Ahead of National Poetry Day on 6 October, Miriam Balanescu speaks to six Cambridge-based bards to discover what makes the region so poetic
Cambridge has long been a touchpoint for poets, from Wordsworth’s residence recorded in verse (“The long-backed chapel of King’s College rear / His pinnacles above the dusky groves”) to Xu Zhimo’s melancholy departure (“I am willing to be such a waterweed / In the gentle flow of the River Cam”). This legacy shows no sign of faltering, with those of all melodic strains hurrying to this poetic hive.
So, what makes it a lure for lyricists? Cambridge’s history has a part to play, but also its inclination towards progression and inventiveness, its rich landscapes and the communities it fosters.
Wendy Cope
One of the nation’s best-known, most-adored poets is a resident of a town just north of Cambridge. Wendy Cope moved to Ely with her husband around the time of her latest collection, Anecdotal Evidence, enticed by the inexhaustible tomes of the University Library. She has even written a poem named after her new home, dedicated to historian Mac Dowdy.
This most recent body of work shows a considerable shift from her first, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, a 1986 collection punctuated with witticisms and satire. “I was going to an evening class where we looked at work by various poets,” recollects Wendy, of her time as a primary school teacher. “I just had the impulse to write parodies of them.
“I’m not as funny as I was when I was younger and I think, actually, it’s because I’m less miserable,” Wendy claims. “There’s something about my second, best-selling book, Serious Concerns, which is really quite miserable. There’s a sort of state you can get into where you’re so miserable, you might as well make jokes about it.
“I don’t like being dismissed as somebody who is just a comic poet,” Wendy insists. Anecdotal Evidence certainly proves anyone who thinks otherwise wrong, interspersed with poignant contemplations of childhood, fragments of the everyday and reflections on what lies after life.
“My parents are both dead now. From the point of view of looking at writing about your childhood, that’s quite liberating,” Wendy says. “Lots of poets are preoccupied with death and go on about it. I mean, Larkin was going on about it from quite an early age.”
The collection opens with a moving work on poetry as an insight into human nature. “The important thing about poetry is that it should be telling the truth,” Wendy states. This is an idea that has remained core to her.
Now, Wendy is piecing together a complete collection of her work. Though, in the wake of the pandemic, she has settled into a gentler rhythm. “I realised it had become quite stressful travelling around doing readings all the time,” she says. “So, I’m doing a lot less of that – and a lot less of everything. I really like a quiet life.”
Elisabeth Sennitt Clough
On the edges of Cambridge and outside the university’s domain, a fierce poetry scene is brewing. By spearheading the Fenland Arts Development Scheme and the Fenland Poetry Journal, Saboteur award-winner Elisabeth Sennitt Clough is right at the epicentre of a community shaped by the Fens and fields.
“I first started writing about the Fens when I was thousands of miles away, living in California on the West Coast,” laughs Elisabeth. “When I was growing up, I wanted to get out of the Fens so desperately.”
Having worked in the likes of Indonesia, Florida and the Netherlands, Elisabeth’s roots have remained firm. “Because the Fens are such a sparse environment, it’s really easy as a poet to enter it imaginatively,” she explains. The writer of Sightings, The Cold Store and the upcoming gothic Fen collection My Name is Abilene first had her passion kindled by creative writing tutor Caron Freeborn at the Open University.
“It was the proverbial door opening,” Elisabeth says. “I don’t think poetry is healing, otherwise all the poets would be healed, but there is a kind of therapy in finding something where you can express yourself.”
Running through her poems are darker undercurrents, stoked by the rain-lashed landscapes of the Fens. “I do feel sometimes I’m excavating myself to write a poem that isn’t flat,” says Elisabeth. “Poetry’s duty is to expose what a lot of people either don’t know about or don’t want to confront.”
At the fore of Elisabeth’s initiatives – including the Fenland Poet Laureate scheme – is supporting under-recognised communities. “There are places that are very marginalised in terms of funding and opportunity,” she explains. “It’s about developing a visible community.”
Megan Beech
A young spoken-word artist who first slammed onto the scene in 2011, Megan Beech has been garlanded with praise from the likes of Mary Beard (the title of Megan’s first 2013 collection is in tribute to the classicist), Lauren Laverne and Laura Bates, proclaimed a feminist icon by the Evening Standard and The Guardian and appeared on the BBC and Sky.
Megan’s journey began when she won a competition judged by Philip Pullman, aged just 11. “I did music for a while and was very mediocre,” Megan laughs. “But I was interested in that dynamic of how you can transform an audience just with the words you say.” She counts Billy Bragg, with his combination of political railing and music, among her influences. “For someone who struggled a lot when I was younger with anxiety, depression and not being able to express myself, there seemed something quite vital about that medium and the immediacy of it.”
For Megan, slam poetry is the perfect vessel to vocalise women’s causes, performing frequently for an anti-FGM charity called The Vavengers. “Spoken word breaks down these hierarchies or theocracies we have in the traditional publishing world,” Megan continues. “It’s a great equaliser to talk about things that need to be discussed. I find that I get those points of view across to people who maybe aren’t expecting to hear those things.”
Fostered by Clive Birnie at Burning Eye Books when the press came into being, much has changed on the slam poetry scene. “Compared to five years ago, when my last book came out, the possibilities for what we call a performance poet are completely different,” Megan says. “That’s been through the hard work of small presses.”
