After a recent poetry reading, someone from the audience came over and said how much they appreciated a white person recognising that they have their own culture, taking on board the ignominy of the colonial past and moving with it to create something new. I think it may just about have been the best thing anyone has ever said to me about my work – because if there is an intention behind the work it is exactly this; and to find belonging again in the ruins, to build new kinds of kinship and ways to imagine a kinder future.
Kin. c. 1200, from Old English cynn "family; race; kind, sort, rank; nature" (also "gender, sex," a sense obsolete since Middle English), from Proto-Germanic *kunja- "family" … from PIE root *gene- "give birth, beget," … Related to both words kind and to child
Now I don’t know this, but I imagine this is something I’m perhaps not meant to do. To set such store in poetry, to believe that it is more than image / sound / affect. More than an imaginative expression of the latest trend in philosophical thinking.
For me, context is everything - whether that’s internal or external. Poems are little time capsules, capable of being realised only in that particular moment by that particular subjectivity and which travel to other moments and other subjectivities in ways that are deeply felt (or, if poems don’t resonate, not felt at all). This is something I know in my body.
Writing my home into the record, to foreground and value contemporary rural experience, has been my compulsion for some time now. A large part of that is (paradoxically?) archival work, deep diving into archaeological, visual, written, official and unofficial archive material, received histories and their alternatives, re-imagining and retelling stories, especially of women ancestors by blood and spirit. It’s also a practice that’s deeply embedded in land-as-archive, attentive to seasonal shifts, the governance of lunar cycles, Earth’s orbit round the sun, the wheel of the year, human relationship with the more-than. I began this work with Red Handed and continue it in my next collection Borrowed Ground, coming out in summer 2026. The work is in some ways a search for an unalienated, sacred kind of practice, an intuitive, somatic practice , practices that (coincidentally) I have a feeling might come in useful in the future. And at the same time I like to undercut this earnest questing and step outside of these practices to question my / our need for them. A turning around and around of the situation like a diamond in the fingers of a gemologist.
There’s a voice inside my head that would like to sabotage this particular stream of consciousness – how dare you write about your own practice, you egomaniac. But what if, I counter, I thought the work, the work of all of us writing into this space, had value; was worth talking about? If you stop people pleasing, you will stop pleasing some people. Oh dear – oops.
I’m not alone in this search, this compulsion, which finds at least one parallel in contemporary folk culture. Brushing aside the enduring symbols of English cultural heritage: red buses and post boxes, the Swinging Sixties, Beefeaters, the Tudor Rose, Big Ben, Britpop, blabla … and make way for rave morris, folk horror electro techno disco, Drag Declares, Ritual Bitchual and much much more.
I’m fascinated by the resurgence of interest in folk culture in recent years, as people increasingly seek an inclusive authenticity, diversity of connection and rootedness in an ever-globalised digital world. From handmade crafts and traditional music to folklore-inspired fashion and seasonal festivals, this resurgence reflects a yearning for slower, more meaningful ways of living. Social media has capitalised on the trend, turning a kind of rustic aesthetic and ‘ancestral wisdom’ into a shareable, aspirational lifestyle package - think foraging, storytelling, and cottagecore. In all the imagery I saw from Stonehenge at solstice, it didn’t look like you could move for cameras seeking to capture the perfect view. I might sound cynical (and I am a little bit) but I do get it, really I do – in a time when many feel disoriented by fast-paced genocidal modernity, folk culture offers a comforting narrative of heritage and belonging, reimagined for contemporary sensibilities. Made safe. Charlie Cooper’s BBC series Myth Country being a case in point. A mark of a subculture’s success is its visibility in the mainstream, sanitised as it may be.
But we mustn’t forget that folk cultures have also always been weird af, by definition marginal, a form of outsider art that both pokes fun at mainstream culture and completely and utterly disregards it. Doesn’t care about it one bit. Folk culture and outsider art often meet at the crossroads of intuition over instruction and expression over expectation. Folk culture draws from grassroots traditions of music, storytelling, crafts, etc. passed down outside formal institutions. Likewise, outsider art is typically created by individuals without academic training, often existing on the edges of the art world.
