Damien Hurst goes back to school, lessons taught or learnt, I can almost hear the headlines now... but on second thoughts they are more likely to be about headless students, bovine professors and such-like. Will I be alone in detecting a strong element of humour in Damien Hurst's latest? Whatever might have been thought about his past productions, pickled shark et al (and just about everything that could have been thought was thought - and fought over) it surely must be agreed that there is an easily understood rationale to his most recent installation, which should make it less controversial than many that have preceded it. The concept - I am tempted to use the literary term conceit - is that of an anatomy school. This is a potentially rich theme allowing for the drawing together of many threads from earlier preoccupations.
And Hurst misses few of those opportunities, it seems to me. A cow flanked by doves does duty as the teacher (fertile ground for punning remarks by critics and reviewers?), whilst the pupils (yet more fertile ground?) are represented by rows of headless, pickled sheep (did I not mention - did I even need to mention - that the Anatomy School is contained within a twelve feet high tank of formaldehyde?) and the mischievous, no doubt pupil-from-hell at the back, is none other than our old friend the shark. The book shelves hold, not books, but rows of medicine bottles and boxes of pills. Been there before, have we not? Hurst has said that the shark represents individuality and the sheep uniformity, the uniformity of education through which "people end up as dead sheep; alive, but not much alive". And the cow...?
Whether or not I agree, I can relate to that, unsubtle though it is - so unsubtle that I could probably have worked it out for myself. And the title of this installation? The Archaeology of Lost Desires Comprehending Infinity and the Search for Knowledge. Not quite so easy to access whatever rationale is behind that, perhaps. We are talking here of an installation that stands in (fills) the very large lobby of Lever House in Manhattan, that will become part of the Lever Collection and that comprises 30 tanks, each supported by a stainless steel autopsy table bearing a sheep's carcass and a 30,000-pound tank containing two sides of beef, in addition to the shark, numerous medicine cabinets etc, etc, and... oh, yes, a leather arm chair, a long string of Italian sausages and a black umbrella.
I will forbear to mention how much Hurst was paid for the installation, but I do believe that the rationale, as I have called it, is sufficiently interesting to deserve success. It's continuity with so much of his past work is also a plus. But does it work aesthetically? Is an installation even supposed to? Does it work in any important dimension? Who can say who has not seen the actual work up close and personal? If you have, or should you get to in the future, a comment would be appreciated. Otherwise, we have to leave him where he has always been - in a class of his own.
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Friday, 9 November 2007
Cracks in the Fabric
Did she vandalise the floor of Tate Modern? Or did she remove the floor first? Or maybe just lay a new one on top of the old? Surveyors, structural engineers and others have been taken along to inspect it, with no firm, or with conflicting, results. The management are not saying. It seems that whatever the method used, its secrecy is an intrinsic constituent of the metaphor that is (must be, surely!) Doris Salcedo's "Shibboleth". She says that it represents the fissure into which drop (or is it "are dropped"?) all the oppressed victims of racial hatred. It represents divided humanity.
With the best will in the world, you cannot get any of that from the work itself. You might have read something like that into it, it's almost a cliche now, anyway, but you could not possibly get it from the work itself. More than anything, what it seemed to me to symbolize when I saw the first press photographs of it, was the poverty or triviality of the concepts that so often lie behind (and should be driving) concept art. Here I must confess that I have not seen Shibboleth for myself, but I am confirmed in my view by the fact that Salcedo (or the gallery authorities) found it necessary to hand out leaflets to visitors "explaining" the work to them. The problem is, I think, that to be successful, a work of concept art must offer both a striking image and a richness of content. It is by no means easy to combine these two, and (usually) it is content that is sacrificed. Salcedo has herself has insisted that it is the meaning of the work (not the process) that is important. That being so, it would seem to me that the work has failed her own test, in that, without the leaflets to "explain" it, the meaning is not clear, its significance is not accessible.
But Shibboleth has been on display at Tate Modern since the 9th of October, so why am I only now making it part of my blog? Deciding, a few days ago, that it was high time I reacquainted myself with the poems of Edwin Muir, I took down his: Collected Poems and as chance would have it, opened the book at The Refugees:
A crack ran through our hearthstone long ago,
And from the fissure we watched gently grow
The tame domesticated danger,
Yet lived in comfort in our haunted rooms.
Till came the stranger
And the great and little dooms.
Muir is in my view a poet undeservedly neglected these days. The Refugees is not uniformly good, yet reading that opening verse again I was immediately reminded of what I had seen and read of The Shibboleth, and struck by the contrast between the two. Impossible, of course, to directly compare a work of visual art with a literary one (though not all would agree), yet what can perhaps be compared are the feelings aroused by them, the insight given, the thoughts provoked. Salcedo is not working in isolation, but within a well-established if not exactly popular tradition. Within the last week I have come across images of an installation (shall we call it?) by two American artists, Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, in which they punched a hole in the wall of a house, and not just in the wall, but right through the house and out the other side, creating a sort of tunnel. Meanwhile, Zhang Dali (good name), the Beijingi artist, is spray painting outlines of his head, magnified to fill the space available, on the walls of houses and then knocking out the head-shaped hole, through which people may see the emerging shape of a city being regenerated. Somehow, both these ideas seem to me to be more fertile than Shibboleth.
With the best will in the world, you cannot get any of that from the work itself. You might have read something like that into it, it's almost a cliche now, anyway, but you could not possibly get it from the work itself. More than anything, what it seemed to me to symbolize when I saw the first press photographs of it, was the poverty or triviality of the concepts that so often lie behind (and should be driving) concept art. Here I must confess that I have not seen Shibboleth for myself, but I am confirmed in my view by the fact that Salcedo (or the gallery authorities) found it necessary to hand out leaflets to visitors "explaining" the work to them. The problem is, I think, that to be successful, a work of concept art must offer both a striking image and a richness of content. It is by no means easy to combine these two, and (usually) it is content that is sacrificed. Salcedo has herself has insisted that it is the meaning of the work (not the process) that is important. That being so, it would seem to me that the work has failed her own test, in that, without the leaflets to "explain" it, the meaning is not clear, its significance is not accessible.
But Shibboleth has been on display at Tate Modern since the 9th of October, so why am I only now making it part of my blog? Deciding, a few days ago, that it was high time I reacquainted myself with the poems of Edwin Muir, I took down his: Collected Poems and as chance would have it, opened the book at The Refugees:
A crack ran through our hearthstone long ago,
And from the fissure we watched gently grow
The tame domesticated danger,
Yet lived in comfort in our haunted rooms.
Till came the stranger
And the great and little dooms.
Muir is in my view a poet undeservedly neglected these days. The Refugees is not uniformly good, yet reading that opening verse again I was immediately reminded of what I had seen and read of The Shibboleth, and struck by the contrast between the two. Impossible, of course, to directly compare a work of visual art with a literary one (though not all would agree), yet what can perhaps be compared are the feelings aroused by them, the insight given, the thoughts provoked. Salcedo is not working in isolation, but within a well-established if not exactly popular tradition. Within the last week I have come across images of an installation (shall we call it?) by two American artists, Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, in which they punched a hole in the wall of a house, and not just in the wall, but right through the house and out the other side, creating a sort of tunnel. Meanwhile, Zhang Dali (good name), the Beijingi artist, is spray painting outlines of his head, magnified to fill the space available, on the walls of houses and then knocking out the head-shaped hole, through which people may see the emerging shape of a city being regenerated. Somehow, both these ideas seem to me to be more fertile than Shibboleth.
Saturday, 3 November 2007
W.S. Merwin - and an exercise.
Writing my "How to Read Poetry" post last week brought to mind a long-time favourite of mine, W.S.Merwin, whose praises I have not yet sung - an omission I am about to correct. He has been one of the most influential voices (some would say the most influential voice) in American poetry over the last half-century or so, but, incredibly, he has been unobtainable in Britain for over thirty years. Now a selected edition has been issued by Bloodaxe which is remarkably good value at £9.95.
