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?                  

The Myth of Primitivism

There is a myth which has been part of Western Civilization since its birth: the myth of an earthly Paradise in which man lived in a state of nature. It has surfaced in several guises down the centuries, most notably, perhaps, in the sentimental but very persistent concept put forward by the eighteenth century philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, of the Noble Savage. However, towards the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century other influences began to work on it and reinvent it in ways that would make it attractive to artists and elevate the best of them to a status akin to High Priests of a new religion.
Sigmund Freud was one of those influences. His emphases on the subconscious and on the importance of understanding the instinctive side of human nature, together with the belief that our emotions, sensations and unconscious urges are the primary influences driving human behaviour, far more potent in that regard than mere rational thought, helped prepare the way for a sea-change in the thinking of artists who were already breathless from the blasts of a totally new kind of mountain air coming to them from the experiments of artists like Van Gogh and Gauguin. (Gauguin, of course, had already gone the extra mile and left the comforts of Western Civilization to live as a native on the island of Tahiti.) They were, if you like, the advance guard of those who would further the growth of the myth of the primitive.

In its maturity this myth would proclaim that each of the various indigenous races of the world received from its special ethos, a spirit superior in its spontaneity and an energy and a sincerity that none of the more civilized races, with their dilettantism and cultivated ways, could hope to match. Artists, most notably perhaps, Picasso, would in future look towards Africa and Oceania for inspiration - though not only there, for their interest would not be confined to "Negro" sculpture, but would branch out to encompass folk art and child art, seeing in them a directness and the immediacy of genuine feeling. But Picasso et al were doing more than just looking for inspiration, they were not only embracing the new, they were consciously and deliberately rejecting the cultivated, over-refined gentility of the old. The old art had sought to divert or instruct, but they were looking for one which sang with genuine, strong emotions. They were looking for, and finding, a new barbarianism.

It was probably no coincidence that there was at this time a painter at the height of his powers who was to achieve recognition throughout our Western Civilization as the only really great artist, coming from that civilization, ever to be blessed with a true genius for Primitivism. His was a genius unrecognized initially except by the other artistic geniuses of the day. Picasso, indeed,owned paintings by Henri Rousseau (called le Douanier and not to be confused with Jean-Jacques) at a time when almost no one else did.
Rousseau's paintings serve as exemplars of one particular form of Primitivism. He was exactly the kind of amateur or Sunday painter the Surrealists would later extol and whose work they would sponsor: a self-taught artist uncorrupted by formal training, one of Nature's geniuses whose eye could see further than the eyes of the trained artist. But this was in an earlier age and Rousseau was to die long before the Surrealist painters began to champion his art. He had been a regimental bandsman, who painted, in great detail, some unusually large and complex canvases of fabulous landscapes and animals from a vision which was simple, direct and completely naive. Not only that, but he painted them in strong, vibrant, unsubtle colours, using a technique that was plodding and unimaginative in the extreme, one very much on a par with a child filling in the colours in a painting book. He claimed that his life as a bandsman furnished him with his fantastic settings, which, he alleged, were of the forests of Mexico. It is now pretty generally accepted, however, that he didn't go to Mexico, and it is thought the animals were taken from books. These then are the characteristics, I would maintain, that distinguish this one form of Primitive painting: a) a simple, strong and individual, perhaps idiosyncratic, vision which is usually unvarying; b) a lack of formal training; c) strong, unsubtle colours; d) a lack of interest in visual authenticity; e) genuine feeling; and f) a piecemeal approach to "filling in" the canvas; g) much intricate detail or patterning. Of course, not all examples of this kind of Primitivism will comply with every one of my criteria. Whether there could be said to be a minimum standard for qualification for this category must be open to debate. How much and in which direction Rousseau influenced the new barbarianism cannot be calculated or clearly demonstrated, but it seems certain that his influence must have been enormous.

