by the same author ghost pot in between
Sea Swim John Wedgwood Clarke
Valley Press
Sea Swim was part of imove: a Cultural Olympiad Programme in Yorkshire, and continues to receive funding from Arts Council, England through Grants for the Arts.
First published in 2012 by Valley Press Woodend, The Crescent, Scarborough, YO11 2PW www.valleypressuk.com Second edition, first printing (September 2014) ISBN 978-1-908853-06-6 Cat. no. VP0029 Copyright Š John Wedgwood Clarke 2012, 2014 Cover photograph Š Lara Goodband 2012 The right of John Wedgwood Clarke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without prior written permission from the rights holders. A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Imprint Digital, Upton Pyne, Exeter www.valleypressuk.com/authors/johnwedgwoodclarke
Contents Introduction 9 South Bay: 12.30-13.00, 26.09.2011 13 Rings 14 Beach chalets 15 Hand 16 Rain Swim 17 Warship, South Bay 18 Hydro 19 We swim between ourselves 20 Landing 21 Swimming Lesson 22 Polystyrene 23 Captain Webb at Scarborough Aquarium 24 Acrobats 26 Swimmers’ Way 27 A stunning 28 Continuous Waterway 29 Winter Minutes 30
for Sea Swimmers
Introduction Swimming is the body singing itself back into being: you take a breath and plunge beyond reflection, back into the full extent of your shape. If, as is the case with the sea that has tempered these poems, the water is cold, that moment is accompanied by an annihilation of thought, a moment of pure shock that knocks the living daylights out of you only the better to let the daylight, with its kittiwakes, kelp and rocks, back in. Each stroke that sustains fluency and flight settles the swimmer into a rhythm of repeated movements that reveal hands and the sea differently over and over again, their disappearance and return discovered in water that is always new, always the same. Swimming, like singing, collapses time and carries us along in the moment of a song we re-join every time we dive in. It enacts metaphor, enabling a state of suspension between the apparently fixed points of our lives. In a world we’ve littered with our traces, in which we’ve surrounded ourselves with virtual information, the sea informs us that we’re a body still, and grants, for a short while at least, a place un-marked and open, which almost becomes us. But the sea, of course, is not us. You don’t turn your back on the sea; you don’t take your eye off it; you read it constantly for signs of danger as well as wonder. This attentiveness balances the sensory joys of swimming; it supplies the element of recognition that makes sea bathing a sublime activity, the source of pleasurable shudders as you venture safely out of your depth. Closer to the shore, swimming intensifies the contrast between the human and the un-human, mineral sea. In Scarborough, a town associated with the birth of sea bathing, a high-tide swim
may carry you in front of The Spa festooned with its stone fruit, past the flashing lights of Silver Dollar and Olympia Leisure, below the fabulous Grand Hotel with a room for each day of the year. The entrepreneurial ambition realised by the Georgians and Victorians may seem a dream when viewed from the sea, a brick and stone hallucination haunting Jurassic cliffs and unstable glacial clays. As you tread water, knowing the full extent of your body’s force in the ripples it transmits and loses in the swell, you may sense the scale of things from a new position in the world, your head just above the water as a half-size replica of the Hispaniola sails by without sails, without breeze, like Coleridge’s ship of ‘Life-in-death’, its passengers waving merrily. I’m an ambler of the ocean, not an ‘iron man’ or triathlete. I swim ‘to make it new’, to unhouse myself, to look back on the noise of my life. When I’m cold I come in. In the lull between the white noise of surf, sometimes I’ll hear swimmers more hardy than myself chatting to one another, and despite the distance I’ll know who they are and find myself amazed once again that the sequences of sounds we make allow us to span the distance between us, to land in each other. My hope is that the poems in this pamphlet are haunted by the song of the swimming body, and that they land in the reader with some of the freshness, friendship and quiet amazement that I’ve experienced as a swimmer. John Wedgwood Clarke Scarborough August 2014
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South Bay: 12.30-13.00, 26.09.2011 Your wake complicates mine. Our footprints dream in the tide. One way, a castle, Ferris wheel, lighthouse, the Grand Hotel all brick mirage – the other, a Jurassic cliff’s crumbling book of the unwritten. Waves hold us as they have held sight before. Terns hunt eels as if we were not here.
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Rings A quiet migration of swimmers, stroke, splash and ripple – where we were going didn’t matter; there was my wedding ring reaching under water, a man surfacing in his dark wetsuit, like a cormorant, further out, and two Norman windows of the ruined castle – here I am, I thought, here I am again.
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Beach chalets are small wooden stanzas in which words undress and step from the damp boards and sixty-watt bulbs into colossal light, blinking, rubbing arms, lifting a little on their toes as if trying to see over the cold, ready as they will never be for the body to speak itself again for the first time in the mouth of the North Sea, the body like a bell note struck by an iron key, wordless in a furl of murk, weed, someone’s foot, and up, shouting, turnstones overhead, the Hispaniola rocking by, treading water back into now, rooted in all the strange words – children, parents – in hands that have held and let go, swimmers in song.
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