Today we have been thinking about changes that we would like to make and what we would like to ‘let go’ of in the coming year. How can we make ourselves feel a little lighter? How would we like to feel by the end of this year? What sort of person would we like to be?
Our students wrote in chalk on rocks what they were leaving behind in 2022, and then we threw them into the sea. It was very cathartic. It feels even better when you do a big roar as you do it, like a professional tennis player.
Then we wrote a message to ourselves to keep for 2023. What would you throw into the sea? What would your message be, to your future self?
Writing haikus outdoors, immersed in nature, offers students a meditative experience. By observing natural phenomena and crafting poetic responses, they connect with the environment. Linked to the John Muir Award, this practice becomes a pathway to deepening appreciation for wild places.
We explore the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian Renaissance painter, was famous for his imaginative and surreal portraits (most famously, Vertumnus). His works were composed of various objects such as fruits, vegetables, flowers, and other natural elements.
On the High Street project we have featured a heavily-edited version of the story of Tom Austin, a local highwayman, and Kev has been absolutely desperate to tell the whole tale in a less sanitised format. Here it is. It’s pretty gruesome.
Our Chelston Heritage Evenings are back! Come and find out more about the heritage of Chelston at the Chelston Manor on Tuesday 8th November, it would be great to see you.
One of the things I love about Taleblazers is that I get to spend most of my working week outdoors, exploring the coast and moors with our young people. Together we go to a whole variety of places, moorland, beach and woodland, and one of our students’ favourite places is Stover. It’s not the wildest of places but there’s always something to see: tufted ducks diving, dragonflies buzzing over the marsh, finches squabbling at the bird feeder. We always love to spend a few hours there.
Nightjar, by Ted Hughes. And a self-portrait
Dotted around the park, and linked together by a trail that weaves around the woods, are some of Ted Hughes poems. They are printed on shiny plaques attached to big wooden posts, and are usually sited in an appropriate environment reflecting the poem. You can sit by the water and reflect on To Paint A Water Lily, or read Roe-Deer deep in the woods. Hughes was born in Yorkshire but is closely associated with Devon, and his poems are perfect for this setting. It can feel very calming to sit by one of his poems and unpick the words and phrases, immersing yourself in each line. His work often needs a little unpicking, but Hughes will repay an investment of time many times over.
My favourite work of Hughes’s is A Cormorant, and on the trail the poem is sited at a spot where you can often look across the lake and see one drying its wings high up in a tree (for all their otherwise perfect adaptation, cormorants do not have waterproof wings and need to dry them off after diving). A Cormorant is a masterpiece, contrasting Hughes as an ‘optimistic, awkward, infatuated’ fisherman with a cormorant ‘dissolving fish naturally’. Hughes is cumbersome, overloaded with gear, entirely unsuited to the task of catching fish, while the cormorant is a sleek marvel, perfect for the task. I love the way Hughes even uses clunky language and lumpy phrases to describe himself, while when describing the words spill out in a wonderful flow. I thoroughly recommend you go and find the poem by the lake and take some time to digest it, and if you are incredibly lucky you may even find you have a cormorant for company.
I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.
Here before me, snake-head. My waders weigh seven pounds.
My Barbour jacket, mainly necessary For its pockets, is proof
Against the sky at my back. My bag Sags with lures and hunter’s medicine enough
For a year in the Pleistocene. My hat, of use only
If this May relapses into March, Embarrasses me, and my net, long as myself,
Optimistic, awkward, infatuated With every twig-snag and fence-barb
Will slowly ruin the day. I paddle Precariously on slimed shale,
And infiltrate twenty yards Of gluey and magnetized spider-gleam
Into the elbowing dense jostle-traffic Of the river’s tunnel, and pray
With futuristic, archaic under-breath So that some fish, telepathically overpowered,
Will attach its incomprehension To the bauble I offer to space in general.
The cormorant eyes me, beak uptilted, Body-snake low — sea-serpentish.
He’s thinking: “Will that stump Stay a stump just while I dive?” He dives.
He sheds everything from his tail end Except fish-action, becomes fish,
Disappears from bird, Dissolving himself
Into fish, so dissolving fish naturally Into himself. Re-emerges, gorged,
Himself as he was, and escapes me. Leaves me high and dry in my space-armour,
To celebrate #NationalPoetryDay, we have a poem of wrongs and retribution, read by our very own storyteller and balladeer, Kev Johns. The poem is ‘Inchcape Rock’; a ballad originally written by Robert Southey in 1802.
The poem tells the story of a warning bell that was placed on Inchcape, a notorious hidden rock that posed a great danger to sailors in Scottish waters. The bell would ring to warn sailors of danger but was removed by a sea pirate. The bell removed, the not-so-savvy sea pirate later perished upon the rock, with his ship and his goods to boot
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