Jackson Pollock, part 1

‘Part 1’ because this is the first of a series of posts on Pollock, a build-up to the publication of The City with Horns this Spring, which contains a sequence of poems on his life and work.

So why Pollock? There are many artists I like, many artists who have inspired poems. With Pollock I had the opportunity to create a narrative, many narratives. A story about a great American painter, some might say a tragedy. A love story, of sorts, about two painters (Pollock and Krasner) who argue until they’re near murder, but through all that passion and fury find a new language of painting. Krasner was an incredible artist, overshadowed by Pollock; more than anyone else she understood what he had discovered, and was able to bring discipline and sensitivity to his great swirling masses of paint, so it was an opportunity to tell her story too. And then there’s the mistress, the drinking, the car … It has the makings of a B movie, the kind of movie Pollock would have liked; it is a movie, but not starring James Dean, as Pollock himself would have fancied, even though Dean was never old and worn enough, and died long before he could age into the role.

Pollock became an actor, in those films by Hans Namuth where Namuth follows Pollock around the studio with his camera, charting every move as Pollock dips and drips and dives, like a butch ballet dancer. He fancied himself a cowboy, a rebel, an intellectual, a philosopher; and all those sides of Pollock, or guises, are evident in this picture, one of Namuth’s most arresting and beautiful portraits of the artist.

Portrait of the Artist as a Depressed Bastard

His brow’s a field of furrows,
his face half-cheek in shadow,
the night of the mind
descended, a silhouette of turmoil,
his cigarette mid-air.
Eyes too black, too deep,
and behind,
the ghost mutt
tails him, the whistling
in his head, nature somewhere
in the distance, crusted,
tinged with sleep.
And still he’s coiled
in the cross and weave of giant screens:
casualties, market shares, Burger King.

Apples

A walk round Metfield in Suffolk and its neighbouring farms. Hedgerows heavy with sloes, wild bullaces, and the last blackberries. But we were there to taste apples. Russet and Pippin and Spartan, but more unusual varieties too: Orange Goff, Orleans Reinette, Flower of Kent. Biting into my first Orange Goff, named not only for its colour but for its citrusy tang, I remembered Tacita Dean’s incredibly moving and beautiful film of the late Michael Hamburger and his orchard in Middleton (like a scene from Vermeer come to life) and WG Sebald’s description of ‘a few dozen diminutive crimson apples on the sill of [his] window darkened by the yew tree outside’. And these lines from Ted Hughes, Hamburger’s great friend and fellow apple lover: 'Through all the orchard’s boughs / A honey-colour stillness, a hurrying stealth, / A quiet migration of all that can escape now.’

http://www.waterlog.fvu.co.uk/dean.htm

http://www.metfield.org.uk/htm/MS_homeNEW.html

Time being

On the occasion of Linda Karshan’s retrospective at the Redfern, I wanted to post an essay I wrote about our collaborative project, Marks, which was published as a limited edition artist’s book by Pratt Contemporary Editions in 2007. Linda’s show features work from 1992 to 2010 and is on until 16th October.

http://www.prattcontemporaryart.co.uk/Linda%20Karshan/Karshan%20LOPF1.html

http://www.redfern-gallery.com/pages/artistinfo/16.html

23rd February 2005

A threat of snow. The sky’s light grey, strangely empty. Linda and I meet in the Oval late morning, each in our serious heavy-duty coats, go for a coffee near the station. We talk about real North American winters, the sort of cold that enters your bones, real snow. Not like here, where everything grinds to a halt with the first flakes. We talk about how artists and writers come together, sometimes easily, sometimes with difficulty, and decide we don’t want to plan anything. Nothing should be forced.

We drive south; through Brixton, Camberwell, Dulwich. The landscape changes from urban tower blocks and concrete, to 30s houses that dream of suburbs; that terrain which is so familiar to us of well-cared-for lawns and doormats that say welcome. Linda has mentioned before that she can identify with the childhood in my poems. America is about childhood for both of us now, since we have lived our whole adult lives somewhere else. I think of a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne:

The years, after all, have a kind of emptiness when we spend too many of them on a foreign shore. We defer the reality of life, in such cases, until a future moment when we shall again breathe our native air; but, by and by there are no future moments; or, if we do return, we find that the native air has lost its invigorating quality, and that life has shifted its reality to the spot where we have deemed ourselves only temporary residents. Thus, between two countries we have none at all, or only that little space of either in which we finally lay down our discontented bones.

