Poems, mostly roses : fragments and fragrances

Having hit a dry patch recently, I thought I would try challenging myself by setting a weekly topic, preferably one that would not normally suggest itself to me. This is my bag from the week just past. (Don't hold your breath though, the weekly bit will probably not pan out.)


Too many heavy blooms the standard bears,
as though a holy man has bowed his head
beneath too many heavy prayers.

The formal beauty of the rose,
self-replicating in concentric rings,
is neither fractal nor a fractal in a sense -
except the sense that "fractal" has in me.

The landscape changed with every step
and still with every pause for breath it changed
until I came upon the rose and knew at once:
it was the pivot of created things around which turned
earth, stars, and sun and moon and all that was;
that only it was still; that he who sought for stasis
inwardly, must focus on it
and be one with it.

Like many another child I would infuse
rose petals from our garden,
brewing perfume for my mother -
which she'd never use
or give attention to (much less affection),
nor even curiosity. You may conclude
she didn't ever smell of it...
It was the stink, I guess.



If when looking at a rose
you're thinking you have
never truly seen a rose
before, it is most likely
you have meditated
recently or taken drugs -
or found yourself
before great works of art.

My father loved conundrums. "Think,"
he said, "of your electric train...
of going forward on a single track, but then
reversing back without an instant's pause.
Would that be possible?" He drew
the scene so well, I clearly saw
the stationary moment -
and later saw it in a rose:
the way the forward motion
of its growth was stilled
to brief perfection
before decay's reverse.

Mornings in the Newsagent's

I do not travel by bus or tram much these days. Indeed, I cannot recall when I last did so, unless I am to count the tour of Bath made a couple of years back in one of those open-topped tourist busses. That being so, the nearest I get to hearing the opinion of "The Man on the London Omnibus" (or any other mode of public transport, for that matter) are the conversations that take place in the newsagent's shop each morning. Recently these have (again!) included the thorny topic of what is to be done about our young people and the poor state of their education. In particular the debates have focussed on their inability to read and write and the dumbing down of English exams. The myth of being rewarded with marks for being able to write one's name has surfaced more than once. And then there came this week the news that a candidate was awarded 7.5% for writing "f*** off " on his paper. The mark was given, not by some rookie examiner, but by the chief examiner himself, who then went on to use the paper with trainee examiners as an example to them of how to mark. The principles are quite clear, he maintained: you give marks for correct spelling and for the sequencing of ideas - though as the pupil wrote nothing else against that particular question, and by the examiner's own admission the phrase had no relevance to the question, it is difficult to see what were the ideas he put into sequence... can you have a sequence of one?

I have always been of the opinion that spelling should be tested separately, and not as part of a creative writing excercise, for example. Everyone should be quite clear about what is being marked. But for the majority of the debaters in the newsagent's shop there are no such qualms: "If they can't spell, knock off the marks!" seems to sum up the attitude. But of course, that is not how it works. You do not knock off the marks that you have given for, let us say, developing a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, you just don't give any marks for spelling in the first place. This means that if something (like spelling) is to be taken into consideration, then marks must be allocated for it, guidance given as to how those marks are to be awarded. Furthermore, those marks must be awarded if the criteria are met. After which, it is all down to the examiner's interpretation, just as the application of rules in football hangs, in the last resort, on the referee's interpretation of them. It does mean, though, that marks may be awarded (in this instance, for spelling) in circumstances in which it would seem to most people more appropriate not to award marks at all.

I was reminded again of this issue by a reference on the radio this week to Winston Churchill's own description of his attempt at a Latin prose paper, part of his entrance examination for Harrow: "I wrote my name at the top of the page. I wrote down the number of the question: "1." After much reflection I put a bracket round it. Thus:"(I)." But thereafter I could not think of anything connected with it that was either relevant or true. Incidentally there arrived from nowhere in particular a blot and several smudges. I gazed for two whole hours at this sad spectacle : and then merciful ushers collected my piece of foolscap with all the others and carried it up to the Headmaster's table. It was from these slender indications of scholarship that Mr. Welldon drew the conclusion that I was worthy to pass into Harrow. It is very much to his credit. It showed that he was a man capable of looking beneath the surface of things: a man not dependent upon paper manifestations. I have always had the greatest regard for him."

Strangely, next to the cry of "why can't youngsters spell, these day?", I would guess that the next most common "newsagent moan" (if we stick to those concerned with the English language) is concerned with what a nonsense our spelling system is and how it's a wonder any child ever masters it! Of course, it isn't a system at all: that's the whole point about it. It hasn't come down to us in any sort of pure form, but as a hybrid script, a coming together of Old English and Norman French. The incompatability of these two made it almost inevitable that there would be no coherent system, but then throw in (as they did) heavy lashings of Greek and Latin and confusion was the more confounded. And there was one other event of great importance, what has become known as The Great Vowel Shift. It affected the way words were pronounced (particularly in London and the South of England), and therefore it had great relevance to the way in which spelling related to the spoken word, the cause of so much anguish these days. It is not always remembered that the spoken word is primary, that spelling merely attempts to represent it in some visual form. Until the thirteenth century words were pronounced very much in the Italian or Liturgical Latin way, but from then on, and over the next four hundred years or so there came about a gradual increase in the height of the tongue and a tendency to push it further forward until Middle English speech had become our Modern English version. The rift between spoken and written had become even wider and the ground had been prepared for the many movements that would attempt to reform our spelling - and, indeed other aspects of our language.

I have concentrated on spelling, but the reverse side of the same coin is punctuation, for which much the same arguments and counter-arguments are raised, but which seems to me to be more important than spelling, though punctuation is perhaps more of an art than a science, whereas spelling is but a convention. There is a lot of talk about "correct punctuation" (in the media as well as in the newsagent's), but I doubt that such a thing exists beyond a very minimal framework. Give two or more professional writers - or two or more examiners, come to that - an unpunctuated script and I guarantee that they will all punctuate it differently.

I have long had a hankering to try for the form of punctuation that was in use until the eighteenth century. It was based upon the pauses for breath which occur in spoken English, and not, as in our current system, upon grammatical structure. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries punctuation was heavily applied, though today the vogue is for a lightness of touch. Even so, there are many variations with some authors using different styles for different purposes and various in-house preferences.
Many of the marks and terms we use these days derive from the Greek and originate from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, at which time they were used to mark off sections of text, the comma and the colon being used to mark off sections in a line of verse. The use of the stop, even when grammatically correct, can imply a separation between sections of text that is not always appropriate, I feel. The voice, with its inflections and pauses is more flexible, as was punctuation when it was more closely related to these. Grammarians have much to answer for, maybe.

Here, to conclude, are a few thinking points:

• How many authors, professional writers and other such are overly concerned with spelling and correct punctuation when getting down the first draft (which an examination answer usually is)?


• For centuries the legal profession managed very well without punctuation of any sort, particularly in such documents as deeds and for conveyancing, considering that punctuation was the cause of much ambiguity. It is only since legal English has become established as the dominant international business language that this has changed. Punctuation has now established itself again in modern legalese.


• James Joyce's Ulysses has an almost complete lack of standard punctuation (being partly based upon the spoken word and partly on "stream-of-consciouness"?), yet despite also lacking the usual narrative flow, is as understandable as any piece of writing can be - for we might well debate whether any work of literature can be completely understandable.


