Skeletons in the Closet

If I came back from the festival thinking of skeletons, it was because of the juiciness of Seamus Heaney’s ‘Blackberry-Picking’. Aoife Lyall’s workshop on ‘Soundscape’ took us from ‘The Wanderer’ (in Old English) to the present day. Alerted to the technicalities of pattern by her brilliantly gentle introduction, and instructed to find slow and quick sounds, we took a child’s or singer’s delight in finding ‘clot’ and ‘knot’ and ‘pots’ and ‘blobs’.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. […]

I longed for us to burst into speaking the words aloud, ruminating on them or letting them explode joyously, rounding our mouths. Thanks to Aoife’s guidance, for the first time I noticed the physicality of that -st in ‘first’ yielding to the -sh in ‘flesh’, like the spurts that follow the bite and the mush that ensues from the chewing; sw-, ‘sweet’, bringing the lips together in imitation of that action. The child-speaker of Heaney’s poem hoards the berries, which fur and rot; the many sweetnesses left untasted becoming one body of decay. And a skeleton may be inferred from every (vertebrate) body.

Did Aoife use the word ‘articulation’? I do not recall; but the ‘Soundscape’ workshop set two different senses of ‘articulation’ playing off each other in my mind – the pronunciation of elements of speech, and the ways and places where two or more bones join. In my first year at university, ...