Sea of grass

The sea of grass in the wind.

The end of observation.

And a new mast.

This is the remains of the Kincraig Gun Battery overlooking the Firth of Forth (and MacDuff's Cave). These gun emplacements or pillboxes have unusually in my experience been deliberately demolished.

In addition to remaking these concrete jigsaws, there are other pleasures in store on the terraced ridges where the barracks themselves would have stood in the past.

You can find out more here at Canmore https://canmore.org.uk/site/55122/kincraig-battery

PS the video at the beginning gives you a little taste of what it must have been like being stationed here and keeping a lonely watch over the Forth.

Creative walks

Found myself walking round in unexpected places on the way to events, readings, plays and other more routine visits to the supermarket or dropping off the kids. A carpark in Newcastle, outside an old nightclub in Dumfries, randoming on the Glasgow subway and Galashiels late on a workday evening.

I like these spaces. The fruitful time I can spend between here and there. The commute. The unengaged freedom.

The way the streetlight might suddenly hit a mundane object. And make things quite curious.

The combination, the presentation, the hit of surprise. The stop I didn't expect to make.

A road that suddenly becomes a slab of light. Or a field becomes a pathway.

As you can probably guess I am in a writing phase. Right now.

Walking with Gerry Loose

There is about a week left to share some time with poet Gerry Loose down at Dawyck Botanic Gardens near Peebles in Scotland. He will be there until the end of September.

The gardens are full of the sugar and spicy smells of evergreen trees, the high quiet repetitive call of goldcrests (I saw a family working the branches together overhead) and when I visited the omnipresent sounds of the Scrape Burn after heavy rain the day before. Not to mention the jewel like blusher mushrooms I thought were a precious stone caught in the stones of the path.

Find out more about what is happening on Gerry's blog here http://walkingwithpoets.com/

Bewick walks to Scotland

And so our trio of related posts is complete with the title of Sally Evans' study on Thomas Bewick based on his stravaig of 1776.

The book is available for a mere £7 published by Arrowhead Press in 2004. I have a copy and it is well worth it.

More here http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/bewick.html and more on Sally herself and her latest ebook Poetic adventures in Scotland here http://desktopsallye.com/.

I hope the road will follow this river's

wooded otter pools.

 (from Sally Evans' Bewick poem Langham)

The old ways

Robert MacFarlane's latest book covers much of the same ground that his readers will be familiar with. But then its subject is The old ways.

Excellent explorations of the ephemeral routes of tidal paths and seaways and contested and prohibited land. And a fascinating knitting together of Nan Shepherd, Eric Ravilious and the ever-present Edward Thomas who touchingly is caught watching in a sentry post chalkpit shortly before his death in 1917. "The sallow catkins are soft dark white..."

Although poet walks aren't much the focus of the book, walking as an act of creation is - the section on the memory walking of artist Miguel Angel Blanco is a revelation.

MacFarlance spends some time himself collecting words for walking.

• sarha - original Arabic for letting cattle out early to wander and graze pasture freely
• stravaig - Scots for a walk without set goals or destination
• saunter - from French sans terre which MacFarlance defines as a contraction of to the sacred place
• navigatio - a voyage away from familiar territory to challenge and confirm our sense of self

Creative text mining

Is that piece of paper still white? Or worse have you a clump of poems or lines that remains resolutely clumpy? My first inclination is to take a walk and let my unconscious do the sorting. But there is another technique: text mining.

1. Gather your texts first off and put them all into one giant file.This may be a bit scarey particularly if you have worked hard on them but don't worry, keep your original files in case this all goes pear-shaped.
2. Now use normal word processor techniques to subvert your content:
3. Use outline view and make a poem of your titles, switch them or use headings to bring lines together in surprising ways;
4. Make a list of your bugbear words, mine are things like still, just, quiet and transparent and they crop up in many a poem; so set up a search and replace and see what results you get;
5. Set up some random coloured text styles; define your poems in this way and then group the text based on colour. Who saw that coming?

These are workshop exercises so keep an open mind; they may not make poems but you may notice some themes or openings in your work that you didn't before.

But this is where things can go hardcore with some text mining techniques: these are actually the kind of methods used to analyse masses of text for example at spy listening posts to pick up if we citizens are talking about naughty or illegal stuff, by search engines to increase the stickiness of links or management consultants pick out the gist of a massive database.

1. So this time get your big file at the ready and pick out some mood words, love, hate, cherish or some colours and see how often you use them using Find.
   There are more technical ways of doing this by setting up a database (sentiment analysis) but we are not doing that now. I discovered that I hardly used colours at all in my poetry a few years ago and this resulted in a profound change in my writing.
2. If possible search on terms that you think define your writing or better still you fear might be omitted. How many poets particularly women poets are writing about their work for example? Is that off limits? Or can't we admit that we do something other than write and quite often enjoy it?
3. Now it is the slash and burn; this is a big ask but go for  it. Text mining uses extraction techniques to glean key points, themes and clusters from text. It is possible to do this by popping your work into XML form for example to enable semnantic weight and indexing. But us lazy poet geeks want instant satisfactions so here goes.
4. Cut every fifth line! Yes, just go for it. Or third. Or the sixth and seventh every time. Wow! I know. Butchery of your beautiful hard-earned work but this gives you a sense of freedom. It is the old cut up approach of the Dadaists but performed on your own work. What is the result? Odd conjunctions of thought, a better understanding of your vocubulary and its tropes, new insights or glimpses of what could be. (And if the thought scares you, remember to ensure your old files of those poems still exist separately before you make the big working file for these techniques.)
5. One final idea from here, although to be honest, there is plenty more you could do. I like this one a lot though. Strip out all your punctuation using Search and Replace; if you are really hard core make everything lower case using the Font function too.
   At this stage, I might convert all my text into ballad form and sing it. Whatever. The result will be a different way of looking at your work. The form you choose to redefine it is infinite. A sonnet. A haiku. A ghazal. Tweet poetry.
6. Enjoy!

Here is a link to a dryish definition of text mining from wikipedia and there are some software links if you have money to spend on this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_mining.

If you want to experience free form without the hassle of the big file approach, go and get your old newspapers like William Burroughs and all, snip them up and reassemble.

This is fun too if you only want to play: http://www.nightgarden.com/shannon.htm.

Burdock and velcro

Walking is the perfect aid to creativity.

For example, George de Mestral was walking in the Swiss mountains with his dogs. This was in the 1940s. Maybe the mountains helped a bit. He noticed the burrs from the burdock had got stuck in his dog's coat and were effectively taking a ride to help disperse themselves.

This thought stuck in his mind too and when he got home, he stuck the burrs under the microscope and realised they used hooks to hang in loops of matted animal hair.

Mestral was an inventor and eventually recreated these hooks and loops in plastic form to create velcro. Later to be used in David Letterman's famous velcro suit and garment fastening.

I recommend a walk in the woods.

For more useful vegetal stories, check out Richard Mabey's Weeds