Join us at 3 pm on Saturday 19th February for a performance of Pibroch in my home town of Paisley as part of the 2022 Paisley Book Festival. Booking now open at the PBF website.
Really proud to have a place in this programme. And in such fine company! Louise Welsh, Vahni Capildeo, Jenny Fagan, James Robertson, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Denise Mina & Kathleen Jamie! And yes…I’ve left a lot out. This is going to be a sizzling week of events in the heart of Radical Renfrew.
So here we are. About to start the production process for Pibroch – the Performance and eagerly awaiting a printer’s proof of Pibroch – the Collection. It has been a long, fascinating journey, summarised in part in the Developing Pibroch page of this site. The journey onwards, however, will be recorded here as an artist blog as we struggle with the meaning and articulation of Pibroch post-COP26.
From the outset, back in 2019, my focus had always been on launching both elements just before COP26 in Glasgow, an act of activism and engagement intended to raise awareness and, especially, encourage audiences to reflect on the meaning of Climate Justice and a ‘Just Transition’.
COVID-19, of course, intervened. COP26 slipped back a year and, as a consequence of cancer treatment during 2018, I was ‘locked down’ for most of 2020 as one of the ‘highly vulnerable’ in Scottish society. It was a year of frustration but also an opportunity to deepen my thinking and practice around the Pibroch project.
It was also a time of (virtual) engagement with other artists who acted as mentors, guides and supporters in developing the various elements of the project especially the performance, musical and audio-visual aspects.
Timelines slipped to the right, however, in the face of pandemic uncertainties (which still haunt us) and the nitty-gritty detail of any collaborative art. The latter element was much aggravated by my inexperience in the processes and economics of theatrical production.
Now, however, we are finally ready to begin the next stage of the journey with a great team onboard including
Mark Thomson, award winning director and former Artistic Director of the Royal Lyceum in Edinburgh,
Graeme Roger, an award-winning audio-visual designer from wildbird based in Moray,
Arthur Coates, a talented young multi-instrumentalist from Aberdeenshire
and the collective talents of Open Road, a creative, entrepreneurial organisation rooted in North East Scotland (‘the North’), but with a global vision. Opern Road uses arts, culture, heritage and the natural landscape to contribute towards health and wellbeing, tourism and environmental sustainability. .
Rehearsals for the show will be during January 2022 with a view to a premiere at Glenbuchat Hall in Strathdon on 15th January 2022.
I am grateful to Creative Scotland and the National Lottery for funding to support the development of the performance elements of the Pibroch project and to Red Squirrel Press for their support in editing, collating and designing my second collection.
Wish us all luck!
Pibroch is a spoken-word performance that blends words, music and striking visual imagery to examine parallels between the Climate Emergency and the Piper Alpha Disaster of 1988. Exploring the responses of people trapped on a ‘burning platform’, Pibroch is grounded in author John Bolland’s personal experience of working in the offshore oil and gas sector and his conviction that only radical change can moderate the impacts of climate change in ways that are just, sustainable and meet the needs of ordinary folk in their communities. The performance will be accompanied by music from Fraser Fifield and followed by a creative conversation, in which audience members will be encouraged to explore themes associated with the work.
This show has been developed with the support of funding from Creative Scotland based on the text of John Bolland’s second collection, Pibroch, forthcoming from Red Squirrel Press.
World Premiere of Pibroch, a spoken-word show exploring parallels between the Climate Emergency and the Piper Alpha Disaster of 1988.
This show has been developed with the support of funding from Creative Scotland based on the text of John Bolland’s second collection, Pibroch, forthcoming from Red Squirrel Press.
Tomorrow night – 11th February 2020 – sees the inaugural event in STEM Poets programme of workshops and readings aimed at developing a coherent and effective body of poetry and other writing which can engage with and influence the outcomes of the ongoing Climate Emergency.
STEM Poets as a group was initiated by Eveline Pye in 2019 engaging a range of poets with a background, or special interest in Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics. They support STEAM, a global initiative to introduce the arts within STEM education in order to encourage creativity and break down barriers between the arts and sciences. STEM poets believe it is important that readers are presented with factually correct and truthful STEM knowledge in works of imagination, specifically poems and short fiction, and wish to promote informed writing on climate change. They want to encourage more people to write about STEM subjects and will offer support and review of STEM content. I am very pleased to count myself as one of their number.
Tomorrow night’s event will involve a discussion between Eveline and Colin Will, exploring some of the ideas and issues around Climate Change poetry, many of which have been outlined in Eveline’s recent essay published by Glasgow Review of Books.
