Long Poem Magazine

Covid and the Fen Line

Black Fens Viral began in the early summer of 2020 when I was starting to recover from Covid. I had been ill for over two months with fever, exhaustion and bands of intense pain, which began at the crown of my head, travelled down across my cheekbones, until my throat was inflamed.  I would have to lie down and let the waves of pain wash over me.  At first, these symptoms were not recognised as Covid, but later evidence accumulated of how it can attack the brain and not just the lungs.  I was reminded of Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare: I had a gremlin squatting on my body and able to penetrate all my defences. 

    At the end of May the swifts returned to the unusually quiet London skies, screaming overhead.  Lockdown began to lift and I knew I had to get out of the city.  Usually my journey to Norfolk started at Liverpool Street station, but I realised I could avoid travelling across London by taking the train to Cambridge, up to Ely, and then east to Norwich or north to King’s Lynn.  This route goes through the Black Fens of East Anglia: a flat, almost hedgeless and treeless, agricultural landscape of black peat which was once marshland, before the drainage of the fens.

  I had barely been able to read, let alone write, while I was ill and I wasn’t sure how or if I would write again. I often write about landscapes I love, such as Exmoor or the north Norfolk coast, protected by national parks and nature reserves, but I needed to write about this damaged landscape, where plants are exploited and biodiversity ignored.  It corresponded to the damage caused by the pandemic, a result of human incursions into wild places.  Looking out from the slow train, as we stopped at all the small stations along the way, I started to make notes on the landscape.  I also observed what was happening inside the train, the voices, both human and automated, as well as the damage that was still happening in my own body. 

The Black Fens

I came across An Introduction to the Black Fens, by H. J. Mason, published in 1973, and it became a key text, written with expert clarity, and illustrated with stark black and white photographs.  A product of his time, Mason remains neutral on the subject of drainage and agricultural improvement, although you sense his approval of the development of nature reserves.  How different from the contemporary books on the fens I read later, such as The Lost Fens: England’s greatest ecological disaster by Ian D. Rotherham, who, according to Melvyn Jones, has been called a ‘take no prisoners environmentalist’.  I discovered that the first sluice was created by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden in 1642, to limit the tidal flow up the Great Ouse, not realising that the peat would shrink after it dried out and be blown away by the wind.  As Rotherham and others point out, this would also add to global warming through leaking carbon dioxide.

  The last chapter of Mason’s short book describes agricultural crops, which I remembered studying in geography lessons at Grantham grammar school.  I was returning to the landscape of my childhood in Lincolnshire and all its associations: depopulated by mechanised agriculture, it was a lonely landscape, as well as lacking in biodiversity. 

The Markov Chain Text Generator

   Before Covid, I’d been writing a sequence called ‘Channels’, about estuaries and parallel coasts, which although forming a single entity for nature conservation purposes, are often sharply divided politically.  I was often writing on site and in response to the landscape, allowing an engagement with its otherness, which I did not seek to consciously control.  In my new world, working on site was more difficult, and the expansiveness of visual or open field poetics no longer seemed possible.

   As I recovered in Norwich, I was able to read poetry again and one of the books I had with me was The Lager Kilns by Steve Hitchins, who I’d met at a conference on visual poetics a year earlier in Cardiff.  I’d joined his ‘Canalchemy Project’, a collaborative enterprise which involved walking sections of the Glamorganshire canal from Merthyr Tydfil to Cardiff Bay, with a group of poets and artists, performing actions and readings along the way.  Reading The Lager Kilns I was struck by how Hitchins moved between the past and present of Welsh landscape and working-class history.  I was also interested in his innovative poetics, including neologisms and unusual word play, and he explained that some of it derived from the Markov Chain Text Generator:

 ‘Andrey Markov, the mathematician who developed the Markov chain … devised the technique by making columns of all the vowels and consonants in Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.  I believe the same or similar algorithms are now used in predictive text and voice recognition software, but for me the most interesting moments are when the algorithm gets it wrong and predicts incorrectly, creating unusual combinations of letters or words.  I tend to use these algorithms to create cut-ups of texts I’ve written or texts of others, and are particularly effective in the production of portmanteau words.  I find that using this method differs from the cut-up procedures devised by Tristan Tzara and William Burroughs in that rather than rearranging the words ‘at random’, Markov Chains operate on the probabilities of grammar so that you get a semblance of sense and syntax even while these are disrupted.  It relates to Noam Chomsky’s ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ argument’.

