is it that people use it for and what can they offer?
KK:How do you see the public space offering an urban resistance?
CH:I think we can learn a lot from the histories of Glasgow Green and the different ways it’s been occupied in that way. Like I mentioned, it’s historically been this huge public commons and originally it was completely managed and maintained by working people from the area, so the land had no owners which enabled quite a radical sense of power distribution, purely out of necessity. In many ways it is hard for us to imagine this kind of land distribution and self-governance now when we’re so bound up within the power structures of capitalism. The area of it has decreased a lot from its initial size and it’s been taken over by the council so a lot of the autonomy there is gone but I think there is still so much that it can offer, and we can see this continuous thread up until the present where it has been a site for gathering and protest and resistance.
One thing I am really interested in looking into is this history of auto-didactic and self-organised education in the Green. I found out about this from a heritage trail booklet that was put out by Glasgow city council, it used to be referred to as Glasgow Green University and at the end of the 19th century the Green became this site for education demonstrations. Each weekend there would be public lectures and people coming to listen to these and this became the education in itself — and like people would go to the local libraries and read up on things and come back the following week and refute what had been said. Loads of working people considered Glasgow Green to be their place of education, it was said that councillors and Members of Parliament had graduated from Glasgow Green University. This really amazing history was facilitated by open space and it makes me think of the possibilities for education outside of the ways that the built environment can control and gate-keep access to education and facilities and knowledge production.
KK:That is really quite exciting hearing about that and it makes me think about contemporary things that I’ve seen online on social platforms about people resisting the closure of libraries in Govanhill and staging protests outside of the library by sitting outside and reading a book or self-organised education.
LT:That made me think as well, how the libraries are closing but also how libraries are not just places that you go and get books anymore; they are also becoming a space where multiple services are getting accessed, it’s not just a space for books. It’s this kind of down-scaling of different buildings and resources and sort of throwing them all into libraries. In the past maybe you would have gone somewhere else to get this information but now it’s just all thrown into the library, so it’s become this kind of really different kind of space.
NR:I remember, as a child, libraries being such a part of my life, going there and getting the books and that being such an exciting thing. Especially living in Govanhill, there’s no money put into this area of town and it’s just let go quite a lot by the council. It’s Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency and she doesn’t really bother with it, the library is another added aspect of, “Oh right, so you really don’t care about this area, this area is not cared for.” And thinking that through [in terms of] what to do about that as a resident, in highlighting those things or making improvements is really interesting.
CH:Yeah. Libraries are one of the only places where you can exist without having to spend money and it’s just not valued.
LB:It’s amazing to think what is possible within public spaces and how that works in terms of thinking about private spaces by comparison and the role that language can play there; is that something that you think about within your work, in terms of thinking about the poetic resistance as well?
CH:Yes, definitely. I think a lot about the amazing potential of language and of poetry as something that is so much more expansive than people allow it to be. I think it is a way of living and existing in the world that is so liberating. I think of it as this ancient mechanism of ritual and healing and survival and it’s so important when you think about it through the lens of the ways that we experience space.
Often the ways that people use green space is quite meditative and ritualistic and poetic in and of itself; it’s a place to relax and reconnect and exercise and have this refuge from the city. In this way that you can exist in the city without even realising that you’re resisting subtly the way that capitalism wants you to behave. Open green space often really facilitates poetry and gathering and contemplation and moving through green space and responding to the landscape with language. You take your private experience, your reflection and by creating language, it becomes something that is public and communal and shareable and tangible in that way, which is really exciting. Thinking about the functions of green space, particularly Glasgow Green is a place historically where protest has occurred and resistance has happened, as well as exercise and refuge and rest. These are both forms of wellness and improvement, where you resist capitalism, at least idealistically.
