When I started to write poetry, I simply wanted to see if I could do it, and if it could help me make sense of the world. I never really thought about where it might take me, but even if I had, I doubt that the answer would have been “Yorkshire”. I’ve just got back from a wonderful weekend in God’s own country and it’s all thanks to my poem, Sycamore Gap.
The poem itself has had quite a journey. I was inspired by the beauty, and the sense of history that stretched across the landscape. I remember having very grand ideas about what I wanted to write, but what came out was much less grand, and much stranger. The poem insisted itself, even when it defied my plans for it, and continued with that same stubbornness when I kept getting rejection after rejection. I kept submitting it until it found a home and then, in a strange echo of the poem itself, it started to propagate. It was featured as a Guardian poem of the week, and it featured in the wonderful anthology, Places of Poetry, a book that grew out of the equally wonderful website which mapped the UK with poems.
I felt all of this was an unexpected and rather fabulous result for a strange and scrappy little poem, but after the mindless vandalism of the tree, the poem insisted itself once again. Many more people found the poem, which had transformed overnight. I had no inkling of what it would come to mean when I wrote it, there is a sadness to it that I never intended. I read the poem on Radio 4 and the BBC World Service when the news broke - I was terrified to do it, but I felt so strongly that a place that meant so much to so many should be remembered, and I trusted the poem to insist itself in the right way.
It was the poem that took me to Yorkshire this weekend, or rather, it was the beautiful work of the composer Gavin Higgins, who created an incredible song cycle, Speak of the North, comprised of poems about the region. I recommend this article in which he speaks about his work, and which explains it better than I ever could.
Hearing my words sung back at me so beautifully, and the way the music created shades and dimensions to the work was very moving. I don’t know enough about music to even imagine how it was done, but I can be sure that both Gavin and the soprano have the souls of poets, the way they interpreted the language, the life that they breathe into their work was so inspiring. I believe there will be more performances in the future and I recommend that you take yourself to see and hear the electricity and love that has been poured into the work.
It was a long hot train journey home yesterday, but I am full of nothing but gratitude for the weekend. Gratitude to Gavin for including my work in his song cycle and putting me in the hallowed company of my heroes, the Brontes. Gratitude to the musicians who performed the work with such soaring talent. Gratitude to the arts for all it can do to connect and inspire. Gratitude for my beloved friend Alison, who drove down from Edinburgh to join me. And of course, gratitude for my strange little poem that continues to insist itself, spreading out like the Sycamore Gap saplings, the trees of hope that are taking root across the UK.