Mimic Pond

This is a photograph I took on Boxing Day of Mounts Pond on Blackheath. The small mound with trees behind it is now called Whitfield Mount after the eighteenth century open air preacher, but has been a radical landmark since the middle ages. Legend has it that John Ball made his famous speech here during the Peasants’ Revolt, Cornish rebels gathered on it in 1497 and later the Chartists and Suffragettes met at the spot, aware of its tradition as a rallying point for dissent. The pond is seasonal, emerging in winter and disappearing in the summer. Currently, as you can see, it is little more than a large puddle, with crows circling and using it as a bath.

I went to look at this small section of London landscape because I had just read Carol Watts' excellent book of poems about it, Mimic Pond. The cover shows grass poking through the shallow water like lines of verse and in the poem she compares the black crows hovering over winter ice to 'black script' or 'notes on a stave'. Her title comes from Henry David Thoreau's Journal for 16 April 1852 - 'here is a mimic sea - with its gulls' (he was describing the look of a meadow after rain and snow melt). Other writers she draws on, whose work I've mention before on this blog, include Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Francis Ponge, Gary Snyder and Allen Fisher. Her poems cover a year of close observation and at about this time she saw the pond as 'a replication of expanses / on different scales, wondering / what the pond sees in the crow / or the crow, as it flies, sees / in the pond / also in motion.'

I went to an excellent online talk by Carol Watts a couple of years ago, 'Pond weathers and inventories: practices of eco-attention in making poetry', but have unfortunately mislaid the notes I made at the time. If I ever come across them I'll amend this blog post... Instead, I'll direct you to an excellent long review of Mimic Pond by Susie Campbell at Long Poem Magazine. She notes, for example, that its 'language fluctuates through shifting levels of meaning and strange reversals, an active playful thinking about pond in writing', and that the rhythms of the poetry sequence 'communicate a quiet spaciousness.'

'Not the restless, trickster shiftings of the pond itself but more like the wheeling, diurnal rhythms of earth and sky, suggesting perhaps that the restless energies of the pond are held within the bigger rhythms of the universe. We feel in them the earth’s curves and parabolas, a recurring motif throughout the collection. Read aloud, these rhythms create a sense of how the great rise and fall of the universe is mirrored in the restless turbulence of the pond.'