I’ve been looking a lot into the work of the poet C.A. Conrad. The ways that C.A Conrad used poetry to move through situations of difficulty and suffering and pain in their life. By treating poetry as a very ritualistic thing and creating these poetry rituals where they go out often into public space and they have activities they undertake and from that they create a poem in this kind of way which is very methodical and very bodily and intuitive, they’re really trusting in the movements and the actions of their body and space and how, from that, poetry’s generated which I think is really amazing.
Before lockdown they created this project called the Poetry Commons. Obviously, it had to stop for the moment but it was people meeting up in public parks across America to do these rituals together and create and share poetry and to learn from each other in that way. Just the act of gathering is just so powerful in itself; learning and sharing and healing each other outside of systems of commodity or power, it’s really radical, I think, in a very subtle way, just through occupying space.
This kind of relates to this idea that I’ve been reading into, of the ‘chronotope,’ which is quite a dense book by this Russian philosopher Bakhtin. But what it is that he talks about is how narrative is driven by this specific constellation of time and space. I guess how the exact positioning of the time and place that you find yourself in defines how we act and perform in specific social organisations and defines how narrative and language is created. From that idea it shows the necessity of thinking about space and within that, the significance of architecture and nature and geography and all these contexts as the spine of how we relate to each other and how we think about poetry and narrative because it’s always rooted in that sense of place. Or at least for me, I’ve always been interested in place and the conditions that that creates for poetry. That was a very long-winded answer but I guess I am very interested in what the physical conditions of place gives to language and how poetry, industry and narrative filters into the ways that we experience place.
NR:It is super interesting, having that focus on looking at land and geography, we all have relationships with that. We all move around the world in different ways and in different spaces and so to have that writing with the land is super interesting. It makes it feel a lot more accessible for people to think about poetry as being relevant to them.
KK:I really like how you describe ‘chronotope’ or this idea of constellation. It makes me think about embodied language. Poetry feels like it always brings to life all of these connections that you make or navigate through, like geographies. You just described it in a really lovely way.
CH:Thank you. I think that it’s a way into poetry as well. Like you were saying, Natasha, it can feel so inaccessible. And that’s, again, about systems of power and how education works in that way of guarding off or creating barriers. And poetry is just the most accessible thing and that is what is so amazing about it, is that it’s your private experience and it’s your meditations on the world and it’s so internal, but then from that you create this thing which is public and shareable, an object that you can then put back out and it’s that way of creating that’s so free.
KK:What does poetry offer us in public spaces?
CH:What I’ve been saying about that engagement with the landscape through the body and using poetry as a tool for channelling power and autonomy. I think about this a lot because my own relationship to writing is really facilitated by being able to access nature and being able to access points that make me feel more grounded and to locate and restore myself in that way, by going out and walking and thinking and moving through public parks and the repeated and ritualistic act of that.
There is this amazing potential and power in that way that you can create value to language through location. I think you can attach meaning and value onto certain locations by investigating the history there and thinking through your own memories, and that becomes quite poetic and changes how you subsequently experience that sense of place. That is quite powerful, I think. You can be so cynical about that, it’s really easy to be cynical about that, but I think the value of poetry is so within yourself and you have to allow it to enter you and take you over; it’s not enough as a form of resistance in itself but it’s so necessary as part of a wider picture.
KK:It makes me think of subtler ways of resisting that we all engage in and the way you were describing the activities or the uses of the public space. I feel like poetry offers you that kind of refuge, as well. And there is so much power in the way that you need to access these vital parts of you and just kind of restoring yourself.
NR:That is really interesting in terms of how the research or how the thinking has an effect on how you move through landscapes or certain spaces and then that creates a relationship between yourself and that space, too. The prescribed way of walking around mindlessly and not paying attention to the space around you. Like, “Oh I’m more engaged and more in touch with it.”
