Poet Katrina Porteous talks to Acknowledged Land editor Paul Batchelor about her work and her particular affinity for radio.

Katrina Porteous’s first major collection, The Lost Music (Bloodaxe 1996), concentrated on the Northumbrian inshore fishing community. She has also explored this subject in prose in Beadnell - a History in Photographs (Northumberland County Library 1990), Beadnell Harbour 200th Anniversary (Harbour in Trouble 1998) and The Bonny Fisher Lad (People's History 2003). Katrina’s other publications include a long dialect poem, The Wund an’ the Wetter (with piper Chris Ormston, Iron Press 1999), Turning the Tide, a collaboration with two artists on the Durham coast (Easington 2001), Dunstanburgh (Smokestack 2004) and Longshore Drift (with artist James Dodds, Jardine Press 2005). Katrina’s three-part poem about the River Tweed (accompanied by photographs by Susheila Jamieson) appears in Tweed Rivers, edited by Ken Cockburn and James Carter (Luath Press and platform projects, 2005). Her work for radio includes the poem Late Blackbird, broadcast on Radio Four.

Katrina’s latest publication is The Blue Lonnen (Jardine Press, 2007), an elegy for the Northumberland coast, the area’s traditional wooden fishing boat, the coble, and the way of life which it represents. The book includes photographs by Nigel Shuttleworth and paintings by James Dodds. The poems and photographs were selected from an exhibition commissioned by Alnwick Playhouse in 2006 through the financial support of the Northumberland Coast AONB.

Dunstanburgh made quite an impact when it was first broadcast. I first heard about it from non-poet friends, who got in touch because they were surprised at having been accidentally exposed to a poem – on the radio of all things – and actually having liked it… Is there any possibility of a CD edition being made available?

I hope so, but I’m very bad at getting my work out there! I’m long, long overdue another collection with Bloodaxe, and the idea is that when this book comes out, there will be a CD that will have some of my radio work on it: Dunstanburgh being one of those pieces. However, I’ll have to remake the whole thing because it’s too expensive to buy the rights back from the BBC.

Your work is marked by a close attention to the historical resonance of locations. Dunstanburgh’s legend of the Seeker (in which a knight finds a girl trapped in the rock) could be a metaphor for the careful listening you specialise in, so that the music and rhythms appear to arise unbidden, as found things rather than being imposed by the poet. However, I know you also read history at Cambridge: so do you begin by visiting the site or by researching it?

I think my primary response is emotional and I begin by going to the place, but I also tend to write about places I’ve known for a very long time. It’s hard for me to write about a place with which I don’t have a personal history. I have to establish some emotional resonance. One way of doing that is through people: I work like a journalist, interviewing people and finding out what their emotional connection with a place is, and... I don’t want to say I ‘give them a voice’ but it’s about allowing them to speak in the piece and having respect for that.

Allowing them to speak literally: in Turning the Tide you use some wonderful overheard poetry-of-the-everyday: ‘Never forget your roots, flower…’

In most of the long poems I’ve written about place there are more examples than you would expect of literal quotations from interviews… The long poem about Hadrian’s Wall was my first radio piece in 2001 and there is a huge amount of recorded speech in that, and The Wund and the Wetter is entirely based on quotations. When that book came out the reviewers said, ‘Oh, she’s made up those words,’ but actually so much of the poem came from speech, including the phrase ‘come wi’ the wund an’ gan wi’ the wetter’ – a local phrase meaning ‘easy come, easy go…’ Most of those long poems about place have been based on visiting the place, walking, and then talking to people.

That collage of voices is particularly evident in Dunstanburgh, where there is no linear narrative: the piece consists of voices from several centuries; some are human, but others belong to the castle or the earth itself. How did you go about constructing the poem? Did you have a framework in mind when you began, or did you go on your nerve?

I did have a framework in that I wanted it to be about the course of a year. I’d had that framework in mind since my early twenties, when I wanted to write a prose book about the castle. I took very meticulous notes about the changes in the wildlife, birds particularly, over the course that year, and used that natural sequence to dictate the shape of the poem.

In your introduction to Dunstanburgh, you say that ‘This is an aspect of spoken poetry which particularly interests me, and one which I think radio serves especially well: it returns poetry to one of its most ancient functions – to explore, through the arguments of history, a common sense of who we are.’ Why do you link this specifically to spoken poetry?

