Waterlines

Ian Stephen, Stornoway's seafaring poet © Peter Urpeth

ON A RECENT sea voyage in the mouth of the River Ex and the coastal waters off the English West Country county of Devon, Stornoway poet Ian Stephen sat on the deck of the yacht, busy at his notebook. His friend and fellow sailor, the artist Graham Rich, on whose boat the two were sailing that day in Graham’s home waters, asked the poet what it was he was sketching.

The poet replied that he hadn’t been sketching at all but taking notes.

“Oh,” said the artist with some surprise, “I thought you were sketching because you were looking the way that any visual artist looks when they are sketching something. You were looking at it and then writing, looking again and then writing, looking at the subject just like someone who’s sketching.”

“Now,” says the poet on reflection, “I never really thought about that before Graham made that suggestion but, for example, when you are making a voyage at sea you make a log of the journey and even if it is not a formal log you are noting what time the tide is going to turn and you notice when you’ve passed a marker and how long it’s taken you, so you’re doing that all the time anyway.

“What that’s about is observing, it’s simply observing, and that, of course, is in some ways what art is doing, whether it is visual art or writing.”

And in many ways, given that the chosen themes of this year’s festival are poetry and the sea and poetry and art, it is not at all surprising that Ian Stephen is the poet in residence at this year’s Stanza Poetry Festival in St Andrews.

There was a time when on a good sailing day, anyone resident in Stornoway could see a car driving with an upturned inflatable rubber boat precariously strapped to its roof, and at the wheel of that car would be the familiar face of the coastguard and poet Ian Stephen, heading for the harbour. A native of Stornoway, ever since he was a small boy Ian could be seen hanging around at the harbour and then, later on, at the helm of his own small craft.

As both his poetry and his sea craft expanded in their capabilities, his duties as a coastguard gradually gave way to his work as a poet and artist. During all of this time his closeness to and understanding of the sea was growing. The boyhood passion was slowly becoming a life’s work. But, of course, as a native of the islands, the poet had been unconsciously steeped in the ways and wiles of the sea: its abundances, its tragedies, and the words of those who were closest to it.

“In terms of my poetry and the sea, all I can say is that it’s a way of looking at things, a whole lifetime’s experience, but what’s important is that there’s also a whole culture behind you and a way of talking. It is a cultural thing, you take it for granted, it is just your background, it is where you are from and you don’t really realise it.

“I remember when I was rehearsing Seven Hunters, my play set on the Flannan Islands last year, and I started talking to the actors about the waves and the water I realised that there were glazed eyes in front of me and that they hadn’t got a clue what I was talking about.

“I think they thought it was a bit strange that anyone would talk about how the waves looked, whereas for me that is a pretty normal topic of conversation. People here talk about the weather and the sea and how the sea is running.

“I remember one of my mother’s phrases from when I was growing up. Whenever there was a big wind going she wouldn’t say, “oh there’s a big storm on tonight”. She would say, “pity those at sea”, and that’s a real island thing.”

At this year’s Stanza festival Ian is presenting a series of short poetry films, ‘invoking’, as the programme states, ‘in visual images and poetry, the relationships between the sea and those working in its proximity’.

The idea for the films grew out of last year’s Comhla event in Uist, organised under the auspices of Taigh Chearsabhaigh and the Triangle Trust. It brought Scottish and international artists together in a large house with little or no agenda other than enabling new work to flourish.

“When it comes to the idea for these films I am completely indebted to the Comhla event,” says Ian, “I’ve always been crazy about film in all its forms but I think a lot of people have had a resistance to artist’s videos maybe because everybody’s doing it and it’s just sheer snobbery really, but that isn’t a good reason not to do it!

“We all made a video diary of the week together and when I started playing with the camera I had this idea to make a work which was based on reliving a job I had as a coastguard, and the idea really evolved as we were doing it. I showed another artist called Melina Berkenwald, who is from Argentina originally and is now living in London, how to tie a bowline, I showed her the seaman’s way of doing it as it has a wee trick to it that way, and she tied and retied that knot compulsively, which became a kind of dance to the story.

“The next step was to leave the story out of the work completely because it was implicit in the movement. The bare bones of the story become a poem, and that became a subtitle to the movement, and this experience led to a whole series of other works that I am showing in the festival.”

Watching that short film, the viewer is drawn into the obsessional repetition of the knot making; the mannered, deliberate, hand movements are distinctly choreographic in form and yet they seem at the same time to belong to a real space, a non-theatrical, almost intimate psychological space in which the essence of the story and its raw recent traumas have been furled.

Compelling too is the appropriateness of the technology, the honesty of the film, and the relationship between short filmic space, rapid movement and claustrophobic shuttering, is handled with great economy.

In such intense encounters serendipity seems to flourish. While making the film, in a spot close to where the events of the story originally took place, Ian became aware that he had also recorded the distant sound of windchimes (the sound was recorded from a sculpture installed near Newton House during the Comhla workshop by Kathryn Chan, an artist from Trinidad), and these remained a haunting and unexpected element of the whole.

“My work in all mediums has really fallen into a pattern in which you start with a bit more and as you live with it becomes honed and then really becomes tighter and often when I make poems it is like that. Storytelling has always been a part of my work and I like that because you can really let the language go and flow but in that film the story was subjected to the same disciplines as the poem so that in the end it was really pushed as far as I could go and the story is not really there at all.

“The story prompted the movement and there are a few lines of narrative, but the story itself is gone. And other films adopt this same technique which is really that of using a ‘hidden story’.”

In another of the poem films, Ian has filmed a woman knitting and telling a story as she knits, but the vocal track is slowed down to the point that the narrative is no longer recognisable but the passion, emotion and rhythm of its telling remain strangely intact.

During his spell as artist in residence Ian is also leading a workshop entitled The Log as a Line to Take, in which an analogy between the ship’s log and poetry will be explored.

Looking at the wide-ranging programme of this year’s festival, one could also say that the organisers have another theme running – the Outer Hebrides. In addition to Ian, artists Susan Wilson and poet Bill Duncan commemorate the life and cultural traditions of St Kilda.

The Stanza Poetry Festival runs from 19-21 March 2004. For further information or programme details, telephone 01592 414714 or e-mail arts.development@fife.gov.uk