Stretching before and after

Helen Frankenthaler wrote of her 1972 painting, ‘Burnt Norton’: 

I was thinking about Eliot, making order out of chaos, of light and dark. Like Eliot’s poem, the painting’s simplicity is arrived at after a great deal of complexity. My work is never playful. This seemed at the time an especially serious and weighty picture to solve.

The resulting work seems to be a distillation of what she found in Eliot’s poem, deceptively simple in its reduction, until you learn that Frankenthaler worked on the grey-blue horizontal line that interrupts the brown near the lower edge of the picture for many weeks until she got it right. Is that line the ‘still point of the turning world’ that Eliot envisioned, something not fixed, but not static? The line hovers in Frankenthaler’s painting, ‘a white light still and moving’; it could be a body of water, a break in the relentless brown of the hulking shape that dominates the canvas – a dark mountain range. There is a dip, a view through to a lighter horizon tinged with rose (the exact colour of ‘dust on a bowl of rose leaves’), something seen but not quite reached. 

Eliot’s poem is about time, how from the present moment stretches both past and future. In Frankenthaler’s painting, it is tempting to see that line she struggled with for so long as the present, the dark mountain as the past, the rosy glow in the distance as the future. But that is perhaps too simple – a way of desiring meaning from a painter whose vision is never absolute. In that respect, Eliot is Frankenthaler’s perfect poet, dense and difficult in his subjects, but light and lyrical in his words. 

Walking around the current Making Painting show at Turner Contemporary, I was struck again by what a brave painter Frankenthaler was, how she took all those butch abstract expressionist movements and softened them. But that makes her sound uncertain, and her canvases are big, bold, exploring colour and light the way Matisse did, but with the lyrical focus of Monet (I found the show’s attempt at a comparison with Turner distracting – he’s not the first painter I would think of as an influence on Frankenthaler, although when you look at their approach to similar subjects, of course there are some similarities). A film of her working shows her kneeling over a huge canvas placed on the floor – the technique of Pollock’s which freed her. But unlike Pollock, all bravado and splash, her gestures are slow, deliberate. And yet she is not as famous as he is, although she deserves to be. You look at Frankenthaler’s work and see the whole scope of Color Field painting opening up with those first grand gestures. 

Frank O’Hara knew it. Eliot, for all his classicism, would not be the right poet to repay the compliment. O’Hara wrote of Frankenthaler’s work:

she is the medium of her material, never polishing her insights into a rhetorical statement, but rather letting the truth stand forth plainly and of itself.

But Eliot was more in my mind than O’Hara as I came out onto the front in Margate, thinking again of his efforts to connect nothing with nothing, and how Frankenthaler somehow nails it.

Rip it up and start again

 

The German artist Kurt Schwitters arrived in Britain in 1940, after fleeing Germany, where he was labelled a degenerate artist by the Nazis, and then Norway, after the German invasion of that country. Schwitters’s practice was to make new things from the fragments of what had come before: refuse, found materials, abandoned scraps. To describe this work, he coined the term ‘Merz’:  

I call[ed] my new manner of working from the principle of using any material MERZ. That is the second syllable of Kommerz [commerce]. It originated from the Merzbild [Merzpicture], a picture in which the Word MERZ, cut out and glued-on from an advertisement for the KOMMERZ-UND PRIVATBANK [Commercial and Private Bank] could be read between abstract forms …  

Schwitters was always interested in words, but not necessarily in their meaning. Like all of his Merz works, he liked to cut up words, reconstruct them, present them in fragments, so a glimpse of a phrase might catch your eye, divorced from the rest of the text around it. He liked the shapes of letters, and typography, so he could find pleasure in the simple grid of a bus ticket or the bright graphic of a candy wrapper. What strikes me about his collages is that they construct a narrative of his movement through Europe – some of them contain texts in German, Norwegian and English – so that they become emblematic of the urban experience, not just in their frantic energy, but in their mix of words: a kind of artistic melting pot.    