Merwin has perhaps three great passions: the landscape, language and the environment. And two great hates: imperialism and the violence that we do to the landscape, the language, each other and ourselves. If any one sense could be said to haunt his work it is the sense of loss; loss to the environment, the loss and impoverishment of language and loss of any real sense of self. He has, for example, dedicated himself to the protection and restoration of the Hawaiian ecology. Three snippets from his work, all opening lines, followed by one complete poem of just eighteen words, will, hopefully, whet your appetite for more:
To the Words
And now the exercise I promised. Not mine, but something I found earlier, something from which I have derived much fascination and, I believe, no little insight - and that not confined to the poetry of W.S. Merwin. We are indebted for it to a book review by Marion K Stocking in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Summer 2006 edition:
Merwin has perhaps three great passions: the landscape, language and the environment. And two great hates: imperialism and the violence that we do to the landscape, the language, each other and ourselves. If any one sense could be said to haunt his work it is the sense of loss; loss to the environment, the loss and impoverishment of language and loss of any real sense of self. He has, for example, dedicated himself to the protection and restoration of the Hawaiian ecology. Three snippets from his work, all opening lines, followed by one complete poem of just eighteen words, will, hopefully, whet your appetite for more:
To the Words
When it happens you are not there
O you beyond numbers
beyond recollection
passed on from breath to breath
given again
from day to day from age
to age
charged with knowledge
knowing nothing
Losing a Language
A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old remember something that they could say
but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words
many of the things the words were about
no longer exist
the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I
Chord
while Keats wrote they were cutting down the sandalwood forests
while he listened to the nightingale they heard their own axes
echoing through the forests
while he sat in the walled garden on the hill outside the city they
thought of their gardens dying far away on the
mountain
Witness
I want to tell what the forests
were like
I will have to speak
in a forgotten language
And now the exercise I promised. Not mine, but something I found earlier, something from which I have derived much fascination and, I believe, no little insight - and that not confined to the poetry of W.S. Merwin. We are indebted for it to a book review by Marion K Stocking in the Beloit Poetry Journal, Summer 2006 edition:
Empty WaterTry reading this poem a line at a time, reenacting the process of composition. Ask what would happen if one ended the poem there. Ask how each hypothetical terminal line casts its light back over the preceding lines, determining what the poem is "about." What it gives me is an overlay of thirty-three delicately different poems in a succession of voices – the affectionate observer, the historian, the gently amused ("left for an outing"), the ecologist, the metaphor maker, and ultimately the voice of formal supplication. Reading "Empty Water" in the context of all that preceded it, I hear resonance of the famous toads in folk literature; I hear Merwin's concern for geologic and natural history (no mask here: the poet speaks of his own spot of time on earth); I hear and am moved by the shifting rhythms of the syntax and lineation, by the limpid lyric progressions, by the clarity and simplicity of the words, always conscious of the silences behind them, and by repetitions all culminating in the incantatory litany. "A poem," Merwin has said, "is an act of attention." His attention here contemplates with sensuous intension a small creature which, in its absence, signifies something crucial about our future on this planet.
I miss the toad
who came all summer
to the limestone
water basin
under the Christmasberry tree
imported in 1912
from Brazil for decoration
then a weed on a mule track
on a losing
pineapple plantation
now an old tree in a line
of old trees
the toad came at night
first and sat in the water
all night and all day
then sometimes at night
left for an outing
but was back in the morning
under the branches among
the ferns and green sword leaf
of the lily
sitting in the water
all the dry months
gazing at the sky
through those eyes
fashioned of the most
precious of metals
come back
believer in shade
believer in silence and elegance
believer in ferns
believer in patience
believer in the rain
In an interview with Edward Hirsch Merwin outlined some of what drives him: "I have a faith in language. It's the ultimate achievement that we as a species have evolved so far. (I don't mean that I think we are the only species with a language.) It's the most flexible articulation of our experience and yet, finally, that experience is something that we cannot really articulate.... That's the other side, one of those things that makes poetry both exhilarating and painful. It's conveying both the great possibility and the thing that we cannot do."
Some Useful Links
poems
more poems
an interview with Merwin
Thursday, 1 November 2007
How To Read Poetry
When the words arrange themselves, be still,
make neither sound nor movement, but allow
them their opacities. Like stones
upon a hillside their significance
lies not in them but in the contours. Lines
lie at the heart of what they are. Do not
exalt them one or severally, do
not mistake the real for what is wonderful,
but let them speak as one in their own time.
They speak the lines. The lines are dumb. The stones
dispose themselves around your thoughts in what
may feel like speech. Something phenominal
is taking place; expectancy and awe
are everywhere, as if creation knows
that some eternal verity from some
external shore has broken through, as if
MacDiarmid's grudging stones had moved at last,
and of their own accord, that needful inch. ^
^ from Hugh MacDiarmid's majestic 'On a Raised Beach'
"'Ah!' you say, 'if only one of these stones would move
- Were it only an inch - of its own accord.
This is the resurrection we await,
- The stone rolled away from the tomb of the Lord."
to read more
make neither sound nor movement, but allow
them their opacities. Like stones
upon a hillside their significance
lies not in them but in the contours. Lines
lie at the heart of what they are. Do not
exalt them one or severally, do
not mistake the real for what is wonderful,
but let them speak as one in their own time.
They speak the lines. The lines are dumb. The stones
dispose themselves around your thoughts in what
may feel like speech. Something phenominal
is taking place; expectancy and awe
are everywhere, as if creation knows
that some eternal verity from some
external shore has broken through, as if
MacDiarmid's grudging stones had moved at last,
and of their own accord, that needful inch. ^
^ from Hugh MacDiarmid's majestic 'On a Raised Beach'
"'Ah!' you say, 'if only one of these stones would move
- Were it only an inch - of its own accord.
This is the resurrection we await,
- The stone rolled away from the tomb of the Lord."
to read more
Sunday, 28 October 2007
Friday, 26 October 2007
The Souls Pass On
Time, I think, for another Digital Doodle...
The Souls Pass On : from darkness into light pollution.
The Souls Pass On : from darkness into light pollution.
Friday, 19 October 2007
A Critical Affair
Doris Lessing won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. I thought I'd mention it, as few others seem to have done so. Or do I do the multi-hued ranks of critic and commentator an injustice? There were the initial announcements, comment on the web, and then - well, very little really. Unless I missed it. I could not have missed the pages of comment on Anne Enright's "stunning" (i.e. unexpected) success in the Man Booker Prize, well deserved, I don't doubt, though I have not yet read the book. It could just be that Doris Lessing is that sort of author (I will come to what I mean by that later), but when you consider that the Man Booker is awarded for one book and the Nobel for a lifetime's work, the contrast of mixed opinion on one hand, and an overwhelming wave of silence on the other, seems all the greater.
If it sounds as though I am comparing either author unfavourably with the other, it is not so. Doris Lessing would approve, I think, the remarks of Sir Howard Davies, chairman of the Man Booker Committee, announcing the award, for she it was who famously submitted the first of her Jane Somer novels to her own publisher, but anonymously, then, when, as she obviously knew it would be, it was rejected, she used the fact of that rejection to draw attention to the way the cards are stacked against the unknown author. That alone makes her one of my heroes/heroines. So we might suppose that she would indeed have approved the chairman's criticisms: that too many publishers laud every word of their established authors while ignoring newer talents; that critics shy away from their responsibilities, giving those whom they have decided beforehand are up-and-coming, or even great, their most reverential treatment; and that you can detect when such a reviewer doesn't like the book only when he uses all his column inches to outline the plot. (My own pet hate is when the reviewer devotes pretty much the whole of the article to an author's previous books.)
But why, I wonder do they shy away from committing their true feelings to print (or, as in the case of competition judges, from making a stand)? Do they fear a loss of reputation if time proves them wrong? But worse yet: perhaps they are doing just that, perhaps they are expressing their true feelings, are not able to see the merits in a newcomer's work or the faults in that of an idol. (I am tempted to, but will not, suggest that on occasions they may not even have read the outsider's work.) To praise a book or manuscript when it comes from the pen of one whom all know to be great, may be a safer bet, but it is singularly unhelpful - and may help to explain why 60% of British authors earn less then £10,000 a year.
I promised to elaborate on Doris Lessing being "that sort of author". It was not meant in a derogatory way, but she does strike me as being an author for whom a critic might hesitate to lay his reputation on the line. The Nobel judges praised her "skepticism, fire and visionary power" and spoke of her "vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life", but she has been criticised for being too strident and eccentric, and indeed her appearance on our T.V. sets when told of her award seemed a little eccentric. The judges hadn't been able to contact her before announcing the award because at the critical time she had "popped down to the shops" and generally seemed not to be taking the matter seriously, chuckling with great (and, I think, unaffected) glee and cooing that "I've won them all now!" A healthy enough reaction, you might think. Eccentric some might argue. Too unsophisticated, not to say child-like? To me she seemed the quintessential English eccentric - and none the worse for that -, but could that be why the critics and others have left her alone for so long. Besides, she doesn't help herself: she has written books of sci-fi!
Maybe posterity will give her novels, short stories and poems the sort of critical success that her feminist classic, 'Golden Notebook', achieved. It was a long while ago, but received the plaudits of many, including Joyce Carol Oates.
The Nobel Prize for Literature Committee has done it before, of course. They seem adept at wrong-footing our most seasoned critics and publishers. I just wonder if the inscrutable silence following the announcement might indicate that they are hurriedly reading as much Lessing as possible before deciding on their response. Maybe her day is about to dawn.
