This week's guest post is from Isabel Rogers, whose poem John's Curious Machines won the Cardiff Poetry Prize in July 2014.
Below she shares what it was about John Harrison's curious timekeepers that so inspired her.
This year is the 300th anniversary of the 1714 Longitude Act. You’re bound to know this: you read the National Maritime Museum’s blog. I was oblivious of this fact when I began my poem about John Harrison a few years ago, and if you had told me it would go on to win one of the UK’s major poetry prizes I would have laughed. Who would want to read about an obscure man long since dead? Still, there I was last month, receiving the Cardiff International Poetry Competition winner’s cheque, reading six stanzas about a man from another century whose legacy changed the way we capture time. The poem had found its place.
My interest in his extraordinary life and work was initially sparked after reading Dava Sobel’s novel Longitude, and I went on to research more about him and the time in which he lived. The more I discovered, the more I was fascinated by the scale of the problem and how difficult it was to solve. So many sailors died.
The idea that his chronometers were saved, repaired and could still work, hundreds of years after they were made, was something I could appreciate intellectually but blew my mind emotionally. But then I’m a poet: that’s my job, to a certain extent. Those enormous early machines, with their precision engineering and ungainly grace, were both rigorously functional and beautiful. I gazed at pictures of them, wondering at the man who imagined them and brought them into the world.
The leap he made between his third and fourth chronometers was not only one of miniaturisation. H4 looks more like it was drawn by an artist than an engineer. The construction drawings would not look out of place in modern Doctor Who graphics for the Chameleon Circuit.
It’s often hard to remember exactly how and when a kernel of a poem arrives. Sometimes it’s the need to capture a moment that would dissipate and be otherwise forgotten. Other times a casual glance can reveal something tiny and insignificant, but that very act of revealing allows us to connect things we consider scattered and independent.
With John Harrison’s chronometers, I felt a wordless pull. Their function is to keep time, and their maker could no longer speak for them. The poem started far too baggy, its long lines ranging across the page as John’s life straddled his century. I kept returning to it: pruning, distilling, trying to catch the essence of what he achieved. When I visited the current
Ships, Clocks & Stars exhibition at the National Maritime Museum and saw all five chronometers together, I felt genuinely shivery. Here were the machines I’d been keeping in my head for years.
My poem, John’s Curious Machines, is on the
Literature Wales website. I hope my effort would draw a little of his legendary hard-to-win approval.