In a Hazelnut part 3
the final section, although it may undergo some revisions yet.
The fourth poet I shall look at here who has written about Julian is experimental writer Frances Presley. Her poem ‘Julian of Norwich: Her Cell’ appeared in the 2004 collection ‘Paravane’ and she has made other references to Julian elsewhere. Presley is a poet who is engaged specifically with both place and language and interestingly concentrates on her visit to St Julian’s Church in Norwich, and Julian’s Cell (both reconstructions themselves), rather than constructing an imagined Julian figure. Language and image are both less clearly defined that in Levertov; where Levertov conjures vivid religious narratives depicted in the stained glass and goes on to create her own, Presley evokes ‘swept colour/ brushed through/ the glass lozenges’; her own poetic brush strokes – with extensive use of parataxis – mimic this miminal impressionism. We glimpse the crucifix (‘nail feet’); the ‘altar cloth creases’; Celtic, wiccan harmomics are sounded here too (‘Morwyn’) .Verbal play indicates an enquiring mind (as was Julian’s own), perhaps also the chattering mind, with its swift associations: ‘bench burn mark/ burn all benchmarks/ mark this bench’: a quick swipe at our accountability culture. But the ludic tone is nevertheless halted and the poem allows a silence, a pause. For the first time since Levertov’s sequence Julian is quoted directly: ‘thou art enough’ taken not only from the text of the Revelation but from the carved inscription on the small stone side altar within the cell: ‘thou art enough for me’. Presley curtails the quote with its original faith meaning refracted into other possibilities: you, the visitor to this place, are sufficient as a human being: a humanistic reframing which would tally well with modern psychotherapeutic appropriations of Julian. Or perhaps its doubling indicates the sufficiency of a human relationship, the self plus human other on an equal phrasing/ footing. The poem’s final lines would seem to indicate this as primary reading/ revision.
Interestingly, another evocation of St Julian’s church occurs in Presley’s poem ‘Fetish’ from the 2000 collection ‘Automatic Cross Stitch’, a collection which is primarily concerned with the modern-day fashion industry. This poem has a clear speaker, alone ‘in Mother Julian’s chapel followed only/ by the video surveillance camera/ and an automatic beam of light/’ projecting onto her back. The following stanza returns to sartorial matters: ‘is the shawl a burthen or a delight?’: a useful juxtaposition when considering Julian herself as ‘veiled’ woman; a site of our projection hiding an ‘absence’ or (delightful?)vanishing point for logical thought. Presley’s poem ends enigmatically. ‘The nothing that he drapes upon his arm’ is also an echo of the Irigarayan veil, an appropriated site covering a subversive absence. Finally ‘Every poem is a story/ masquerading/ as an object’ offers a paradoxical close both to Presley’s ‘Fetish’ and to this paper, suggesting again that a poem has the capacity to be as resonant with potential as Julian’s hazelnut, an object containing every story and none: a portable universe of pause.
The fourth poet I shall look at here who has written about Julian is experimental writer Frances Presley. Her poem ‘Julian of Norwich: Her Cell’ appeared in the 2004 collection ‘Paravane’ and she has made other references to Julian elsewhere. Presley is a poet who is engaged specifically with both place and language and interestingly concentrates on her visit to St Julian’s Church in Norwich, and Julian’s Cell (both reconstructions themselves), rather than constructing an imagined Julian figure. Language and image are both less clearly defined that in Levertov; where Levertov conjures vivid religious narratives depicted in the stained glass and goes on to create her own, Presley evokes ‘swept colour/ brushed through/ the glass lozenges’; her own poetic brush strokes – with extensive use of parataxis – mimic this miminal impressionism. We glimpse the crucifix (‘nail feet’); the ‘altar cloth creases’; Celtic, wiccan harmomics are sounded here too (‘Morwyn’) .Verbal play indicates an enquiring mind (as was Julian’s own), perhaps also the chattering mind, with its swift associations: ‘bench burn mark/ burn all benchmarks/ mark this bench’: a quick swipe at our accountability culture. But the ludic tone is nevertheless halted and the poem allows a silence, a pause. For the first time since Levertov’s sequence Julian is quoted directly: ‘thou art enough’ taken not only from the text of the Revelation but from the carved inscription on the small stone side altar within the cell: ‘thou art enough for me’. Presley curtails the quote with its original faith meaning refracted into other possibilities: you, the visitor to this place, are sufficient as a human being: a humanistic reframing which would tally well with modern psychotherapeutic appropriations of Julian. Or perhaps its doubling indicates the sufficiency of a human relationship, the self plus human other on an equal phrasing/ footing. The poem’s final lines would seem to indicate this as primary reading/ revision.
Interestingly, another evocation of St Julian’s church occurs in Presley’s poem ‘Fetish’ from the 2000 collection ‘Automatic Cross Stitch’, a collection which is primarily concerned with the modern-day fashion industry. This poem has a clear speaker, alone ‘in Mother Julian’s chapel followed only/ by the video surveillance camera/ and an automatic beam of light/’ projecting onto her back. The following stanza returns to sartorial matters: ‘is the shawl a burthen or a delight?’: a useful juxtaposition when considering Julian herself as ‘veiled’ woman; a site of our projection hiding an ‘absence’ or (delightful?)vanishing point for logical thought. Presley’s poem ends enigmatically. ‘The nothing that he drapes upon his arm’ is also an echo of the Irigarayan veil, an appropriated site covering a subversive absence. Finally ‘Every poem is a story/ masquerading/ as an object’ offers a paradoxical close both to Presley’s ‘Fetish’ and to this paper, suggesting again that a poem has the capacity to be as resonant with potential as Julian’s hazelnut, an object containing every story and none: a portable universe of pause.
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