Poet draws on North-East traditions for new collection

KATRINA Porteous stands amid a group of Northumberland fishermen; incongruous, firstly, in being a woman, and, secondly, an outsider. She listens intently, their tuneful dialect washing over her like the waves on the beach, and what she hears is not so much words but music. While she notes down certain phrases, she is most interested in the rhythms and meanings of what is being said. A shape begins to form – and Katrina refines this as a poem.

Katrina grew up in Shotley Bridge, County Durham, and has, for almost 30 years, lived in Beadnell, in Northumberland, whose residents have provided a wealth of inspiration. As a local historian as well as a poet, Katrina has undertaken extensive research into the traditional occupation of fishing – now all but extinct – and her knowledge of the native dialect has led to her being appointed president of the Northumbrian Language Society.

While she does conduct formal interviews, much of her work is based on talking with – and, crucially, listening to – those who have lived their lives in the communities about which she writes. Her poetry is intended to be heard, rather than read, and she feels it is more like music than prose. Katrina’s desire to reach as many listeners as possible has prompted her to write primarily for radio.

“Since 2000, I have done something for radio every year and much of this has been long poems – by which I mean pieces of half an hour in length, which I have recorded myself,” says the 54-year-old. “The majority of people don’t read poetry, so radio is one way of reaching a wider audience than poetry in a book.”

Katrina’s latest collection, Two Countries, is comprised in the main of poems commissioned for this medium. One of those included, The Wund an’ the Wetter, led to a fruitful relationship with senior BBC radio producer Julian May.

“That was published by the Iron Press and the Northumbrian Language Society and it’s all in the fishermen’s dialect,” Katrina explains. “I had recorded it on a CD and Julian May, who is very interested in folk music, picked it up and featured it on an arts programme on Radio Three. The year after that, he and the then poet laureate, Andrew Motion, commissioned me to do a short piece for National Poetry Day. They put a poem on Radio Four every hour of the day and mine was one of those.”

Only her second major collection, Two Countries follows The Lost Music, published in 1996. Since then, Katrina has had several smaller collections published, containing a diverse range of poems. She wanted Two Countries to have a sense of cohesion, so only included work rooted in the North-East. Katrina feels that her sense of foreignness, having first arrived in the region aged seven, is partly what inspires her interest in its communities.

“It was a big shock to me coming from Scotland to County Durham,” she admits. “The school was very, very different and it made me aware of one’s attachment to place because I knew that I felt different. Secondly, my parents are both from the North-East and I used to go and visit both sets of grandparents, so I also felt an attachment because of the family connection.”

Having written about the coal mining heritage which is so integral to the region, Katrina was commissioned for work as part of the Turning the Tide project, which removed millions of tonnes of colliery waste from the "black beaches" of East Durham. She was proud to be involved in what she felt was a significant step towards regeneration.

“It was an incredibly wonderful, positive thing – but, like most things, it was very complicated because I felt that it was important that we didn’t wipe away the memory of the pits,” says Katrina. “It was important to remember where we had come from. That was the message that I wanted to get across – that we should be proud of where we came from and that sense of identity gives us the strength to go into the future and into the unknown.”

Katrina feels that the sort of poetry she writes – inspired by the lives and traditions of communities and using local dialects – is becoming increasingly rare, as the art form is absorbed by academia. She doesn’t object to poetry being studied at universities, but feels that its true home is in wider society.

“The poetry world has changed in my lifetime,” says Katrina. “It’s become more concentrated on universities because creative writing has become a university subject. In order to be recognised as a poet, I think you almost need to be in the academic field. I’ve always tried to stay away from that because I feel quite strongly that poetry belongs, as much as possible, in the community.”

Katrina’s work is written, primarily, for its subjects, to whom she is extremely grateful, but is intended to have universal appeal. She feels that curiosity is a key attribute and writes about anything she finds interesting – even cutting-edge science. “I’m currently working on a piece with the composer Peter Zinovieff about particle physics,” says Katrina. “It’s for the planetarium at the Centre for Life in Newcastle and it’s a performance piece of poetry and computer music.”

Fundamental to everything is the desire to communicate at a core level – and to engender a sense of belonging. “With the particle physics, just like with the fishermen, you can find something human,” says Katrina. “It’s always about linking the intimate, the things we all understand, with things that might be alien.

“I think what the traditional ways of life I write about in the book have in common is that they gave people a huge sense of what they were about, and therefore human values and a sense of community and what mattered in life. I think it’s really important to carry the memory of these things forward.”

Two Countries by Katrina Porteous (Bloodaxe Books, £12)