Tag: Bath

Let us hold hands and look

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In a Bath Teashop, by John Betjeman
“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another —
Let us hold hands and look.”
She such a very ordinary little woman;
He such a thumping crook;
But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels
In the teashop’s ingle-nook.

I have it on good local authority that Sally Lunn’s is the only teashop in Bath with an inglenook, so Betjeman’s poetic assignation must have occurred here. It’s the oldest remaining house in Bath, according to the plaque out front, and all the guidebooks say one must eat a bun there. We finally obeyed on Wednesday with my visiting cousins, and it was full of Americans–including one of my daughter’s high school teachers, to their mutual shock. It’s a lovely old three-story place with exposed timbers and a low curving plaster ceiling over the narrow stairs.

I didn’t scan for an inglenook because I wasn’t sure what qualified as one, but I just looked it up now: it’s a warm recess by a fireplace. The alliteration in Betjeman’s last two lines gets even more interesting when you learn than angel and ingle both come from Old English via Scots or Irish Gaelic–angel also means fire. I know almost nothing about Betjeman–although he was a poet laureate in the UK, he’s a small-ish figure in the US version of the British canon–but I admire the way character transformation links to linguistic change in this poem. How paradoxical, though, that speaking threatens to break the romantic spell. Language seems to debase love and identity here, and at the same time it carries the flame across great spans of time.

I’m saying goodbye now after a month in Bath, having never figured out what the local accent is, because everyone seems to be from elsewhere–or, at least, changed by long stays in other places. A month isn’t a significant sliver in forty-seven years, so I’m not claiming to have been re-written by the experience myself, as Bath itself has been re-mapped by Romans, medieval kings, and then the grand plans of the Georgians. But I made some wonderful connections here and elsewhere in England. I rendezvoused with family members I hadn’t seen in nine years. I talked and tippled with poets whose work was new to me and picked up more books and magazines than I should have, considering the luggage problem. I did some writing, too, and I suddenly have some new ideas for my youngest poetry manuscript, the core of the book that will come after Radioland. So now I’m off to a picnic lunch by the Avon, and tomorrow morning, very early, we’re dragging our cases onto a coach to Heathrow. Even though I’m returning to work and muggy heat and a small town without Thai food or Roman ruins, I’m feeling nearly ready for the translation.

Lines Composed in Bath a Few Days After Visiting Tintern Abbey

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Lines Composed in Bath a Few Days After Visiting Tintern Abbey and Also Nottingham, Coleford, Netheravon, and Miscellaneous Places Viewed Accidentally Because We Forgot to Reserve a Car with Sat-Nav and Had No Map. June 22, 2015.

Twenty-six years have passed!–two advanced degrees,
two mortgages, two beauteous teens raised
to height if not to wisdom since I last
trudged complainingly uphill to gaze
upon the Royal Crescent; since I toured
the Roman Baths at student rates, and couldn’t
find an open pub at which to order cheaply.
Again I hear the angry-baby cry
of gulls and shiver in the English summer
drizzle. Again I fail at navigation
in the passenger seat of a hired car, calling
“Left!” down mazy B roads or into the coils
of roundabouts.

Yet Nottingham was new,
where Zayneb paced me past the trams toward
the castle and back to Wired, weaving the evening
into lace. And the puzzling mossy scowles we found
in a Welsh wood, where Nigel carried Ella
over yew bridges and slick mud, rust-hued.
It seemed a miracle to reach the abbey,
soaked clothes steaming in a sudden blaze.
The Wye rippled along, bright-scaled, as if
it were a sleeping dragon breathing. And next
day, the solstice, we steered past Stonehenge toward
a barbeque, where Boris the boxer chased
the terrier Molly round and round the garden
till she bared her fangs and jumped up on my lap.

If I could see into the life of things
or feel a Presence or hear the still sad music
of humanity, I wouldn’t presume to admit
it; trampling iambs into rubble with
my trainers is American enough.
Plus I’ve learned I’m “misophonic,” meaning
tormented by chewing and ticking and scraping,
and so the sadder human noises tend
to outscratch the musical intimations.
I need a white noise app to sleep, given
how the pigeons carouse and tourists flap.
Yet it’s pleasant to sit in the Pump Room
or try on corsets in the Fashion Museum,
dreaming of Austen heroines, or to look
on ruins overwritten by Romantic
musers, as if their lines still chime in each
damp breeze;–with each new scene a riffling
as of pages, worn soft now. Streets more dear,
and valleys greener, for my poets’ sake.

