Things move on apace.
‘Spoil Heap Harvest’ is falling into distinct piles.
Coleorton 1806-7 – a grounding and take off point at the same time.
Four main strands are emerging:
The Blind Fiddler – This piece will be a recreation of David Wilkie’s The Blind Fiddler of 1806 in a modern setting. The original was painted in Coleorton Hall Farm kitchen and is now part of The Tate Collection. I propose that the original be loaned to Snibston, bringing it home to North West Leicestershire, and that it be exhibited alongside the new Blind Fiddler and other works connected to it out of Spoil Heap Harvest.
Ruby Slippers – Public intervention, poetry and walks in and around Swannington. William Wordsworth selected the spot for the building of Swannington St George’s Church here. Somehow, Dorothy from the Wizzard of Oz, has become lodged in my mind alongside Wordsworth in Swannington – we can’t but walk together. Some evocation of Dorothy – her ruby slippers – will be lodged here – becoming part of this place.
Indifferent – a shamanistic divination process using images of crushed leaves, berries, animal faeces collected from the Snibston spoil heap on my intial walk through it and the poetry of Francis Beaumont.
When I’m Cleaning Windows – I go window cleaning with Mick and Richard, both ex-miners. Our work mediated by place and the poetry of Wordsworth and Beaumont. We share poems with the people whose windows we clean and make new poems too. The window cleaning itself becomes poetry.
Paul Conneally Dec 30th 2010
Some have thought the musings in my last post, on William Wordsworth and Dorothy from the Wizzard of Oz, walking together, were, even for me, a little too far gone. Well here’s a poem by Wordsworth with a preceeding note that he wrote about it – and how the series its from “ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS” was inspired by the construction of the Church in Swannington at a spot chosen by Wordsworth himself:
“the intended Church which prompted these Sonnets was erected on Coleorton Moor towards the centre of a very populous parish between three and four miles from Ashby-de-la-Zouch, on the road to Loughborough, and has proved, I believe, a great benefit to the neighbourhood.”
I SAW the figure of a lovely Maid
Seated alone beneath a darksome tree,
Whose fondly-overhanging canopy
Set off her brightness with a pleasing shade.
No Spirit was she; ‘that’ my heart betrayed,
For she was one I loved exceedingly;
But while I gazed in tender reverie
(Or was it sleep that with my Fancy played?)
The bright corporeal presence–form and face–
Remaining still distinct grew thin and rare,
Like sunny mist;–at length the golden hair,
Shape, limbs, and heavenly features, keeping pace
Each with the other in a lingering race
Of dissolution, melted into air.
William Wordsworth
“Shape, limbs, and heavenly features, keeping pace Each with the other in a lingering race Of dissolution, melted into air.”
Spending some time reading. Letters between the Wordsworth’s and the Beaumonts.
John Constable considered his time in the area as life changing. He spent many hours sketching in the gardens of Coleorton Hall and copying some of Beaumont’s collection of classical paintings by the great masters. These formed the basis of Beaumont’s gift to the National Gallery where they are still on show.
Mrs Wordsworth’s letters and notes are homely.
Dorothy was with them here too.
No! Not Dorothy from the Wizzard of Oz – Dorothy Wordsworth – but that’s got me thinking… you don’t need to know!
But imagine Dorothy and Toto skipping up the road to Swannington and meeting not the Scarecrow but good old William Wordsworth and on they skip. Stopping to catch their breath in Swannington itself. Dorothy clicks her heels and is gone.
Wordsworth tells Beumont to build a church on the spot where the red shoed girl vanished and he does.
I’m visiting it tomorrow – really.