If it sounds as though I am comparing either author unfavourably with the other, it is not so. Doris Lessing would approve, I think, the remarks of Sir Howard Davies, chairman of the Man Booker Committee, announcing the award, for she it was who famously submitted the first of her Jane Somer novels to her own publisher, but anonymously, then, when, as she obviously knew it would be, it was rejected, she used the fact of that rejection to draw attention to the way the cards are stacked against the unknown author. That alone makes her one of my heroes/heroines. So we might suppose that she would indeed have approved the chairman's criticisms: that too many publishers laud every word of their established authors while ignoring newer talents; that critics shy away from their responsibilities, giving those whom they have decided beforehand are up-and-coming, or even great, their most reverential treatment; and that you can detect when such a reviewer doesn't like the book only when he uses all his column inches to outline the plot. (My own pet hate is when the reviewer devotes pretty much the whole of the article to an author's previous books.)
But why, I wonder do they shy away from committing their true feelings to print (or, as in the case of competition judges, from making a stand)? Do they fear a loss of reputation if time proves them wrong? But worse yet: perhaps they are doing just that, perhaps they are expressing their true feelings, are not able to see the merits in a newcomer's work or the faults in that of an idol. (I am tempted to, but will not, suggest that on occasions they may not even have read the outsider's work.) To praise a book or manuscript when it comes from the pen of one whom all know to be great, may be a safer bet, but it is singularly unhelpful - and may help to explain why 60% of British authors earn less then £10,000 a year.
I promised to elaborate on Doris Lessing being "that sort of author". It was not meant in a derogatory way, but she does strike me as being an author for whom a critic might hesitate to lay his reputation on the line. The Nobel judges praised her "skepticism, fire and visionary power" and spoke of her "vision of global catastrophe forcing mankind to return to a more primitive life", but she has been criticised for being too strident and eccentric, and indeed her appearance on our T.V. sets when told of her award seemed a little eccentric. The judges hadn't been able to contact her before announcing the award because at the critical time she had "popped down to the shops" and generally seemed not to be taking the matter seriously, chuckling with great (and, I think, unaffected) glee and cooing that "I've won them all now!" A healthy enough reaction, you might think. Eccentric some might argue. Too unsophisticated, not to say child-like? To me she seemed the quintessential English eccentric - and none the worse for that -, but could that be why the critics and others have left her alone for so long. Besides, she doesn't help herself: she has written books of sci-fi!
Maybe posterity will give her novels, short stories and poems the sort of critical success that her feminist classic, 'Golden Notebook', achieved. It was a long while ago, but received the plaudits of many, including Joyce Carol Oates.
The Nobel Prize for Literature Committee has done it before, of course. They seem adept at wrong-footing our most seasoned critics and publishers. I just wonder if the inscrutable silence following the announcement might indicate that they are hurriedly reading as much Lessing as possible before deciding on their response. Maybe her day is about to dawn.
Sunday, 14 October 2007
sound fellows, poets.
Caitlin Moran writing in the Times a week or so ago, set me idly thinking along a track along which I often idly think. Showing a touch of envy towards those - these days everyone except her, it seems - who has a £1 million 3-year research project to study, well, anything you can think of, it seems, she came to focus on a £1 million 3-year research project to study soundscapes. Town soundscapes. The results were taken to suggest that we who live in these comfortable, human enclaves called towns, away from the brutish life with which we would otherwise have to share our existence, actually like the sounds that designers try so hard to filter out for us. Apparently we like the sound of skateboards and the swish of tyres on tarmac. We certainly prefer them to the noise of animals trying to kill each other or having violent sex. In future, architects and designers, it was proposed, should try to manage these sounds on our behalf. Filter them, yes, but not filter them out.
So what was the track along which my thoughts were again sent idly roaming? Well, I have often wondered whether and to what extent the soundscape in which we are brought up influences, for example, our musical preferences. Moran's musings extended my familiar thought-track into the realm of poetry. Those sounds with which we are most familiar and have therefore come to love, hate or apathetically filter out, do they help to determine whether we like or hate Schoenberg's Piano Concerto or prefer the classical scale? Or heavy metal? Would the day-in, day-out and nightly sounds of beasts clashing and mating predispose us to the music of Schoenberg, with its lack of the usual hierarchy of pitches focused on a single, central tone - with its lack, in other words, of any unifying foundation? Or would the reverse be the case? What about a £1 million pound 3-year research project to discover if there is any significant difference to be found when comparing the musical tastes of town and country folk?
Interestingly (how relevant?), there is something called ambient music. Here is a quote by Eno: "Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." He had just come out of hospital and was bedridden. He was given a CD, which with great difficulty he put on his music system, only to discover that one speaker was producing no sound and the other was set very low. He was too incapacitated to correct it, but listened to it anyway. It suggested another way of listening to music - as ambient sound.
Patience! I am getting round to poetry. Coming up now, in fact. The interesting/ignorable hypothesis interests me, but attempt to apply it to poetry and there is a difficulty: the fact that poetry is not just sounds, but speech sounds, which it could be argued, vary significantly as between town and country and so contaminate the discussion. They vary geographically, of course, though to what extent the divide is a town/country divide, would probably be difficult to establish. Either way, how do I exclude the influence of speech sounds from the results of my £1 million 3-year study? Would rhythm perhaps be a way forward? Would our ears be tuned differently by a rural ambiance as opposed to an urban one? Would either rather than the other favour an appreciation of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sprung rhythms, for example? Perhaps there is room for another £1 million pound 3-year study - on whether there is a geographical (say north/south) poetry divide.
Here is a quote I found interesting (from Adam Matta, beatboxer), back with music, but very close to (some would say incorporating) poetry:"I am definitely trying to integrate the urban and percussive elements of hiphop and beatboxing with some of that abstract sensibility, as much as I enjoy painting the urban landscape. It’s the rhythms of the city that have interested me since I was two years old, but, for instance, when you watch traffic gather and disperse at an intersection, they start to resemble flocks of birds, or water flowing, elements that speak to patterns of nature, and they start to locate man’s relationship to the concrete construction. Hip hop is a way to harness the chaos of urban life and to layer your impressions of your relationship to that landscape." Interesting: visual rhythms inspire his music and it is the urban scene, not the rural, that he finds chaotic. Could others be influenced by aural rhythms, the way he is by visual ones? And if Adam could be so influenced at the age of two, could not some be influenced, but below the conscious level? (For how conscious can we be at the age of two of what influences us deeply, and how?) Perhaps we are all influenced, in ways we can only guess at, by ambient sounds and rhythms, visual and aural, way below the conscious level.
So what was the track along which my thoughts were again sent idly roaming? Well, I have often wondered whether and to what extent the soundscape in which we are brought up influences, for example, our musical preferences. Moran's musings extended my familiar thought-track into the realm of poetry. Those sounds with which we are most familiar and have therefore come to love, hate or apathetically filter out, do they help to determine whether we like or hate Schoenberg's Piano Concerto or prefer the classical scale? Or heavy metal? Would the day-in, day-out and nightly sounds of beasts clashing and mating predispose us to the music of Schoenberg, with its lack of the usual hierarchy of pitches focused on a single, central tone - with its lack, in other words, of any unifying foundation? Or would the reverse be the case? What about a £1 million pound 3-year research project to discover if there is any significant difference to be found when comparing the musical tastes of town and country folk?
Interestingly (how relevant?), there is something called ambient music. Here is a quote by Eno: "Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting." He had just come out of hospital and was bedridden. He was given a CD, which with great difficulty he put on his music system, only to discover that one speaker was producing no sound and the other was set very low. He was too incapacitated to correct it, but listened to it anyway. It suggested another way of listening to music - as ambient sound.
Patience! I am getting round to poetry. Coming up now, in fact. The interesting/ignorable hypothesis interests me, but attempt to apply it to poetry and there is a difficulty: the fact that poetry is not just sounds, but speech sounds, which it could be argued, vary significantly as between town and country and so contaminate the discussion. They vary geographically, of course, though to what extent the divide is a town/country divide, would probably be difficult to establish. Either way, how do I exclude the influence of speech sounds from the results of my £1 million 3-year study? Would rhythm perhaps be a way forward? Would our ears be tuned differently by a rural ambiance as opposed to an urban one? Would either rather than the other favour an appreciation of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sprung rhythms, for example? Perhaps there is room for another £1 million pound 3-year study - on whether there is a geographical (say north/south) poetry divide.