CH:And that idea of ownership and drawing up what is public and private and how we are expected to perform in public is really interesting. It’s all about systems of power and control. I am really interested in how we are so dictated by those systems of power and how that plays out in our urban environments and thinking about what alternative systems of power and organising could look like and what effect that would have on our cities. Also, it’s just so ingrained in your head and engrained in the ways that we live, capitalism is so efficient at burrowing itself into our heads and there are so many ways that we’ve subconsciously adapted around that. It takes a lot of work to imagine alternatives that could be possible. I think the fundamental beginning of challenging that is challenging that in yourself and allowing yourself that hope and possibility to begin thinking through the possibilities of new kinds of power or organising authority. I know we were talking about this quote before, in previous discussions and it feels quite relevant here. This is by Audre Lorde from Poetry Is Not a Luxury, about poetry:
“It is a vital necessity of our existence, it forms the quality of life in which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change. First made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
I think that is really exciting and shows how much potential poetry has in beginning to initiate change or challenge existing structures. Going from that, you suggested that I read one of the poems I’ve written for the project. So, this one is actually the first poem that I wrote at the beginning of starting the research, which kind of shaped everything that came after it. I don’t normally work in that way — starting a project or research stemming from a poem. I think the research has gone in different directions since but what I was thinking about at the time is ways we actually visualise systems of power, like I was talking about, and how this plays out in cities and visualising the charge-like energy or potential in the spaces where people gather together against that. I was also really inspired by a poem A Modest Treatise by Lisa Robertson, which I read while out in the park, so there’s elements of that that come through in this also.
the city speaks and we reply in gesture
poetry embeds itself in our skin like a song,
we recognise it only as survival
in the green,
the architecture of feeling is heavy and invisible.
we called this “civic harmony”
power forms itself into uneven mounds along
the horizon of history
along
the myth of perspective
space is always faltering,
always tearing itself down again
we need new monuments.
this is a place where bodies have huddled together, historically.
a structure to represent the ways of
holding each other up.
at the drying poles, a curtain is blown open by the breeze and
inside, each citizen, working against their longing.
these are windows onto networks
that are both stable and ornate.
in this evening of sugary light the body and the city become each other,
time collects on everything and it
looks something like liberation, but it must not be mistaken.
we come as one spreading out through afternoons,
movements of time are held up by the movement of each body.
we will never identify with power, it’s built for resistance.
NR:Thanks, that was really nice. It was quite interesting when you were talking about how you wrote this first as part of the process. If you could maybe talk a little bit about the writing process of poetry for you, thinking about what we were talking about Audre Lorde as well. I feel a little bit that there is a parallel between doing that as part of the research process and then the language, and then into idea, then tangible action. It is kind of forming that process, maybe not intentionally?
CH:Yeah. I definitely have very varied ways of writing. Sometimes I can be very methodical about it and sit down like, ‘Okay, this is what I want to do.’ And then sometimes that doesn’t work for me at all but then I will just feel like writing coming to me. I always need to be reading and reflecting and thinking in that certain frame of mind, I think in order to write and that is kind of where space and location is really important because if I go out walking or connecting in that way, I can enter that state. I really admire the way that writers like C.A. Conrad work; they kind of expose that process where they create rituals that they do and they are able to create a poem from that. I am trying to work my way towards that way of writing but at the moment it does feel a bit more sporadic. But it definitely is always sort of in response to surroundings; that’s always been really important, the actual physical location.
LT:Do you write during these walks or during visits to these locations or is it when you come back? That is something I have been trying to do more… because I also totally get when you’re out and you have that sort of restorative headspace where you’re not really thinking about things, but you are, and it’s not too forced. Whereas if you’re sitting at your desk and you’re like, ‘Right, I’m going to write, I’ve got an hour…’ so I’ve been trying to find ways of creatively note-take while walking and start the writing process while in the environment.
CH:Yeah, I think I do try and do that. I can’t always do that but then there will be just going out and moving through and thinking and maybe making some notes and then coming back and really reflecting and I think putting myself — transporting myself into the memory of myself when I was there and creating a narrative from that. Sometimes it can be hard to really engage when you are actually physically there, but then you are creating that experience, then you can come back and enter into that experience as a memory and that can be quite generative.
