Katrina Porteous CELCE Talk 24 02 2021

Poet and historian Katrina Porteous lives on the Northumberland coast and writes from a deep commitment to the ecology of place and local community. Her poetry collections from Bloodaxe Books include The Lost Music (1996) and Two Countries (2014), and poems written for a planetarium, Edge (2019).

Her talk today ‘The Sea’s the Boss’ is about the life and language of the Northumbrian ‘coble’ fishing community in the late 20th century, and its understanding of place and nature. In the talk, touching on the language of fishing practices and species caught, place names, navigation and visualisation of the seabed, taboo words and beliefs, Katrina will argue that elements of the coble fishing way of life remained little changed since medieval times, and that recent developments in fishing technology, reflected in its language, have profoundly altered the relation between people and place.

With illustrations from her poems, she will show that an intrinsic understanding of ‘sustainability’ lay at the heart of the coble fishing way of life, and explore the human cost at which this was achieved.

Скачать видео