Re-wording Wordsworth: Ullswater
Aim of the experiment
To radically re-invent famous poems and paintings, as a means of appreciating how art really does affect the way we think about and perceive our surroundings (ie it’s a creative process in far more ways than one). This experiment is aimed at written experimentation; the partner experiment Re-turning Turner is aimed at re-imagining through visual art, although in both cases I’ve suggested how the experiment could be adapted for the other form.
Background
The focus here is on Romanticism, since this era was so influential in how we think about the Lake District (although it can easily be adapted to different eras and places, both within Cumbria and further afield). Undoubtedly William Wordsworth is the most famous poet to have sought inspiration in the Lake District, alongside his sister Dorothy and the other Lakes poets Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey. Romantic paintings of the Lake District are less well-known, but include works by JMW Turner, John Constable, Joseph Farington and Thomas Gray. Wordsworth wrote ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ in response to a bank of daffodils at Glencoyne Bay, Ullswater, not far from where Turner painted ‘Ullswater from Gowbarrow Fell’.
The n+7 experiment draws on AN OULIPO technique invented by Jean Lescure. OULIPO (ouvroir de littérature potentielle / workshop of potential writing) was a loose gathering of mainly French writers (eg Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino) with an interest in applying new structures, mathematical techniques, games, constraints and puzzles to writing. Philip Terry’s The Penguin Book of OULIPO is a fantastic introduction to this approach to writing, where you might also find ideas for alternative ways of approaching this experiment. (See here for a hugely contrasting n+7 translation of ‘I Wandered Lonely as Cloud’ to my own - ‘The Imbeciles’, by the late American OULIPO writer Harry Matthews.)
Route instructions
The route provided here begins at the National Trust car park at Glencoyne Bay, to enable you to return your rewritten poem to where William and Dorothy Wordsworth originally saw that bank of daffodils. I have designed the hike so as to also incorporate two different kinds of location (the lakeshore and the promontory summit of Glenridding Dodd) from which to ‘return’ your poem, although this can equally easily be done during an easy wander along the lakeside. Obviously this version of the experiment is season-dependent. The Mapping Wordsworthshire project at Lancaster University and Grevel Lindop’s A Literary Guide to the Lake District might help you find ideas for other poems and locations for routes at different times of the year.
Click on the image above to open an interactive version of the map on Viewranger,
or you can download the GPX file of my route here (© OpenStreetMap contributors)
Glenridding Dodd from Glencoyne
Route: Easy distance, but difficult / v steep terrain up Glenridding Dodd (3.5 miles, 1,355 feet of ascent)
Easier alternative: the first section of this walk along the lakeshore is accessible to those with limited mobility or with rugged buggies, but not for wheelchairs.
Accessible route: wheelchair access to the lake shore can best be achieved from Pooley Bridge, where the experiments can equally well be completed (there are daffodils - in season - and there are views up the lake!) See Route 1 of the Miles Without Stiles website.
Glenridding Dodd from its more photogenic side (with Glenridding!)
Writing (& Art) Ideas, & Virtual Alternatives
Part 1: Take Wordsworth’s ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud’ as your starting point, and apply the n+7 OULIPO technique to it by replacing each noun in the original poem with the noun 7 places further on in the dictionary. You can be 100% strict with these rules and enjoy the resulting oddities, or allow yourself a certain leeway (in my below poem I worked in the n+5 to n+9 bracket). You can also decide how much subsequent editing you allow yourself.
Part 2: the second stage in the experiment involves bringing your revised artwork ‘home’, to appreciate how the revised language / image changes how you perceive the original landscape. I encourage you to be playful, performative and imaginative with how you go about this (if you want to get dressed up in full historic garb, then be my guest!) During my own hike, I first launched the opening line of my poem into Ullswater written on a twig, before orating the entirety of my poem from Glenridding Dodd’s summit. I’d initially wanted to set sail to my poem as a paper boat, yet of course this would itself have comprised littering! Meanwhile, I was interested to observe how uncomfortable I felt orating my poem from the summit of Glenridding Dodd (although it did help me with editing!)
Visual art interpretation: If working in the visual medium, you could equally apply n+7 by starting from a historic painting of a scene (eg Turner’s painting ‘Ullswater from Gowbarrow Fell), and reinventing it by replacing a number of chosen objects with the noun seven places further on in the dictionary. This could either be done through repainting / redrawing or using photoshop…I’ve just flicked through the dictionary to see how my own reinvented Turner would look: the cows could be replaced with Christmas crackers, the fisherman by a fizzy drink bottle, the lake comprised of language and fences could take the place of the fells! In other words my photoshopped Turner would bear an uncanny thematic resemblance to my re-written Wordsworth poem below (littering, enclosure / an attempt to tame the landscape, consumerism, and the role of language within this). Indeed, the strange thing about this experiment is how the resulting variants often do make an unlikely kind of sense - as if a different meaning had been hiding there all the time.
Virtual alternative: the written part of this exercise can easily be done as an armchair exercise. If you would like to do the visual exercise, please feel free to experiment with my above landscape image of Ullswater, or any of the landscapes in the separate Re-turning Turner route experiment.
Route adaptation for walk-from-home
This experiment is infinitely adaptable to other art or writing which responds to a wide range of different landscapes in the Lake District or further afield. However, I’d recommend working with historic (even if only 50 or 100 years old) art rather than contemporary work.
My own poetry
Our dancing damages
I wander lonely as a clown,
setting idle float to words that vandalise
our claim to hindsight. As if only at the final
onslaught might I really see the crux, of
this. A human hothouse of all our godforsaken
damages – beside the landscape, beneath our sense
of trespass – cluster-fluttering bric-a-brac.
Continuous; our manifest starvation shines
and thrives, as if our lives were but mimes,
stretching in never-ending poetic lines devised
to meet the market needs of consumer bearings.
A throwaway glimpse. How we toss
headlines to the reassuring slight of darkness.
Our utmost wealth dances beside us, but we outdo
even the speak of money. Words larger than our
own imaginations. Like global warming, extinction,
pollution of the very air we breathe. A poet couldn’t but
be gelatinous amidst such jocund competence. I gaze –
and gaze – but little think but think how wedded I am
to the brink, and how often, when I countenance
the lies of my vacant or pensive morals (might that
better be morale) will they flash upon that inward
eyewitness which is the blockade of otherwise.
Yet still this supposed heaven fills with the plumage
of our fluttering; right here, our dancing damages.