I spoke a tiny bit (and this is such a huge topic that it’s hard to really go into or I won’t be able to do it justice) about monuments in that poem, which is something I have been thinking a lot about because that is typically the architecture that exists in our public spaces. They are amazing places for healing and restoring ourselves and as refuge but then they are occupied by these horrible colonial objects, and how that takes up space in those environments. There is a really terrible one in Glasgow Green, the Doulton fountain, which is actually the largest terracotta fountain in the world. It’s a huge terracotta fountain and it’s a really vulgar celebration of imperial power. It’s got Queen Victoria on the top and all the commonwealth around it. It is things like that where it feels like this model of hierarchical power and it’s that idea of individualised power and individuals who have created the city or helped build Glasgow as it is, without thinking about what were the networks of labour and resistance, like protests that happened and how those are also forms of what built up to what we understand Glasgow to be today. And maybe thinking about how monuments or things like that could represent those more distributed and horizontal forms of power and organising, rather than this hierarchical structure; that idea of unity and resistance in that way and how that isn’t represented through just horrible… the fact that that has to take up what is quite a meditative space.
KK:It makes me think of the Bristol protests where people are taking away or shaping the city in a different way and removing some of these statues or monuments as a refusal to keep walking past them and keep enduring this emotional labour as well. I think we should have a shared power in how our cities are shaped.
CH:Yeah. It is all about how power is presented and how it’s continually presented and how it is that creation of history as triumph and success, which it wasn’t. That needs to be addressed in different forms. I think that is something that poetry offers as well, it is a way of creating and remembering. It can also be a monument in itself, in that it’s like a preservation of history and of thought and of feeling. It has that sound and rhythm and ritual to it that is quite easy to remember and take on and hold inside yourself.
NR:Yeah definitely. I just wanted to ask if there was anything else that you wanted to say about how we think about and use common land today, within poetry or even when you were speaking about how you move around the city?
CH:Yeah, I think it is that subtle resistance. Thinking about how in the past common land enabled that quite radical form of self organisation which happened out of pure necessity because there weren’t other systems of power in place. Following on from that, or thinking about that history when we’re in those spaces, about how can I reclaim space or engage with my body through space? And in that way just challenge what is public or private. I think poetry is that taking of the private into the public and it becomes that idea of common thing and the common object; it really enables that sense of commonality which is really exciting. And all the layers of language and experience and that interaction in between all the stuff that we keep inside of us and that we carry around with us and bringing that into what is this public domain, and how we choose to engage with that. I think open space and public space really offer that subtle resistance, interrogating that public-private relationship by thinking it through using poetry.
The Rhubaba committee and artist Clara Hancock consider the role of — and need for — public parks and open green spaces. We discuss the ways poetry has a radical potential to transform our experiences in public parks into collective forms of restorative refuge through language and storytelling. In the podcast we look to the UK’s oldest public park, Glasgow Green, as a key example. The Green is a public commons with histories of being a site of resistance for working people: a space for gathering, self-organising, education and protest. Although space and architecture are not inherently political, the ways in which they are occupied and ordered reinforces oppressive systems of power. This is particularly visible in the built, urban environment but also, as we discuss, in the colonial monuments that occupy many of our public parks that perpetuate selective narratives around powerful individuals who ‘built Scotland’s cities’ depicted in ways that omit the violent reality of the British Empire. Clara proposes that poetry could be an alternative monument in public space that creates and remembers histories, thoughts, and feelings through a form of subtle resistance.
CP: Clara Hancock
KK: Khadea Kuchenmeister
LT: Laura Tully
LB: Lindsay Boyd
NR: Natasha Ruwona
NT:Today we are joined by Clara to discuss their research, so maybe we could start off with that Clara, tell us a little bit about what you’ve been working on and what you’ve been thinking through.
CH:It began out of thinking around the ways that public green space can offer itself up to different forms of resistance. I’m quite interested in the ways that power is created and controlled in the built environment and within architecture; so then, what open green space can offer to push up against that and what role parks and open spaces play within the neo-liberal project of the city and this attempt to own and control and manage every area of urban space.