The issues around STEM poetry and climate are, at even a cursory exploration, complex and fascinating. How is the complexity of biophysical processes communicated clearly and coherently in ‘verse’ – as opposed to their natural vernacular of algebra and algorithms? How do we as poets and scientists avoid bowdlerising reality in order to get an essentially political point across?
Eveline’s essay explores guidance of ‘effective communication’ on Climate Change from a number of government and academic sources which, in summary, propose that effective climate change poetry ‘should’:
“
i) be clear, relevant and coherent avoiding references which are unlikely to be understood by the general public;
ii) not rely on evoking fear either for the reader or the next generation but should evoke positive emotions which support people’s internal sense of agency – the feeling that their actions are meaningful;
iii) not be overly strident as this increases the likelihood that the message will be discounted or ignored, and should avoid highlighting the difference between the reader’s attitude and actions since this is more likely to change their attitude than their actions;
iv) focus on past loss and the restoration of what has been lost, near-term benefits and opportunities to avoid future losses rather than apocalyptic scenarios;
v) help overcome negative associations and poverty attributions associated with actions we want to encourage such as buying second-hand furniture and clothes, drinking tap water and using public transport.
Talk about squaring the circle!
Having been active and interested in this area over the last decade, I find these criteria challenging in the extreme in the context of a single poem or even collection.
How to express the complexity – and often counter-intuitive nature – of processes avoiding references ‘unlikely to be understood’?
How to avoid frightening or shaming individuals into apathy or denial?
How to avoid advocacy in a literature which is, no matter your perspective – whether a denier, a mitigator or an adaptor – partial and political?
And how to present positive inducements in a situation which, ‘scientifically’, seems to forecast few upsides for human societies or the majority of other critters currently on the planet?
In this context, this project does not need individual poets but a community of poets – with diverse (precise but necessarily limited) STEM knowledge and a range of political and aesthetic perspectives on this process. There are those who see rewilding as a ‘good’…others, perhaps, the preservation of a material ‘civilisation’ (for some) at great cost to other creatures and fellow-human beings. Some, in workshops and discussions, have been sanguine and of the view that a world without people would be a ‘good thing’…bring on the next mass extinction! Let us start again. The planet will recover…and it will (whatever that means?). (And who are ‘we’ in that ambition?)
All of the above are essentially political perspectives – not scientific – and should be expressed and explored clearly and coherently in an accessible literature – doing what poetry and fiction do best – exploring alternative personal perspectives and trajectories – but staying close to the topic. That the climate IS changing and will have many complex ramifications for all living things and their social connection.
One of the areas I am working on, at the moment, concerns the Thwaites Glacier, part of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf which extends ‘into’ the Amundsen Sea. Thwaites Glacier is melting AND calving at an accelerating pace due to complex hydrological and physical processes which, though perfectly ‘logical’ confound the simple notion that ‘ice melts’.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/146247/thwaites-glacier-transformed
Essentially, studies suggest, warm water (well… 1.5 degC) is being hosed towards the grounding line of the ice shelf by canyons in the seabed (themselves relics of earlier glaciation). The warm water (Circumpolar Deep Water), which ‘flows’ out of the Northern hemisphere, undercuts and destabilises the ice, which is NOT floating but grounded on the sea bed hundreds, sometimes thousands of metres down. Melting from below and subject to bending stresses it calves, releasing fragments to the open ocean which float north (and melt).
So…make a poem out of that (working on it!) The episode highlights the gap between school-child physics (ice melts at 0 degC in some slow dripping process – like an ice-cube in a glass – as the global temperature inches up through 1.5 degC to 3 degC above pre-industrial levels) and the complexity of geophysical processes in the ‘real world’. In fact, local geophysical processes are directing jets of warm water at the grounding line and the thinning ice is collapsing. Think of a high-powered water jet rather than dripping meltwater.
It is estimated that Thwaites Glacier could account for 0.4m of mean sea-level rise.
So,
Does the poet addresses the consequences or the process – a nostalgic grieving over things I’ve never seen or experienced but are about to be ‘lost’?
I am drawn back to one of my creative touch-stones in this, advice attributed to the Chinese Song Dynasty poet and scholar, Wei T’ai.
‘Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing but reticent about the feeling. ‘
I am very much looking forward to tomorrow night’s event at the CCA in Glasgow and an ongoing collaboration with fellow writers and artists in this vital area. Hope to see you there.
Pleased to be reading as part of the STEM group of poets in the great company of Eveline Pye, Colin Will, Mandy Haggith, Elizabeth Rimmer, Chris Powici, Leela Soma, Lesley Traynor, Gill Ian and Joe Murray.