Most people, I imagine, understand the term Primitivism as applying to the art and artifacts of primitive - i.e. prehistoric or non-Western - races. This is a form of Primitivism quite separate from the one discussed above in that neither derives from the other. There may be on occasions a fortuitous similarity of appearance, but that is all. Perhaps here it would be worthwhile to mention that there is always an inaccuracy of some form in the attribution of the word Primitivism to an art form, an inaccuracy which in this instance is an ethnocentric one, often acknowledged by the insertion of quotes. In the sense in which we are using it here, the term was coined at the beginning of the Twentieth Century to refer to art forms which the West had not previously regarded as works of art. They were the products of the Near East, India, China and Japan, and were the subjects of Europe-wide Exhibitions and "Ethnographical Museums", which had appeared, bringing the works of these lands before the good citizens of Europe, but the motive had been part of the cult of progress, it had been to give to all and sundry a glimpse of the ground base from which our art had ascended, and to emphasize how far we had travelled. It was all in accord with the sentiments unleashed by Darwin's "The Origin of the Species", the sub-title of which was "The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life". These curiosities (as they were termed), these objects of alien strangeness were seized upon by artists looking to break out of the prison of visual truth and away from the rest of the sterile conformities which they considered had engulfed the art of the day. Into this category we must place, then the works coming from Oceana, Polynesia, Africa, Australia, The Noth West American Continent. We are talking of such artifacts as the monolithic heads of Easter Island, God-images from Hawaii, India and elsewhere, Maori carved and painted objects.

But there is another form to which the term Primitivism is applied: it is used to denote the work of an artist who is to all intents and purposes Western, and works in a basically Western tradition, but borrows from the art of indigenous peoples to a significant extent. Gauguin's paintings, with their extensive use of Tahitian motifs would fall into this category, which is probably the one most central to the development of modern art.

There are other examples which you might or might not think would be more appropriately included under headings already given. The Pre-Raphaelites, for example, breaking away from the West's obsession with visual appearance by looking back to the Middle Ages and re-introducing the use of the woodblock. Or the NeoPrimitives drawing from folk art and popular art in exactly the ways that others were drawing from indiginous art, and Paul Klee and Joan Miro doing the same from child art.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to remind ourselves that what they were all taking from these various sources was the one thing those sources always had in common: each its own individual grammar of motifs capable of the direct expression of pure emotion untainted by the need to consider visual appearances.

I personally have a predilection for those artists who fall into my first category, a fine example from nearer the present day, would be Stanley Spencer. He is often likened to William Blake, a comparison which I do not find convincing. Both he and Blake were very individualistic, not to say unique, but Blake had more philosophy driving his work. There is, I would argue, an obvious naivety about Spencer's work which is not so apparent in Blake's. Spencer's naivety was of a religious (and to some extent a sexual) nature. He lived most of his life in the small village of Cookham on the River Thames (where he knew absolutely everyone), and hardly ever left it, except to serve in Macedonia during W.W.I. and to work as a war artist in the Glasgow shipyards during W.W.II. He had the distinguishing vision of the genuine Primitive. In his case the vision was of Christ living in Cookham, joining in the life of the village and ministering to the villagers, Spencer's friends and neighbours, the characters who populated his canvases. He does not comply with all my criteria, having had four years art training at the Slade School, but I have no doubt that he was a genuine Primitive. I must own up to a long-standing passion for Stanley Spencer's work, but I have also included him for a somewhat more practical reason: you can see in the unfinished painting (in the black and white image)being worked upon by Spencer, something of his manner of working.There is a famous unfinished painting, the one he was working on when he died (and for which he left sixty working drawings), called "Christ Preaching at Cookham Regatta" which shows it very dramatically, but even in this small monochrome you can see that some characters have not yet had a drop of paint applied to them, whilst all around them the painting is nearly finished. It is a process not unlike fitting jig-saw pieces together.

Some might be surprised to learn that they are not quite an extinct breed, our Primitives. I learnt of one, previously unknown to me, a short time ago. He was featured in a magazine (I think "Country Life", to which magazine I am indebted for most of what follows) which I picked up to leaf through in a doctor's waiting room. His name is John Caple and he is from Sidcot, in Somerset, he was born in 1966, but has only been painting for ten years. His family has farmed in the Mendip Hills for generations and he is steeped in the mythology of that part of the world. It, and his ancestors and family members such as "Granfer Flinders", and local and family tales and legends, form the subject matter of much of his art which draws on the folk art of the area and the work of Alfred Wallis, a Primitive painter of Mystical subjects. Caple is totally self-taught. The titles of his paintings are suggestive: “Luvvy Garnet, Full Moon” (Luvvy Garnet was a lady in the village who walked through the narrow streets whenever there was a full moon while still fast asleep.) “Congregation, Somerset/Mother Prayer, Plymouth Brethren” (John’s maternal grandparents were part of the Plymouth Brethren, a religious sect based in the south of England.) and "Cheddar Quarry" are typical. He has designed numerous book covers for Penguin Books, including jackets to a recent edition of Roald Dahl's novels.

