Lee Nelson is a poet and educator from Luton. He has been writing and performing poetry for nearly 30 years. His work has rhythm and grit, humour and commitment. Lee thinks that the purpose of art is to change the world. Art makers and those who enjoy art all have a role to play.
For his Nature Calling commission, Lee created a short collection - Sharpenhoe Begins (links to each of the poems below) - inspired by visits to the Chilterns with community groups.
"From the beginning I had an idea of the basics of what I wanted the poems to 'say' but what was less clear was how they would get it said. It was important that things not be too much from one point of view - the intention is to draw people out to see for themselves and being told that some old geezer knows better what they should be looking at is unlikely to achieve much in that direction. That said, the initial research chats suggested that at least part of the issue was people not feeling 'invited' or 'permitted' or that they had the time/space/wherewithal/right to get out to the green spaces and that wanted looking at for sure. Then there was the need to communicate the simple stuff, the freshness, the freedom the fairness, the space, the time, the chances that being outdoors can bring. Then there was the need for the work itself to be welcoming and accessible...
At the beginning there was a lot of thinking, shilly-shallying and fret in the air... but one epic ramble did arrive almost unbidden one afternoon (and that became the basis of The Mainstream). After that it was the organising of the field-trips and the practicalities of those... no more poems arrived for a while, but the feedback and advice from my Poetry School mentor Matthew Caley helped to shape the shilly-shally and plant some ideas about form and convention - posts that the tides could swirl about for a bit. After the Barton Hills walk it became clear that I needed a poem about the guy running down the 35-degree slope smiling his head off and that there was lots to be said about the different hills around Luton, Barton Hills, Warden Hill and Sharpenhoe for sure but then, as Matt Rosier's henge idea came together, so Waulud's Bank became a location in need of attention too.
From here, things picked up speed, context and detail and the thing took on a shape, a local gazetteer, a sort of psycho-topographical map of the area and peoples' responses to it . . . the poems as tributaries running down the sides of a drainage basin to feed the headwaters of The Mainstream... and as that shape had gaps in it, more poems sprang to fill those dry stream-beds.
In the collection, we begin at Sharpenhoe, where my time on hills began, then to Waulud's Bank to see what Luton is all about, on to Beginners' Hill, setting an agenda and a reason for ascending, WHOWHATWHEREWHENWHY wonders what you might do when you are up there and why you would go more than once, Running Full Pelt is about joy and liberation under the sky, Do Tell asks you what you found and The Mainstream is the poet preaching just a little bit... then in The Good Air of the Chilterns there's local detail and local history and local issues leading up to that vital invitation to everyone to come outside. Finally, a slightly daft coda that hints at what you might bring back from the hilltop and use to open up the valley.
In the end the process was processing the process (if that isn't too tortured...). The job was drawing out and setting down in words real feelings from the responses of people to the earth beneath, the sky above and the self between. Hopefully I did an honest job..."
