Below is the face of the Shigir Idol, it is considered to be the world’s oldest wooden sculpture, older than the Great Pyramids of Giza. It’s on display at the Sverdlovsk Regional Museum of Local Lore in Russia.
It is named after the Shigir peat bog where it was found in the Ural Mountains in Russia in 1890. It was estimated the idol was made about 11,500 years ago, as reported here in the journal Antiquity in 2018. Now it’s believed it may be even older. Possibly as old as 12 100 years old.
The people who created it would have before the Quaternary extinction event 10,000 years ago, when ice age species such as woolly rhinos went extinct. By comparison Stonehenge is about 5000 year old and the Great Pyramid of Giza 4500 years old.
Use the image as a prompt. Freewrite from the point of view of the Shigir Idol. Consider things like what he/she/they have witnessed, what the idol makes of the world today or what thought of its makers. Since so little is really known you can take this whoever you like.
Set a timer for ten or fifteen minutes, stick to whichever you choose and freewrite from the point of view of the idol.
Rules of the freewrite after Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones
Keep your hand moving, don’t stop or cross out
Don’t worry about spelling or grammar.
Don’t think, just write
Go for the Jugular.
Follow the words, just see what comes.
When you have finished consider what you have just made. Is it is enough as an exercise or does it feel it needs development? Does it welcome a form?
If you feel drawn to it rework your draft. Play with your words until you find a form of words that satisfies you.
My diary posts are the place for a bit of my news, poetry community news, plus my adventures in creativity
At the end of this month I’m off to a writing retreat in Wales organised by The Writing School called Journey to the Centre of the Poem with poet Vanessa Lambert. Very much looking forward to this. I’m hoping it will help with that tricky question of what is the poem doing? Hannah Lowe referred to this as “finding the nub of a poem,” in this interesting article.
I’ve booked the trains, now the dilemma is what to pack? Tee-shirts and shades or umbrella and woolies. A very British problem at all times, the only answer is both, though right now this situation is exacerbated by an inclement weather system produced by, you’ve guessed it, climate change. Some poetry news follows but first a reflection on this phenomenon.
This time three years ago I was sitting outside my flat reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in balmy Mediterranean temperatures that whole month. I can’t help think of the contrast with this year where temperatures struggle to limp above ten degrees, feeling like six with the wind chill factor.
It’s all down to the Polar Jet Stream I hear, fast moving air currents at high altitude which form at the boundary of two different air masses. To the north cold polar air, to the south warm tropical air. By is very nature it fluctuates, it meanders, but this much? According to this article this is a direct consequence of climate change.
“Even a slight change in the “waviness” of the polar or the subtropical jet stream can lead to dramatic weather changes in mid-latitude regions, from northern California to Moscow… In the past 30 years, scientists have observed an intensification of the waves, coinciding with increased global warming. More waviness in the jet stream means that rain and wind remain in a region longer than if the jet stream simply traveled due east with no detours.”
So there you have it. Thirty years of research yet still the deniers clamour.
The Jet Steam 15th April 2023
COMING UP
Friday 21st April 12.00-2.00pm
Poets for the Planet will be joining Writers Rebel on the first day of XR’s four days of mass non-violent protest organised by XR in partnership with more than 70 other organisations including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth.
We will holding a picket outside “the home of fossil fuel dark money”, the home of lobbyists and think tanks linked to climate denial, at 55 Tufton Streetwith speeches from Rupert Read, Juliet Stevenson, Jay Griffiths, Baroness Rosie Boycott and other leading campaigning writers and poetry readings.
The day itself is part of the People’s Picket happening across London by XR, as part of The Big One. XR are picketing numerous government offices along with Tufton Street that day. Writers Rebel won’t be the only group picketing Tufton Street. We will be joined by a 200 strong samba band XR Rhythms, The Dirty Scrubbers, XR Merseyside, XR Plymouth, XR Buddhists and other groups.
Thursday 27th Apr 7.00- 8.30pm
The Auditorium (Level 6) at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, London WC2 0DT hosts the launch of Neptune’s Projects by Rishi Dastidar.
Rishi will be joined in a conversation through their work by fellow poets Jessica Mookherjee and Tania Hershman for an evening of maritime-themed poetry. More info here.
Neptune’s Projects is published by Nine Arches Press who write, “What do you do when you are a god – but powerless to prevent one of your favourite species from their insatiable, accelerating death wish? Such is the dilemma that underpins Rishi Dastidar’s third poetry collection, Neptune’s Project, a reshaping of mythology for the climate crisis era.”
“There has always been an intersection between poetry and the natural world. Now here comes Rishi Dastidar’s Neptune to add wit, postmodern panache and mythic irony to the tradition of the open sea. A richly rewarding read.”
– Roger Robinson
£14 Book and Ticket, inc. a copy of Neptune’s Projects (RRP £10.99) / £8 General Admission
#amwriting Have discovered the Japanese form Zuihitsu just days after coming across an old draft of of poem which approximates that form so playing with that.