Here is a quote I found interesting (from Adam Matta, beatboxer), back with music, but very close to (some would say incorporating) poetry:"I am definitely trying to integrate the urban and percussive elements of hiphop and beatboxing with some of that abstract sensibility, as much as I enjoy painting the urban landscape. It’s the rhythms of the city that have interested me since I was two years old, but, for instance, when you watch traffic gather and disperse at an intersection, they start to resemble flocks of birds, or water flowing, elements that speak to patterns of nature, and they start to locate man’s relationship to the concrete construction. Hip hop is a way to harness the chaos of urban life and to layer your impressions of your relationship to that landscape." Interesting: visual rhythms inspire his music and it is the urban scene, not the rural, that he finds chaotic. Could others be influenced by aural rhythms, the way he is by visual ones? And if Adam could be so influenced at the age of two, could not some be influenced, but below the conscious level? (For how conscious can we be at the age of two of what influences us deeply, and how?) Perhaps we are all influenced, in ways we can only guess at, by ambient sounds and rhythms, visual and aural, way below the conscious level.
Saturday, 6 October 2007
Another Digital Doodle
Was going to be another in the Raising of Lazarus series, but now I'm stuck for a title. Any suggestions?
Saturday, 29 September 2007
What is the language using us for?
My title is from the title of three poems by W.S. Graham. It is a quotation that sprang instantly to mind as I read a review by James Buchan of Ian Fairley's "translation" from Paul Celan's, "Snow Part/Schneepart and Other Poems (1968-1969)". He began his review by asking whether there can be any point to translating poetry.
The question has been raised many times before, by critics and writers, poets and linguists. Others too, have wrestled with the issues involved: cognitive scientists like Naom Chomsky and Fodor for instance. Indeed, the scientific study of language grew up with the development of the cognitive sciences, and has now become one of its central topics - and surely one of the most controversial. The problem of "what the words say" is fascinating in whichever aspect it is studied. It gives food for thought to playwrights, critics, philosophers and others and has spawned the current hot potato of (the impossibility of?) translating verse from one language to another.
There are perhaps three main strands to the problem:
words and their meanings
flow and rhythm
rhyme and assonance
Retain one of these as you translate, and you will lose the other two. There is a saying in Italian which we might render as: "translator - betrayer". Words just don't have literal equivalents in other languages, much less do they do they carry the same raft of alternative meanings and echoes of distant meanings from which we derive the all-important nuances, the vital ambiguities.
There are those - and I am all but persuaded to sign up - who argue that language, having developed for purely domestic and practical purposes, is suited to just those, and is out of its depth in deeper realms. In poetry, for example. If "uncertainty in meaning is incipient poetry" (Can anyone direct me to the source of that quote? I have not been able to track it down), it is also a barrier to understanding
Here are some lines from the first of Graham's three poems:
Certain experiences seem to not
Want to go into language maybe
Because of shame or the reader’s shame.
Let us observe Malcolm Mooney.
Let us get through the suburbs and drive
Out further just for fun to see
What he will do. Reader, it does
Not matter. He is only going to be
Myself and for you slightly you
Wanting to be another. He fell.
He falls (Tenses are everywhere.)
Deep down into a glass jail.
Malcolm Mooney is Graham's fictional explorer. According to Lopez the name derived from a chain of bars owned by Guiness.
Now here are the first ten (and a bit) lines from the second poem:
What is the language using us for?
It uses us all and in its dark
Of dark actions selections differ.
I am not making a fool of myself
For you. What I am making is
A place for language in my life
Which I want to be a real place
Seeing I have to put up with it
Anyhow. What are Communication’s
Mistakes in the magic medium doing
To us?
And finally, the last two verses from the third poem
What is the language using us for?
I don’t know. Have the words ever
Made anything of you, near a kind
Of truth you thought you were? Me
Neither. The words like albatrosses
Are only a doubtful touch towards
My going and you lifting your hand
To speak to illustrate an observed
Catastrophe. What is the weather
Using us for where we are ready
With all our language lines aboard?
The beginning wind slaps the canvas.
Are you ready? Are you ready?
In fact I could have taken my examples from any of Graham's poems. His early ones embody the problem, his later ones address it. Here is Dennis O'Driscoll on Graham:
'Language itself became a central obsession of his later work, especially in the incomparable "Malcolm Mooney's Land" (1970). This book appeared after a fifteen your gap and evinced a desire on the part of the poet to make contact in the most direct way possible with his readers: "Anyhow here we are and never / Before have we two faced each other who face / Each other now across this abstract scene."'
Again: 'Indeed in an uncollected poem, he remarked that he had begun "to speak what I think is / My home tongue," and "to translate/English into English."
Yet his words retained much of their sense of mystery and paradox and the overall effect was of what he had once termed "Intellect sung in a garment of innocence."'
Poetry is not just words or just sound patterns or even just meaning. At its best it is metaphor set to music. Retain the words and neither music nor metaphor will be replicated in the target language. Take rhyme, for example: it arises naturally during the composing of the original poem, since it is part of the same dynamic process that produces both the content, which leads up to it and gives it its rightness, and the rhythm and flow by which the poem breathes. It is, in other words, the content that returns the sonar echoes of nuance, the "pings" given off by the word when, being exactly the right word, it alerts us to its relationships to other words nearby.
some languages are rich in rhyme: Italian, for example, where every other word, it seems, ends in a or i. One consequence of this is the more frequent use of an eleven-syllable line for an iambic pentameter, necessary to accommodate the almost inevitable weak ending. (It happens in English, of course: Shakespeare's "To be or not to be, that is the question" being a very good example.) English, by contrast, has a very poor rhyme pool, so translations from Italian into English where rhyme is important become fraught with difficulty and the line may sound forced. French poets and dramatists like Racine made frequent use of hexameters which are cumbersome in English, the reason being that French is a very evenly stressed language that derives its rhythm from the varying vowel lengths, whereas English has at least one strong accent in every word of more than one syllable. This gives French a flexibility in the longer line that is denied to English
According to Fairley, Celan, a Jew who lost both of his parents in the Michelailovka Labour Camp and was himself a Holocaust survivor, could have written his poetry in any one of six or more languages, but chose to do so in German - the language by which was delivered the authority for his parents' deaths - but, Fairley says, he took on that language, its portmanteau words and logical structure and proceeded to demolish it, its logic, its structure and its meaning. "Only when language is utterly disabled," Fairley writes, "can it articulate, in some abandoned region at the end of space and history, a fugitive echo of reality."
In spite of my intention to write on the inadequacy of language to the purposes of poetry, I seem to have produced an appreciation of W.S. Graham. So that's what the language was using me for!
That being so, I'll let Graham have the final word:
What does it matter if the words
I choose, in the order I choose them in,
Go out into a silence I know
Nothing about, there to be let
In and entertained and charmed
Out of their master's orders? And yet
I would like to see where they go
And how without me they behave.
(Part 1 of "Approaches To How They Behave")
The question has been raised many times before, by critics and writers, poets and linguists. Others too, have wrestled with the issues involved: cognitive scientists like Naom Chomsky and Fodor for instance. Indeed, the scientific study of language grew up with the development of the cognitive sciences, and has now become one of its central topics - and surely one of the most controversial. The problem of "what the words say" is fascinating in whichever aspect it is studied. It gives food for thought to playwrights, critics, philosophers and others and has spawned the current hot potato of (the impossibility of?) translating verse from one language to another.
There are perhaps three main strands to the problem:
words and their meanings
flow and rhythm
rhyme and assonance
Retain one of these as you translate, and you will lose the other two. There is a saying in Italian which we might render as: "translator - betrayer". Words just don't have literal equivalents in other languages, much less do they do they carry the same raft of alternative meanings and echoes of distant meanings from which we derive the all-important nuances, the vital ambiguities.
There are those - and I am all but persuaded to sign up - who argue that language, having developed for purely domestic and practical purposes, is suited to just those, and is out of its depth in deeper realms. In poetry, for example. If "uncertainty in meaning is incipient poetry" (Can anyone direct me to the source of that quote? I have not been able to track it down), it is also a barrier to understanding
Here are some lines from the first of Graham's three poems:
Certain experiences seem to not
Want to go into language maybe
Because of shame or the reader’s shame.
Let us observe Malcolm Mooney.
Let us get through the suburbs and drive
Out further just for fun to see
What he will do. Reader, it does
Not matter. He is only going to be
Myself and for you slightly you
Wanting to be another. He fell.
He falls (Tenses are everywhere.)
Deep down into a glass jail.
Malcolm Mooney is Graham's fictional explorer. According to Lopez the name derived from a chain of bars owned by Guiness.
Now here are the first ten (and a bit) lines from the second poem:
What is the language using us for?
It uses us all and in its dark
Of dark actions selections differ.
