Episode 78
Desire Path by Jude Rosen

 

Jude Rosen reads ‘Desire Path’ and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.

https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/78_Desire_Path_by_Jude_Rosen.mp3












This poem is from:

Reclamations from London’s Edgelands

Available from:

Reclamations from London’s Edgelands is available from:

The publisher: Paekakariki Press

 

Desire Path
by Jude Rosen

Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone?

Ah! the difference the trampling to mud makes

when the trampled grass becomes a path.

We follow a whim, taking the diagonal trail

through Lammas Meadow – on the desire path

extending freely to those who come after,

who may be lured by the emerald field,

become immersed in its pasture, one foot

after the other, leaving a single line

without a tar or gravel scar churning up

the past or effacing it. Strange how walking

has changed the course of grass and repossessed

the Lammas lands – the right to graze surpassed

by the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on.

 

Interview transcript

Mark: Jude, where did this poem come from?

Jude: Well, I think it came from the coming together of a number of different experiences. First of all, I was walking the Lammas lands, which are ancient open green spaces. Lammas lands were originally where commoners, people without power or property, had customary rights to graze their animals after the harvest. And I was part of an artistic collective that was resisting the Olympic encroachment onto the marshlands, the green wild that we still have it in Hackney and Walthamstow and Stratford.

Mark: Right. And this was the 2012 Olympics in London?

Jude: This was the 2012 Olympics in East London. And it was really destroying the wild ecology of this place through concreting over and fencing off and evictions of people, particularly marginal people and students and asylum seekers and people on low income who lived on the edge. And it also destroyed the one of the last industrial villages. So in a way I was involved, and walking was both a sort of poetic and political practice. It was kind of contemplative and reflective. So observing and actually going through these spaces, experiencing them as part of everyday life.

And so the whole sequence of the book, but in this poem, it’s all in blank verse, or it’s largely in blank verse, which is the sort of the rhythm of walking and breathing. And it’s, predominantly, it has this unrhymed five beat line.

Mark: Great. So long time listeners will, of course, recognize blank verse as being unrhymed iambic pentameter, ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM ti TUM, the five iambic beats. Because we did a whole mini-series on it from Marlowe through Shakespeare and Milton and Wordsworth. So it’s great to hear that you are continuing that grand tradition, Jude. And like Wordsworth, you’re doing it via walking.

Jude: I think that’s really important because it’s really poetry coming out of the body, not just the mind, but actually walking and breathing and words being somehow all integrated. And some of that is the influence of psychogeography, which I was also somewhat immersed in at the time.

Mark: Which is?

Jude: Psychogeography really is the idea that the geography, the physical environment is also imbued with spiritual and emotional and cultural power. It’s not simply grass and trees and leaves and plants. The idea is that there’s actually a kind of cosmic energy and ley lines, they’re called.

The point for me is not really a kind of New Age notion. For me, it’s really the embodiment of history and language and the historic presence of people who’ve gone before our predecessors in the landscape, and particularly in the marshes, because the marshes have been like a sponge absorbing waves of immigrants, and they’ve got different signs and different kinds of burial grounds, and they’re places where rubbish is, full of pits and waste and recycling. So it’s this whole remaking, which is like an ongoing historical process.

And if you walk in it, you see it and you’re part of it. And in a way that’s. I think one of the impulses in ‘The Desire Path’ is that by walking it, you’re also remaking it. You’re leaving a light imprint. The path, the idea of the desire path, is often that it’s an alternative path to that imposed by authority, by the state. It’s not about ordinance, maps and official signage, so they’re often short cuts or the ways round, and they express something of the autonomy of walkers and of people using that path. And in a way that’s that’s one of the strongest impulses in the poem is about how we can read the design. By walking it, we participate in it and we walk in the path of our predecessors.

Mark: Wonderful. So it’s like that brown stripe across a lawn or a field where people have forged their own path. And I hadn’t realised until I read your poem that that actually had a name, that that is the desire path.

Jude: And the one I was walking was right across the Lammas meadow. And it is a diagonal right through the hay meadow. Of course, when there’s no hay, the hay is gone.

And so that’s how it came. And a phrase came to me from a poem called ‘Grass’ by a Bulgarian poet, who is very, very famous in Bulgaria, Blaga Dimitrova: ‘I’m not afraid that they trample me. The trampled grass soon becomes a path.’

Mark: Wow. What a line.

Jude: Yeah. And she wrote, I think in the context, both of male oppression, of being downtrodden or trampled by men, because she was quite a powerful politician in Bulgaria after the fall of the Soviet Union after 1989. And also I think it was more broadly, I suppose, against state oppression. So that idea of it goes from the individual body to something much bigger. ‘The trampled grass soon becomes a path.’ It only soon becomes a path by other people following in your footsteps. So it becomes an image really from individual resistance to collective resistance. So that also that that rang in my mind as I was walking. So I think that’s where the poem came from.