I think all poetry is spoken poetry: it’s meant to be heard. In the early 90s I spent a lot of time talking to fishermen all along the Northumbrian coast, particularly in Beadnell, and they were telling stories that went back to their grandfathers’ time, the 1850s. There was a real repository of history there, and it was all done through argument. Charlie would say that such-and-such a thing happened, and his brother would say ‘Nay such bloody thing, it was this way…’ and that brought home to me the way all our history comes from argument. For all I’d studied history for years in Cambridge and I’d thought about dialectic, actually seeing that as a process in a family and in a community made me realise that this is how we’ve established our histories. In the past, handing on the stories of a community has been one of a poet’s functions. So it’s good to have more than one voice in a poem, because if you’re trying to get at what happened, and trying to tell the truth, the way to access that is through many voices and through argument.

Your radio poem Longshore Drift is also built around the interplay of voices: the two main voices are shown by different coloured fonts and given a separate page. This generous layout is a sign of the book’s high production values: good quality paper, a hardback edition, and illustrated with beautiful linocuts by James Dodds. All of this helps compensate for the loss of the actual sound of the voices chanting together. Are you happy with that pay-off between an independent press that has limited distribution and smaller print runs, but has much higher production values?

I was delighted with that book. I felt very lucky to have met the artist James Dodds, who did the artwork for that book, and who also has a huge commitment to the fishing community (he was a boat builder to begin with). Longshore Drift was published through his press, Jardine Press, and his wife Catherine designed the book and we worked together on the layout. Actually its print run was as big as any other book I’ve done: 2,000 copies. It sells slowly, as poetry books do, but it also sells because James Dodds probably has a higher profile than I do as an artist.

Longshore Drift, like much of your work, seems aimed at extending the oral tradition. This seems more than simply a case of literary influence, and I would connect your interest in the oral tradition with your depiction of fishing communities: both want to bring poetry back to actual lived experience and living traditions. Is this important for you?

I was dreading being asked which poets had influence me, because while obviously there are poets who have influenced me, the primary influences have been musical – singers like Bob Dylan who was influenced by the folk tradition and then in the last 10 or 15 years being interested in the music of Northumberland… I think that has certainly been equal to any literary influence. But the most important influence has been the voices of people locally, listening to the dialect of the fishermen. I wasn’t born in that place – I wasn’t ‘of’ it – but listening to it, I was so strongly aware of its expressiveness and its musical qualities, and its ability to make you feel through sound what is being described… to me, that is exactly the same as listening to poetry.

Your most recent radio piece is Late Blackbird: tell me about that.

It was commissioned for White Nights, a late-night series on BBC Radio 4. The series was about the borderline between waking and sleeping. The poem was based on a very early memory I have of lying in my pram in the garden and this bird singing, and I remember very clearly the frustration of wanting to speak. The poem runs alongside a tape of the blackbird’s song. I wrote nonsense phonemes to imitate each phrase of the blackbird’s speech. From the phonemes come words, and from those words comes the poem. Later, the poem starts to break back down into phonemes. It was also about the way language expresses things through sound before its intellectual content. I think musicality lies at the heart of poetry.

Working for radio has opened up new ways of working for you…

It’s a completely different medium and I find it very exciting. There are all sorts of things you can do with radio that you can’t do on the page or at a poetry reading. You can have several layers of speech at once, with chants going on in the background, or cross-rhymes across the layers, or dissonance. You can incorporate natural sounds as well. Very interesting three-dimensional things you can do with sound on the radio.

Katrina’s next radio poem is The Refuge Box, her fourth collaboration with Julian May (who also produced Dunstanburgh and Longshore Drift) and will be broadcast in the series Between the Ears on BBC Radio 3, Saturday 8 December (time to be confirmed). The Refuge Box explores the theme of sanctuary. It was recorded on Holy Island and in the raised Refuge Box on the Causeway, where travellers stranded by the tide can take shelter.

You can read more about The Blue Lonnen at www.jardinepress.co.uk. The book is available for £15 (post free) from Jardine Press, 20 St Johns Rd, Wivenhoe, Essex, CO7 9DR.

A longer version of this interview can be read at www.acknowledgedland.com, where it was originally published.