On arriving in Grasmere to take up the post of poet-in-residence at the Wordsworth Trust I was greeted by a poster which advertised an exhibition; English Poetry 850-1850 The First Thousand Years. Not much to live up to then.
I had harboured the idea that my cottage, at the end of a cobbled lane among a series of low-slung slate houses, would contain a great unfinished poem, one line contributed by each former poet-in-residence (Helen Farish, Owen Sheers, Paul Farley, to name a few). However, a thorough search of the meter cupboard, wardrobe and chest of drawers revealed nothing. In truth, I was relieved and have duly settled into four months of writing; writing into the small hours, writing the poems my nine-to-five had not given me time to produce.
But beyond the tired sounding "time to write", what are residencies for?
In Britain and the US there are a number of residencies and retreats (the latter offering the writer time and space, the former reaching out in some way to a wider audience) which can make the critical difference in the development of writers at any age. They play an integral part in the way a modern writing life is geared (as a measure of this you need look no further than the number of poems about residencies; Derek Mahon's Yaddo Letter written from the retreat made famous by Sylvia Plath or Tobias Hill's collection Zoo, inspired by his time in residence at, well, a zoo.) They can enforce distance and force concentration on the craft.
Search the acknowledgements of any contemporary collection of poems and you will probably find some mention of the Hawthornden Foundation, the McDowell Colony or the Wordsworth Trust. There is even one residency in California, talked about in hushed reverence – the way conquistadors discussed the Lost City of Gold - which offers two years of writing time at an Ivy League university. The best residencies foster creativity and offer a break from the demands of shelf-stacking, pint-pulling or envelope-stuffing that constitute the norm for most writers.
But as far as poetry is concerned, that is the absolute minimum residencies are capable of. People often come to poetry with a sense of uncertainty, the feeling that because it's a verbal art form they should be able to respond to verbally, and that they should be able to "understand". Think about that great secular cathedral the Tate Modern, and the thousands who stream across the Millennium bridge each weekend: they don't come away knowing how to articulate exactly what they felt in front of a Louise Bourgeois sculpture or a Mark Rothko painting. They are open to the experience and the multiplicity of individual responses to it that might exist. Indeed, half the fun is in spilling your coffee as you argue after the show about just exactly what it did mean. This should be made true for poetry.
When I went to university my parents moved from Manchester to the Lake District. One summer, my mother, bored rigid by her bored son, suggested I go along to a poetry workshop being held at the Wordsworth Trust. We read a few poems and the poet taking the class discussed a work in progress. He was candid about his problems with the piece and the parts he felt worked. Suddenly the poem and the poet were real, rounded, full of doubt, and so the near transcendental act which occurred when I later read the poem on page was all the more miraculous.
Residencies and their residents can connect, they can enrich and act a point of contact between reader and writer. The American poet, Dana Gioia, in his moving defence of and manifesto for poetry in the modern world, Can Poetry Matter? said if poets venture outside the confines of their world they can begin to make poetry essential once more.
Thankfully, as the late Michael Donaghy pointed out, poetry has always had a slightly different place in English society: where else in the world would you see a poem making front page news in a national newspaper? (think back to Andrew Motion's Causa Belli in the The Guardian). But that's not to say the status quo is stable, or even satisfactory. Poets in residence can maintain that vital link with the public, making sure our art doesn't drift away into esoterica and irrelevance.
At best a resident - be he or she in a school, a gallery, a zoo, a lighthouse, an airport or an aviary - can enrich people's experience of these places, through classes, workshops, readings. They can also demystify the writer. The act of writing is mysterious but that mystery should be open to all.
Just as residencies are a break for the writer, so too the writer in residence, at least, at very least, can show that words can have a life outside of the working life we give them.