I do not doubt that he is a genuine Primitive as defined by my criteria, even though he does not comply with all of them. It is necessary to exert a little care here, though, for there are more pseudo-Primitives around than there are of the genuine article. Not just where the Rousseau-type, as I have called it, is concerned, but, for example, in the matter of fake and pseudo Aborigine works flooding the market as a result of the endeavours of disreputable agents.

You may think that I have over-emphasised he Rousseau-like individual at the expense of other types of Primitivism. Which would be correct: I have. I have been indulging what I admitted earlier on was a personal passion.

George Barker

Breakfast time last Saturday (19th of April '08) and as on most Saturday mornings at breakfast I open The Guardian to look for "The Saturday Poem". It is from Villa Stella. I read:

"The children are gone. The holiday is over.
Outside it is Fall. Inside it is so
quiet that the silence seems inclined to
talk to itself. They will not recover
the summer of seventy-seven again, even
though they become, in turn, their own children.

I sit in my sixty odd years and wonder
how often before in this old house a man has
sat thinking of what is now, and what was.
But can it serve a serious purpose to ponder
upon the imponderable? There, there beyond a
fall glimmers the long-lost garden

That garden where we, too, as in a spell
stared eye into dazed eye and did not see
that suddenly the holy day was over,
the flashing lifeguard, the worm in the tree,
the glittering of the bright sword as it fell,
and the gate closing for all time to be."


It is a magical moment, a déjà vu moment - and are not all deja vu moments magical in some way? The difference between now and before is that this time I know who wrote it: George Barker.
I came across the poetry of George Barker soon after I had begun to take a serious interest in poetry, but at that stage was in the seductive grip of Dylan Thomas (who famously dismissed Barker's poetry as "masturbatory monologues") and the still-fashionable T.S. Eliot, who had sponsored Barker's work. In fact, like a shopper at Blue Water on a Bank holiday, I was bumping into people at every turn, poets who seemed to be saying things that chimed with me at some level in some significant way. In the melee I decided that Barker's work was too intellectual for me. How come I thought he and not Eliot was too intellectual? Don't ask, for I have no sensible answer to offer you. It was several years later that in a magazine in a dentist's waiting room I read a passage from "Villa Stella". These three verses stayed in my mind. To me the final two have an almost undefinable beauty. I read them without knowing who had written them. When I came to the realisation that it was Barker, I knew I had some serious reading to do. End of story? Not quite, for I was still coming across poets and works faster than I could assimilate them. I must have been like a small child let loose to explore the great wide world on his own for the first time: what to have a go at next? Somewhere along the way George Barker was lost to view - until my déjà vu moment. Today I almost put him in the same bracket as W.S. Graham, in that he sacrifices linear logic and grammatical conformity to verbal and emotional extravagance. There is an slightly eccentric diction and a strong musicality. I say almost put him with W.S.Graham, for he is impossible to categorize; he belongs to no school.
It would seem that the world in general has treated Barker in much the same way as I have, for he was poorly received in the early days then encouraged by John Middleton Murray, which encouragement led to his first collection being published by David Archer's Parton Press, he was then promoted by T.S. Eliot, who, with one exception, would publish his work from then on. He became easily forgotten though, when the fashion changed. It would be nice to think that the analogy could come to be drawn more exactly with a revival of interest in his work. He became the youngest poet to appear in Yeats's Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and his two collections, "Lament and Triumph" and "Eros in Dogma", were to attract critical acclaim. Yet the promised "breakthrough" seems never to have happened. It is difficult to avoid asking why. We have been here before, I know, most recently in discussions of Ezra Pound and his work, but the thought will not go away that maybe the apathy is due, not to the poetry, but to the man. This, after all, is a poet who was thought by Yeats to be the finest of his generation, better than Auden and as rhythmically inventive as Gerard Manley Hopkins. Eliot seems to have been in at least partial agreement, for he initially rejected Auden, but apparently had no reservations where Barker was concerned. Could the fact that Barker's incipient popularity never did take off have had anything to do with his Bohemianism, his outrageous behaviour, his drinking and his proclivity for throwing heavy objects at guests and family - as, for example, when he threw a heavy ashtray at Elspeth, his second wife, for daring to venture the opinion that she hadn't enjoyed his most recent volume as much as the earlier ones? He fathered, according to one family member "around seventten" children by four women, though he was only married twice - to the mother of his first child, she being the first of his four long-term relationships, and to Elspeth, after the death of his first wife. He never divorced. In fact he didn't actually get around to leaving any of his lovers, preferring to drift in and out of relationships as he cooled towards one and (I suppose) warmed to the other. But he would pop back months later, unannounced, and expect all to be as he had left it. He once told the Sunday Times:" It is a woman's duty to be beautiful. When we have a civilized society, they will put down ugly and stupid women." There is much more, but you get the idea... Most of us would agree that such considerations should not influence our view of his poetry, but perhaps they do, by some sort of osmosis, get into the cells where judgements are made, for he has never been fashionable, and for someone so prolific, there is surprisingly little of his work to be found on the internet - and little enough biographical material. When I checked him out on Amazon they had a few books: one copy of his "Selected" (new), three "collected"s (new and used) and some copies of his "Street Ballads"; they also had 4 copies of biographical books and a copy of his "True Confessions". Not much, you might think, for a poet who was once highly regarded by the likes of Yeats and Eliot. "True Confessions" is a long autobiographical poem, and is the one not published by Eliot, who thought it too sexually candid for public taste. Maybe he was right, for when broadcast on radio by the B.B.C. it resulted in angry condemnations in parliament and in outraged accusations of pornography. It is the only book of his poems which Amazon has in plenty!
The fact is, though, that when the fashion was (as it still is) for a distant and ironic voice, when it was cool to be cool, when the trend was for linear logic, Barker wrote poetry that had much in common with Dylan Thomas's in that it was neo-romantic, exuberant and imagistic and had that commonality with W.S. Graham in being, yes, intellectually challenging, though perhaps more in its use (some would say abuse) of language than in its content. But not always. Here he is speaking of his mother:

