by Jeffrey C. Robinson
“The ‘experiment,’ we think, has failed…” (Robert Southey on Lyrical Ballads)
Reading some of the first negative responses to Lyrical Ballads after its publication in 1798, is shocking. A year later in 1799 an anonymous reviewer wrote, “The language of conversation, and that too of the lower classes, can never be considered as the language of poetry.” The reviewers will not tolerate the presence of the lower classes within poetry, which, they assume, belongs only to a higher—leisured, monied—class. What they really dislike is “conversation” among the middle and lower classes, in their own language occupying the same space as “poetry,” to which the ruling classes claim exclusive rights. In Wordsworth’s kind of poetry, the poor are revealed not as objects on display but as people of acute feeling. The “experiment” erupts in new conversations—the dispossessed, the middle-class witness, and the middle-class reader, all freely talking.
Over the centuries, we have forgotten the ambitious poetic and social radicalism of Lyrical Ballads, but have the opportunity to recover it in Refuge from the Ravens: New Lyrical Ballads for the 21st Century (2022). I want to point to how Refuge also brings to vivid focus the lives and the minds of people pushed to the edge of society, by using (and purposively mis-using) Lyrical Ballads.
This small but powerful book gathers twenty-three poems (the same number as the 1798 Lyrical Ballads) written by people from North-West England who have experienced homelessness, in collaboration with poet Philip Davenport and arts producer Julia Grime and a small team of artists. Coming from Manchester, Lancaster, Liverpool and Kendal, over 100 people affected by homelessness — and other vulnerable people — joined workshops to re- make the 1798 Lyrical Ballads and other poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the journals of Dorothy Wordsworth written roughly at the same time.
The mostly short-lined lyrics often refer formally to ballad stanzas with or without rhymes but also free-verse explorations; they are full of experiential material and wisdom statements from the lives of the makers. Some pages contain draft material with cross-overs and erasure. Others juxtapose text with drawn images, and occasionally text is hand-written, so that the impression of the whole is a two-dimensional “workspace” with the makers themselves just out of the reader’s sight. Many of the poems are written by groups; Refuge is poetry by collectivity, responding to systemic social injustice. There is a film and an aural dimension to the book as well, with a soundscape and musical renderings of some of the poems. Interspersed among the ballads in the book are several anonymous prose poems written by Philip Davenport, describing the human encounters behind it.
Lyrical Ballads enters this new poetry as trace material: quoted titles, lines and phrases, images, often reworking Wordsworthian situations and encounters; walking, pathways, and crossroads are important here. Lyrical Ballads becomes a grounding for a new poetry experiment, this time devised by Julia Grime to confront contemporary problems.
Clik here to view.
Refuge from the Ravens exhibition detail at Wordsworth Grasmere, Fall 2022, juxtaposing poetry and images by the Refuge makers with original Wordsworth manuscript notebook. Photo: Julia Grime.
Refuge from the Ravens recovers the original social as well as poetic radicalism of Lyrical Ballads that the centuries have diminished. Lyrical Ballads began to be domesticated almost from the beginning, by Wordsworth’s subsequent conservatism and by his method of re-organizing his collections from 1815 on, when the power of the 1798 gathering was scattered. Commentators since Wordsworth’s time, while acknowledging the presence of “vagrants” and other dispossessed people, with two or three exceptions, have generally veered away from the subject. It has taken this 21st-century re-vision to fully recover the energies and implications of the original—first as an act of memory of a radical post-French-Revolutionary poetic event, and second as a rekindling of that essence amidst our current crisis of inequality, with its devastating effects upon the lives of many. Refuge alludes to a more capacious, Lyrical Ballads, letting other poems by Wordsworth written before, during, and just after those that end up in Lyrical Ballads become part of the remix material available to the participants. These included: “The Discharged Soldier,” “A Whirlblast from behind a Hill,” the “nest-stealing” (of ravens’ eggs) passage from The Prelude, as well as lines, excerpted by Grime, from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals. Furthermore, reflecting their study of Wordsworth’s drafts, some of the poems from Refuge themselves appear as drafts, with crossed over passages and marginal possibilities. Tampering with the canon and presenting drafts creates a portrait of a poet as one alert to all sorts of poetic influence while engrossed in composition. The italicized prose poems contrast people of “privilege” meeting with the dispossessed and disenfranchised —Davenport and Grime, and the “us” who aren’t homeless/vulnerable — people with roofs over their heads, people educated in poetry… And the original radical power of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s experiment is distilled, crosses classes, exists in process, expresses self- and social-consciousness, and dissolves the canon. (As Phil Davenport observes, “Poetry dissolves boundaries”).