I am not making a fool of myself
For you. What I am making is
A place for language in my life
Which I want to be a real place
Seeing I have to put up with it
Anyhow. What are Communication’s
Mistakes in the magic medium doing
To us?
And finally, the last two verses from the third poem
What is the language using us for?
I don’t know. Have the words ever
Made anything of you, near a kind
Of truth you thought you were? Me
Neither. The words like albatrosses
Are only a doubtful touch towards
My going and you lifting your hand
To speak to illustrate an observed
Catastrophe. What is the weather
Using us for where we are ready
With all our language lines aboard?
The beginning wind slaps the canvas.
Are you ready? Are you ready?
In fact I could have taken my examples from any of Graham's poems. His early ones embody the problem, his later ones address it. Here is Dennis O'Driscoll on Graham:
'Language itself became a central obsession of his later work, especially in the incomparable "Malcolm Mooney's Land" (1970). This book appeared after a fifteen your gap and evinced a desire on the part of the poet to make contact in the most direct way possible with his readers: "Anyhow here we are and never / Before have we two faced each other who face / Each other now across this abstract scene."'
Again: 'Indeed in an uncollected poem, he remarked that he had begun "to speak what I think is / My home tongue," and "to translate/English into English."
Yet his words retained much of their sense of mystery and paradox and the overall effect was of what he had once termed "Intellect sung in a garment of innocence."'
Poetry is not just words or just sound patterns or even just meaning. At its best it is metaphor set to music. Retain the words and neither music nor metaphor will be replicated in the target language. Take rhyme, for example: it arises naturally during the composing of the original poem, since it is part of the same dynamic process that produces both the content, which leads up to it and gives it its rightness, and the rhythm and flow by which the poem breathes. It is, in other words, the content that returns the sonar echoes of nuance, the "pings" given off by the word when, being exactly the right word, it alerts us to its relationships to other words nearby.
some languages are rich in rhyme: Italian, for example, where every other word, it seems, ends in a or i. One consequence of this is the more frequent use of an eleven-syllable line for an iambic pentameter, necessary to accommodate the almost inevitable weak ending. (It happens in English, of course: Shakespeare's "To be or not to be, that is the question" being a very good example.) English, by contrast, has a very poor rhyme pool, so translations from Italian into English where rhyme is important become fraught with difficulty and the line may sound forced. French poets and dramatists like Racine made frequent use of hexameters which are cumbersome in English, the reason being that French is a very evenly stressed language that derives its rhythm from the varying vowel lengths, whereas English has at least one strong accent in every word of more than one syllable. This gives French a flexibility in the longer line that is denied to English
According to Fairley, Celan, a Jew who lost both of his parents in the Michelailovka Labour Camp and was himself a Holocaust survivor, could have written his poetry in any one of six or more languages, but chose to do so in German - the language by which was delivered the authority for his parents' deaths - but, Fairley says, he took on that language, its portmanteau words and logical structure and proceeded to demolish it, its logic, its structure and its meaning. "Only when language is utterly disabled," Fairley writes, "can it articulate, in some abandoned region at the end of space and history, a fugitive echo of reality."
In spite of my intention to write on the inadequacy of language to the purposes of poetry, I seem to have produced an appreciation of W.S. Graham. So that's what the language was using me for!
That being so, I'll let Graham have the final word:
What does it matter if the words
I choose, in the order I choose them in,
Go out into a silence I know
Nothing about, there to be let
In and entertained and charmed
Out of their master's orders? And yet
I would like to see where they go
And how without me they behave.
(Part 1 of "Approaches To How They Behave")
Monday, 24 September 2007
My Entry for the Turner Prize
You may have forgotten - or even assumed that I would - but here is my entry, as promised in my post of May 11, for the non-existent Turner Prize for Poetry".
I Don't Know What I mean, but I Definitely Disagree.
Out of the darkness at the deep
heart of what I am, blind Angel, blinded
by internal light, by light
that burns its way towards the surface.
I am the Bush that burns
and yet is not consumed,
the burning Bush from which the voice of God goes forth
into the world, to put
out cap for coin, for currency
enough to buy this world of frivol
and fatuity, this pin-ball world,
for decency, for
eyes like those my father had
that saw in darkness,
sawed through the darkness
to the grain that ran our way.
I am the one you show across the road,
your penny-whistler whistling in the dark.
But friend, the other path is darker still.
All paths are dark except to one
who lives in darkness.
I am the hewn stone raised in witness,
the white stone of acquittal,
the stone-cold certainty
rejected by the builders.
But friends, know this:
there are those in this wicked world,
insurgents, evil men who snatch
the burning brands from me,
the lighted beacon of the western world,
to keep their flames alight
across the world's dark voids.
You see them in Iraq - and
what's that other country thereabouts?
But they shall not prevail, and those that die
I shall raise up.
Friends, let me be frank: at times
I grope for walls, for footholds, footling
holds, forgetting I have wings.
Come in beneath the shadow of my wings. There find
my Father's mercy seat.
I am the edifice
upon the megalith
upon the pebble from the shore
upon a grain of sand
adrift upon the void.
But friends, the void shall not prevail!
Friends, I am all things to all men, both
Elephant and Castle, Bush and Shepherd, and below
me are my Father's mansions. I, the way,
the only way, the escalator to the lines
of your salvation. No one can come
to Him but first descend in me.
I Don't Know What I mean, but I Definitely Disagree.
Out of the darkness at the deep
heart of what I am, blind Angel, blinded
by internal light, by light
that burns its way towards the surface.
I am the Bush that burns
and yet is not consumed,
the burning Bush from which the voice of God goes forth
into the world, to put
out cap for coin, for currency
enough to buy this world of frivol
and fatuity, this pin-ball world,
for decency, for
eyes like those my father had
that saw in darkness,
sawed through the darkness
to the grain that ran our way.
I am the one you show across the road,
your penny-whistler whistling in the dark.
But friend, the other path is darker still.
All paths are dark except to one
who lives in darkness.
I am the hewn stone raised in witness,
the white stone of acquittal,
the stone-cold certainty
rejected by the builders.
But friends, know this:
there are those in this wicked world,
insurgents, evil men who snatch
the burning brands from me,
the lighted beacon of the western world,
to keep their flames alight
across the world's dark voids.
You see them in Iraq - and
what's that other country thereabouts?
But they shall not prevail, and those that die
I shall raise up.
Friends, let me be frank: at times
I grope for walls, for footholds, footling
holds, forgetting I have wings.
Come in beneath the shadow of my wings. There find
my Father's mercy seat.
I am the edifice
upon the megalith
upon the pebble from the shore
upon a grain of sand
adrift upon the void.
But friends, the void shall not prevail!
Friends, I am all things to all men, both
Elephant and Castle, Bush and Shepherd, and below
me are my Father's mansions. I, the way,
the only way, the escalator to the lines
of your salvation. No one can come
to Him but first descend in me.
Saturday, 22 September 2007
Art Therapy
One of my earliest ambitions - after I had emerged from the 'wild man of the woods' phase (see my profile) was to be a medical artist. Someone had told me of the people who sat in the observation areas of operating theatres and made drawings at various stages of an operation. Why that appealed to me, I cannot now remember or imagine. For sure I would never have had the draftsmanship to carry it off. Later, two of my friends were to become art therapists, though neither of them permanently. (I am not sure if that small insight into a dead-end stage of my development will prove relevant, but I throw it in on the chance that you might find it so.)
So much is but background. My interest in art as therapy really took off at art school. The agent for it was a commission for six students each to paint a mural in a public area of one of those vast Victorian mental hospitals, fortunately now confined to history. The man responsible for this project (a psychiatrist, as I recall) would visit regularly to check the progress of the work that nothing might be put there to inflame or excite his charges. One student, engaged on a scene of fishing boats on a beach, was reprimanded several times for allowing the masts of the boats to cross the horizon. This was too dramatic, too violent for the patients. Horizontal lines were what were required, for they were soothing. Definitely nothing crossing.
I have been a somewhat frequent waiter in waiting rooms of late: dental, hospital and others. On one of these occasions I overheard a patient describe a rather gaudy sunset as "therapeutic". To my mind the thing about therapy is that it does not have to be Art, but it does have to be done by the patient - or at the very least to engage with the patient, not just sooth. It is the patient's field of encounter with what is troubling him or her. It is a way of facing - and hopefully, facing-down - the current demon. As such, it is not for waiting rooms.
