Bog Myrtle & Peat

I’ve often apologised for this blog and the tangents I’ve taken here, but many of those apologies stem from a sense that I’m writing away from my designated space. I wrote a book which was marketed as nature writing, although it also gave me a platform to write and think about farming, food and rural communities. In the aftermath of that initial excitement, publishers and agents approached me asking “what next?” At the time, I wasn’t sure. I felt like I could go anywhere next, but when I offered some suggestions, they replied that it would make sense to persist on the path I’d started. I was told there was a clear market for my writing, on the condition that I should keep stick to themes of farming and the countryside.

I wouldn’t describe that trend as pressure, but it did shape the way I thought of myself as a writer. I love the subjects I chose, but they’re only part of what interests me in the world. Feeling that I couldn’t tackle issues which lay beyond my genre became stifling, and in time I reached a roadblock. I hardly wrote a word for six months. When I started again, I wasted time and page-space producing screeds of background material at the start or finish of articles to show how X or Y was really relevant to me as a farmer. In that sense, I had a clear view of my own entitlements; where they start, and where they finish. I now realise that during this period, I produced a wealth of second-rate, single-use material which insists upon justifying its own rural voice. I created this stuff by accident, under the mistaken impression that I was broadening my horizons.

Listening to Sarah Wheeler’s Point of View on the radio this morning, I recognised her anxieties about appropriation and what right the writer has to speak on behalf of others. However, while she’s struggling with a sense that she cannot speak for certain places, I’m stuck with a sense that I can only speak for the place where I belong. But Sarah Wheeler comes hot on the heels of my recent visit to Sligo, where WB Yeats spent a fair measure of his childhood. Yeats represents something like a sourcecode for almost every good Twentieth Century writer, and I follow his influence avidly through a wide diversity of writers like RS Thomas, Sylvia Plath and Patrick Kavanagh. But I don’t know much about the man himself, and in the past I’ve found his poetry strangely opaque.

This latest visit to Sligo comes off the back of some fresh encounters with Yeats’ early work, and I begin to realise that he might not just be the most important writer of all time; he may be opening a door to an entirely different state of consciousness. I should’ve cleared all this passionate excess as a teenager, and it’s rather embarrassing to discover so much for the first time in my late thirties – but if Yeats is what he’s currently appearing to be, he’s bigger than anything I’ve ever imagined.

Hyperbole aside, it’s only reasonable that beautiful Sligo should be plastered with Yeats memorabilia. He’s their major claim to fame, and the residues of his celebrity are everywhere. It seems like he could hardly have paused by a lamp post without a plaque being placed in the wake of that moment, but I found a simple quote (or mission statement) stapled to the wall of a pub in the town from the man himself: “Hammer your thoughts into unity”. Feeling this quote treading heavily upon a painfully exposed nerve in myself, I looked it up. It comes from the essay If I were four and twenty, in which he explains some of the rationale behind his creative approach, and how the careful, patient marshalling of numerous disparate interests enabled him to build a clear and coherent worldview.

I have to be clear and say that I am not Yeats by any stretch of the imagination, but it was an extraordinary relief to stumble upon this glimpse of his process. And timely too, just as I begin to see how all my apparently unconnected interests are linked; how agriculture overlaps with design and religion, conservation, nationality and magic. It’s suddenly possible to see how they can be hammered together into something like unity. But “hammering” also implies that the work is not easy; the word evokes an image of some aggressive and violent forge, filled with sparks and expletives. Seeing how it can be done does not equate to doing it, but the pay-off is potentially so thrilling that it’s clearly something to pursue for its own sake, even if it never shows fruit. And it’s a better reason than any I’ve found so far to stop whining and apologising for the way my writing reels and flounders across the page. I’m trying to start hammering.

Picture: The quote as part of “The Poetic Mind of WB Yeats”; a Yeats exhibition in Sligo 6/8/22