My mother used to carry that quote inside her wallet, the paper brown and brittle, and so I knew it from very early on, before I had any inkling that one day I would be an expatriate, as Hawthorne was, as Linda is. I always wondered what it meant for my mother, who is 76 and has always lived in America. Could she somehow sense my future in it? She must have cut it out of an article published in ArtNews Annual in 1966, where it was in turn quoted by John Ashbery, writing on American painters in Paris. Later, driving home, Linda will tell me about her year at the Sorbonne, the excitement of Paris in the 60s, the time of the painters in Ashbery’s article, and how she knew it was the place for her, and I will remember that same feeling of arrival in the late eighties, when I first moved to London.

But that’s later. We park on a tree-lined residential street, Sunray Avenue (like Cornell’s Utopia Parkway) and I can’t guess where Linda is taking me. I follow her up the driveway of a family house with a bright pink corrugated metal garage door. It tilts open to reveal chairs, a mirror, a bicycle, a filing cabinet, stacks of boxes. It is a surprise, but later it makes sense to me, that you should have to pass through that space of memory and nostalgia, the contents of a family’s life, to get to Linda’s studio.

She takes me through another door, and we are in a small white corridor between the house and the back garden. We open another door and head up the garden path. Through the window, I can see into the kitchen of the house. Cluttered, with a big pine table. A woman is seated at the table, drinking her coffee, watching us. We walk past a trampoline, a child’s model fairy castle. There is snow lying on the tree branches, a light frost on the grass. At the end of the garden is a plain wooden building, with a small porch, like a Scandinavian hut. It looks at if it has travelled through the sky, landed here.

Linda opens the last door, Alice negotiating Wonderland, and we are in the studio. It’s like one of those spartan New England churches. Linda had mentioned the spiders, and how when she had arrived in the studio Monday morning, she found their webs matched one of her grids. And here are the webs, cross stitched into the beams. Linda had been wondering what she wanted me to see when I first walked in, and when she arrived in the studio Monday morning, she found what she wanted to show me was already there. And here are the pictures, the clean white of the paper against the studio wall, a halo of pinpricks around them, from other pictures that have occupied this space.

But I won’t talk about the pictures. What I write will talk about the pictures.

Linda pulls out other drawings from thick stacks in the corner, explains how one led to the next, which led to the next. Everything is chance. I tell her I’m reading Molloy. She has mentioned his sucking stones in her writing, and I’ve been trying to make sense of the reference. I get it now—the comfort of doing something you understand, you’ve done often. Something primitive, almost childlike. I pick up my copy, read her the line:

If you think of the forms and light of other days, it is without regret.

I already have an idea that this will be my beginning, as I look at the bright grey light that fills the studio. Everything is chance.

We spend the morning talking, looking at drawings, books. Feeling our way in. Thinking about progression. We drive to the Dulwich Picture Gallery to have lunch. There is snow on the lawn. We talk about Soane and how his buildings look like mausolea. Solid, irrefutable. Soane wanted to control space, the relationships of things inside a room. What Linda does is like the blueprint, a way of reading space. A map of the interior.

We go back to the studio, with Soane’s symmetry in our heads, read Donne’s ‘A Valediction forbidding mourning’ which ends with the line:

Thy firmnes makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begunne.

Then Linda starts to draw, and I watch her make the line down the centre of the paper, in her rubber gloves, like a surgeon halving the body with a scalpel. The precision of it. I know that this image will go into the poem, that moment of beginning, of entry. Here’s my beginning… Linda talks as she draws, she counts silently, she taps her foot. She tosses a drawing to the floor, it floats like a sail. She crosses the room, leaves her footprint on the paper as she passes. She takes up another paper, the same motions, the lines traced and retraced, she turns it over, finds the ghost of the drawing beneath, begins to trace the lines again. As I watch her, I am writing, just randomly, things I’m thinking, things she’s saying. The writing is coming out in short lines, almost following the motion of Linda’s hand. This feels right to me.

Before we go, Linda shows me a folder of work done by children who visited her Soane exhibition. They were asked to describe her drawings. One of them wrote:

There were spaces. They were made out of space.

We drive back north, through London in rush hour, but I am thinking of space, how difficult it is to leave the studio, return to the world of things. Linda makes this journey every day, from her home to the studio and back. A to B to A. The way we navigate our places, the way we move through space.

Something else one of the children wrote about Linda’s drawings:

The whole earth is like that.

Yes, it is.