This hiatus was while Megan undertook a PhD on Charles Dickens at Cambridge. She points to other spoken word poets, whose careers have been multifarious: viral poet Vanessa Kisuule, Kae Tempest and even Michaela Coel and Jack Rooke. Freedom is what, for her, spoken word enables: “I don’t want to judge myself too much by the criteria of the snobbery that says, poetry isn’t allowed to rhyme or be about women’s bodies.”
Mina Gorji
Spurred by the talent of her colleagues and Cambridge contemporaries, academic Mina Gorji rallied with other poets to found the Judith E Wilson Centre, today a staple of Cambridge’s poetry landscape.
Mina’s intricate work is known for turning a magnifying glass on the natural world. This year’s collection, Scale, takes this approach even further, something she perhaps picked up from one of her favourite poets – and topic of academic interest – John Clare. “He’s a great noticer of the natural world,” explains Mina.
After visiting the Institute of Astronomy on Madingley Road with fellow poet Bhanu Kapil, perusing the ancient star maps of the 16th and 17th centuries, Mina had a moment of revelation. “It was a winter’s morning and there were snowdrops on the ground. I remember thinking how extraordinary it was that, up in the sky, you have white spots of light – and down on the ground, snowdrops and frost are producing a kind of pattern, too.”
That seed of an idea grew into Scale, a collection which deals with our relation to the natural world, temporality and immigration. “We don’t tend to think of the hippopotamus as a native animal in the UK. But, in fact, there were hippos just outside Cambridge in Barrington. I became quite interested in that question because I wasn’t born here, continuing from my first collection which explores things, humans, plants and creatures migrating across the world in different ways.”
Confronted with the pandemic and an oncoming climate crisis, the resilience of living beings was another fascination of Mina’s. “It’s very strange to get your head around the idea that 1-2°C of climate change can make such a huge difference,” Mina says. “I was thinking about how the imagination has to work to understand the difference these tiny shifts of scale make.”
Mina has been called an eco-poet, a description she feels is ‘about remembering our relation to other living things and the history of other living things, thinking about the human as part of something much bigger’.
“The natural world has an extraordinary power to heal us,” Mina continues. “My mother, many years ago, was having nasty treatment for cancer. She would go into the park, and it made a huge difference for her to sit there in the shade of the oak trees.”
Fran Lock
Fran Lock is this year’s incoming Judith E Wilson poetry fellow, a scheme pairing poetic practice with academic study. Authoring a multitude of collections (often touching on her Irish traveller background), among them 2019’s Contains Mild Peril, Raptures and Captures and Ruses and Fuses, Fran started out on the spoken-word scene in London and won third place in the National Poetry Competition in 2014.
Dogs crop up in her work frequently. “I’m interested in the imaginative yoking of abject animality and others – gendered, racialised and classed others,” Fran says. “A lot of the cultural representations of travellers are linked to the dog, particularly this idea of the dangerous dog. I felt an affinity for that. But the real reason is: I just like dogs. I’ve got a rescue pitbull-lab cross. I used to walk dogs for a living – I’m sort of a dog whisperer.”
Her work over the past few years has probed this through therianthropy – the melding of human with animal. “I have an idea stuck in my head, and the only way to get rid of it is to write it – much like the remedy for having an ear worm is to sing it.” The figure of the hyena has Fran in its clutches, with research sending her on trips to London Zoo, rifling through textbooks and delving into the medieval bestiaries.
“Poetry exists to push the limits of the things we are comfortable and habituated with in language, and the definitions that we apply uncritically and without thinking,” Fran insists. “Discomfort and unease is a really productive place, creatively.”
As an eco-poet, Fran hopes that the increasing tangibility of global warming will precipitate change. “We’re past the stage now with poetry where bearing witness is enough in raising awareness,” says Fran. “It’s important that you try to situate yourself back in nature, not as a poetic witness whose job it is to interpret what’s going on for everybody else. Your job is to acknowledge complicity, to make a space for that terror and that mutual experience of vulnerability and suffering.”
The Judith E Wilson Centre entices names from around the UK, going hand-in-hand with exciting events and projects. “I want to get everyone involved and also bring other writers down to Cambridge to have some crazy, juicy, awesome poetry performances,” enthuses Fran.
Reem Abbas
With a lack of access to poetry books when she was growing up, the Jeddah-raised, Yemeni-Syrian poet Reem Abbas truly began to take flight when she began her undergraduate studies in Ankara.
“Before, the only outlet I had for poems was Instagram. I wasn’t aware that magazines and publication were a thing,” Reem recalls. “I made a point of publishing something each day, which meant I had
to produce something each day. But once my poetry found expression on the page, my experience and playfulness really exploded and expanded in ways I had never thought possible.”
Now in Cambridge as a postgraduate student, Reem skirts between various languages and forms to capture her thoughts – partly a response to the culture shock of arriving in the UK. “It seemed to me no one spoke any of my languages,” Reem says. “I – and all my experiences – needed to be explained in order to be understood, or even known.”
The writer is involved with the scheme Polylingual Poets Please and endlessly inspired by other lyricists combining non-Anglophone forms with the English language. “One of the things that Mimi Khalvati does is take Persian forms and render them in a way that is congenial to the English language,” Reem says. “Up until the point of reading her, I thought rhyme was a thing of 20th-century poets.”
Reem often writes in the Arabic qasida form, tinkering with possibilities presented by the use of different languages. “As a polylingual poet, one does not live in the world with a segmented mind,” Reem states. “Things intermingle whether you want them to or not. The longer I stayed in the UK, the more I realised that I don’t need to keep explaining myself to an Anglophone readership.”
For Reem, the city’s scene is fed by its history. “It’s magical, walking the landscapes and thinking – centuries ago – these poets roamed the same fields.”