  Although I was interested in Hitchins’ use of the Markov Chain, I wasn’t sure how to pursue it further.  Then I came across the website of the Dutch programmer Hay Kranen, which made it easy for me to input my own writing and generate Markov text:  https://projects.haykranen.nl/markov/demo/.    As far as Kranen was concerned it was a way of producing ‘nonsense’, but he later told me I wasn’t the first writer to find my way to his site for creative purposes.  I realised that it could provide a response to the hell of Covid19.  When I explained this to Steve, he agreed: ‘The way algorithms iterate and mutate seems kind of viral – William Burroughs said language is a virus’.  The outcome resembled a viral assault, but it also lent itself to discovering new semantic and syntactic patterns, and so began Black Fens Viral:

standing water in meres maintain our embankment swaying water in meres on hard stands swaying slightly on our scarp combed green rows in the shape of a black lozenge grey sky and rain to mark my dark masked escape loco espresso is closed thank you for your cooperation operation combed green rows in my throat the shape of a black fen rasps in the black lozenge grey sky and rain our scarp combed to mark my dark masked escape standing water in my throat the shape of a black fen rasp in meres combed green rows in the black fens rasp in my throat the black earth thank you for your embankment combed green rows in the black fens rasp in my dark masked escape loco espresso is closed maintain our scarp the black fens rasp in meres on our scarp combed grey sky and rain to mark masked escape loco espresso is closed thank you for your scarp combed green rows in the black lozenge rasp in my throat the shape of a black ear

   When I sent these new poems to Hazel Smith, experimental poet and also a practitioner of machine-generated text, she identified a ‘maximalist’ style, with a lot of ‘drive’, almost the opposite of my usual minimalist style.  I found the Markov Chain definitely encourages repetition, with an almost infinite possibility of variations.  Words are broken up and recombined to create new words – what Hitchins calls ‘portmanteau’ words.  I have also observed how similarities of rhyme, both consonance and assonance draw together words and phrases which were previously kept apart. Hitchins explains that the algorithm hits ‘a junction or node on key words, then branches off in different directions’.  Markov text generation seems to imply the interchangeability of language, even its exploitability.  Language is a resource, open to exploitation.  It shows us how malleable language is, and that can be dangerous, just like our misuse of natural resources. 

   I would edit the Markov text, to a greater or lesser degree, and sometimes even decide that it hadn’t worked.  I also experimented with various lengths and types of extracts from my notes to see which worked best.  Kranen advises that it’s best to put in a longer, more interesting text, but I found that sometimes the short extract can also produce interesting results. 

    I was never quite sure how a particular set of notes would translate in the output version.  Sometimes I would reinsert my original lines if I preferred them.  It was like a collaboration with another poet in which you’re never quite sure what they’re going to do, but that’s why it’s interesting.  As time went on, I had some sense of what the algorithm might do with a text, although it still surprised me with some of its choices and sometimes seemed to ignore particular words or phrases.  Generally, if I gave it a text which I thought had potential, it would reward me with its response and I noticed that if my observations were less acute, it would also fall flat.

   The ‘drive’, to use Smith’s word, is supplied by the text generation process, but also by the desperation of the times we live in, political and ecological.  This is evident not only in the landscape, but also in the conversations, or slightly crazed monologues, I heard on the train.  When I wrote ‘Envoi’ for friend and poet Anthony Mellors, as an urgent incantation for his health, although I didn’t use Markov, I was still echoing its secular litany of repetition:

You are standing straight with the high sign, but the sign makes no sense.  How can this be a relief channel when it cuts through all protection?  How can your body be designed against this?  Your eyes are closed as if this body is already less inhabited, as if your gaze is taken in and not beyond.  It makes no defence in the Fens and offence cuts through to nothing.  Yours is no detachment but attachment to the fen and wetlands where the relief channel will not cut.  You have followed my desire to walk the dark unrelieved channel and you humour my black humour, waiting until it is time to move to a restored reserve, waiting until we can observe birds and not signs.  The sign itself a relief of dents and pockmarks, still and straight and hollow props to be resisted by your sentinel, patient and without patience, the living self, ready to move, perfectly shaped.   Nothing cuts through you or with you because you can allow all these permutations to run out in whatever lines they choose. 