To My Mother

Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
Under the window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
Irresistible as Rabelais, but most tender for
The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her -
She is a procession no one can follow after
But be like a little dog following a brass band.

She will not glance up at the bomber, or condescend
To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,
But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain
Whom only faith can move, and so I send
O all my faith, and all my love to tell her
That she will move from mourning into morning.

My own feeling is that you could trawl the archives of poetry for a long time and not find anything as movingly beautiful as "To My Mother" or those three verses from Villa Stella. But now, in somewhat different vein, some extracts from two poems dated 1934.
First, the opening two verses of

The Leaping Laughers

When will men again
Lift irresistible fists
Not bend from ends
But each man lift men
Nearer again.

Many men mean
Well: but tall walls
Impede, their hands bleed, and
They fall, their seed the
Seed of the fallen.

And some verses from:

Elegy Anticipating Death

Within abysmal catacombs lie
Branches of flame in darker trees,
The figures of precedented I.

As I under wander, these
Forms which crouch in alcoves
Clasping their cadaverous knees,

Glare down on me.
.................................................
Later comes:

A third in speaking knows it says
No sound; a fourth chews air; and another's
Loins lack love's artifices.

Numberless countenances all brothers
To mine confront me at each turn
So that I an dead in the death of others

Yet all are myself; here they learn
The ossified restrictions I
Foresee must make my spirit burn

Only the more intense, when the soul-racks die
Not to loose dust but to the icy
Pain of bone laid immovably.

Perhaps to remake a point already made, George Barker published twenty-two books of poems. Of the twenty-two Google turned up no references to four of them, and many of the references that I did find were to second hand book suppliers, ebay, to books out of print and to Antiquarian Books. Furthermore a high proportion of the references were to the title only, with no quotations from, or comments on, the book. It maybe that my searches were not as exhaustive as they could have been, but it seems inconceivable that I could have drawn as many blanks on any other poet of his status, even on one so out of fashion. The twenty-two works are:

Third Preliminary Poems. 1933
Poems 1935
Calamiterror 1937
Lament and Triumph 1940
Eros in Dogma 1944
Love Poems. 1947
News of the World 1950
The Truie Confessions of George Barker 1950
A Vision of Beasts and Gods 1954
The View from a Blind I 1962
Dreams of a summer Night 1966
The Golden Chains. 1968
Runes and Rhymes and Tunes and Chimes 1968
At Thurgarton Church 1969
Poems of Places and People 1971
In Memory of David Archer 1973
Dialogues 1976
Villa Stella. 1978
Anno Domini 1983
Collected Poems 1987
Seventeen 1988
Three Poems.

Bits and Pieces

No one told me..