• Is not the main consideration that the reader should be able to plug in to the author's intended (and, depending upon the nature of the writing, his unintended?) meanings?

All dolled-up and nowhere to go but home

I have had a busy week, mostly away from the computer and mostly for pleasure. We went to Wimbledon, for example, to see something of the tennis championships, and to The Royal Horticultural Society's gardens at Wisley. So not a lot of blog activity, I fear. Apologies wherever they may be appropriate. I will try to catch up. The poem comes from the Wisley visit. It probably needs putting away for a week or two and then some serious work to be done on it, but I post it now for reasons of topicality.

All dolled-up and nowhere to go, but home.

Scarecrows. A magic trail of them. People
are posing with them, photographs are being taken
of them arm in arm, embracing them
or smooching up to them, some
even feigning a meaningful moment,
all glad-eyed and gossippy, down on their knees
with them. Others not feigning, alive in
a fantasy: scarecrows are living;
we, the clockwork copies of ourselves.



"How fresh and original!" someone is saying.
(I think it must be one of the people.)
(Can you see in the figures
some ground-breaking trait?) I fancy
you'll find no unorthodox types.
They are all of conventional breed: punk,
vicar, court jester, spiv, banker, director -
and one Madam Chairman who thrills me to bits,
and looks like a dominant minus her whips.



Bamboozled by appearances,
we cannot resist
the subtle crudities of gaping hole for mouth
and earth-filled stocking for a nose. Like songs
or smells they are connecting us
to home, to where we most belong, where are
the china dog, long-legged doll and fluffy bear,
a place of lost relationships
found for this short while.

A Question of Gender

The latest - and for a good while, probably the last - in my series on childhood.

The house was different that morning,
the shadows darker, highlights brighter,
people quieter, breakfast just a touch
more special, grandad toasting bread,
thick slices on a long wire fork, the fire
too big, the room too warm, dad not at work,
mum still in bed, and gran (who would have
felt a scandal coming on if she had guessed
how I knew - thought I knew - what lay behind
the fuss) with her large saucepan on the hob.
At which point he appears, the doctor,
in the doorway - and me but half-way
through my toast. His bag a disappointing
flat, looks empty - and too small to ever
hold a baby. Manfully I try
to play it like I do not care. Upstairs
a cry. "Good lungs on him!" my father says.
So now I care, with knees red raw from bed
times praying for a sister. Getting wind
of which, the doctor's ferretting for whys
and wherefores - though too subtle, not in
my face enough to break me down. I keep
my counsel, fob him off: "So we can call
her Sylvia," I lie. They all at this
time - doctor, family, the world at large -
are too ingenuous to comprehend
the full extent of that dark place within
my soul. He rolls himself a cigarette:
"Small problem, simply solved," he muses
to himself... "we call the little lad
Sylvesta." "Over my dead body!"
will growl my mother when she hears. It's all
a great distraction from what lies beneath
that off-white lie (mum always says there are
no truly white ones): my first craving
of the flesh, my first illicit itch,
my twice-repeated, horror-greeted plea
(the voice of old Beelzebub, gran says)
to add a dolls' house to the toys I own.
A sister, though, might bring the longed-for
object in her train, might be prevailed upon
to share it with outlandish beings,
dolls of different kind, long raised in
caves and tunnels underground, all sworn
to games of gross and most ungirlish play.

Comment with the experts.

The Times newspaper is running a weekly article under the title "modern art explained", which is actually claiming too much for it. The format is that each week (Tuesday) they reproduce a significant work of modern art, together with verdicts by readers and an expert. Interesting though these can be (and so far the readers' have had the edge on the expert), they have not, in my view, amounted to an "understanding" of modern art - or even of the works themselves. There have been two so far. This week it was the turn of the Jake and Dinos Chapman brothers to have their "One Day You Will No Longer Be Loved" put up for scrutiny. It is basically a desicration of a perfectly respectable portrait, such that it now depicts the inevitable decay which the body must suffer. Rachel Campbell Johnston, the expert, considers it the modern equivalent of the traditional image of St Jerome meditating on the skull beneath the skin . Last week's offering was Pablo Picasso's "Woman Weeping", an image which grew out of "The Greek Chorus of women weeping" in the aftermath of Guernica, one of the worst atrocities of The Spanish Civil War, involving the bombing of the Basque village. He produced a series of such images, all related to his great work of that name.

At any time the work for the following week can be viewed at www.timesonline.co.uk/modernartexplained, thereby making it possible to email your views in time for them to be published alongside the expert's. Next Tuesday's offering is to be a Robert Gwathmey print.

This week the views seemed to divide according to whether or not the person commenting considered that art should depict beauty. There certainly have been times when the universal view would have been that beauty was art's business first and foremost, and many even today would be inclined to ask what is art's business if not beauty in some form or other? Possibly a more productive talking point than the work itself?

The singer, the poet, the actor and the bard

Before I get intp my post proper, a word of apology for my recent absence, and this particularly to any whose comments have not been responded to, the reason being that my hard drive gave up the ghost in the middle of a defrag. The "pooter buff" in whose tender care I laid my machine was initially sure that he could ressurect it; to me it seemed terminal. Alas, I was correct, he was too optimistic. So I now have a much larger drive with acres of empty space - and miles of re-installing to and tweaking and adjusting to do. Still, (Almost) Normal Service is Resumed.

The singer, the poet, the actor and the bard

I am not exactly a devotee of performance poetry and have not attended a vast number of poetry readings, so am probably not the person best equipped to write this post, but I do not accept the oft-stated opinion that performance poetry is related to pop culture rather than to literature, and I have always found it difficult to understand those who suggest that performance poetry is in some measure inferior to the printed form, to what has been termed 'page poetry'. Analysis of this latter attitude will show, I suspect, two basic misconceptions: that performance poetry is mostly produced by would-be "page poets" who feel - or have been made to feel - that there is something lacking in their work which prevents it from standing up to close examination on the page.

In which connection: there was a touch of public tut-tutting a couple of weeks back when the news broke that this year's Cambridge University Final Year English Lit Paper required the finalists to compare a lyric from Amy Winehouse, Love is a Losing Game (I ask you: what are our universities coming to?:

For you I was a flame
Love is a losing game
Five storey fire as you came
Love is a losing game
Why do I wish I never played?
Oh, what a mess we made
And now the final frame
love is a losing game
Played out by the band
Love is a losing hand.)

with a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh, As you came from the Holy Land:

As you came from the Holy Land
Of Walsinghame,
Met you not with my true love
By the way as you came?
How shall I know your true love,
That have net many one,
As I went to the Holy Land,
That have come, that have gone?
She is neither white nor brown,
But as the heavens fair,
There is none hath a form so divine
In the earth or the air...

Extremely interesting to me were the reported reactions of the finalists. These ranged from: "I sat there looking at the paper in shock" and "I wouldn't consider a controversial pop singer a literary figure" (the word 'controversial was intriguing there, I thought: would a non-controversial pop singer have been fine and dandy? Should we avoid controversial poets as well?) through "It was really bizarr," to admiration for the examiner who had set the question: "I think it's cool, poetry doesn't have to be Keats and Byron". (I guess we can assume that he was one candidate who hadn't gone into the examination room with a stock of prepared answers.) I am not sure whether or not the paper asked for differences rather than similarities ( I have not seen the actual question reprinted anywhere), but I doubt it. That, I imagine, is just what the press has fixated upon - at which point my former professional involvement with intelligence testing reminds me that the ability to discern differences precedes that of spotting similarities, which is a higher cognitive skill. So an infant asked to say how a ball is like an apple will likely say "You can't eat a ball, but you eat apples" or "The apple is red, but the ball is blue". however, a year or so later s/he will happily tell you that they are both round. However, to give credit where credit is due, one journalist did spot a similarity, though as between the authors, not the works; he honed in on the fact that both had a penchant for mind-altering substances.