Wordsworth’s term “conversation,” that so disturbed his anonymous 1799 reviewer, becomes central to his new vision of how to create and realize humanity and community. Wordsworth saturates the “Advertisement” to Lyrical Ballads with images of conversation, with references to conversing lower and middle classes, to readers conversing in consternation about the poetry, to readers’ “intercourse” with the poetry of the ancients, and to conversations among friends who give him ideas for poems; at the core of Lyrical Ballads, of course, are conversations between speakers in the works themselves. Conversation operates similarly in Refuge. 30 members of the group of makers travelled to the Wordsworth Library in Grasmere to view and learn (from the Curator at Wordsworth Grasmere, Jeff Cowton) about Wordsworth’s writing, the look and significance of his manuscript drafts, and material conditions under which he worked. Cowton, as if alive to the “Advertisement,” recalled seminars with the Ravens writers on the manuscripts of Wordsworth, “There was no shortage of conversation.” One entry for “conversation” in the O.E.D. refers to a “society” of persons, a social configuration, in the case of both Lyrical Ballads and Refuge from the Ravens, a new and for some disturbing configuration.
The dynamics of this conversation, according to Phil Davenport, is exchange, in which each side gives and receives something essential: “Our general assumption is that because people who’ve been homeless have often been through an intense multi-layered experience, they have precisely that experience to bring to the table. It’s a thing of value. Especially once they’ve escaped the chaos and have time to reflect. By navigating through that, using poetry and art, the makers can crystallise and pass it onward, as well as sometimes having headspace to re-evaluate it themselves.”
The Preface to Refuge describes an “imaginary conversation” with the past:—“We reach out from our moment, back to them and now to our own future, asking “When will it ever change?”” Conversations amassing over time, spreading outward towards potentially larger and larger circles; more and more people asking. One of the makers says he’s “frustrated by the fact that there is so much public will to help people in poverty, and yet it’s never important in politics.” (Dom, interview 2022) But, in May 2023 Refuge from the Ravens travelled to the Houses of Parliament for exhibition, mirroring the journey of the original book, which Wordsworth sent to the Leader of the Opposition Charles Fox along with a letter petitioning for equality: “Those who do not wear fine cloaths can still feel deeply.” It was Dom who read out a newly-rewritten version of the letter at the Houses of Parliament, on behalf of the Ravens.
Clik here to view.
Refuge from the Ravens exhibition detail, Houses of Parliament, May 2023. Photo: Phil Davenport.
There are two crucial differences between the 18th-century and 21st-century protagonists. Unlike their forebearers, the people described in Ravens have become authors — the makers. And they often write in a collective, not an individual, voice, as indicated by the several names that appear beneath the poem. They are people who have suffered systemic injustice writing together to bear group witness.
The makers of this poetry present themselves in the midst of chaotic, “uncertain” circumstances, “noise,” consciousness of the proximity of death (Refuge is dedicated to Danny Collins who died during the project) yet newly situated in a surround of poems. At several points Refuge erupts into praise of poetry, its “honourable characteristics,” at once critique and celebration of the Wordsworthian tradition. Promotion of “idleness” in Lyrical Ballads (“Put on with speed your woodland dress, / And bring no book, for this one day / We’ll give to idleness”), as a condition for both life and creativity that resists modern anxiety produced by the market economy, is for the makers of Refuge time and space for reflection, difficult to access in a world saturated with vulnerability. “Sleeping on the street, people abuse you, call you names and shit. Whereas I go somewhere quiet, the graveyard. Don’t mind sharing with ghosts so long as they don’t touch my stuff.” “. . . as soon as you go out that door, they change your locks.” Inner pressures follow: “Because my brain keeps going 24/7 I can’t remember when I last switched it off.” Time for reflection, as Phil Davenport puts it, is rare and deeply valued in the poetry workshops, and you feel its vital effects in all the poems of Refuge.