 

There are also his ‘sound poems’, which when viewed on the page look like Finnish on acid but are actually not a recognisable language (which made me wonder if the Icelandic band Sigur Rós had come across them when inventing the language of their lyrics). The greatest of these is the Ursonate, or sonate in urlauten ( which translates as ‘primordial sonata’ or ‘sonata in primordial sounds’). Schwitters left instructions for reciters of the 30-page work, mainly advising on the correct pronunciation of the letters. Perhaps the most important of these interpreters is the Dutch poet Jaap Blonk. But we also have recordings of Schwitters himself reciting the poem, sounding like a deranged exotic bird:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X7E2i0KMqM 

 

How to process the world he had known, the destruction of Europe through two catastrophic wars, the experience of being made homeless and turning up in a foreign country, grappling with an unfamiliar language, always being alien (for even in Germany, he was different)? Perhaps the Ursonate is the only acceptable response – the world is nonsense, impossible to fathom. We just have to make sense of it as we can. And, to paraphrase Eliot, we must shore our gathered fragments against ruin.

Schwitters ended up in rural Cumbria, creating a Merzbarn (he would have liked the fact that after his death, part of it was lifted away and transported to Newcastle – a very Schwitters-like intervention). But he also painted conventional landscapes and portraits to earn a living – these are completely ordinary, boring even, without a hint of the concerns of the more radical artist and thinker. In that respect, perhaps he did understand what he had to do to settle in and become one with the English. A collage work created in this period is interesting in that it is one of the few in which the text is meant to be read and understood: these are the things we are fighting for. 

  

The Ursonate in full here: http://www.costis.org/x/schwitters/ursonate.htm

Schwitters in Britain is at the Tate until 12^th May: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/schwitters-britain?gclid=CJrd7tzRu7UCFabLtAodEFoAuA

The shadowy cave

I continued my tour of faded seaside resorts this weekend with a trip to Margate. We had intended to visit the new Turner Contemporary Art Gallery, only to discover that they are currently between exhibitions. So after a mooch around the gift shop, we were at a loss as to what to do – we’d already had our lunch, and the wind was strong enough to prevent us from walking along the front (although Robert was keen to see the shelter where Eliot wrote ‘On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing’). And then I spotted a flyer advertising the famous Margate Shell Grotto. The others were less enthusiastic about the prospect, it has to be said, but since we were in Margate on a blustery grey Sunday afternoon with nothing better to do, they went along with it.  

I am a fan of a good grotto, as celebrated by Pope and Akenside. But my interest is not exclusively poetic; it stems from a fascination with caves and crevices and (especially) catacombs. Anything subterranean, hidden, possibly forbidden. A shell grotto has that extra dimension of obsession; the one in Margate incorporates 4.6 million shells, the leaflet proudly declaims. Shell grottos represent a single-minded and rather insane venture; they are without any real value apart from novelty – a kind of outsider installation art on a grand scale.  

And it’s a great word, grotto, suggesting both “gritty” and “grotty”. I was excited to find this piece on the derivation of the term on Wikipedia:

The word comes from Italian grotta, Vulgar Latin grupta, Latin crypta, (a crypt). It is related by a historical accident to the word grotesque in the following way: in the late 15th century, Romans unearthed by accident Nero’s  Domus Aurea on the Palatine Hill, a series of rooms underground (as they had become over time), that were decorated in designs of garlands, slender architectural framework, foliations and animals. The Romans who found them thought them very strange, a sentiment enhanced by their ‘underworld’ source. Because of the situation in which they were discovered, this form of decoration was given the name grottesche or grotesque.

And who wouldn’t want to visit Nero’s underground chambers?! Although as we walked up the hill, away from the sea and Margate’s small concessions to tourism, the streets became less appealing, grotesque in their own way. There were a few guys sporting neck tattoos and cans sitting outside a dilapidated cafe. There was a scappy, treeless park. My companions were even less certain, but no one suggested going back. We had come so far, a whole ten minutes from the sea front.  

The Margate Shell Grotto is no doubt less grand than Nero’s digs, but impressive nonetheless. At one time the chambers would have been gas lit, which would have added to their eerie quality, but even with the few electric lamps, the grotto was wonderfully creepy. The other couple who had ventured there (possibly by accident, having rolled up at the Turner Contemporary as we had) were keen to show us the odd acoustic trick they’d discovered. The man made us stand under a dome with a small round skylight (a diorama of passing clouds, like a James Turrell), the only source of natural light, while he passed through the adjoining chambers, demonstrating his Mongolian throat singing abilities. The strange, disembodied noise caught in the dome, which acted as a sort of stereo speaker. In the upper display room was a black-and-white photo of a séance held inside the grotto at the turn of the century. The woman behind the gift shop counter introduced us to her three-legged Siamese cat. The place was a perfect fit for a sort of Aleister Crowley-type occultism, complete with capes and spells, and I wondered if Crowley had ever visited (after all, he ended up in Hastings, just further along the coast). Robert also reminded me of the Romantic fad for hermits, who would often hole up in grottos or follies. I wondered too if Eliot had wandered off the beaten track as we had, away from his solitary shelter on the front, and discovered that odd underworld …