Is there any significance then, I wonder, in the fact that all the adverse comments I have read, be they from the finalists themselves or from the press, relate to teasing out differences, rather than any similarities, between Raleigh's poem and Winehouse's lyric. Typical has been: "The Raleigh poem is a lyrical poem, written to be sung or to be read aloud, whilst the Winehouse lyric doesn't have to exist without the music."

The Guardian made a couple of interesting points, the first being that the finalists were also asked to compare the Raleigh poem with Fine and Mellow, by Billie Holiday and Boots of Spanish Leather, by Bob Dylan, but no voices were raised in protest at their inclusion. It does begin to look as though the devil was in that word 'controversial', do we not think? The Guardian's other point was made by asking readers first to imagine that they had come to these lines blind, not knowing anything about them or where they were from:



"Self-possessed and profound,
'Till the chips were down,
Know you're a gambling man,
Love is a losing hand."

Would we, the Guardian asked us all, be able to say for sure whether these lines were written during the reign of Elizabeth 1 or whether they date from the time of Elizabeth 2? Easy-peasy, I thought: the word "chips" gives it away, but that, apparently is not so.

Quite possibly, I am in danger of making the introduction the longest part of the post, so I will tear myself away from this absorbing topic and move on to the more general one which has been a bone of contention for as long as I can remember, and which the Winehouse controversy revived for me: the question as to whether or not a lyric can be regarded as a poem with music added - and conversely, whether a poem is but a lyric stripped of the music that should rightly belong to it. I say it has been a bone of contention for as long as I can recall, but it is nevertheless a relatively modern dilemma Historically, of course, the song came first. Poems were set to music. Before even there was writing there were what today we might dub 'performance poems', by the recitation of which the history and mores of the tribe or community were passed on from generation to generation. By the fourteenth century (I speak of Britain, though the phenomenon was almost universal) these had become the ballad, an oral narrative poem with no stated author and often sung to a simple musical accompaniment. They relayed the tales and myths of the community and would very often contain a strong element of the supernatural. They had a simple stanza form, usually of four lines rhyming abcb(see here) and were usually characterized by much repetition and direct speech. The heyday of the ballad was the late Middle Ages.

There were national differences. Ireland, for example, was an intensely aristocratic society and as with all such, attached geat importance to the record of its past achievements. It was the duty and purpose of the poet to keep alive the details of its history and the genealogy of those who had made the history, thereby to enhance the reputations and value to the community of the ruling classes. Later, this mnemonic tradition met with the Latin writing tradition and adopted the fixed forms which gave it a greater permanence, with printed poems coming into their own in the sixteenth century as broadside ballads, being printed on one side of a broadside sheet. Both in England and Ireland, they survived until well into the twentieth century. It was Irish society's aristocratic nature that was responsible for ensuring its ballad tradition would be underpinned by a literary one. This was not so in Scotland, where the tradition was basically a non-literate one in which the vernacular (rather than the classical literary language) was used. It would seem that hundreds of songs must have been lost because of this difference, and what survives is mainly what was written down by a few educated Gaels, many of them clergymen, and mostly after the disaster of Culloden had brought home to them the likelihood that the Gaelic world was comng to an end, and that the fragments must be collected. However, bards would continue to exist and ply their trade in Scotland until well into the eighteenth century.

It was the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that saw the appearance of the literary ballad. Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Keats's La Belle Dame sans Merci are excellent examples, as, in Scotalnd, is The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. The U.S. and Australia saw the development of the popular ballad retelling old tales to fit changed circumstances.

What the history of poetry seems to tell us - and it should come as no surprise - is that all poetry, written or otherwise, is essentially a coming together of sound, rhythm and meaning. No doubt some bright spark will find the exception that proves the rule and come up with some poem in which one or more of these elements is missing, but for all practical purposes poetry is a form in which they work together. I would find it difficult to conceive of a poetry that was not, potentially at least, performable. Certainly the best performance poets are craftsmen who would want their work to stand up for itself on the page as well as on the stage. This would be true even when the performance was meant to incorporate theatrical elements, including acting, and it remains true even in the case of a work that is almost universally acknowledged to be more successful on the stage than on the page. \simon \munnery's Deadlines would be such a work:

I do nothing without a deadline.
Without a deadline I do nothing
Until the deadline is almost upon me, and then I panic
Which is doing nothing quickly!
Only when the deadline is past, do I begin work
On my excuses.

Personally, I think it works very well on the page. It is said that it brought the house down when it was performed.

Now, though, is the crunch time. I can put it off no longer. The $64,000 question is: what about the Winehouse lyric? Is it poetry? It had just won an Ivor Novello award for the best musical and lyrical song, but the Cambridge finalists had to rank it, not just against a poem by Walter Raleigh, but against the might of Wordsworth and Milton also. For our purposes, though, it does not have to be great poetry; it just has to qualify as poetry. Do sound, rhythm and meaning gel together? The meter is simple iambic (te tum - a beat or "foot" consisting of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one) trimeter (3 such beats or feet per line) with some inversions called trochees (tum te - stressed, unstressed) and occasionally at the beginning of a line, something called a spondee (tum tum - two stressed syllables). So that's okay then, nothing wrong there, that would all pass muster - you can invert or tum tum at the beginning of a line! But there's more: the Winehouse lyric is written in rhyming couplets. Not fashionable, maybe (certainly not in the world of The Poetry Society, for example), but it's okay, they can't touch you for it. There is not a lot of assonance (repetition of vowel sounds) - so you want everything in the one poem?

It goes without saying, of course, that regular rhyme and rhythm schemes do not of themselves make a poem. They may produce a verse of sorts, a container to hold the poetry, as it were, but the last thing we want is to go te tumming to infinity with rhymes that dong their merry way the while. What matters is the poetry, which is more than rules and guide lines. Here, though, we have a verse which is simple - and appropriate, you might say - in that it purports to convey the thoughts and feelings of a person of simple, unsophisticated outlook. The comparison with the Raleigh is with a poem that gives the sixteenth century outlook and language of a sophisticated man-about-town, but to my mind the Winehouse lyric makes it as poetry on the page - and although I have not seen her perform - except on the t.v. - I am quite sure that, performed by Winehouse, it makes it as poetry on the stage as well! It maybe doesn't make it as intellectual poetry, which is perhaps why it set so many Cambridge hearts a'pumpin'.

Intelligence Gathering

The light below,
which was always white in sitting room and hall,
but yellow from my post upon the landing,
could be a wedge to split a wall in two,
and then a horn or speaking tube that filled
the stairwell with a muffled drawl - deep speech


that might have come through water.
My great aunt and my mother speaking late
at night, their voices sounding foreign.
My great aunt's house. My sleeping
brother, five years younger, unaware
of how the world can change its shape and bare


its soul when darkness falls. Evacuees,
our world had changed uncannily; we'd seen
new images replace the old. And there,
in my mind's eye, on my aunt's bureau,
sat code books, two-way radio
and all the many trappings of the spy.