I didn't know, until I read it in the paper the other day, that this is The National Year of Reading Shakespeare on behalf of which a national survey was commissioned to discover the preferred reading matter of 11 to 14 year olds. And guess what? Shakespeare did not come top. Not only that, but the bard escaped bottom spot only by the narrowest of margins, with homework pushing him up one place. First and second places were taken by Heat and Bliss, celebrity gossip magazine and teenage girls mag, respectively.

These unsurprising results were followed by the disconcerting "news" that most serious theatres are concerned that there is no source from which to replenish their existing audiences when, from one cause or another, these fall by the wayside.

All this led up to a consideration of how to interest the teenage youth in the Sweet Bard of Avon. (Why do we insist on referring to him as the bard, by the way? The one thing he never was, was a bard.) Putting him back in the school curriculum is ruled out, Tom Stoppard having been asked what he had thought of his first encounter with Shakespeare (which, as it happened, was Laurence Olivier's Hamlet), and having received the reply that it had bored him "shitless". (Not sure of the connection there, but I do know that I was put off Shakespeare at school, mainly by "The Merchant of Venice" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream". What wouldn't I have given for Laurence Olivier's "Hamlet"!)


There was much discussion of the various media available for communicating Shakespeare these days: opera, dance, radio, T.V., film, music, musicals... no mention was made of puppets or X boxes... but the most likely saviour, it was thought, was cartoons, particularly the Manga series, which are Japanese in style. Particularly, it was thought that the Japanese style of the Manga comics alongside Shakespeare's "funny English" would appeal to teenager Gothic tastes. The Classic Comics series was also thought to be a runner as these come in triplicate with a complete text, a "plain" text and a quick text". (There is also a no text version.)


I don't think the comic approach would have tempted-in many of the adolescents I have taught, though many of them, I am sure, would gladly have read them. But maybe the present teenage population.... maybe I am not well-placed anymore to judge. I would be interested to hear what others might think.

The comic page is from Richard III "plain" text.
Click on it to see larger size.

A Change of mind?

This is a follow-up to my post One man's meat is another man's Haiku, and has been occasioned by my discovery of a recently-published book by Maryanne Wolf, "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain". In my post I touched on the changes to a brain's structure that result from the process of learning to read, and how those changes vary enormously according to the type of reading matter being mastered. The example I took concerned how the structures resulting from learing to read an alphabet-based text such as English will differ from those in the brain of a person learning to read, say, Chinese, a visual encoding whose method is based upon the ideogram. One of my illustrations involved fMRI scans of the two brains. Wolf has a more powerful image which I would certainly have used had I been aware of it at the time: she tells of a bilingual man, a fluent reader in both English and Chinese, who suffered a disasterous stroke which destroyed parts of his brain, such that he could no longer read a word of English. His ability to read Chinese, however, was undiminished. She makes the point that reading is an unnatural activity, or as she puts it: "Our brains were never wired for reading." Reading was only ever made possible by the capacity of the neurons in the brain to forge new links in response to new demands being made upon the brain. This allows the language form being used to write a particular structure to the brain. Or as Wolf puts it: "We are what we read." I think that sums up quite succinctly what I was struggling to express in my original post.

A Subaltern's Love Song

Sad to hear of the death of Joan Hunter Dunn. I am sure many thought she was a fiction. As many as those who think John Betjeman was too light-weight or too jingly to be considered as a serious poet. Much of his work was maybe too light-weight and too jingly to have made of him a likely Poet Laureate, yet Poet Laureate he became. And there was more: he has been called parochial and passe and has been faulted for not doing the big themes - except for death. All of which is fair comment. He was not a nature poet, not a Wordsworth certainly, but perhaps his biggest crime has been that of becoming known for the wrong poems. A Subaltern's Love Song, would, I suppose, be regarded as typical Betjeman. And it is, but if that is to summarise what he achieved, it sells him short. He was best known for his nostalgia, his sense of place and of Victorian architecture in particular, even for his melancholia, but to my mind he was, above all, a poet of landscape, nearer to Crabbe than to Wordsworth. For me his best works are the poems from and of Cornwall and Ireland:

Stony outcrop of the burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
Where a stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe's Stone Age race.

He was also a splendid writer of blank verse and was happier with it than with prose. And what an incredibly lucky poet! How many others have been lucky enough to find a muse with a name like Joan Hunter Dunn? You couldn't even hope for it, could you? To what extent she was his muse, I am not sure, not in the same way that Maud Gonne was Yeats's muse, I think. To the best of my knowledge Joan Hunter Dunn inspired only the one poem (though I am happy to stand corrected on that), but Betjeman's muse is what she is, and I guess, will remain.