From this, I started to focus on Glasgow Green, which I found interesting, it has this really rich history of protest and mobilisation and resistance in different forms. It’s the oldest park in Glasgow and it has this historical role in the city as a large public commons. I can use that as a point to examine what has been a shifting definition of the commons, thinking about ‘the commons’ as a place where resources and knowledge can be shared democratically. When thinking about this history — thinking about ‘what is political space?’ — space is never inherently political, it’s the way that it’s occupied and ordered that is political. I’m quite interested in teasing apart those histories and the charged nature of the landscape, thinking about how that history filters into how we experience space.
The main thing that I have been exploring through this is poetry, thinking about poetic experience or poetic understanding of existing in the city. I think that poetry is this amazing tool for resisting power and finding connections and location through the body, and also what it can provide in terms of community and commonality and the relationship of that with space and location.
LT:You touched on it a bit when you were describing the project there, when you think of value and how it is inherently linked to commodities. Thinking about that and what the implications of that are; the continued production of public space,either the creation of new ones or ones that already exist…
CH:The idea of commodifiable space and how individuals are expecting to perform in public, in accordance with capitalism. I think it’s really interesting when you get space like open green spaces where the functioning of it isn’t so inherently linked to commodities, so what is it that people use it for and what can they offer?
KK:How do you see the public space offering an urban resistance?
CH:I think we can learn a lot from the histories of Glasgow Green and the different ways it’s been occupied in that way. Like I mentioned, it’s historically been this huge public commons and originally it was completely managed and maintained by working people from the area, so the land had no owners which enabled quite a radical sense of power distribution, purely out of necessity. In many ways it is hard for us to imagine this kind of land distribution and self-governance now when we’re so bound up within the power structures of capitalism. The area of it has decreased a lot from its initial size and it’s been taken over by the council so a lot of the autonomy there is gone but I think there is still so much that it can offer, and we can see this continuous thread up until the present where it has been a site for gathering and protest and resistance.
One thing I am really interested in looking into is this history of auto-didactic and self-organised education in the Green. I found out about this from a heritage trail booklet that was put out by Glasgow city council, it used to be referred to as Glasgow Green University and at the end of the 19th century the Green became this site for education demonstrations. Each weekend there would be public lectures and people coming to listen to these and this became the education in itself — and like people would go to the local libraries and read up on things and come back the following week and refute what had been said. Loads of working people considered Glasgow Green to be their place of education, it was said that councillors and Members of Parliament had graduated from Glasgow Green University. This really amazing history was facilitated by open space and it makes me think of the possibilities for education outside of the ways that the built environment can control and gate-keep access to education and facilities and knowledge production.
KK:That is really quite exciting hearing about that and it makes me think about contemporary things that I’ve seen online on social platforms about people resisting the closure of libraries in Govanhill and staging protests outside of the library by sitting outside and reading a book or self-organised education.
LT:That made me think as well, how the libraries are closing but also how libraries are not just places that you go and get books anymore; they are also becoming a space where multiple services are getting accessed, it’s not just a space for books. It’s this kind of down-scaling of different buildings and resources and sort of throwing them all into libraries. In the past maybe you would have gone somewhere else to get this information but now it’s just all thrown into the library, so it’s become this kind of really different kind of space.
NR:I remember, as a child, libraries being such a part of my life, going there and getting the books and that being such an exciting thing. Especially living in Govanhill, there’s no money put into this area of town and it’s just let go quite a lot by the council. It’s Nicola Sturgeon’s constituency and she doesn’t really bother with it, the library is another added aspect of, “Oh right, so you really don’t care about this area, this area is not cared for.” And thinking that through [in terms of] what to do about that as a resident, in highlighting those things or making improvements is really interesting.
CH:Yeah. Libraries are one of the only places where you can exist without having to spend money and it’s just not valued.