Sometimes above the gurgling, a sun-
lit phrase might leap in distant echo
of a half-forgotten sentiment once tied
to one of my first snapshots of the world -
now mis-identified. Inside my skull,
cold analysts, sifting the intelligence,


uncovered things I swore to carry to
the grave: an uncle whom I loved
kept skeletons in some dark kitchen closet;
my mother loved a man who wore a funny hat;
and, dying of an unknown illness,
I'd only days (or so) to live.

© David King

Nearly! - True story 2

This is the true story I promised when I posted my poem "A Family Occasion". You may recall that a couple of posts on Ken Armstrong's blog had given me cause to stop and think: a true story in which Ken was himself involved, and a tale about the tale and how he came to write it, leading to a moral, almost a moral imperative, you might say, that this story of mine which I have had for some while asking to be written down, should get its wish. I hesitated long, partly because it reveals the slightly unpalatable truth that I have not always been the exceedingly likeable chap that I have become. So I worried about the details, how it would come out, the spin, if you like. But Ken made the issue clear enough: not to worry about getting it right; get it written. So with a thank-you nod to Ken, here it is:-

It is drawn from my days as an art student. I have mentioned before that sculpture was an ex-curricular activity engaged in at evening classes in a small, rather deep cellar which doubled as a pottery studio. We shared the sessions with further education students and inherited a long tradition of mild hostility between "them" and "us" - a bit like "town" and "gown" at university, I used to think. From our point of view they were not serious about the work, spending much of the time gossipping and fooling around. They also took too much of the lecturer's time. (Though in truth, two minutes would have been too much.) From their point of view we were Bohemian (just because we dressed that way), dismissive of them (can't argue with that!) and pretentious. (Pretentious, nous?)

Well, once upon that far-off time, I had arrived early for the session and was alone in the studio when a newcomer descended the stairs. It was obvious that he was another of "them". Who but an amateur would turn up for modelling or pottery in a lounge suit? Some of the sculptures, including my own, were on turntables or pottery wheels. He walked up to one, removed its cover, the purpose of which was to keep the clay damp and workable, and set it turning very slowly, leaning back to examine it as he did so, and making low, reflective mmmmmmm sounds. I found this very presumptuous of him and was beginning to get a bit hot under the collar when he turned to me and asked "Did you do this?" No," I replied., "not bloody likely!" The model was in point of fact the work of a friend of mine, and I thought very highly of it. It was a huge construction, based upon a motif of seashells, and had been painstakingly built up over a period of many weeks by the patient application of small pieces of clay. "Do you know the person who did it?" came next. "Sure, he's a friend of mine!" "Does he work like this a lot?" "Does he? He'll knock off five or six of an evening!"

There was no response to this last titbit of information, but instead he moved off to the next model, which happened to be mine, a plaster model, built on armatures, also over many weeks, an abstract, but loosely based on various skeletons I had sketched at the Victoria and Albert Museum. "Is this one of his?" "Nope. Mine." "Do you do a lot of this?" "When I can tear myself away from my first love." Which is?" "China dogs and long-legged dolls. Good market for them." At this point there came another figure darkening the stairway, and with it the voice of Mr Henke (not sure about the spelling) the lecturer, bellowing down the stairwell: "Are you down there, Mr Epstein?"

End of story? Nearly. Actually it wasn't the Mr Epstein, but his brother (Harold, I think), a highly respected sculptor in his own right. Later, Mr Henke caught up with me and asked "What the hell have you been saying to Mr Epstein? He asked me who the lunatic was down there!" So passed ingloriously my one (illusory? We'll - I'll - never know) chance of fame.

Sea Change

I had been told (by reviewers and others) that she is too cerebral; even "cold" and "bloodless" was mentioned by one, and, from a passing acquaintance with individual poems, I was inclined to agree - but then if folk keep telling you that the water is cold, and all you ever do is dangle a toe in it to see if they are right, then you will be almost certain to agree, for it will feel cold. In order to be sure you have to take the plunge. There are some poets who can draw you in and make you theirs for ever, just on the strength of a single poem, but with others it is necessary to immerse yourself. At least, that's how it is for me. Jodie Graham is one of the latter. The effect of her poems on me is cumulative. Partly it may be because of her long lines and the fact that I had read them mainly in reviews. They just do not do what they are meant to do when contracted to three or four column-wide lines. Of course, one should be able to imagine them stretched out and looking as they will look on the book page, but for me it does not work quite like that. I saw the difference as soon as I opened her "Sea Change" in my local book shop. It brought about a sea change in my attitude towards her work. Well, not immediately perhaps, but it was the start of something almost magical.

If you will forgive the pun, one of the things her poems do, and do electrifyingly well, is to bring us to the point where we can see change, and see it for what it is. She has been accused - as was Seamus Heaney - of ignoring the political and social disasters of today's world, but one of the poems in "Sea Change" deals with the collapse of our belief systems - and that surely is a cause at the root of much modern turmoil and turbulence. Already I consider my purchase of "Sea Change" to be one of the most thought-provoking of recent acquisitions. Here, the opening lines from "Nearing Dawn":-

Sunbreak. The sky opens its magazine. If you look hard
                                                        it is a process of falling
                                                        and squinting - & you are in-
terrupted again and again by change, & crouchings out there
                                                        where you are told each second you
                                                        are only visiting, & the secret
                                                        whitening adds up to no
meaning, no, not for you, wherever the loosening muscle of the night
                                                        startles-open the hundreds of
                                                        thousands of voice-boxes, into which
your listening moves like an aging dancer still trying to glide - there is time for
                                                        everything, everything, is there not-
                                                        though the balance is 
                                                        difficult, is coming un-
done, & something strays farther from love than we ever imagined, from the long and
                                                        orderly sentence which was a life to us, the dry
                                                        leaves on
                                                        the fields

This was where the book opened in the shop. It was where the browse began, and it won me over, persuaded me to take the plunge. Actually, the second sentence showed me the way of things: "The sky opens its magazine." Magazine as in what? Gun - a bullet or cartridge holder? Glossy - full of images? T.V. programme - a collection of disparate items? Storehouse? A supply device feeding raw materials into a machine? You do not know until you have read on - and then you do not know for sure whether you know or not. The poetry is dense with layers of meaning and dense with alternative meaning. And each layer has its alternative and each alternative its layers. We are interrupted again and again by change, but that which is changing is our perception. Graham's is a world grounded in the phenomena of the natural world in which we live, and yet it is, above all, a mental universe, so the word "interrupted" is interrupted by a line-break, a use of spatial form to represent a spiritual or psychological experience, in this instance a changed perception in which we see ourselves as merely visitors. At least, that is how I read it; you may read it differently - and tomorrow, so may I. Meanwhile there is much to enjoy, not least passages like:

meaning, no, not for you, wherever the loosening muscle of the night
                                     startles-open the hundreds of
                                     thousands of voice-boxes

and lines like:

your listening moves like an aging dancer still trying to glide

I absolutely love that line. That line and many another.

The blurb on the book's back cover reads:' Sea Change is a poetry of the tipping point, when what is lost and damaged in our world and our humanity is forever irrecoverable, when time itself has disintegrated", yet rightly or wrongly I detect an inextinguishable hope in the tone of the verses. Not everywhere, but here and there, like a fire about to break out gain.

