The M60 & Eulogy: a neurotrippy take on the art of climate crisis

Our current ecological crisis has demanded many shifts in the artistic landscape. In the face of our sixth mass extinction, creativity fosters an envisioning of the future and unburying forgotten rituals. As this apocalypse gives birth to a host of dynamic and experimental artistic practices, one particular performer adapts the refocusing of contemporary poetry within the context of chaos and catastrophe. Here, poetry is pulled into the sensorial realm of three dimensional landscapes. 

Sam Hickford’s debut poetry book, Poems Sketched Upon the M60, uses one of the largest ring roads of the north as a transportative vehicle to revive remnants of extinct species and red civilisations in a pre-industrial pastoral period. Pit stopping at sites like Moston, Salford Viaduct and Preston’s bus station, whilst indulging in dérives that find moments of the English poet, John Clare (who, himself was well known for his directionless meandering across countrysides) we are invited to connect with familiar sights in the new light of this psychogeographical voyage. 

Composed around the death of his sister and working as a carer during the pandemic, Poems Sketched… journeys through both personal and climate grief. The collection’s delicate poetry presses on the dislocated humour that comes with the contemporary familiarisations, locating ‘some industrious Hollingwood dealer’ as the only remaining lingerer in the empty landscapes pre- motorway Moston. There is a desire to reestablish a ‘perfect circle’ mirroring the orbital M60 and restoring the microclimates which have been destroyed to the ‘despair/ of diesel particles’. This first poem utilises the more archaic Petrachan sonnet, pointing, perhaps, to Petrach’s loss of his beloved, Laura, during the plague. The onset of the collection thus sets up both reanimating and eulogising imminent and ancient extinctions, continuing throughout the collection. 

This transital movement embodied in one of my favourites, ‘Obituarying’ which has, at times, a more mystical lyricism. With the immediacy of the verb to encircle these cycles of ‘resurrecting and becoming new’ speaking from the ‘womb’ to and ‘mourning/ forever’ as a way of noting closure and orbiting back to present motions. This almost sacred reverie of sadness consumes the dimming present, and a way of mourning opens up as the poems scatter back for beginnings in a longing itch to complete some sort of circular journey.

Honing a little closer to home, the collection presents trodden and trampled living ecosystems further in a small series on three northern airports. Psychogeographist, Will Self, inspired Sam’s wanders to airports, with the idea of association of the self emotionally familiarising through unravelling disorientation in foreign surroundings. This becomes a regrounding in his lyric to the emotional history of this overlooked landscape. Walking as a grounding mode of transport, opens these landscapes to be what as they once were: places of mourning, burial, and, perhaps, of spiritual transformation. 

Ritual is reexamined in pulling back into present interactions with buried ecosystems. Leeds-Bradford airport, for example, is refigured into its origins of a Celtic Burial ground, where ‘Celts lie deep, sleeping in concrete’. There is a resistance of linear temporality and direction as a way of engaging again with ancient ecosystems in a contemporary setting, where it is hard to dismiss ‘the drone of ryanairs bleating across t’Aire’. Newcastle airport, meanwhile, was grounds a nature reserve where the poet exclaims was a place even humans with their ‘dog-walks (always!)’ could rejoice in a distilled form of peace. Like many of the poems in the collection, however, it remains haunted by the fast paced pressure of the present day, ‘where cars now race/ besides a railway’. The concept of linearity is tested in the following poem, ‘Burial Corridor’. A concept, suggested by medical professor John Ashton, of building a burial corridor alongside motorways. The collection’s reanimation of sacred Celtic burial grounds under Leeds airport and envisioning the ‘gas-leak meadow in the stars’ of a future cemetery frequented by cars serves to dig up diagonal ways of thinking about eulogising ecology. 

The use of material in Sam’s poetics, further plays with expanding and examining the seemingly closed destination of death into a circle. A coffee cup in the form of ‘Ceberus’ acts as a ‘guardian of the recently-deceased’ at ‘West Norwood Cemetery’. This cup, in its stubborn refusal to be removed, becomes a tool for inscribing poetry, and allowing for forms of cyclical immortality in its rotations and possibilities phonetic play. Sam’s most recent project, cuppoetry.  , challenges the standard, linear form of the written word through decorating disposable cups and reanimates poetic form. Everything within, around and of the art is paratextuality considered with a conscious care to use, place and space. What would be discarded without a second thought is given another life.The cup is able to be lifted and twisted as an object, or artefact, dictated not by punctuation but the flow of our individual breath and physical pace of our hand movements. At times, readers are invited to create new meanings with every reading, removing the vowels as is written in forms of Arabic or Hebrew writing, abjad. On other times, the english language as we more commonly recognise it is used:

Far and away the only short term we know | the moment intimates its precarious | temptation, draws lots with fickle | clay. Like a dervish, I dance at | its precipice, sprawl | and pine, | reel and stay.

Sam’s performance at the world’s largest performing arts festival, Edinburgh Fringe, in early August, will sing the songs of what has been lost and bring to the forefront that which is on the verge of disappearing. His act, titled Brother Smudge’s Strange Meditation destabilises what we think of as poetry, and expands into contemporary experimentalism. As an art form, Sam’s lyrics offer a vibrancy, and take on an unheard turn, through the musicalities of hammer dulcimer chimes and Gregorian chanting. The performance accumulates what is at once a revival through noted consideration and a revisitation of loss. An oral landscape equally important in incorporating an ephemerality in an age verging on disappearance. Visually brought to life with linguistic flutters of almost disposed scrap material and accompanying his pieces with BSL, it is clear that this Strange Meditation is a creation inseparable from the collapsing catastrophes surrounding our everyday. Audiences, as both participants and observers, can expect an element of spontaneous theatricality, as the space transforms into an amalgamation of creative and restorative ecological practice. Art is a reaction, and resistance to contemporary environments. I’d encourage anyone to approach the lane of Sam’s work, either to lose themselves, or find what has been lost.