   Smith suggested that machine-learning-generated text has a wildness which is almost ‘posthuman’.  It certainly reflects our increasing incoherence on the verge of the post- Anthropocene.  For me, however, the landscape, although degraded, remains an active part of the text and continues to have an unpredictable and disruptive role.  Or perhaps I was repurposing the Markov text chain to reconnect the depleted environment of the Black Fens with a richer organic life: a virus that could bring new life to exhausted soil. 

Walking the Black Fens

Since 2016 I had been taking the King’s Lynn route to visit Anthony, who had moved to Hunstanton, on the north Norfolk coast.  We both grew up in Lincolnshire – something so rarely encountered that it creates a special bond, although he was on the coast and I was inland.  He kept a close and sceptical eye on the ‘pastoral’, but was deeply attached to the landscape, especially the shoreline, and was a keen birdwatcher and swimmer. 

   With Anthony I was able to explore part of the Black Fens on foot. Walking anywhere remained difficult during Covid and full or partial lockdown, but also some areas are always difficult to access and the only way to get there was by car.  In October ‘20 we accidentally found ourselves in the village of Magdalen, south of King’s Lynn, and found refuge in the church which was open and decorated for harvest festival. 

  The following April we were able to walk the Black Fens Waterway Trail, from Downham Market, along the bank of the Great Ouse relief channel, with its surrounding agricultural landscape, and past the lock at Salters Lode to Denver Sluice, a massive steel floodgate.  I couldn’t connect with the monotonous landscape which reminded me of a computer screensaver.  I asked Anthony for a comment and he replied, with his usual mordant humour and word play, ‘The deep rolling sod is relieved by teasel’ which it was:

these are the fields divided by a thin line of reeds and I am filled with bliss to see cloud shadows brush across the dark soil and I am filled with a Bliss longing before the field and its animated shadows because the screen began with monoculture although critics might argue that the field furrowed to a fine grain lacks a point of interest it is inviting for the desk-bound computer user who forgot his bramble hedge at the bottom of the Ouse embankment the  disorder of hawthorn and daisies pink blush of petals below us the glass I cannot experience don’t tell him don’t confess this was our screensaver at the bottom of interest longing for the raked soil and I am filled with monoculture something moving on the field he forgot his binoculars forgot his binoculture he says the dark rolling sod is relieved by teasel although critics might argue that the image is bland it is inviting a pink blush across the raked soil and I am divided by teaseltics relieved by teaselargue raised by teaselith moving for the disorder of reeds

   There was also a darker mood because Anthony had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.  ‘Envoi’, quoted earlier, expresses my concern for him and apology for taking him to this damaged landscape.

    In September ‘21 we went to the nature reserve of Welney Wetlands Centre which takes in 1,000 acres of the northernmost part of the Ouse Washes – Britain’s largest area of seasonally-flooded land.  Scottish prisoners, after the Civil War, in 1651, were used as slave labour on the building of the Hundred Foot River: Vermuyden’s most ambitious drainage channel.  The Ouse Washes were intended as the overflow to protect agricultural and fenland towns from flooding, but now they flood more often and more deeply. Access roads are often impassable. The Centre is trying to create new varieties of wetland, which will also protect the wildlife.  Due to a warming climate, it is now the large whooper swans which arrive first from Iceland, with their resonant vocalisation and they became a recurring feature of Black Fens Viral.  As well as my favourite swans, we saw the largest dragonflies we had ever seen, which resembled helicopters. 

  In February 2022 I stayed in Ely with my partner, Gavin Selerie, and having thoroughly explored Ely, especially its Gothic cathedral, and second hand bookshops, we walked through Cawdle Fen, between Great Ouse and the railway line, down Braham Dock Drain, past Grunty Fen Catchwater to Little Thetford.  The old name for Cawdle Fen was Cald Welle or cold spring, which describes the day itself, with a biting wind.  The landscape was drained and ploughed with few wild spaces and we were relieved to be able to shelter in the rewilded churchyard at Little Thetford:

 ‘for they are rewilding the church and feeling like Sheela Na Gig on a low stone teasel and heat with my legs spread open na gigla to disorder’.