Graham is no newcomer. She has published eleven collections , and in 1996 won The Pulizer Prize with The Dream of the Unified Field - definitely my next purchase. She lives part-time in western France and part-time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she teaches at Harvard University.

The most difficult poem in Sea Change (of those I have read so far) I found to be Guantánamo, which is perhaps as it should be, but what about this, the opening lines of Day Off?

from the cadaver beginning to show through the skin of the day. The future without
                                                    days. Without days of it?
                                                    in it? I try to-just for a second-feel
that shape. What weeds-up out of nowhere as you look away for
                                                    good. So that you have to imagine
whatever's growing there growing forever. You shall not be back to look
                                                    again. ......................

Bits and Pieces

I've got on to this fist concern very late in the day, so maybe you were there long before me, but it seems to me to be a matter of concern that the poet John Gallaher who, rightly, in my humble opinion, found himself with a page to himself on Wikipedia, signifying to all and sundry, that he is regarded as a "significant" poet. What was no doubt a very gratifying moment, was, alas, short-lived when he found himself to have been deleted. This, we know, is the downside of Wikipedia. Another contributor can decide that an entry is inaccurate or unworthy and alter it. In this case, though, it seems he was deleted because he didn't meet the Wikipedia criteria of significance. Except he was then reinstated, so perhaps he did meet it, after all! What it has thrown into relief, however, is the whole question of Wikipedia's criteria. Gallaher discovered that very few poets make it to the hallowed pages. (That has not been my experience, but I guess it all depends on how you interpret "many".) It seems that the criteria to be met include: the size of the poet's public following; how many articles have been devoted to him in what sort of publications; what awards he has one, and what sort of awards; the size of his publishers, etc, etc. My first reaction was to think: ah, well there has to be some sort of criteria. But does there? Why not allow bios of any bona fide poet initially and remove those that after a certain period of time are deemed to have aroused insufficient interest? The real questions raised by this issue are, I guess: how do we judge the "significance" of a poet? What is anyone's poetry worth to any other person? Is there a better way to give the public an opportunity to show its interest?

Two other news items caught my eye on the same day this week: first came the announcement that The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition Time has come round again (it will open on June 9th), followed by a few column inches devoted to an opinion voiced by Professor David Crystal to the effect that texting, as in C U 2NITE, is actually improving the literacy skills of the younger generation.

I am something of a dinosaur in that any mention of The Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition - or simply The Royal Academy, come to that - brings back memories of the days when Sir Alfred Munnings (whose painting, Setting Off, appears left) was president and that august body was the last and most formidable bastion against the encroaching hoards and the abandonment of technique and ll else that was holy to the true artist. Indeed, so fixed am I at that point in past time that I have to change gear mentally to recall that it is no longer like that. It couldn't be more different, in fact, as was shown by the announcement last year that Tracey Emin had been made a member of the academy, and the further announcement this year that for the 2008 Summer Exhibition she has been given one of the rooms to curate. Exactly at what point the hooligans managed to take over the running of the boot camp, I am not sure, I think I must have been on my gap year at the time, but take it over they did, and have been well in control for some time. They are very well dug in now. Strange, is it not, that the world does not seem to be any the worse for it? The academicians of yesteryear - if, indeed any remain - must be seething at the thought of the likes of Emin in such control.

It is no secret that The Summer Exhibition is intended as a democratic affair, though some democracies are more democratic than others. Anyone can take their masterpiece along, run it (no exaggeration, that) before the hanging committee (good name!) and hope to get the nod of acceptance. Academicians, of course, do not have to do anything so demeaning, but the result is that the exhibition is a hotch-potch of paintings crowded together, those by totally unknown artists rubbing frames with works by the great, the good and the famous.

Into this melee comes Emin, with her twenty-something exhibits by other artists of the moment, erotic works that make her "feverish". There is to be a video of a naked woman and a giraffe having sex. Another naked woman will be screened performing a hula hoop routine using barbed wire for the hoop. Emin, no doubt, finds herself becoming more and more feverish as the woman becomes more and more cut and bloodied. There will also be some stunning porcelain sculptures by Rachel Kneebone, but here I will detour for a moment to recall that fifty-something years ago my brother, who was attending a Methodist Church Youth club, persuaded me to accompany him to their Youth Week debate. The subject for debate was: That the artist is of more use to the world than the scientist. The young lady that I sat next to, my future wife, was passionately on the side of the scientist, I equally passionately for the artist. We both had good cause to be grateful to medical science for our health, even our existence. Naturally, I have often thought of that evening since, not least when I have read screeds detailing how bad science has screwed up the food chain or polluted the earth or whatever happens to be the latest disaster to hit the headlines. At such times it occurs to me that the doctors' Hippocratic oath contains the injunction that a doctor's first duty is to do no harm, and I wonder if all scientists should not have to take a similar oath. But what about the artist? The question has never been resolved: can the artist even do any hatrm? And the corollary: can the artist do good? Down they years there have been poets and artists in plenty denying that their art is capable of b ringing about any change in the world. I am sure some will think Emin's selection of works will do harm - if only to the Academy's reputation. But could it go further than that? And could it also do good?

There is no doubt at all that some will consider as harmful, David Crystal's opinion that txting benefits the literary development of those who engage in it. Txt messagers have been described by John Humphrys on the BBC as doing more harm to literacy and to our native language than ever Ghengis Khan did to his neighbours 800 years ago, and my instinct is that the vast majority who have even thought about the subject will agree with Humphrys. Yet to my mind David Crystal is one of the good guys, a talker of sound common (and uncommon)sense and a defender of whatever most profits the spirit of man. No matter what the subject for debate, I will always start with the assumption that I am on whichever side can count David Crystal among its supporters. It seems almost instinctual, now that someone has said it, that txting would improve literacy skills. Text messagers play with the language and if you can read btfl as beautiful you will certainly be able to scan a page of text more quickly than someone like myself who has to look at it twice before the penny drops. Written language contains a high proportion of redundant characters, the ability to screen them out is just one of the higher reading skills. That may not be the only benefit that txting brings, but it is a useful enough starter.

spin didn't begin with tony blair

I see this poem as a companion piece to A Family Occasion, though my interest here is less in memory and false memory than in fantasy and a child's imagination. I am nine months younger in this poem, but the memories seem firmer and more reliable (perhaps because there is no one who can contradict me about what I was thinking), though if I am correct in that it might suggest that I was suffering from grossly uneven development!

Spin Didn't Begin with Tony Blair

Coughing, I'd missed a lot of what he'd said,
but fairy air, that much I'd heard, and there-
by come to think the doctor scary who
had always been my friend - and who
had never spooked me half to death before!
But fairy air...? Could human beings breathe
the like of it and live? Dad put me straight.
Not 'fairy air'. He called it 'extra-airy air',
your chum. The stuff to give you back your puff.
He knows a wizard place with kindly folk
who kind of magic children well
with just a whiff of it. He'll meet us there.

I saw the place at once - as clear
as anything I've ever seen:
walls webs of sparkling glass; shelves bright
with wands and pickled toads -
and jars of honeyed air. And there,
behind the counter, taller now
in wizard's hat (less chilling too), my "docker man"
was taking from his bag the magic props
he'd always bring on visits: pills,
his stethoscope and, best of all,
his books of British Empire swaps!
Those stamps were passports to exotic lands,
to Montserrat and Sarawak,
Aden and Samoa. Just
what I've been looking for! he'd drool,
perhaps of some quite common stamp of mine,
then offer me a "Sea Horse", Bechuanaland, five bob,
maybe. One landscape with the Monarch's Head,
my Grandma said, does more than all his pills!