Where they overlap is in their resistance to commercial polish and mainstream aesthetics. Both value authenticity, often stemming from deeply personal or communal narratives. A handmade talisman, a simple ballad, or a quilt made of swatches rich with symbolism aren’t made for galleries or critics, but for hyper local rituals, communal remembrance or simply as expression, a way of saying I am here, and this is what I stand for. And this is an energy and an attitude we’re leaning into with a show we’re about to take around to venues in the West Country – all driveable within an evening so we can get home to our kids – often at the fringes in quirky community venues and in museums which are taking a chance on a performance that rifles through the trouble with compassion, unearthing the lost mythos of the region to hold them up to the light.
There is a radical underside of emergent and ongoing folk cultures that you probably won’t find online. Dismissed as old school woo-woo these are the groups that organise in the small places, the edgelands, the unglamorous slightly grubby and grotty spots. These spaces are full of shamans and doulas and herbalists and musicians with all their talk of menstrual blood and breastfeeding grief in their harem pants and barefoot shoes and they really do not care what you think of them. They know that we have been schooled to dismiss their practices, to deride them as ‘out there’.
Sometimes it feels that we are in a time of forgetting, especially when it comes to being in relationship with the land, but there are actually a great many of us – within and beyond the neo-folk movement - who are looking to ancient history for learning and answers, and we are in a time of remembering. I spent a beautiful day at the Red Hearth gathering in Sladebank Woods recently, exploring ancestral memory and matrilineal bonds through archaeology, building bridges to the next generation with the wisdom of our feminist sisters and foremothers, all that they knew and teach us now in this moment of resistance. Everything about the day – from the roundhouse décor to the ceremonial paraphernalia – reminded me of second wave feminism which has always given me slight cringe at the ways they organised, but these days I understand it much deeper in my bones as we face the rise of fascism, the end games of ecocidal colonial patriarchy. They knew what they were doing, and we have all of their wisdom to cherish and pass on.
I guess I have written a lot here and set a few hares running and I guess I’d better post before I overthink it. It’s time to let you go, but before I do I want to say that in this time of remembrance and reckoning there is a place and a need for new ways of imagining our communitas. Poetry and words don’t always take up much space in the alternative and neofolk movements, other than in song – perhaps something to do with historical notions of literacy and class. The visual, the sonic and the performative are foregrounded – but there is room for us. Poetry offers us a way to engage with our intuition, our unconscious, the knowing of the body, the imaginal and we have a role to play in this great transition we are heading towards. The best manifestation of this in poetry that I know of at the moment is the brilliant Ambient Receiver which is absolutely blazing a trail – check in out. As archivists and alchemists of cultural memory, poets offer language that feels hand-hewn. To read or hear this kind of poetry is to re-enter ritual, to inhabit myth not as abstraction but as lived presence. Leaning into that knowing is an act of quiet resistance - against speed, against forgetfulness, against the flattening of experience. In these words, we find a way home not through reason alone, but through resonance.
More and more I am finding the online world a strange place to connect (though I still value the way it connects me to a writer community I can’t reach from my rural space). See me in real life here and do come and say hello if you’re at one of these gigs – I would love to chat to you …
9th July. STROUD. Reading from FOREST, Museum in the Park
11th July PRIDDY FOLK FESTIVAL, 7.30pm in the Church, free to all!
12th July LEDBURY. Lost Mythos at Ledbury Fringe Festival, Market Theatre
13th July TOTNES. Lost Mythos at the Fringe Festival, Totnes
15th July STROUD. Chapter Two, Stroud Hotel panel event
17th July DURSLEY. Lost Mythos at Kingshill House, Dursley
Great piece Juliette. Glad to have read this before making my next...x