LB:It’s amazing to think what is possible within public spaces and how that works in terms of thinking about private spaces by comparison and the role that language can play there; is that something that you think about within your work, in terms of thinking about the poetic resistance as well?
CH:Yes, definitely. I think a lot about the amazing potential of language and of poetry as something that is so much more expansive than people allow it to be. I think it is a way of living and existing in the world that is so liberating. I think of it as this ancient mechanism of ritual and healing and survival and it’s so important when you think about it through the lens of the ways that we experience space.
Often the ways that people use green space is quite meditative and ritualistic and poetic in and of itself; it’s a place to relax and reconnect and exercise and have this refuge from the city. In this way that you can exist in the city without even realising that you’re resisting subtly the way that capitalism wants you to behave. Open green space often really facilitates poetry and gathering and contemplation and moving through green space and responding to the landscape with language. You take your private experience, your reflection and by creating language, it becomes something that is public and communal and shareable and tangible in that way, which is really exciting. Thinking about the functions of green space, particularly Glasgow Green is a place historically where protest has occurred and resistance has happened, as well as exercise and refuge and rest. These are both forms of wellness and improvement, where you resist capitalism, at least idealistically.
I’ve been looking a lot into the work of the poet C.A. Conrad. The ways that C.A Conrad used poetry to move through situations of difficulty and suffering and pain in their life. By treating poetry as a very ritualistic thing and creating these poetry rituals where they go out often into public space and they have activities they undertake and from that they create a poem in this kind of way which is very methodical and very bodily and intuitive, they’re really trusting in the movements and the actions of their body and space and how, from that, poetry’s generated which I think is really amazing.
Before lockdown they created this project called the Poetry Commons. Obviously, it had to stop for the moment but it was people meeting up in public parks across America to do these rituals together and create and share poetry and to learn from each other in that way. Just the act of gathering is just so powerful in itself; learning and sharing and healing each other outside of systems of commodity or power, it’s really radical, I think, in a very subtle way, just through occupying space.
This kind of relates to this idea that I’ve been reading into, of the ‘chronotope,’ which is quite a dense book by this Russian philosopher Bakhtin. But what it is that he talks about is how narrative is driven by this specific constellation of time and space. I guess how the exact positioning of the time and place that you find yourself in defines how we act and perform in specific social organisations and defines how narrative and language is created. From that idea it shows the necessity of thinking about space and within that, the significance of architecture and nature and geography and all these contexts as the spine of how we relate to each other and how we think about poetry and narrative because it’s always rooted in that sense of place. Or at least for me, I’ve always been interested in place and the conditions that that creates for poetry. That was a very long-winded answer but I guess I am very interested in what the physical conditions of place gives to language and how poetry, industry and narrative filters into the ways that we experience place.
NR:It is super interesting, having that focus on looking at land and geography, we all have relationships with that. We all move around the world in different ways and in different spaces and so to have that writing with the land is super interesting. It makes it feel a lot more accessible for people to think about poetry as being relevant to them.
KK:I really like how you describe ‘chronotope’ or this idea of constellation. It makes me think about embodied language. Poetry feels like it always brings to life all of these connections that you make or navigate through, like geographies. You just described it in a really lovely way.
CH:Thank you. I think that it’s a way into poetry as well. Like you were saying, Natasha, it can feel so inaccessible. And that’s, again, about systems of power and how education works in that way of guarding off or creating barriers. And poetry is just the most accessible thing and that is what is so amazing about it, is that it’s your private experience and it’s your meditations on the world and it’s so internal, but then from that you create this thing which is public and shareable, an object that you can then put back out and it’s that way of creating that’s so free.
KK:What does poetry offer us in public spaces?
CH:What I’ve been saying about that engagement with the landscape through the body and using poetry as a tool for channelling power and autonomy. I think about this a lot because my own relationship to writing is really facilitated by being able to access nature and being able to access points that make me feel more grounded and to locate and restore myself in that way, by going out and walking and thinking and moving through public parks and the repeated and ritualistic act of that.