Made welcome by a snowed-on Oberon in bronze,
then stretchered on a flying carpet, in
through busy casualty. Strange wonderland,
where sterilizers whistled jets of steam.
How worrying was that? Two armies poised for war
I'd left; men bunkered in my bed;
I hardly had the time to stay for tea!

Then lemonade and buns with cream.
No mention yet of oxygen. Instead,
still shadow-boxing truth, another tack:
It might be fun to stay the night, they said.
"The night when Father Christmas comes," I wailed.
"What fun is that?" They were persuasive then,
that he who knew the whereabouts
of every child, would know
for sure to find me there
where seven rag doll dwarfs
sang carols over boughs of holly,
and miners' lanterns hung above each bed.
I said my silent prayer aloud: "Drums, if you please...
an army ambulance... but most of all, a Snow
White doll, to keep the dwarfs in check."

The Christmas tree lights blazed more brightly yet.
All things conspired - a nurse who must
have fanned a latent spark in me,
so easily she worked my strings -
to coax me out of my mistrust.

But fairylands can harbour evil things.
Across from me, a terrorist,
a sleeper 'till the time was right.
Now, with the confidence that heavy armour brings,
he'd send his Christmas tanks, he said,
to snuff out my Snow White.

Environmental Art

Antony Gormley's Angel of the North having been credited with bringing cohesion and a sense of identity to an area that had been lacking these attributes, it was inevitable, perhaps, that there should be pressure brought to bear for an Angel of the South to bring those same qualities to the yet-to-be-realised Ebbsfleet Valley development close to the Thames Estuary. The rules for the competition for the new Angel do not say that it must bean angel, merely that it should be twice the height of the Angel of the North. Twice the cohesion and twice the sense of identity, no doubt! The news that Mark Wallinger's proposal for a naturalistic horse is by many a long length the public's choice for the project seems less inevitable to me. And less inevitable still, the gooey enthusiasm of Jonathan Jones, "a leading art critic", for the Wallinger solution of a horse thirty-three times life-size standing in a field one times life-size. Does it not strike Jones - or any of the many other backers of this particular horse - that a perfect, laser-copied, reproduction of an actual horse, blown-up to thirty-three times its actual size - i.e. out of scale with its environment by a factor of thirty-three, so big that it will nedd shipbuilding techniques to realise it in steel plate - is anything but "naturalistic". Had nature decided the horse should be that size, she would not have been so foolish as to retain its present proportions. It would never have managed to rise on its spindly legs, let alone gallop across the countryside. Other proposals seem more in keeping with the natural scale of the area.

However, Jones maintains that the horse is in the English tradition. He points to the white horses on the hills of Southern England. And so he might, for they have been there since 1000 B.C. Or at least, one of them has, The White horse at Uffington. The rest were carved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He inveighs against such installations as the Antony Gormley figures standing sentinel along the Crosby sea shore, comparing them unfavourably ("trite") with the henge monuments and Neolithic stone circles, yet to me, Wallinger's vision of how his white horse will look is grotesque. Unlike the other white horses of which Jones speaks, it will stand in no relationship to its environment, and contrary to what Jones maintains, it exhibits none of the qualities that must have entranced the creators - and others - of those ancient chalk figures. For that matter, it will display none of the qualities Jones admires so much in the Angel of the North.

This flying in the face of the obvious (as I saw it) started me thinking in more general terms about the relationship between art, and specifically sculpture (including installations), on the one hand, and the landscape on the other. I began to think, in other words, about the matter of Environmental Art. There are now two distinct concepts of art that are commonly referred to by that phrase. I had, only a few days before, chanced to read an article, in a National Geographic magazine, on Christo and Jeanne-Claude, two people who call themselves environmental artists and represent one of the two strains of environmental art.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude achieved fame, and some notoriety, way back, wrapping objects and people, before moving on to larger stuff like islands and sea shores wrapped in polypropylene. Their latest project, not to be realized before 2011, is to suspend translucent panels of fabric, horizontally, over the Arkansas River in the State of Colorado. The panels will be seen as shimmering screens waving high above the water level and, when seen from below, will have "projected" on them, the silhouetted forms of clouds, mountains and vegetation.

Typically, their projects take decades to come to fruition, most of which time is consumed by the need to survey perhaps dozens of potential sites to find the perfect one, to complete all the paperwork, obtain all the permits, reassure the locals at public meetings, modify the plans to meet any objections and/or the requirements of local use and health and safety issues. Indeed, most projects never see the light of day, and those that do, Christo and Jeanne-Claude insist, are dismantled after a fortnight.

When it was put to Christo that it must be very difficult, thinking of the concepts for their projects, he disagreed: "Any fool can get a good idea," he said, "the difficult part is doing it".

Art such as Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's tends to grab the limelight and so has become what most folk know as Environmental Art. It is one of the two forms I mentioned earlier. It is Site Specific art. It should have much going for it, but it has had its failures. Christo, for example, once wrapped the coast of Little Bay, near Sydney, Australia, as a result of which a seal and some penguins became trapped. The fabric had to be cut to allow them to escape; an incident which caused the creatures concerned no little trauma and set in train a great deal of rethinking on the issues of environmental art.

This brings me to a consideration of the other form, which has been with us since the days of early man. We might think of Cro-Magnon man painting the walls of his cave, for example, or of the megaliths and stone circles already mentioned to realize for how long man has sought to connect with the powers of nature and to interpret their images and patterns, their structures and their systems.

It has usually been a gentle art form, but whenever the world has been thrown into some sort of religious, political or technological turmoil, man has come up with new art forms to forge new connections between himself and his changed or changing environment. Most recently, perhaps, during the 1960's some Western artists began to reject the traditions of formalism which had governed painting, and set out to find ways to bring mankind into some more direct relationship with his environment. One of the things they did was to begin to sculpt the landscape itself. At first some of these attempts were crude by today's standards, and did more harm than good to the environment. Since then, of course, the issues have multiplied, concern has deepened immeasurably and the terms by which we know, what was then simply environmental art, have proliferated. We may now speak of eco-art, land art, art in nature, urban art and others, but whatever the term, the three key, defining attributes of the art are that it should do no harm to the environment, that it should be sensitive to environmental issues, and that it should sensitize us to those same issues. In the meeting of those goals we might expect it to:- look for ways in which we might more happily co-exist with our environment; highlight ways in which our fragile eco-systems are being damaged and how they might be repaired and/or sustained; use natural materials (feathers, twigs, leaves, mud etc) and where appropriate power its art works using natural forces; alert us to our abuses of nature in all its forms.