“The Honourable Characteristic of Poetry,” from which I have taken these passages, is an “Advertisement” for Refuge from the Ravens situated towards the beginning of the book, written by seven participants dramatically presenting the way that poetry relieves pressures in their lives by giving them a vantage point from outside those pressures. In workshops and in the presence of Wordsworth’s poems, words take on their own life, they “curdle in my head”; the participant poet “let lines build, . . words leave my mind, carriages in a train of thought.” In a sentence that returns in various forms throughout the book, “I let go of my past.”
One of the makers describes the process as “taking a famous poet’s work and redefining it for the 21st century to help people grasp the concept [of homelessness, dispossession, vulnerability].” (Ric, The Guardian feature, Fall 2022) To “take the work,” to repurpose it, however, can violate, the way that, historically, revolution, as opposed to reform, has demanded violence to crack resistance. As they appropriate them, the poems of Refuge from the Ravens crack open Wordsworth’s lyrics for renewal. Is this a violation, mimicking the violations the writers have endured? At least one of the Refuge poets sees his own life as part of this process: “What makes us breaks us in three / What breaks us is how we are made.” A line or phrase from Wordsworth will appear like a limb broken off its original body and reattached to something new—a de–formation. Take, for example, “The Thorn” by an anonymous maker, reworking Wordsworth’s ballad of the same name. The thorn now drops its metaphoric weight as the burdened, aged widow Martha Ray to become the agent of substance abuse: “The thorn it pricks me through my skin / Its needle lets the winter enter in.” Wordsworth’s Martha Ray “is known to every star, / And every wind that blows.” In the Refuge poem, a wayward, centrifugal force redirects the line towards the speaker’s devastating self-description: “And I am known to every star / And every wind that’s blowing me apart.”
The Refuge poet’s linking to a star points to a powerful feature of this project, to radically shift perspective from chaos, fear, and danger to a cosmic or natural vantage point. Reality doesn’t vanish—in fact, it grows, beyond the conventional accounts of people who have experienced homelessness, so the person is no longer swamped by description of their burdens. A favourite line from Wordsworth’s 1802 sonnet “It is a beauteous evening calm and free” inserts itself in an account of debilitating addiction: “the gentleness of heaven is on the sea.” This line reappears in “Years of the Quiet Sun,” a short-line lyric by Ravens poets Claire, Debbie, and Sue, that also, like Wordsworth in a Lyrical Ballad who exhorts his sister Dorothy to “Make haste, your morning task resign; / Come forth and feel the Sun,” urges a companion to
Leave the past awhile
Come forth and feel the Sun
A change of scene
Start afresh in little steps.
Come forth and feel the Sun: Wordsworth’s speaker simply means, “come out of doors,” leave tasks for play. For the Ravens poets, uprooting the poem of 1798 and replanting it in a challenging present, it means, leave behind the mental constraints imposed by vulnerability and/or economic pressure. Look at one’s life otherwise, in an “upside down sky.”
Clik here to view.
Refuge from the Ravens book illustration, by Dom, 2022.
Play drives the particular use in Refuge made of Wordsworth’s poems, what is called “détournement,” a powerful method of repurposing a canonical text. As its Situationist proponent of détournement Guy Debord explains: “Poetry is nothing when it is quoted, it can only be detourned, brought back into play.” Otherwise the study of the poetry of the past is nothing but an academic exercise. The makers of Refuge from the Ravens play with Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in the serious way of detournement, repurposing a canonical text as an energy source as well as a site of literary authenticity for their own reimagining. That people whose lives are so disrupted can play represents a momentary victory over oppression; they release in themselves what Wordsworth’s contemporary Friedrich Schiller called the “play-drive” innate in every person released from the constraints of a hierarchical society.
In the poem from Refuge, “Sweet Cherry Tree (“Stand Down”)” the source text, “The Discharged Soldier” (comp. early 1798), a wrenching account of a soldier just returned from foreign wars and found by the poet wandering bereft on “the public way,” clearly resonated with the Ravens group, which included some war veterans. (UK statistic: approximately one in five people who become homeless are ex-military.) Wordsworth says of the soldier: “His visage, wasted though it seem’d, was large / In feature, his checks sunken, and his mouth / Shewed ghastly in the moonlight.” The poet, after listening to his story, eventually helps him find shelter for the night. How do you respond to this poem? How do you represent “otherwise” its truths with which you so identify?