#amreading What Poets Used to Know: Poetics § Mythopoesis § Metaphysics by Charles Upton
Time Come: Selected Prose by Linton Kwesi Johnson is out now, published by Pan MacMillan and he is appearing in Conversation in Liverpool on the 9th May and at Brixton Library on the 17th May. His influence of British cultural life is inestimable. ““Recognized as one of the great poets of modern times, and as a deeply respected and influential political and cultural activist and social critic, Linton Kwesi Johnson…” Pan McMillian
I’m filing this under Poetry by Others as Linton Kwesi Johnson is best known for his dub poetry. The title of this collection of prose comes from his poem Time Come on the album Forces of Victory released in 1979, a defiant lament with these last three stanzas:
“It soon come/ It soon come/ Is de shadow walkin behind yu/ Is I stannup rite before yu/ Look out!
But it too late now/ I did warn yu/ When yu fling mi inna prison/ I did warn yu/ When yu kill Oluwale/ I did warn yu/ When yu beat Joshua Francis
I did warn yu/ When yu pick pan de Panthers/ I did warn yu/ When yu jack mi up gainst de wall/ Ha didnt bawl/ But I did warn yu”
Time Come: Selected Prose is collection of essays and lectures, book and record reviews, published in newspapers and magazines, and includes obituaries and speeches selected by Linton Kwesi Johnson brought together for the first time.
I can’t help thinking how absolutely relevant are those two words, “Time Come” now as then in the context of the multiple crises the whole world faces right now, in my opinion, multiple opportunities for us to connect and change this world. Linton Kwesi Johnson is and was always relevant with words that cut sharp, cut thru.
“Written over many decades, it is a body of work that draws creatively and critically on Johnson’s own Jamaican roots and on Caribbean history to explore the politics of race that continue to inform the Black British experience. Ranging from reflections on the place of music in Caribbean and Black British culture as a creative, defiant response to oppression, to his penetrating appraisals of music and literature, and including warm tributes paid to the activists and artists who inspired him to find his own voice as a poet and compelled him to contribute to the struggle for racial equality and social justice.”
I also can’t help reflecting on a personal memories; the privilege of seeing LKJ live and how in the early days of punk a bunch of us decided what our sterile home town, the New Town of Stevenage, needed was a bit of graffiti. We had previously re-enacted the cover of the first Damned album, (so that would most likely make it 1977, would make me 15.) The boys up against a wall, faces covered with cream. I took the photo. Graffiti was the logical next step.
So we set off down to the alley that led out of Peartree Park, a secluded space with a huge white wall at the end of a terrace, with our cans of spray paint and up went the words; The Clash, The Damned, U.K. Subs, Sham 69 and The Jam. Someone added at the centre the word BRIXTON and LKJ. I have a photo of this some place.
I seem to remember asking, who’s Brixton? What’s LKJ? Someone, pretty sure it was Donald, (not his real name, who I was more than a bit in love with) said, “Punk rock init!” At that time that expression, used like that, conveyed; good, admirable, to be respected, though at the time I was none the wiser.
Back then Stevenage New Town was almost entirely white and exclusively working class. It was The Clash that led us to dub and reggae though we were unaware of the intellectual and cultural forces rising at this fervent and formenting time.
It was the same year The Anti Nazi League and Rock Against Racism were launched bringing together dub poets including Linton Kwesi Johnson, bands such as Misty in Roots and Steel Pulse with punk bands. We wouldn’t get to discover that for another year when gigs began in the next town of Hitchin.
Time Come: Selected Prose opens with an essay called Jamaican Rebel Music which appeared in Race and Class in 1976. In this essay Linton Kwesi Johnson describes how Jamaican music “embodies the historical experience of the Jamaican masses”. And yet it transcended that, not only to appeal to the Black British experience but to white subcultures and our little provincial town.
A few years later circa ‘79 in a punk squat in Islington I’d finally got to hear Linton Kwesi Johnson and other dub artists. It reminds me how punk, dub and reggae entwined at that time in a defiant call of resistance to what was a country riddled with racism and sexism, (just watch 1970’s sit-coms to get a flavour of that).
It was a time plagued with the rise of the right in the form of the National Front and the beginning of austerity under a Labour government, who had gone cap in hand to the International Monetary Fund and subsequently with inflation at 20% imposed a 5% pay offer on public sector workers leading to the winter of discontent. I guess in this context we felt defacing a hidden wall was small beef.
When I moved to London never expected to end up living in Brixton, I had my sights set on Islington or Notting Hill, never imagined working literally next door, at Brixton Advice Centre, to the former offices of the Race Today Collective established by Darcus Howe, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Leila Hassan, Jean Ambrose and others. As if those words on the wall were prophetic. Can’t wait to read this book.
In a review in the Guardian Colin Grant writes, “LKJ recalls that, aged 11, he left Jamaica for England armed with proverbs, hymns, folk songs and the sounds of mento and ska. When giving voice to his experience, he drew on the deep well of his Caribbean education, constructing verse that became “a weapon in the black liberation struggle”, making each gig a call to arms… Given the neglect of the “sufferahs” in our society and the shameful assault on refugees, the grace and power of LKJ’s writing are as necessary as ever.”
Seeds and Fuses 