Monday

On Monday we trekked out onto Dartmoor to hunt for Ted Hughes’ memorial stone. Its exact location was kept secret for several years, partly – so the story goes – for fear that Sylvia Plath supporters might deface it, and partly – again, so I’ve read – to prevent it ‘becoming a shrine for Hughes fans’.

Which is kind of crazy. Surely the function of a memorial is so that the living can remember and appreciate the deceased? We’re not talking about Heinrich Himmler here – ‘Hughes fans’, I should have thought, are likely to do nothing more than gaze pensively at the stone for sixty seconds, look around at the bleak majesty of Dartmoor, glance again at the stone, let out a little semi-aspirated sigh then hike back the way they came.

Anyway, the dizzying series of feints and mysteries worked. We didn’t manage to find the stone – the guides we read said you need strong boots and a compass, and that you need to let someone know you’re attempting the walk so they can report you missing if you don’t come back. Mixy thought he saw some tombs in the middle of the moorland, but after we stomped through an ocean of dry ferns to reach them, it turned out they were just sewage grates.

Undeterred, we found a pleasant spot beside the River Taw – beside and into which Hughes’ ashes were scattered – and wrote poems for 15 minutes. We were sitting beside a little weir – on one side, the river was ridged like a thumbprint. It bunched in bubbling clusters of black pearls as it reached the rocks, creaming round the swerve of the bank, collecting as yellowish foam. The poem I wrote was dreadful, portentous guff.

We stopped in at Exeter University to do a performance to about a dozen members of the Theology Society. We set up in one corner of the busy Ram Bar. It was kind of weird, you guys! But also really fun.

In the evening we went to Launceston to see Charles Causley. We stayed in a brilliant pub called The White Horse, who very kindly put us up - in gorgeous rooms - and gave us dinner, breakfast, and drinks all evening. It was another intimate one - maybe a dozen or so people - but again, really fun! We sat around a big table and me, Mixy and Mark took it in turns to do poems while the other two took commissions from the crowd and wrote speed poems over by the pool table. We also had Charles Causley poems read to us.

My favourite was 'By St Thomas Water', set in the churchyard where his grave now stands. We crossed the little stone bridge over a stream, and Mixy laughed at a woman who was standing alone beneath a brolly, quacking loudly at the ducks. Here's an extract:

By St. Thomas Water
Where the river is thin
We looked for a jam-jar
To catch the quick fish in.
Through St Thomas Church-yard
Jessie and I ran
The day we took the jam-pot
Off the dead man.

On the scuffed tombstone
The grey flowers fell,
Cracked was the water,
Silent the shell.
The snake for an emblem
Swirled on the slab,
Across the beach of sky the sun
Crawled like a crab.

I wrote a poem for a woman whose daughter had spent 5 hours in A&E that weekend after ingesting poisonous mushrooms. Also the patrons began competing to see who could come up with the dirtiest limerick.

Hunting down graves is hard work, you guys! As and when we have wifi, we'll keep you updated as we continue. Thanks to everyone who has come so far!

Death and the Poet

For me, death is usually a bedfellow of insomnia. (hi, I'm Tim by the way - me, Mark and Mixy will be contributing posts and poems through our journey round poets' graves) I'm staring up at the bluish, blurry ceiling (life without my spectacles on is like being continually underwater) and I imagine my heart stopping, and all my memories vanishing, and the acres upon endless acres of unbeing that await me and everyone I love.

It's a pretty horrible situation, isn't it? And given the inevitability and permanence and totality of death, it's not surprising that most poets have felt their strings of shrewd and pretty words rather inadequate by comparison. As Larkin puts it in 'Aubade':

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die. 

Or Betjeman, in the cheerily-titled 'Loneliness':

And, though you tell me I shall die,
You say not how or when or why.

So many poets chew on death, like a terrier with a rat in its jaws, but the more they gnash, the more death is there, real and indomitable and basically insoluble.

When we started discussing this tour, I was up for it because I was desperate for an excuse to get out on the road and gig. I love performing, and I wanted more practice, to earn some performance karma and challenge myself and have fun. The death thing was just a gimmick, an excuse.

It's past midnight on a Sunday now. We just did our first gig, our launch show, in Bristol, at the Leftbank. It was fun, slapdash, challenging, and raucous. We tried some new material, some of which worked, some of which didn't. We performed with some great local poets (thank you so much Al Cummins, Stef Mo, Richard Harris and Anna Freeman). I got heckled by a drunk guy who seemed to be trying to give me advice on the best way to murder someone. A weird thing to yell across a crowded pub during a poetry gig, granted, but pleasingly on-theme!

Knowing death is real and unstoppable and utterly dreadful, what can we, three semi-talented novelty poets, possibly teach the world that is of any use whatsoever? If greats like Betjeman and Larkin basically covered their heads with their hands and said 'oh Christ, I'm doomed', what chance have we got?

I don't know if staring at slabs of stone and patches of soil will help us with that. I just feel like, thinking about death might be important. If we come up with any insights along the way, I'll share them with you. If you have any thoughts, please do share them with us. Maybe we can figure this out together.

And, you know. If we can't, who cares? Soon we'll all be dead and there'll be no 'us' to even recognise there ever was a problem.