First, you ritualize the moment: seven of the eight stanzas (one for each writer) are organized around a different tree: Cherry, Christmas, Disaster, Cedar, “protecting,” oak. And an “ee” rhyme runs imperfectly through the whole poem, which now can be said to discharge the burden of the soldier’s misery. The (collective) imagination is then free to follow Wordsworth as he moves from his time into ours:
Among the fields and woods, I see
A man moon-lit and eerie
Dancing on his face are shapes of leaves
This man, who has seen
the Disaster tree.
And in th
“My trust is in the god of heaven
And in the eye of he who passes me.”
With a surreal beauty, a tree—its leaves—comes alive on the soldier’s face! Yet he has witnessed a “disaster tree.” As the poem moves towards its close, the witnessing speaker, the military man, and the tree begin, with ghostly realism, to become one.
Moonlight projecting the tree that protects him
Casting silhouette, shadow of a being
Complicit in the life that supports him
Earthly and steadfast with age-old boots
Decaying roots grown within him.
In a nightmarish ending which nonetheless has pitched the speaker into agency through the poetry he has made, he “couldn’t believe” that “It’s the oak tree ghost of me.” This poem explores and discovers two expressions of mental freedom sprung from and amidst Wordsworthian traces. The poem risks uncovering an uncomfortable perception, of the speaker’s complicity in their own victimhood. The revelation requires a trust, in the group of participants, registered by the half-erased quotation from the discharged soldier about his own trust.
In a workshop in Spring 2022, the project reworked lines Julia Grime had culled from Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere Journals. One Refuge poet, Amy, picked this line, “a flight of swallows gathering,” from which sheer exuberance erupts out of the image, breaks the stricture of the traditional line and the stricture of the signified; even the noun is allowed to become a verb, and a gathering of “a”s emulates the flying swallow gathering in space. Like many of the traces from the Grasmere Journals, this one pictures a world in which no one controls the subject, where the subject produces its own cause and effect; might this help to account for the unfettered explosion of the line?
Clik here to view.
Refuge from the Ravens book illustration, by Amy. Sheer exuberance erupts out of the image, breaking the traditional line and the signified, even the noun becomes a verb.
Refuge from the Ravens performs two acts of preservation: the memory of a past revolutionary occasion announced in poems, and the articulation of recent stories and experiences, and the wisdom broadcast from them, that would otherwise completely disappear, swallowed into the air. “Lyrical Ballads reflects the voices of people not usually heard, as do our new poems. Objects in museums aren’t static, they change meaning over time and we believe that the Lyrical Ballads is currently sounding a warning…” (Julia Grime)
The new lyrical ballads mix traces of often violent everyday life with traces of old canonical poems by means of imaginative play; the poems are beautiful in part because they startle us with minds in their self-conscious freedom, minds often unreachable to others in our society of accelerating inequality. Interwoven with them, a sensitive, alert witness, knowledgeable in poetry, deepens the picture. The canonical text that calls our attention to discarded figures can, as Julia Grime observed, become inert, but in this experiment the conversation around a library table at Wordsworth Grasmere — a major literary research collection — establishes a socially significant precedent. It re-opens the door to a question that both the original Lyrical Ballads and Refuge ask, one to which poetry is particularly attuned: will you listen?
Clik here to view.
Refuge from the Ravens exhibition event, Houses of Parliament, May 2023. Photo: Sue Arrowsmith.
Refuge from the Ravens was devised, directed and delivered 2021-23 by Zwiebelfish CIC and funded by the Heritage Fund. Research workshops took place at Wordsworth Grasmere Spring 2022. Exhibitions: Wordsworth Grasmere Sept-Dec 2022, Bury Art Museum Feb-May 2023, the Houses of Parliament May 2023.Zwiebelfish would like to thank all at Wordsworth Grasmere for their kind support, expertise and enthusiasm throughout this project.
This essay was commissioned as a piece of independent scholarship from Professor Jeffrey Robinson by Zwiebelfish CIC. Jeffrey Robinson’s recent work includes: Poems for the Millennium, 3 (Romanticism), with Jerome Rothenberg (2009), and Poetic Innovation in Wordsworth 1825-1833 (2019). He has written commentaries on poetry by people who have experienced homelessness: The Homeless Library and The Book of Ours (arthur+martha/Philip Davenport). He taught poetry for 50 years at the Universities of Colorado and Glasgow.
Further links
YouTube — https://youtu.be/EpoSd5tNb_o
Virtual exhibition — https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=yXthxXJd4GV
Soundcloud — https://on.soundcloud.com/9t9do
Project diary — www.zwiebelfish.org
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