Afterword

  I visited Anthony in March ‘22, but he wasn’t well enough for any expeditions.  I was going to return in the summer, but then Gavin was diagnosed with brain cancer.  Inevitably, these tragedies add another dark layer to Black Fens Viral.  I was able to return briefly to King’s Lynn in March 2023, hoping to see Anthony in hospital, but I arrived two hours too late:

there will be snow in King’s Lynn today good morning stack of bricks good morning gravel ballast held by reeds good morning heartbreak snow swirled as we fell asleep by the stove last March …

   I still miss his observational skills and enthusiasm.  On a visit to the nature reserve of Wicken Fen, shortly after he died, I felt like Francis Pryor, archaeologist and author of The Fens, describing his first visit there with an unappreciative girlfriend, who took one look and said: ‘So, is that it?’. 

   A year earlier, Anthony was in despair over his diagnosis and the futility of making plans for the future.  He said: ‘Everything in life becomes meaningless when you have seen death’.   Afterwards on the train, while I thought about Anthony’s terrible words, I looked out at Ely and its Gothic images, where life and death co-exist.   I saw the monotone black field, the array of solar panels and reservoirs, but I also heard bird song.  All these things were in my notes when I copied them into the Markov Chain.  I found that the text which returned to me had taken the nihilism, in language and landscape, and effected some kind of Mallarméan, post-Hegelian, double negative, from which a synthesis emerges:

Ely cathedral gothic so much life in death changes everything he said everything becomes meaningless one perfect black strip  he seemed to mean no life at all when you have seen death he meant that you can’t be young anymore brimming with water like a reservoir entirely at our disposal opening up and reflective like a sequence of shutters or solar panels turning their faces to us opening their faces to mean no life at all when you have seemed to us reflecting our faces reflecting our disposal turning becomes meaningless yearn for a reservoir when you have seen death it changes everything in life we are in gothic he said everything becomes meant brimming with water like a sequence of birds opening up and reflecting when you have seemed to mean no life at all in gothic so much

References

1. Black Fens Viral, Literary Pocket Book (Steven Hitchins), 2020
         https://literarypocketblog.wordpress.com/lpb/

     Collected Poems: Volume 1, 1973-2004, Shearsman, 2022

     Collected Poems: Volume 2, 2004, 2020, Shearsman, 2022

     Black Fens Viral  Shearsman, 2025 www.shearsman.com 

2. An Introduction to the Black Fens, H. J. Mason.  Ely, 1973

3.The Lost Fens: England’s greatest ecological disaster, Ian D. Rotherham. History, 2013

4 “Common pink metaphor: from ‘The Landscape Room’ to Somerset Letters”, How2, 2008.  The disconnect between romantic ideas of nature and the reality around me are  discussed in this essay, as well as my membership of the World Wildlife Trust and attempt to find ‘wilder’ spaces, which were usually privately owned woods.

5. An Alphabet for Alina, with Peterjon Skelt. Five Seasons, 2012, was also a return to Lincolnshire, with the energetic pre-grammar school vocabulary of my childhood, when we ranged across the rural landscape in spite of obstacles.      

6. The Lager Kilns, Steven Hitchins, Aquifer, 2019

7. “Sexual damage and porcelain: Jane Joritz-Nakagawa Plan B Audio and Steven Hitchins The Lager Kilns” | Long Poem Magazine, December 2020

8. Hazel Smith is a British-Australian poet who has published several collections of poetry, as well as CDs and videos of poetry and performance and multimedia collaborations.  Her  critical works include The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen & Unwin, 2005.

Note

I introduced the Markov Chain to the online Writers Forum Workshop, chaired by Peter Philpott, and poets experimented with it. I was struck by how fragmented the language of some versions had become, rather like the sound poetry of Bob Cobbing or Bill Griffiths.  It demonstrates how many different ways it can be used and with quite different results.