No doubt that sounds like a counsel of perfection, and certainly, I feel this post is becoming something of a sermon, which was not intended, so I will leave the issues now and move on to a consideration of artists who fall into this second category. Or rather, I will choose two to represent the breed, my first choice being Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy is one who might be known to some. His use of such materials as flowers, leaves, soil, moss, icicles, twigs and branches, stone, rocks, snow and pinecones has become a trademark. He has become famous as the founder of modern rock balancing. He produces two distinct forms of art: ephemeral and permanent. For the latter he will use machinery such as earth-moving equipment, whatever is necessary, but for his more impermanent works he uses only his hands and teeth - with a little help from tools which he finds in nature. Goldsworthy maintains that his ephemeral works grow, stay a while, and then decay, and he is at pains to photograph them at every stage, producing a complete record of the processes of nature. The images, he believes, show the work when it is at its height (i.e. is most alive) at each stage. Do find the time to look at one or more of the following videos. I guarantee you will not be disappointed - and there are more on the pages to which the links will take you.Andy Goldsworthy Video :Collaboration with Nature Andy Goldsworthy Video : Yorkshire Sculpture Park Nature and Nature : Andy Goldsworthy Video

Richard Long is my second choice. I probably could do no better to introduce him than to quote from the home page of his official website: Art made by walking in landscapes. Photographs of sculptures made along the way. Walks made into textworks. That seems to me to sum up the whole spirit, not only of Richard Long's work, but of the genre as a whole.


Richard Long's "Sahara Line" installation - and my proposal for an Angel of the West, bringing the nations together... or just milking the concept?

Robert Rauschenberg

"Canyon"

News of the death of Robert Rauschenberg (1925 - 2008) is a reminder of yet one more artist who has perhaps not received his just deserts from what should have been a grateful world.

When Marcel Duchamp threw down the gauntlet in the shape of a urinal and then just left the idea lying around to worry us while he went off to play with other things, this was the man who picked it up and ran with it in a variety of new directions - so many, and so quickly that by the time the critics of the day and others had realised the sleight of hand, it was too late, the ball was out of sight.

Rauschenberg was perhaps one of those artists who failed to get the acclaim he merited (in my opinion) because he could not be pigeon-holed. It is said that he did for painting what Walt Whitman did for poetry: he opened it up. Before Tracey Emin was, he had incorporated a quilt sheet and pillow from his bed in a montage, and had soaked them with paint to represent blood; ere Damien Hirst had taken the stage he had affixed a stuffed bald eagle to a canvas ("Canyon") and placed a stuffed goat encircled by a tyre above a painted panel. It was he who first painted completely white canvases, and then went on to paint completely black ones. It is said that the composer John Cage was inspired by one of his white canvases to write his silent work, (4' 33"). Generations of artists have drawn water from the wells he dug, yet beyond the art world he is hardly known.


He argued that painting is made more like the real world if it is made out of the real world. “I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly,” he once said, “because they’re surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable.” He embraced Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art (though some critics will deny that he was ever a pop artist), performance art and in many ways became midwife to the Concept Art that Duchamp had sired. He was never afraid of being thought banal and was thus able to respond to the everyday and to other art forms. He learnt from Dadaism how to juxtapose items in playful, humorous ways.

It maybe that he is better-known and appreciated by our friends on the other side of the pond. I don't know, but it would be good to think so - or are prophets still not honoured in their own countries?

(The second image above is of "Riding Bikes")

A Family Occasion

For sometime now, I've had a couple of true stories buzzing around in my head whilst I wondered if I could (should) use them, and if so, how. Then, not a hundred years ago, I swanned over to Ken Armstrong's Writing Stuff which is always different and always a pleasurable experience, and blow me, if he didn't have a couple of posts that might have been meant especially for me. One was a true story in which Ken was himself involved, the other a tale about the tale and how he came to write it, leading to a moral, almost a moral imperative, you might say, which convinced me that the true stories with which I have toyed long enough are asking to be written down and should get their wish. One of my stories is in verse, the other in prose. The one is a mix of childhood memories, mist and maybe even false memory, the other perhaps does not project my true image, does not show me as the totally lovable, virtuous guy I truly am. Hence the hesitations. No matter, Ken has made the issues clear enough: not to worry about getting it right; get it written. So with a "thank you" nod to Ken, here is the first:-

A Family Occasion.

Out on a limb above the Anderson,
hands reaching for the choicest plums - those velvet
bombs of taste, incendiaries of pleasure;
soft, waxy reds and yellows, blue-blacks and indigos.
Then suddenly alone upon an icy ridge
(though grandpa's hands were holding me,
tight as a rope around my waist),
the Anderson a lower peak; the tree
my Everest; the golden plums
small nuggets left by thieves - my treasure trail.
My plums! My own Victorias! - all mine, because
the tree was planted on the day that I was born.

You'd bite your plum along its length to leave an amber wake,
grainy, firm and juice-filled, then gently squeeze
until the sharp stone surfaced like a stricken submarine.

Those hands, though, strong and sure, whose were they?
Grandpa's, I was always told, but
I've a different memory: my relatives,
grandpa among them, sitting in the shade, in deck chairs,
by the house, their sherries and their beers and my half-eaten
birthday cake beside them on the ground (they, like
the day, were drowsy hot), when from the sky
a drone, and, looking up, a fighter plane,
black crosses on its wings. Then others,
distant, silent, high above the rooftops, out
beyond the chimneys, twisting, turning
the way our neighbour's hungry fish would pike
and swerve, challenging for food. One,
diving from the sun, was like the sly one
striking from his hideout in the reeds.

So I bellowed at the slumberers: "Achtung! Achtung!
Get down the Anderson, the huns have come,
the huns are here!" and heard my mother's voice:
"You'll have to stop him, John, we'll be in trouble
if the Bobby hears!" I saw dad rise and start towards us,
then stop dead. My anchor man behind, had weighed-
in with "Don't take all day, they're overhead!"

The shelter had a corrugated lip to be stepped over.
My mother slipped in hurrying, the lip
scraped down her leg, removing half the skin.
I thought she was the war's first casualty -
and that the bone might surface like a submarine.

Some things still worry me: those
German fighter planes... for half an hour or so
they must have stayed. Had they the range?
And mother's leg, could it have been
that badly injured? If so, who treated it,
and how? Who was it held me safely
as I crawled along that bough?

All I remember clearly, are the plums.

More on Primitivism

My earlier post on Primitivism in art (to which this is very much a follow-up) brought various comments, questions and suggestions, both as comments and by email, on the relationships between the various branches of Primitivism - if, indeed, that is what they are, for there seems to be no finality as to what exactly each is and where it lies in relation to the others. There is instead, a great deal of overlap and imprecision. So, back to basics: my Encarta World Dictionary defines Primitivism as "1), The state of being primitive or the qualities associated with being primitive. 2), (Arts) Simplicity or Naïvety of style. 3) Anti modernism: the belief that less technically dependent cultures and ways of living are inherently superior to those more technically dependent." The first definition sent me to look up the definition of Primitive. There are nine, ranging from "first forms of... or early forms of...", through "simple", "original", "natural", "untrained", "from a culture with simple technology", "early Medieval", to "in an original state". Not much help there, I think, for someone looking to see how and where Primitive art, Primitivism, Naïve art, Folk art, Tribal art and Outsider art (the last intriguingly thrown into the melting pot by Jim ) might dovetail together. Whatever your views on any or all of them, you could find some confirmation there.

So let's take another tack. In 1984 The New York Museum of Modern Art moved into newly expanded premises and celebrated with a now famous exhibition: Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. I had thought, when composing my previous post, that I was being somewhat broad in my definition of Primitivism, but this throws it even more widely open, for the sub-title of the exhibition was: The Influence of "Uncivilized" Art on the Twentieth Century.(My quotes.) Wider, but also more profound, more basic, for the exhibits were paired, one Primitive with one modern, all the way through the exhibition, but in ways that would make it difficult to believe that between the paired artists there could have been any direct influence. For example, Portrait of Madame Matisse by her Husband, was paired with a mask from the Gabon. In other words, what the visitors were being asked to realize for themselves was an "affinity", the idea that something was going on in the one which was also going on in the other. (The Gabon mask shown here is not the actual one from the exhibition, which I was unable to trace, but hopefully it makes the point.)