Apologies to Wordsworth, but this was too much fun to resist. We’re having a terrific trip so far, with a good balance of history, art, food, family, and walking around pretty landscapes. Bath is a great base. Chris is fairly busy teaching his creative writing workshop, but since he has superhuman energy levels anyway, he is still sightseeing with us some mornings and on the weekends, and our flat is so central (North Parade, between the Roman Baths and the cricket grounds) that taking the kids around by myself is simple. It’s a fifth floor walkup, though, so keeping the beauteous teens in groceries carried from Waitrose by hand is the biggest challenge. Here’s the view from the chair by the window beside which I composed these mortal lines.image

For any of you who know my “Coffee with Poets in New Zealand” essay, I’m reprising that experience, too. It was a great pleasure to meet Zayneb Allak and many of her teachers and fellow-students in Nottingham. The reading series at Wired Cafe has a wonderful energy, as do the creative writing staff at Nottingham Trent. And yesterday I drank my pot of chai with Carrie Etter who teaches here in Bath–and who already had a copy of Heterotopia, courtesy of Peter Covino at Barrow Street. Next stop: Liverpool, to read at the Blue Coat!

Flashing through spacetime

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In theory, in two days, all this year’s schoolwork will be in recycling bins on the curb, I’ll be the parent of a rising high schooler and a rising first-year college student, and we’ll all be flying towards an English city full of ancient Roman ruins where my spouse is already teaching a fiction-writing class involving contemporary, historical, and speculative short stories. In addition to cars, planes, and trains, this will require yelling at teenagers in a perpetual loop to clean their rooms and pack already, AND repeatedly running after Poe the prophet-cat who detects suitcases and is trying to beat his own escape before we do. Oh, for a TARDIS so we could just land in Bath without the hassle of the process!

If you’re in the UK, you can see what I’ll be up to poetically on my events page. I plan to spend lots of time as a happy tourist, absorbing new-old stuff while writing a little and reading a lot, but you know how it is–all the proofs arrive in your inbox as soon as you’re en route and can no longer print them out to read properly.

The books that have been virtually transporting me lately include Liz Berry’s strong poetry collection Black Country; Stephen King’s Finders Keepers, which runs into some unfortunate bramble-patches but is an interesting mystery very much about reading; and Naomi Novik’s Uprooted, which as a good fantasy novel is in most ways nothing like VanderMeer’s recent eco-horror trilogy, and yet made me think about how many speculative books I’m reading concern nature fighting back against human despoilers and polluters. Hmm. The monsters are shifting on us again.

Next up, in honor of Bath, is Northanger Abbey, followed by McDermid’s rewrite. I’ll be looking for the British books on the Forward poetry short list, which looks promising. I also have the new 10th anniversary issue of Ecotone for the plane, in which I’m honored to appear–an essay from my in-progress Taking Poetry Personally project is this issue’s “Poem in a Landscape” feature. It’s called “Spacetime: Walking Around in Paula Meehan’s ‘Death of a Field'” and you can read the beginning of it here. It braids together criticism and memoir, including material about my trip to Ireland a couple of years ago, right after my father died. Note that Ecotone‘s excellent editorial team hyphenated spacetime, but I don’t–I like how collapsing the words gestures towards the inseparability of those two dimensions.

I’ll write again, with pictures I hope, from our flat in the Nunes House. And in the meantime, tonight is Cameron’s graduation from middle school. We all missed Madeleine’s eight-grade ceremony because we were in New Zealand. I can’t believe that’s four years ago now. It terrifies my daughter when I tell her again and again that in most ways I feel just the same as I did at her age, and I’m only pretending to be the Competent Parent in Charge, because that’s what this moment seems to require of me. After a flare of panic, she squints back at me skeptically, knowing I’m really an alien. Our internal organs–and most definitely our feelings–are NOT in the same places. I’ll close with a link to her recent guest blog about Joss Whedon: more evidence of how spacetime flies.