There is this amazing potential and power in that way that you can create value to language through location. I think you can attach meaning and value onto certain locations by investigating the history there and thinking through your own memories, and that becomes quite poetic and changes how you subsequently experience that sense of place. That is quite powerful, I think. You can be so cynical about that, it’s really easy to be cynical about that, but I think the value of poetry is so within yourself and you have to allow it to enter you and take you over; it’s not enough as a form of resistance in itself but it’s so necessary as part of a wider picture.
KK:It makes me think of subtler ways of resisting that we all engage in and the way you were describing the activities or the uses of the public space. I feel like poetry offers you that kind of refuge, as well. And there is so much power in the way that you need to access these vital parts of you and just kind of restoring yourself.
NR:That is really interesting in terms of how the research or how the thinking has an effect on how you move through landscapes or certain spaces and then that creates a relationship between yourself and that space, too. The prescribed way of walking around mindlessly and not paying attention to the space around you. Like, “Oh I’m more engaged and more in touch with it.”
CH:And that idea of ownership and drawing up what is public and private and how we are expected to perform in public is really interesting. It’s all about systems of power and control. I am really interested in how we are so dictated by those systems of power and how that plays out in our urban environments and thinking about what alternative systems of power and organising could look like and what effect that would have on our cities. Also, it’s just so ingrained in your head and engrained in the ways that we live, capitalism is so efficient at burrowing itself into our heads and there are so many ways that we’ve subconsciously adapted around that. It takes a lot of work to imagine alternatives that could be possible. I think the fundamental beginning of challenging that is challenging that in yourself and allowing yourself that hope and possibility to begin thinking through the possibilities of new kinds of power or organising authority. I know we were talking about this quote before, in previous discussions and it feels quite relevant here. This is by Audre Lorde from Poetry Is Not a Luxury, about poetry:
“It is a vital necessity of our existence, it forms the quality of life in which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change. First made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
I think that is really exciting and shows how much potential poetry has in beginning to initiate change or challenge existing structures. Going from that, you suggested that I read one of the poems I’ve written for the project. So, this one is actually the first poem that I wrote at the beginning of starting the research, which kind of shaped everything that came after it. I don’t normally work in that way — starting a project or research stemming from a poem. I think the research has gone in different directions since but what I was thinking about at the time is ways we actually visualise systems of power, like I was talking about, and how this plays out in cities and visualising the charge-like energy or potential in the spaces where people gather together against that. I was also really inspired by a poem A Modest Treatise by Lisa Robertson, which I read while out in the park, so there’s elements of that that come through in this also.
the city speaks and we reply in gesture
poetry embeds itself in our skin like a song,
we recognise it only as survival
in the green,
the architecture of feeling is heavy and invisible.
we called this “civic harmony”
power forms itself into uneven mounds along
the horizon of history
along
the myth of perspective
space is always faltering,
always tearing itself down again
we need new monuments.
this is a place where bodies have huddled together, historically.
a structure to represent the ways of
holding each other up.
at the drying poles, a curtain is blown open by the breeze and
inside, each citizen, working against their longing.
these are windows onto networks
that are both stable and ornate.
in this evening of sugary light the body and the city become each other,
time collects on everything and it
looks something like liberation, but it must not be mistaken.
we come as one spreading out through afternoons,
movements of time are held up by the movement of each body.
we will never identify with power, it’s built for resistance.
NR:Thanks, that was really nice. It was quite interesting when you were talking about how you wrote this first as part of the process. If you could maybe talk a little bit about the writing process of poetry for you, thinking about what we were talking about Audre Lorde as well. I feel a little bit that there is a parallel between doing that as part of the research process and then the language, and then into idea, then tangible action. It is kind of forming that process, maybe not intentionally?