Always, though, there are exceptions to our rules. Along one wall of one large department in our local main hospital is a series of large coloured photographs of body tissues and fluids in a variety of magnifications. They are sumptuous images, sexy, sensuous, and, it seems to me, having a great deal in common with my fractal print-outs (16 March, 22 March and 24 April). More importantly, they are relevant to , or could be seen to be relevant to, the preoccupations of some patients at least. They may not have been done by the patient, but they might well engage with the patient at an appropriate level. And if only one patient comes to see one or more of the images as relevant, and by that came to see the problem as having its own great intrinsic beauty, might that not help, emotionally? Might it not offset to some extent, the ugly thoughts that had held total sway until then? Might that not trigger a change from negative to positive?
So much that is referred to as art these days is little more than self-expression. The boundaries are blurred. And not just in painting. In poetry, for example, Frieda Hughs wrote recently about the perception that more people are writing poetry these days then are reading it, and attributed that largely to the fact that much of what is written is self-expression, requiring no work, no discipline, no engagement with the language or with the rules and forms of poetry.
So much is but background. My interest in art as therapy really took off at art school. The agent for it was a commission for six students each to paint a mural in a public area of one of those vast Victorian mental hospitals, fortunately now confined to history. The man responsible for this project (a psychiatrist, as I recall) would visit regularly to check the progress of the work that nothing might be put there to inflame or excite his charges. One student, engaged on a scene of fishing boats on a beach, was reprimanded several times for allowing the masts of the boats to cross the horizon. This was too dramatic, too violent for the patients. Horizontal lines were what were required, for they were soothing. Definitely nothing crossing.
I have been a somewhat frequent waiter in waiting rooms of late: dental, hospital and others. On one of these occasions I overheard a patient describe a rather gaudy sunset as "therapeutic". To my mind the thing about therapy is that it does not have to be Art, but it does have to be done by the patient - or at the very least to engage with the patient, not just sooth. It is the patient's field of encounter with what is troubling him or her. It is a way of facing - and hopefully, facing-down - the current demon. As such, it is not for waiting rooms.
Always, though, there are exceptions to our rules. Along one wall of one large department in our local main hospital is a series of large coloured photographs of body tissues and fluids in a variety of magnifications. They are sumptuous images, sexy, sensuous, and, it seems to me, having a great deal in common with my fractal print-outs (16 March, 22 March and 24 April). More importantly, they are relevant to , or could be seen to be relevant to, the preoccupations of some patients at least. They may not have been done by the patient, but they might well engage with the patient at an appropriate level. And if only one patient comes to see one or more of the images as relevant, and by that came to see the problem as having its own great intrinsic beauty, might that not help, emotionally? Might it not offset to some extent, the ugly thoughts that had held total sway until then? Might that not trigger a change from negative to positive?
So much that is referred to as art these days is little more than self-expression. The boundaries are blurred. And not just in painting. In poetry, for example, Frieda Hughs wrote recently about the perception that more people are writing poetry these days then are reading it, and attributed that largely to the fact that much of what is written is self-expression, requiring no work, no discipline, no engagement with the language or with the rules and forms of poetry.
Sunday, 16 September 2007
Yet More Doodles from the Digital Darkroom
A touch too long since my last post, but having been given a new monitor (an early birthday present from my wife and my first LCD), I decided to spend a bit of time playing with graphics to try out its colour capability. (I know: excuses, excuses.) Naturally enough, I got myself hooked.
But easier to show than to tell what I have been squandering my time on: the second image here was intended as an abstract, but I have renamed it "Tunnel of Lights". The first is one of a series (ongoing) on The Raising of Lazarus, a favourite theme of mine from way back
Saturday, 8 September 2007
The Prose Poem
A rather unusual email in my website box this week. Unique, I could say. From Portugal. A whole string of questions, from "What about a regular column on 'Little Known Facts of Poetry'?" (more appropriate for the blog, perhaps?) to, am I an expert on either ghazals (pronounced guzzles) or prose poetry and could I tell him..... in a frenzy of excitement at having had such an email to my website, I turned at once to answer it, only to wilt at the number of points raised. Then a better idea occurred: post the reply on the blog, thereby providing me with a ready-made subject and guaranteeing at least one additional visitor. (My Portuguese friend is comfortable with this.)
First of all, no, I am not an expert on either ghazals or prose poetry.... Well, thinking about it, I guess I know as much about ghazals as about other forms of poetry (interpret that as you will!), but all I will say for now is that a couple of blogs back (Two Poets) I wrote of Khalvati's latest book which contains some excellent examples. There are also plenty on the web, though many of these would not be regarded as 'true' ghazals. I may write more on them in the future.
Of prose poetry I probably know less, but never having been one to let ignorance stand in the way of an opinion, I will have a go. According to some authorities, the genre we know as prose poetry was invented by Baudelaire, though others maintain that it goes back to the ancient Hebrews and that The King James Bible is full of examples. Others believe that it is not a genre at all. These divide into two camps, one maintaining that it belongs to poetry by virtue of the way it uses language, and because of its (often) metaphorical nature. The other believes it to be a branch of prose through its reliance (usually) on narrative and its pursuit (usually) of some form of objective truth. I have seen it argued that prose poetry is really literary prose by another name, and that it shares with poetry a more thorough-going use of rhythm, euphony, fragmentation and so forth. It is the lack of recurring metric patterns that identifies it as prose. In Aristotle's famous dictum: It must neither possess meter nor be without rhythm. Additionally, some have pointed to the absence of line breaks as evidence of its place in the prose camp. This last point strikes me as being wholly trivial. What we can say, I think, is that at its best, prose poetry demonstrates the power of poetry in its use of compression, rhyme, assonance and those layers of meaning and nuance which take on such importance in our journey to understand what is being said.
So, if prose poetry looks like prose, it nevertheless reads - and sounds - like poetry, and it stays with us the way that poetry does. But of course, there are degrees. Most good prose (apart from purely technical, "plain" prose) has elements of poetry, which is why, no doubt, my Portuguese friend*asks how it is possible to tell "whether a piece of prose-looking writing is just prose or actually is a bit of prose poetry" (sic). At what point, I suppose he is asking, does it cross over? How many boxes must be ticked for it to qualify? It is like asking at what point, as you add red to mauve, does it become purple? It depends. On the viewer. On the colours around it. On the light. Or perhaps we should take our cue from the Modern painters and say, It is prose poetry because I say it is!
I will conclude with two examples. First, the final passage of Baudelaire's "Be Drunk".
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
My other example is "Hysteria" by T.S.Eliot
S she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part of it, until her
teeth were only accidental stars with a talent
for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps,
inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally
in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by
the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading
a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
green iron table, saying: "If the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden,
if the lady and gentleman wish to take their
tea in the garden ..." I decided that if the
shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,
and I concentrated my attention with careful
subtlety to this end.
Or click here for an interesting read on the influence of William Wordsworth on the prose poem.
* I do not know that my emailer is Portuguese, only that the email came from Portugal.
First of all, no, I am not an expert on either ghazals or prose poetry.... Well, thinking about it, I guess I know as much about ghazals as about other forms of poetry (interpret that as you will!), but all I will say for now is that a couple of blogs back (Two Poets) I wrote of Khalvati's latest book which contains some excellent examples. There are also plenty on the web, though many of these would not be regarded as 'true' ghazals. I may write more on them in the future.
Of prose poetry I probably know less, but never having been one to let ignorance stand in the way of an opinion, I will have a go. According to some authorities, the genre we know as prose poetry was invented by Baudelaire, though others maintain that it goes back to the ancient Hebrews and that The King James Bible is full of examples. Others believe that it is not a genre at all. These divide into two camps, one maintaining that it belongs to poetry by virtue of the way it uses language, and because of its (often) metaphorical nature. The other believes it to be a branch of prose through its reliance (usually) on narrative and its pursuit (usually) of some form of objective truth. I have seen it argued that prose poetry is really literary prose by another name, and that it shares with poetry a more thorough-going use of rhythm, euphony, fragmentation and so forth. It is the lack of recurring metric patterns that identifies it as prose. In Aristotle's famous dictum: It must neither possess meter nor be without rhythm. Additionally, some have pointed to the absence of line breaks as evidence of its place in the prose camp. This last point strikes me as being wholly trivial. What we can say, I think, is that at its best, prose poetry demonstrates the power of poetry in its use of compression, rhyme, assonance and those layers of meaning and nuance which take on such importance in our journey to understand what is being said.
So, if prose poetry looks like prose, it nevertheless reads - and sounds - like poetry, and it stays with us the way that poetry does. But of course, there are degrees. Most good prose (apart from purely technical, "plain" prose) has elements of poetry, which is why, no doubt, my Portuguese friend*asks how it is possible to tell "whether a piece of prose-looking writing is just prose or actually is a bit of prose poetry" (sic). At what point, I suppose he is asking, does it cross over? How many boxes must be ticked for it to qualify? It is like asking at what point, as you add red to mauve, does it become purple? It depends. On the viewer. On the colours around it. On the light. Or perhaps we should take our cue from the Modern painters and say, It is prose poetry because I say it is!