The first in a programme of events exploring the beneficial links between poetry and the sciences especially in the context of the current climate emergency.
In a previous post, A New Realism about the Anthropocene, I reflected on recent scientific and academic speculation on the inception date of the Anthropocene – the period of our planet’s history which is visibly dominated and effected by human social practices such as
• burning,
• selective breeding and species elimination,
• terraforming,
• trans-oceanic migration,
• mining
• the release of synthetic compounds and man-made (transuranic) elements.
Some might view this characterisation of what might conventionally be called agriculture, manufacturing, travel – civilisation, progress – as unduly critical and damning. We have burgeoned haven’t we? We thrive. We have created complex social structures within which most of us live longer and less stressful lives that our remote ancestors. For the majority of us more of our children live and live longer, reproduce in turn. This is what life does after all. It reproduces itself. It persists.
It could be argued that we have transcended the ‘natural’ barriers to growth – the limitations of terrain, of topographic obstacles, of seasonal patterns. Our ingenuity has enabled us to cover the earth, colonise every advantageous niche, eliminate competitors and biological threats. Why, in the debate around the Anthropocene, should there be a tone of dread and pessimism?
Perhaps it is that the limitations that we now conceive and have the scientific tools to interpret and imagine not biological but physical. Climate. Toxicity. And that the breakdown of temporal and spatial barriers our ingenuity has realised may result in a rate of change in these factors which is likely to be unprecedented in human history.
I have exchanged with sceptics who insist, of course, it’s all a con – it’s all about the sun and nothing we can do…a comforting fatalism diluted with a dash of Micawberism (something will turn up). This wilful irresponsibility, often revealing a fundamental lack of understanding of the difference between energy and heat, ignores the fact that, even if it’s not our fault, we are the only species in any position to address the issue…and if we don’t, in either case, it is we who will suffer.
Of course, the biosphere will respond – some species by dying out, others by multiplying. Productive land will become arid. Dry land will be submerged. Storms will intensify. Plants will not be pollinated. Harvests fail. Patterns will be disrupted.
I believe the human species will survive – among others.
The question which I believe is unique to us is – how? In what social form? And in what numbers? We count. It’s is one of our foibles.
Megadeaths?
Dystopias in art are comforting. More comfortable, perhaps, than Utopias to which we don’t feel quite adequate. Better a final reckoning then – apocalyptic and definitive – or the thrill of sordid and heroic ‘post-apocalyptic’ struggle – a new Dark Age of zombies, brigands, tyrants. We came through the Dark Ages didn’t we? So Dark Ages are survivable. That’s known.
Well yes….and a lot of people died.
Survivalism is romantic escapism. Individualistic. Mock-heroic. It ignores kith and kin, that which is precious to us in our social fabric. It ignores our humanity.
In contrast to the comforting wallow of fatalism and machismo, others attempt to imagine a ‘sustainable’ world beyond ‘our’ civilisation. A world in which we have come to terms with the pathological aspects of our behaviour – the uncontained appetite for meat, speed, distance, things – a world which recognises limits – boundaries – and the vital productivity of edges where cultures and ecosystems abut, overlap, intermingle.
Some, like Paul Kingsnorth in his recent book ‘Beast’ and Em Strang in her stunning poem ‘Stone’ seem to exhort us to reconnect with the animal in us – the panther, the horse – creatures which flow with and through ‘the natural world’ channelled by its barriers and limitations – hedgerows, rills, its seasons. These texts portray solitary human protagonists who have, to some extent, stepped free of kith, are finding a new way to be in straightened circumstances and closer to an animal simplicity.
I suspect most of us will find ourselves in ‘straightened circumstances’ in the decades to come and there may be a need for greater self-sufficiency, self-reliance and self-discipline. But we are human. Our humanity is as natural as any pantherness or equine nature (horses themselves an artefact of human interventions). Our humanity is social. Communitarian. Linguistic.
What persists over the longue duree is not technology or social organisation but stories, music, dancing, systems of belief, cooking, painting, carvings, trade routes, pathways – things we share. In imagining the Late Anthropocene, I believe we must imagine a social world, perhaps a world defined by the re-instatement of boundaries, a mosaic of social and ecological experiments but a world in which the protagonists are human and animal – not zombies, not orcs – social not solitary – and where the challenges are to eat, to love, to reproduce, to trade, to sing, to celebrate. Life as normal in an abnormal world – for us – the world beyond the bump. I offer up that challenge.
You cannot copy content of this page