Mark: It’s wonderful. And I love the way you linked the act of poetry and the rhythms of walking, the rhythm of the body with the rhythm of metre, which has always been one of my arguments for it, is that if you really want to feel a poem in your bones, then you need some rhythm. But also, you know, I love the title of your book, Reclamations from London’s Edgelands. So the poems themselves are reclaiming the land.

Jude: Yeah.

Mark: I know that the edgelands, the marshlands, have got a long history of being claimed and reclaimed from the sea and from various human groups. But it’s really interesting that you say even in a kind of a what is ostensibly a nature poem here or a poem about going for a walk, that there’s a political aspect to this for you.

Jude: Yes, but a different kind of politics to what is usually assumed to be politics. It’s not polemical. It’s not messaging through a poem. It’s not using the poem as a vehicle. It’s actually through the practice of both walking and writing. So as a sort of forms of resistance to a certain kind of – well, specifically, it was against the sort of Olympic machine that got going and has redeveloped the whole area and privatized land and done many things and claimed many things which it wasn’t responsible for.

But yeah, I think I think that was the main impulse behind the poem and behind that it wasn’t an idea to, you know, a concept to attack the state. It was through an alternative way of being and of practice – challenging and retrieving language. Because a lot of the book is there – there are a number of verbatim poems in it, which come from redundant workers, from residents who were displaced. So I wanted to, in a way, make the marshes have a kind of chorus of different voices and have that in the in the book as well.

Mark: Yeah, those are really terrific monologues because I think the material came from interviews, some of which you had conducted.

Jude: Yes.

Mark: And we really do hear these voices from the past coming through, who worked in and on the river and then the factories and some of the scrapes they got into, the stories behind the area are fascinating. And also this – so I’m looking again now at this phrase right at the end where you talk about, ‘Strange how walking / has changed the course of grass and repossessed / the Lammas lands – the right to graze’ – that phrase is jumping out at me now – ‘the right to graze surpassed / by the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on.’. So that right to graze was the old common land, right?

Jude: Yes.

Mark: Everyone had the right to graze their sheep or their cow or their pig or whatever they had on the common land. Was it towards the end of the 18th century, it really gathered pace that there was enclosures by private landlords? And that became very controversial politically. And it’s interesting, you know, linking the right to graze with the right to roam.

Jude: Yes. I mean, those lands, the Lammas lands were actually taken over by what was then the district boards, and then it became the London County Council, and then district council, that Hackney actually took over the Lammas lands and made them the marshes that were given ‘in perpetuity’ to the people of the borough, for their recreation and enjoyment. And it’s those rights which were passed down from customary grazing rights from medieval times, to becoming common lands which were under the local authority, they were supposed to be securing forever, really for recreational purposes, rather than development roads or housing. And it also has been very vital in being part of the protection of the green lungs of London, for the air quality and general health of the population. And it’s those rights and those lands that are continually being encroached on.

And so that’s part of the – the Olympics was one very particular, but there have been many others, I know there will be future – attacks really on our common wild greens on which we all depend for life.

Mark: So this is wonderful, Jude. I mean, I used to live in East London, and I know this part of the city, and I think you’ve caught the atmosphere of it really wonderfully throughout the whole book. It’s like going for a going for a walk with a really well-informed guide because you’re seeing the landscape and the cityscape through your eyes and you can see all the little, you know, the ‘tar or gravel scar churning up the past’. You really bring it alive in the poetry. And zooming in a bit more on this particular poem, how did you know it began with that walk? And you’ve got the rhythm of the blank verse. I mean, how did that evolve into the form you have now?

Jude: Well, the form is an Italian sonnet but without the formal rhyme endings. You’ve probably talked about the sonnet before in other podcasts.

Mark: We had Mimi Khalvati talking about the Italian sonnet. She read her sonnet on the fried egg.

Jude: Yes. Well, the Italian sonnet came rather naturally because it’s sort of philosophical and meditative and this is really a meditation on time and desire. So I think it just came out like that, literally. But I think this very important, what makes the poem really more than anything is, is the two aspects. There is a sound pattern that comes from this ‘Ah’, which to me is the sound of desire that infuses the whole poem.

Mark: Right.

Jude: And I think the sound pattern is based on that long ‘Ah!’. So you have ‘Ah!’, ‘path’, ‘after’, ‘pasture’, ‘after’, ‘tar’, ‘scar’, ‘past’, ‘grass’, ‘surpassed’, ‘pass’. And I think that’s one aspect of the sound pattern. And then it’s got this consonant, this hiss of these hard ‘s’s, evoking a sort of squelch of feet on grass, I think.

Mark: For me it also suggested the wind in the grass.

Jude: Then you’ve got ‘grass’, ‘pasture’, ‘course’, also ‘surpassed’, ‘pass’ again – those ‘s’s. But then along with that. ‘Ah!’ and those ‘s’s you’ve got this ‘m’, the ‘m’s which are also of desire, you know, ‘mud makes’ but it’s really the ‘trampling – ‘trampled’, ‘whim’, ‘Lammas’, ‘emerald’, ‘immersed’, ‘roam’. And so I think the whole poem in sound you know, combines a sort of ‘ah-ing’and ‘umming’ [laughter]. And I think that sound, that ‘Ah!’, suggested them. So that in all the possible choices of words, I was I think, drawn to those long ‘ah’s. And then that ‘m’. I don’t that was conscious, but I think it was dictated in a way, by that long ‘ah’ and that ‘m’.