I will conclude with two examples. First, the final passage of Baudelaire's "Be Drunk".
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."
My other example is "Hysteria" by T.S.Eliot
S she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being part of it, until her
teeth were only accidental stars with a talent
for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps,
inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally
in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by
the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter
with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading
a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty
green iron table, saying: "If the lady and
gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden,
if the lady and gentleman wish to take their
tea in the garden ..." I decided that if the
shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of
the fragments of the afternoon might be collected,
and I concentrated my attention with careful
subtlety to this end.
Or click here for an interesting read on the influence of William Wordsworth on the prose poem.
* I do not know that my emailer is Portuguese, only that the email came from Portugal.
Saturday, 1 September 2007
on beauty
It must be fashionable just now to speak of beauty as being unfashionable, at least so far as art and its practitioners and admirers are concerned. I have latterly come across several, some from either camp, talking as though beauty was either something to be weeded out of a "serious" piece of artwork or something of no consequence either way. Sometimes it is a question of one man's beauty another man's yuk, or even the confusion of "serious" with beauty. For me the whole issue was somehow encapsulated in the sad story of Jack Vettriano, he of "The Singing Butler" fame (£744,000 at auction), he who was originally, just plain Jack Hoggans. Jack Hoggans made an executive decision to change his name (a marketing ploy) and put commercial success before critical acclaim. Some would say before art, certainly before serious art (a definition of which must wait for another post). He succeeded, surely beyond his wildest dreams and now finds himself irritated by the carping and sniping of fellow artists who are obviously not a little resentful of his success. He is entitled to be. But he is equally at odds with the critics for their low opinion of his work, though it is not so easy to see why he should resent them. He deliberately turned his back on what he knew to be their standpoints. They sre not only within their rights, but duty-bound to say "We think this is not how it should be!".He went a different road and cannot now complain if they say so.
I suppose it was always so: there must always have been portraitists who were willing to flatter sitters (perhaps forgetting why they took up their brushes in the first place) for popular success - and artists who, sticking to their first principles, became jealous of that success. And from very early days there were probably artists frustrated when work was rejected for for not matching the wallpaper or some other trivial reason. And feeding that frustration, there would have been those who were willing to sacrifice other things in order to match the wallpaper for the sake of a few bucks - as they were perfectly entitled to do. Nothing wrong with that.
On the page facing the Vettriano story Grayson Perry was interviewing another artist commanding six-figure price tags, the sculptor Gary Hume, a workaholic and a man consumed by self-doubt, but one who does what he does from a "love of seeing and making".
Nothing wrong with that, either. Just don't compare Vittriano and Hume or judge one by the standards of the other. They are in different occupations. They are doing different jobs.
The two images are from the Wikipedia site. (Click for Gary Hume
Click for Jack Vettriano) They are: The Singing Butler and Gary Hume's Water Painting, which is in The Tate.
I suppose it was always so: there must always have been portraitists who were willing to flatter sitters (perhaps forgetting why they took up their brushes in the first place) for popular success - and artists who, sticking to their first principles, became jealous of that success. And from very early days there were probably artists frustrated when work was rejected for for not matching the wallpaper or some other trivial reason. And feeding that frustration, there would have been those who were willing to sacrifice other things in order to match the wallpaper for the sake of a few bucks - as they were perfectly entitled to do. Nothing wrong with that.
On the page facing the Vettriano story Grayson Perry was interviewing another artist commanding six-figure price tags, the sculptor Gary Hume, a workaholic and a man consumed by self-doubt, but one who does what he does from a "love of seeing and making".
Nothing wrong with that, either. Just don't compare Vittriano and Hume or judge one by the standards of the other. They are in different occupations. They are doing different jobs.
The two images are from the Wikipedia site. (Click for Gary Hume
Click for Jack Vettriano) They are: The Singing Butler and Gary Hume's Water Painting, which is in The Tate.
Saturday, 25 August 2007
Two Poets
No doubt, it's the time of the year: it's been a while now since this sort of excitement, but this morning (Saturday), two such, both in The Guardian.
First there was The Saturday Poem. There is always the Saturday poem, of course, but not always with the freshness (for me, it had that freshness) and excitement of this morning. "Autumn Collection" by Luke Kennard, was the piece in question. I had not heard of him, nor of Mimi Khalvati. Her "The Meanest Flower" was the subject of this morning's Poetry Review. So, not just a couple of new poems, but the buzz of two new poets.
The quotes from her book passed my first test: they were not stock poems, my ears did not complain that they had heard this, or something like it, before - even though, as Charles Bainbridge points out in the review, the title is taken from Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood", and "the book as a whole could be seen as an on-going conversation with that wonderful meditation on childhood and loss". Indeed, the book is inspired by Shakespeare's songs, the short poems of Emily Dickinson, and Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems, and by the way in which weeds spread ubiquitously. Along the way, Khalvati experiments with the Ghazal, an ancient Persian form composed of an unrhymed couplets. Here she is, in a sonnet sequence, speaking of a family as though they were flowers - or is it the other way around?
"As if they were family, flowers surround you.
As if they were a story-book, they speak.
They speak through eyes and strange configurations
on their faces, markings on petals, whiskers,
mouth-holes and pointed teeth. They are related
to wind. Wind is a kind of godfather, high up
in the branches. They’re willing you to listen
to them, not him."
Obviously, I have not read the book - yet. But I have done some research on the web (There is a mass of material; she has been around for a long time, and I really should have known all about her.), enough to guarantee to myself - and you - that the whole oeuvre would be worth a good, long look.
For a good introduction to Khalvati, Click Here where you can read some of her verses and/or listen to her reading them.
But before I move on, here are some lines from "Mirrorwork" in which she is using Islamic mirror mosaics (She was born in Tehran, but left at the age of six and went back only briefly during her late teens and early twenties.) as the skeleton to bring the work together as a functioning whole.
'We are the thought of something not itself.
Each fragment whole, each unit split, but
dovetailed, one wall, one dome, in whose
muddied lakes of colour swim the blues
of a bag, green rings of a skirt. We
are the hall of mirrors, a fine mosaic,
the mirrorwork in which not even Kings
can see themselves.'
Luke Kennard seems not to be as well established, which is not surprising in one so young (a PhD student who also happens to be the youngest writer ever nominated for the prestigious Forward Poetry Prize, this for his collection "The Harbour Beyond the Movie".
Here are the first and last verses from "Autumn Collection"
There was dancing but no music.
The liquidambar scattered its leaves;
I played jacks with the Intuit girl.
Many of us have our own versions of events
Engraved one over the other on monuments
Erected one on top of the other.
First there was The Saturday Poem. There is always the Saturday poem, of course, but not always with the freshness (for me, it had that freshness) and excitement of this morning. "Autumn Collection" by Luke Kennard, was the piece in question. I had not heard of him, nor of Mimi Khalvati. Her "The Meanest Flower" was the subject of this morning's Poetry Review. So, not just a couple of new poems, but the buzz of two new poets.
The quotes from her book passed my first test: they were not stock poems, my ears did not complain that they had heard this, or something like it, before - even though, as Charles Bainbridge points out in the review, the title is taken from Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood", and "the book as a whole could be seen as an on-going conversation with that wonderful meditation on childhood and loss". Indeed, the book is inspired by Shakespeare's songs, the short poems of Emily Dickinson, and Wordsworth's "Lucy" poems, and by the way in which weeds spread ubiquitously. Along the way, Khalvati experiments with the Ghazal, an ancient Persian form composed of an unrhymed couplets. Here she is, in a sonnet sequence, speaking of a family as though they were flowers - or is it the other way around?
"As if they were family, flowers surround you.
As if they were a story-book, they speak.
They speak through eyes and strange configurations
on their faces, markings on petals, whiskers,
mouth-holes and pointed teeth. They are related
to wind. Wind is a kind of godfather, high up
in the branches. They’re willing you to listen
to them, not him."
Obviously, I have not read the book - yet. But I have done some research on the web (There is a mass of material; she has been around for a long time, and I really should have known all about her.), enough to guarantee to myself - and you - that the whole oeuvre would be worth a good, long look.
For a good introduction to Khalvati, Click Here where you can read some of her verses and/or listen to her reading them.
But before I move on, here are some lines from "Mirrorwork" in which she is using Islamic mirror mosaics (She was born in Tehran, but left at the age of six and went back only briefly during her late teens and early twenties.) as the skeleton to bring the work together as a functioning whole.
'We are the thought of something not itself.