The constructed space

Thinking about poetry and structure, in the wake of my writing workshop at the Fitzwilliam Sculpture Promenade. I had decided to name the session ‘The Constructed Space’ after the WS Graham poem of the same title. And that poem will always remind me of a weekend in St Ives with a group of poets: walking the cliff paths in Zennor, sitting in Barbara Hepworth’s garden after rain, talking about those extraordinary Wallis paintings where ships tilt in their harbours and sail up streets. After the Fitzwilliam workshop I ended up in Kettle’s Yard, looking at more paintings by Wallis and thinking about how everything is linked, certainly by memory, but also by what moves us and continues to move us.

And so back to Graham’s poem. The 'constructed space’ is the poem itself, but also the 'abstract scene’, the 'public place’ (those lines make me think of empty city squares with isolated figures heading in different directions, never to connect), and also communication, the words on the page reaching out to the reader, two speakers engaged in conversation. Even in that transaction, it is never certain that meaning will be conveyed, which is how I read the phrase 'lonely meanings’. But the attempt is all, and so he must continue in 'this abstract act’, the act of writing poems.

The painting is by Roger Hilton, Graham’s long-time friend and drinking companion. It’s called 'January 1957’. Hilton often titled his paintings with dates or months, as if he was trying to fix an impression or sensation in time. When I look at it I too think January, in all its cold greyness, parched fields and bleached skies …

The Constucted Space

Meanwhile surely there must be something to say,
Maybe not suitable but at least happy
In a sense here between us two whoever
We are. Anyhow here we are and never
Before have we two faced each other who face
Each other now across this abstract scene
Stretching between us. This is a public place
Achieved against subjective odds and then
Mainly an obstacle to what I mean.

It is like that, remember. It is like that
Very often at the beginning till we are met
By some intention risen up out of nothing.
And even then we know what we are saying
Only when it is said and fixed and dead.
Or maybe, surely, of course we never know
What we have said, what lonely meanings are read
Into the space we make. And yet I say
This silence here for in it I might hear you.

I say this silence or, better, construct this space
So that somehow something may move across
The caught habits of language to you and me.
From where we are it is not us we see
And times are hastening yet, disguise is mortal.
The times continually disclose our home.
Here in the present tense disguise is mortal.
The trying times are hastening. Yet here I am
More truly now this abstract act become.

Death becomes her

In her 1995 book Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet, Germaine Greer states:

Too many of the most conspicuous figures in women’s poetry of the twentieth century not only destroyed themselves in a variety of ways but are valued for poetry that documents that process.

And then she lists a roll call of poets from Plath to Sexton to Jonker to Tsvetaeva whose poetry could be described (as Greer puts it) as ‘elaborated suicide notes’. With Plath, the poetry and the desire for death are inextricably linked, so that dying becomes 'an art’ which the poet must practice again and again (she was successful in her third suicide attempt) until she achieves perfection.

These are the first four stanzas of her final poem, Edge:

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Is it the case that we are more attracted to Plath’s suicide and endless speculation over the reasons for it than we are to her poetry? Are we in love with the elegant, black and white photos of Anne Sexton, chain smoking, arms stacked with bangles, because we know her fate? And where are the male poets in this list? True, there’s Berryman and Weldon Kees (assuming he did jump from the Golden Gate Bridge, as his body was never found), but there appears to be a higher percentage of women if you start counting. And although you could argue that both Berryman and Kees wrote of the turmoil in their lives, it’s not obsessive and singular, as it was with Plath and Sexton. Their desire for death was their subject.

Is Greer correct when she suggests that in a literary world run by a male establishment that a woman poet had to 'make an exhibition of herself and ultimately to come to grief’? Is Plath saying to be great, to be placed in the pantheon of poets, you must be dead first? Certainly in her lifetime it was Hughes’s career which blossomed; in her death, she became a phenomenon. But not necessarily for her poetry …

Greer argues that today’s women poets will be largely forgotten 'because they fail to flay themselves alive.’ I think in our generation of poets, quite a few of us (both men and women) will be forgotten; as Anthony Thwaite so charmingly put it, 'we are too many’. Part of the reason is that our profession is not as highly regarded in Britain and America as it is in other regions of the world. Also, it is increasingly difficult to find a readership in the wake of so many celebrity biographies (which are often public self-flagellation), and during these tough times for publishing.

But I do take Greer’s point that it is more difficult to be noticed as a woman generally, unless you are wearing a dress made out of meat or describing yourself as a 'mama grizzly’ …

The image accompanying this post is from the current show of Josephine King’s paintings at Riflemaker: http://www.riflemaker.org/s-now#jose