Madame Matisse                     and a mask from The Gabon

But the history of Primitivism is as littered with misunderstandings as a road in some "Bomb Alley" with potholes. African masks have been held aloft as proof of a belief in spirits, though the purpose of the masks in question, we now know, was to scare the enemy in battle. (There are, of course, a wide range of masks for a wide range of purposes.) Picasso confessed that African art both drew him and repelled him. Artists who were consciously influenced by what they took to be the "meaning" of a Primitive artifact could not tell the difference between African and Oceanic examples. They were all the same to them. The interest was in them almost as "found" objects, and not in the cultures from which they had come. Until recently we in the West were unaware of the fact of African art having its own masters, schools and influences in exactly the same way as our own art. Similarly, it was late in the day before we realized that Aboriginal Art had gone through its periods of changing styles, exactly like ours.

Maybe I chose an elliptical route to get here, but we are at the point of coming to realize that there is a definition of the word Primitivism that is missing from my Encarta World Dictionary (though some might argue that it is subsumed under the third definition). The missing definition would go something like: "Primitivism" is an artistic movement which idealizes whatever is thought to be simple or primitive above that which is seen as having a degree of sophistication." The first five words form the core of the definition, the rest could be argued about. The inspiration for Primitivism came from the eighteenth century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (not to be confused with the painter Henri Rousseau) who was at pains to point out what eighteenth century culture most lacked: nature, passion, emotion, instinct and mysticism.

Primitivism, then, is the trunk, from which emerge the various branches we have mentioned: Naïve Art, Folk Art, Tribal art (this last perhaps distinguishable from Folk art only by the preponderance of body art.) and Outsider art. And if Primitivism is the trunk, then Primitive art is the soil from which it comes. Primitive art includes the art of all prehistoric peoples and those tribes and races that are still technically unsophisticated. Aboriginal and Maori art, for example. African art and the art Oceania. That much, I think, is indisputable. This next bit is for the purist - which we all are from time to time, though few consistently. My previous post on the subject was maybe chewed at a bit by that fiend pragmatism, whom I let off the leash once or twice for the sake of a quiet life.

These then for the pure of heart:-
Naïve Art or Art Naif
The term presupposes the existence of an academy or a "canon" of work, different from it. It could not, therefore, properly be applied to true Primitive Art, such as Aboriginal Art. We are speaking of the work of self-taught artists with no formal training, but often obsessively dedicated to making art. The appearnace of the works is usually quite distinctive, but may be deceptive: typically they will have the appearance of a child-like innocence, though the artist may have borrowed his visual vocabulary, composition and techniques from old masters and others. Nevertheless, there will be an awkwardness that is quite genuine and stems from a lack of accomplishment with drawing and perspective. The result may be a vision that is refreshingly "different". However, the genre has become so popular, not to say, financially rewarding, that not all is what it seems. There is a great deal of "pseudo Naïve" or "faux Naïve" art about that is imitative rather than original. And, as noted in my earlier post, the genuine Naïve artist is often termed Primitive, Henri Rousseau, being a prime example. We, though, are being purist, so I will say no more about such goings-on! To recap my earlier post, other characteristics of Naïve Art are bright, even gaudy, colours, intricate detail and flat space.

Folk Art is often confused with Naïve art, but is characterized by traditional decoration or motifs and form that are specific to its culture. Sadly it is often found in corrupted form, the negative influence of tourism.

Outsider Art is a new kid on the block as the phrase didn't exist until 1972, when it was coined by Roger Cardinal, the critic, as a pseudonym for "Brut art", which translates literally as "Raw" art or "Rough" art. It refers to outside constructions and artifacts made by individuals with not training, and who do not see themselves as artists. It is art from outside the world of art.

End of my purist phase, back to what happens in the real world. What happens is that a group of artists come together or come to be considered together because of a commonality in what they are attempting, some common purpose to their philosophies or similarities in style or technique. In time, if they become successful, others, with some points in common, will be added to the group. Imperceptibly, almost, the definition loosens and may end as little more than a similarity of appearance. It happened to The Impressionists. The term was coined by the critic Louis Leroy of Monet's "Impression Sunrise", and seemed to him to fit the loose, "unfinished" style they favoured. The characteristics of The Impressionists were: Brush strokes that were rapidly applied, were broken, short and, above all, visible; colours that were laid side-by-side or applied wet-on-wet and allowed to mix on the canvas; no use of transparent glazes, of colours built gradually from "ground-up"; en plein air painting with an emphasis on natural light. Today, depending on which authority you consult, you might find any of the following, listed as one of the Impressionists: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Paul Cezanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh - and even the sculptor Auguste Rodin (for his broken, "impressionistic" surfaces, I suppose).

Now a few examples of Primitivism and the labels I have found attached to them after the briefest of trawls on the web.

L.S. Lowry: Naïve
Alfred Wallis (Cornish fisherman) Naïve / folk
Edward Hicks: Folk (Artcyclopedia), Naïve, Primitive (Worlwidearts Resources)
Henri Rousseau: Naive or Primitive (Wikipedia)
Grandma Moses Naive, Primitive and Folk (various)

Images are from Wikipedia

More from my April Haiku Challenge

April having now left us, and the challenge to write a poem a day departed, I have both a feeling of profound relief and one of regret that April could not have gone on a little longer. Who am I kidding? I didn't have to stop writing. Seriously though,my grateful thanks to Sorlil at Poetry in Progress for the inspiration and for awakening me to the fact of April being Write a Poem a Day month (I might never have known!) and to Jim at The Truth About lies for the suggestion that for the second half of the month I try to break away from the 5-7-5 format. (For the earlier set see My April Haiku Challenge.)It certainly relieved the strain on the brain's musculature. Whether it has improved (or dis-improved) the quality, I am not sure. Too close to them all to judge, I will have a looksee in a month or so. And to those who didn't like my presentation last time (and I was one of them), an attempt to break up "the wall". So, for better or for worse, here is a selection:

                           presented this time
                           on a single string -
                           kite-flying, if you like.
                           With two strings, though, this tanka might
                           have turned a somersault.
                           /                           
       under the bird table
       pigeons gather the crumbs
       that small birds drop.
                              \
                               even humble water cans
                               will form a landscape
                               at the touch of snow
                                                   \
                                                   at my approach
                                                   the larger birds
                                                   are always first away
                                                  /
                               one spring-like day
                               the one bee in the daffodils
                               prefers the one bedraggled bloom
                               /
           trying to give light
           by striking endless matches                                                         
           - that's lightning for you!
                                    /
                                    low cloud cover
                                    keeps the earth frost-free, 
                                    dark - and dry as desert sand!
                                   /
                         hailstones
                         hammer the conservatory roof
                         drowning out the thunder
                                                |
                                                incessant rain
                                                this year the flame
                                                bush merely smoulders
                                               /
                     snow on the pony's blanket
                     and we see in his back
                     an echo of the distant hills
                     \
       council workmen  
       strimming the grass verges
       strim a sleepy hedgehog.
                               \
                                three feasting on the table
                                blue tit and sparrow unaware 
                                the third one is a mouse?