photo courtesy of Amy Stein

Wilder shores of love

I can think of no other recent painter whose work has been so intricately and delicately linked to poetry than Cy Twombly, who died yesterday at the age of 83. Incised directly into the paint in pencil are snippets of Keats and Rilke and Eliot, his ‘gauche scrawl’ (as Barthes called it) often compared to graffiti; but his ‘scrawl’ is more considered than that – like notes, like the artist reciting beautiful words that come back to him while painting, and then whispering them to us, his gestures meeting those of the great poets he loved. He said that painting was a ‘fusing of ideas, fusing of feelings, fusing projected on atmosphere’ – the way these phrases float up to the viewer from the turbulent surfaces of his canvases. He was an artist who looked to the old world of Europe rather than the new world of America – surrounded for most of his adult life by the ruins of Rome, their grand inscriptions fragmented, worn away.

Those small snippets of poetry are like coded messages, a chart of the artist’s moods and desires, often mixed with scatological sketches of cocks and cunts (there the comparison to graffiti seems apt – his canvas like a blank wall waiting to be defiled). Twombly was drafted into the US army in the early 50s and assigned to the department of cryptography. At the same time he experimented with drawing blind, at night, to try and ‘unlearn’ what he had been taught. The paintings are there for us to work out – he gives clues, but no answers. We have to meet him in the dark.

I wrote a poem in response to the ‘Inverno’ canvas of his great ‘Quattro Stagioni cycle. It is for me is the most poignant, the most secretive of his seasons; sparse words obliterated by a storm of black and yellow veiled in bright white – like snow, like the sky wiped clean by coldness. Nicholas Cullinan describes it as a ‘mist of sorrow’. I wanted my poem to tell a story in fragments, ‘in a language no one understands’. The link to the poem at Tate Etc. is here:

 http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue16/potmjuly09.htm

The blank page

Pristine.  A field of white, like the first snowfall, undisturbed.  You almost don’t want to spoil it with words.  Especially when you are having an “inarticulate” day, when the words aren’t flowing, for whatever reason (in my case, sheer tiredness, a slight hangover, end-of-week malaise). So why do we force ourselves to write when we have nothing in particular to say? Perhaps out of fear of drying up completely. We are desperate to get something, anything, down on the page. The old writers’ trick of “automatic writing” is supposed to produce results if you keep writing past the banal, the completely obvious. But I’ve never been very good at that. I am an excellent self-censor.  Poetry is about shape, concision; so over the years I have learned to whittle my words down to the essential.  Writing a novel was a painful, prolonged (and sometimes very boring) process, during which I came to this conclusion (one I think I’ve mentioned here before, as if to prove my point): poets have short attention spans. They see the world in phrases, they reduce narratives to one striking scene. They are terrible at telling jokes, because they always leave out a vital piece of information. And famously, they can’t drive, because driving requires linear logic, which poets don’t have (they are always thinking about the road not taken).

I have been talking about writers’ block recently with a few of my students, and ways to shake yourself out of it. My top tip has always been to take a line or phrase from another poet (I see it as more of a dialogue than out and out theft). And anyway Eliot thought it was ok:

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.

 My other trick is to take an image, usually from my enormous box of postcards that I have hoarded over the years, and just start writing (kind of like automatic writing, but with a visual prompt). For me this nearly always works. I suppose both methods are about accepting outside stimuli; getting you out of your own head, your own broods and concerns. 

One of the reasons writers’ block is so terrifying must be the term itself, which suggests something large and solid and impassable, like a boulder. A blocked entrance, a blocked drain; blockage being the thing that prevents flow, passage. That analogy suggests that during the times when a writer is not blocked, words come easily, swiftly, but my experience has always been that poems move slowly, like giant ancient tortoises, so those moments of simply sitting in front of the computer waiting for something to happen are far longer than the moments when actual writing occurs. And so, I have become fairly relaxed about the times when I’m not writing. I am aware of storing ideas in my brain, filing them away for later, when I will be perhaps more alert to their demands.  

Maybe the block is partly inertia. The news in Libya and Japan feels too vast to take in properly at this stage; in the face of such strange and horrible facts maybe the poem feels too fragile to hold our shock and helplessness.

The image is of works by Robert Ryman.