Each fragment whole, each unit split, but
dovetailed, one wall, one dome, in whose
muddied lakes of colour swim the blues
of a bag, green rings of a skirt. We
are the hall of mirrors, a fine mosaic,
the mirrorwork in which not even Kings
can see themselves.'
Luke Kennard seems not to be as well established, which is not surprising in one so young (a PhD student who also happens to be the youngest writer ever nominated for the prestigious Forward Poetry Prize, this for his collection "The Harbour Beyond the Movie".
Here are the first and last verses from "Autumn Collection"
There was dancing but no music.
The liquidambar scattered its leaves;
I played jacks with the Intuit girl.
Many of us have our own versions of events
Engraved one over the other on monuments
Erected one on top of the other.
Sunday, 19 August 2007
The Sculpture Park
Time for a few more pics, I thought. These Digital Doodles are, as the title of the post suggests, from a series I call The Sculpture Park.
Saturday, 11 August 2007
Have You Read It Before?
What do you most look for in a new poem? Speaking personally, I look first for something I have not read or heard before, after which I would hope to gain from it some fresh insight, to be shown something or someone in a new light. Finally, to fully satisfy, there is the requirement for a distinctive voice. I say "finally", though in fact there remains an extensive list of potential requirements, but the three I have given are enough for now, they represent, as I see it, both a very demanding expectation and the three absolute essentials, in that the absence of any one renders the poem poorer for its loss.
These thoughts were prompted in part by suggestions made in the media recently that Ian Mc Ewan has been guilty of plagiarism. To the best of my knowledge, the P word has not actually been used, but the implication has been made, and that strongly. Specifically it is said that "Enduring Love" is a somewhat below par rewrite of Stephen King's "Misery", and "Atonement" owes far too much to Lucilla Andrews's "No Time for Romance". One question raised, inevitably, you may think, by these charges, concerns that of the drawing of the line between inspiration and plagiarism. As always, everyone, it seems, would draw it somewhere else. I doubt whether there could ever be an objective standard laid down. "If more than 30% of the words in more than 40% of the book are replicated in their original order, the work shall be deemed to be...." I don't think so, do you?
The problem of the P word does not occur so much in the same way in the case of poetry. (Or do you know differently?) Here, plagiarism tends to be replaced by slavish imitation combined with a failure of the imitator to establish some essential distance from the imitated, a lack of that distinctive voice, in other words. How many would-be poets have lost their way in the wilderness trying to be yet one more Seamus Heaney? How much poetic talent has been lost that way? Poetry may not suffer from the P word to the extent that prose does, yet I think I more often read a poem than a novel with the feeling that I have read it before.
Echoes of other poets, even quotes, are common, but in any poem worth its salt they are positive: a phrase strikes sparks and invites us to consider a line from Eliot or Heaney. It all adds to the density of the poems, to the layers of meaning or possible meaning. To its ambiguity, perhaps. An image from the pen of Yeats or a metaphor from MacDiarmid may provide a loom of light above the poem's own horizon.
These thoughts were prompted in part by suggestions made in the media recently that Ian Mc Ewan has been guilty of plagiarism. To the best of my knowledge, the P word has not actually been used, but the implication has been made, and that strongly. Specifically it is said that "Enduring Love" is a somewhat below par rewrite of Stephen King's "Misery", and "Atonement" owes far too much to Lucilla Andrews's "No Time for Romance". One question raised, inevitably, you may think, by these charges, concerns that of the drawing of the line between inspiration and plagiarism. As always, everyone, it seems, would draw it somewhere else. I doubt whether there could ever be an objective standard laid down. "If more than 30% of the words in more than 40% of the book are replicated in their original order, the work shall be deemed to be...." I don't think so, do you?
The problem of the P word does not occur so much in the same way in the case of poetry. (Or do you know differently?) Here, plagiarism tends to be replaced by slavish imitation combined with a failure of the imitator to establish some essential distance from the imitated, a lack of that distinctive voice, in other words. How many would-be poets have lost their way in the wilderness trying to be yet one more Seamus Heaney? How much poetic talent has been lost that way? Poetry may not suffer from the P word to the extent that prose does, yet I think I more often read a poem than a novel with the feeling that I have read it before.
Echoes of other poets, even quotes, are common, but in any poem worth its salt they are positive: a phrase strikes sparks and invites us to consider a line from Eliot or Heaney. It all adds to the density of the poems, to the layers of meaning or possible meaning. To its ambiguity, perhaps. An image from the pen of Yeats or a metaphor from MacDiarmid may provide a loom of light above the poem's own horizon.
Friday, 3 August 2007
Process V Outcome
My Grandparents were true Victorians. Indeed, you could say that in some ways they were more Victorian than the good queen herself. Not unnaturally, therefore, their taste in art ("pictures", they would have said) was Victorian. "Every picture tells a story" was a phrase I grew up with. They meant, of course, "Every picture should tell a story". Certainly, their pictures had narratives, usually a moral, which could be deduced from the work itself, often with the aid of the title.
Some days ago, surfing on the net, I came upon a blog extolling the primacy of process in all things art. I thought little of it at the time, and surfed on, but later thought more about it. Back a decade or two (or three) there was a vogue for process, not only in art, but in other fields also. (There may still be, for all I know.) In Education, for example, this translated as "How a person learns is what matters, not what s/he learns". "Process, not outcome," became the dictum. In other words, it is what happens to a person during the learning process that matters in the long run, that will decide what sort of a person s/he will become.
Following this dictum in art, the story is no longer told by the work, but of it. So what at first sight appeared to me to be a ventilation grill well overdue for cleaning, having layers of fluff adhering to its bars, became, when I was given its credentials, an object of vastly different kind: it was Idris Khan's photograph of the Qur'an'. He had scanned every page - nearly 2000 in all -into his computer and then digitally layered them to form a composite image. some say the result is beautiful. I do not go that far, but would say that knowing the story behind it, changes the emotional charge.
Cornelia Parker, you may recall, blew up a shed - or had it blown up, hopefully by someone who knew what s/he was doing. She presented the result as an installation, and intriguing it was, too. But knowing the means by which it was achieved added enormously to its impact. Simon Starling's boat seemed nothing extraordinary - until you were told that it was an ex-shed, and would be one again. It was said that his Shedboatshed was instrumental in gaining for him The Turner Prize.
There is in fact a whole genre called Process Art, has been since the 1960's. It was originally a reaction against minimalism. Its exponents chose transient materials, such as ice, wax, sand, fat, yeast. The artist would devise and set in motion a process by which the chosen materials would be changed, often repeating the process over and over. I think I see similarities here with the way in which fractals are produced, but here we have something physical, an artifact, if only fleetingly, not an image of something virtually conceived.
Like to find out more? Try these links.
General
The Guggenheim Collection
The Tate Collection
Artists you might like to look at are: Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis and Richard Serra.
Haacker
Kounellis
Serra
Some days ago, surfing on the net, I came upon a blog extolling the primacy of process in all things art. I thought little of it at the time, and surfed on, but later thought more about it. Back a decade or two (or three) there was a vogue for process, not only in art, but in other fields also. (There may still be, for all I know.) In Education, for example, this translated as "How a person learns is what matters, not what s/he learns". "Process, not outcome," became the dictum. In other words, it is what happens to a person during the learning process that matters in the long run, that will decide what sort of a person s/he will become.
Following this dictum in art, the story is no longer told by the work, but of it. So what at first sight appeared to me to be a ventilation grill well overdue for cleaning, having layers of fluff adhering to its bars, became, when I was given its credentials, an object of vastly different kind: it was Idris Khan's photograph of the Qur'an'. He had scanned every page - nearly 2000 in all -into his computer and then digitally layered them to form a composite image. some say the result is beautiful. I do not go that far, but would say that knowing the story behind it, changes the emotional charge.
Cornelia Parker, you may recall, blew up a shed - or had it blown up, hopefully by someone who knew what s/he was doing. She presented the result as an installation, and intriguing it was, too. But knowing the means by which it was achieved added enormously to its impact. Simon Starling's boat seemed nothing extraordinary - until you were told that it was an ex-shed, and would be one again. It was said that his Shedboatshed was instrumental in gaining for him The Turner Prize.
There is in fact a whole genre called Process Art, has been since the 1960's. It was originally a reaction against minimalism. Its exponents chose transient materials, such as ice, wax, sand, fat, yeast. The artist would devise and set in motion a process by which the chosen materials would be changed, often repeating the process over and over. I think I see similarities here with the way in which fractals are produced, but here we have something physical, an artifact, if only fleetingly, not an image of something virtually conceived.
Like to find out more? Try these links.
General
The Guggenheim Collection
The Tate Collection
Artists you might like to look at are: Hans Haacke, Jannis Kounellis and Richard Serra.
Haacker
Kounellis
Serra
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