CH:Yeah. I definitely have very varied ways of writing. Sometimes I can be very methodical about it and sit down like, ‘Okay, this is what I want to do.’ And then sometimes that doesn’t work for me at all but then I will just feel like writing coming to me. I always need to be reading and reflecting and thinking in that certain frame of mind, I think in order to write and that is kind of where space and location is really important because if I go out walking or connecting in that way, I can enter that state. I really admire the way that writers like C.A. Conrad work; they kind of expose that process where they create rituals that they do and they are able to create a poem from that. I am trying to work my way towards that way of writing but at the moment it does feel a bit more sporadic. But it definitely is always sort of in response to surroundings; that’s always been really important, the actual physical location.
LT:Do you write during these walks or during visits to these locations or is it when you come back? That is something I have been trying to do more… because I also totally get when you’re out and you have that sort of restorative headspace where you’re not really thinking about things, but you are, and it’s not too forced. Whereas if you’re sitting at your desk and you’re like, ‘Right, I’m going to write, I’ve got an hour…’ so I’ve been trying to find ways of creatively note-take while walking and start the writing process while in the environment.
CH:Yeah, I think I do try and do that. I can’t always do that but then there will be just going out and moving through and thinking and maybe making some notes and then coming back and really reflecting and I think putting myself — transporting myself into the memory of myself when I was there and creating a narrative from that. Sometimes it can be hard to really engage when you are actually physically there, but then you are creating that experience, then you can come back and enter into that experience as a memory and that can be quite generative.
I spoke a tiny bit (and this is such a huge topic that it’s hard to really go into or I won’t be able to do it justice) about monuments in that poem, which is something I have been thinking a lot about because that is typically the architecture that exists in our public spaces. They are amazing places for healing and restoring ourselves and as refuge but then they are occupied by these horrible colonial objects, and how that takes up space in those environments. There is a really terrible one in Glasgow Green, the Doulton fountain, which is actually the largest terracotta fountain in the world. It’s a huge terracotta fountain and it’s a really vulgar celebration of imperial power. It’s got Queen Victoria on the top and all the commonwealth around it. It is things like that where it feels like this model of hierarchical power and it’s that idea of individualised power and individuals who have created the city or helped build Glasgow as it is, without thinking about what were the networks of labour and resistance, like protests that happened and how those are also forms of what built up to what we understand Glasgow to be today. And maybe thinking about how monuments or things like that could represent those more distributed and horizontal forms of power and organising, rather than this hierarchical structure; that idea of unity and resistance in that way and how that isn’t represented through just horrible… the fact that that has to take up what is quite a meditative space.
KK:It makes me think of the Bristol protests where people are taking away or shaping the city in a different way and removing some of these statues or monuments as a refusal to keep walking past them and keep enduring this emotional labour as well. I think we should have a shared power in how our cities are shaped.
CH:Yeah. It is all about how power is presented and how it’s continually presented and how it is that creation of history as triumph and success, which it wasn’t. That needs to be addressed in different forms. I think that is something that poetry offers as well, it is a way of creating and remembering. It can also be a monument in itself, in that it’s like a preservation of history and of thought and of feeling. It has that sound and rhythm and ritual to it that is quite easy to remember and take on and hold inside yourself.
NR:Yeah definitely. I just wanted to ask if there was anything else that you wanted to say about how we think about and use common land today, within poetry or even when you were speaking about how you move around the city?
CH:Yeah, I think it is that subtle resistance. Thinking about how in the past common land enabled that quite radical form of self organisation which happened out of pure necessity because there weren’t other systems of power in place. Following on from that, or thinking about that history when we’re in those spaces, about how can I reclaim space or engage with my body through space? And in that way just challenge what is public or private. I think poetry is that taking of the private into the public and it becomes that idea of common thing and the common object; it really enables that sense of commonality which is really exciting. And all the layers of language and experience and that interaction in between all the stuff that we keep inside of us and that we carry around with us and bringing that into what is this public domain, and how we choose to engage with that. I think open space and public space really offer that subtle resistance, interrogating that public-private relationship by thinking it through using poetry.
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