Mark: In the second line. ‘Ah, the difference the trampling to mud makes.’ That’s like the tuning fork for the whole poem, isn’t it?

Jude: Yeah. You know, trampling mud you don’t usually think of as a positive thing. And I think this was kind of saying that, that when we make a mark, we put down a mark like that. It’s a suggestion for everybody.

I mean, one of the things that came to mind, if I can give another metaphor, is when you walk in a cathedral and you go on the steps of a cathedral and they are bowed in the middle where so many feet have passed and the hard thing has worn away as Brecht would say. I get a little tingle. When I think of all the people who have gone before me and those who will come after. And I think that’s the other thing that comes together in this poem, that the first and last lines end on the same rhyme.

Mark: Yes!

Jude: ‘how many feet have gone’, and ‘pass on’. And in a way, it bookends it. It frames it. And I think that is another movement in the poem, which is about the meditation on time, that we participate in something. And we in a way, in that sense actively relate to our environment by walking and observing and engaging with the space. But also we leave something behind and it’s also about passing something on. And so there’s a kind of awareness of history as the present, but also a moment on a path, you know, and going on into the future.

Of course, it sort of touches on death but not in a negative sense, but this participating in something and always aware of history in the present so that we’re aware of our predecessors as we move forward or we move on. And I think that’s partly why – the lyric poem is always about time and love and death.

Mark: Great subjects!

Jude: And I suppose this poem is really focuses on our participation in something bigger than ourselves, but in which we all have a place. That’s the thing about common lands and the and the ecology of our lives. The desire path is a path we can make, we can remake and leave for others. So it’s a sort of metaphor for – also treading lightly. You know, it’s leaving a single line ‘without a tar or gravel scar’. It’s it’s a different kind of passing through than a road or the extension of the M11, which which was also fought over in that area.

Mark: I absolutely love what you’ve done with that first and last line. I mean, it’s a really bold move to have the rhyming couplet enclosing the entire sonnet. That’s quite unusual. But what you’ve done, I think, is marvellous because you’ve got like you say, you’ve got ‘Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone?’ Those are the feet from the past. And then at the end, as you say, this is us now with ‘the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on’. So you’ve got past and future. You’re kind of neatly joining there. And it’s only, as you talked about it just then that I picked up on the triple meaning of ‘pass on’.

Jude: Yes.

Mark: You’ve got ‘pass on’ as ‘moving on’, but you’ve also got ‘pass on’ as ‘leaving something behind, passing it on for other people’, and also, heartbreakingly, ‘pass on’ as in ‘dying’.

Jude: But I think. I think it makes it a lovely, I think it makes death something positive, rather than just negative or a tragedy, because if you pass on and are able to pass on something beautiful and healthful and – it’s like passing on breath, you know, to be able to breathe fresh air. I think that’s rather wonderful.

Mark: And I think that’s exactly what you’ve done with this poem. You’ve passed on something beautiful for the rest of us to enjoy.

Jude: I hope so. That’s very kind of you

Mark: Well, let’s listen and savour that. And maybe listen out for those sound patterns that Jude was just talking about so eloquently. So thank you very much, Jude, for sharing this from a wonderful collection, Reclamations from London’s Edgelands.

Jude: Thank you.

 

Desire Path
by Jude Rosen

Through this green swathe, how many feet have gone?

Ah! the difference the trampling to mud makes

when the trampled grass becomes a path.

We follow a whim, taking the diagonal trail

through Lammas Meadow – on the desire path

extending freely to those who come after,

who may be lured by the emerald field,

become immersed in its pasture, one foot

after the other, leaving a single line

without a tar or gravel scar churning up

the past or effacing it. Strange how walking

has changed the course of grass and repossessed

the Lammas lands – the right to graze surpassed

by the right to roam, pass through, reflect, pass on.

 

Reclamations from London’s Edgelands

‘Desire Path’ is from Reclamations from London’s Edgelands by Jude Rosen, published by Paekakariki Press.

Available from:

Reclamations from London’s Edgelands is available from:

The publisher: Paekakariki Press

 

 

Jude Rosen

Jude Rosen is a second generation immigrant of the Jewish East End, former historian and urban researcher who now works with refugees. As a poet, she explores the relationship of language to place, drawing on archival and oral histories, local ecology and etymology discovered through walking. Her pamphlet A Small Gateway, was published by Hearing Eye in 2009. Reclamations from London’s Edgelands, (Paekakariki, 2024) grew out of artistic resistance to Olympic redevelopment. Poems from the collection are performed on poem and living history walks (poemwalks.wordpress.com). She is currently revising a long poem of refugee journeys and a sequence on Gaza.

 

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This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday.

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