More ruins

Why is it that a pile of stones can make us so emotional? Think of the great abbeys toppled, mansions abandoned, the kind of ruin that represents the decline of the mighty and powerful. Then think of the modest shacks of Haiti razed to the ground, families picking through the pulverised remains of their homes. Or the Gaza Strip, or Basra, or Kabul, anyplace where war has created the kind of ruin which is instant and total and unsalvageable (not like the graceful ageing process of slow decline). Or the most cataclysmic, devastating and recognisable ruin of our age: the site of the former World Trade Centre in New York (I have never liked the phrase Ground Zero, which suggests that nothing was there to begin with). We encounter ruin everyday in our lives as city dwellers: empty office blocks like bulky ghosts, or crumbling houses, foreclosed or squatted. We become so accustomed to ruin as a normal state that we cease to notice it, so when a new building appears and alters the horizon, we can’t remember what was there before (although chances are we walked past it often enough). But there is still a sense of regret; these are the things we have built, and nothing is permanent, not even our efforts to make something of lasting value.

In perhaps the greatest ‘ruin’ poem of the last century, The Waste Land, Eliot gathers ‘fragments I have shored against my ruins’. The assembling of those fragments, those histories, myths, voices and places, is the poem itself, the monument he hopes will save him and his world from destruction. But in the ‘unreal city’ he portrays, destruction is present everywhere, and so what he seems to be saying is that we can gather our words around us, but nothing will stop the slow creep (sometimes immediate blow) of devastation.

The image is Athanor by Anselm Kiefer 

Outside the box

 

A weekend of books, but not just any books. First, to the Research Group for Artists Publications Small Publishers’ Fair at Conway Hall, where international presses displayed their wares: pamphlets, prints, cards; as well as books, bound in board or leather or fabric, hand-sewn or stitched, or loose-leaved, or accordioned, some which popped from their boxes like springs, some which scattered their disparate pages like an attic of mementos. What these publishers and artists and poets have in common is the desire to prioritise the book, so that it becomes not just a container for words and images, but an object in its own right, as important and as memorable as what it says and shows. These are books which make themselves awkward, which do not sit vertically on shelves, which ask to be displayed like sculptures, to be opened from different vantage points. They force the reader to do more than ‘read’; they are about participation, working out how ‘word’ and ‘meaning’ and ‘gesture’ and ‘vision’ are linked, are indivisible.

And then to the Poetry Library’s open day, to see poets working in a diversity of strategies and ideas: computer poetry, concrete poetry, Oulipo techniques, patterned poetry, collaboration, chance operation, etc. And again, the idea that the book should not be secondary to its contents. Here are a few thoughts from Ulises Carrion, from his essay on The New Art of Making Books, originally printed in Kontexts no. 6- 7, 1975:

A book is a sequence of spaces.
Each of these spaces is perceived at a different moment – a book is also a sequence of moments.
A book is not a case of words, nor a bag of words, nor a bearer of words.

And this from Rick Myers, who talks about the concept of the ‘portable museum’:

I have been exploring the book as a format for this portability, for words and images, and when the contents of the pages have spilled over into three dimensions it has been necessary for the container to do the same … A box is a perimeter for space, for isolation of content, accumulated, often lying in darkness waiting to be revealed and considered …

It was the boxed editions which I found most exciting: lifting the lid on the unknown, a world in an enclosed space, like a walled garden. It takes me back to Bachelard, once again, the idea of the house as a receptacle for memory, the place where our memories are housed. ‘Intimacy needs the heart of a nest,’ he says. The book is like a nest that we crawl into …

As a poet, the idea that the poem can fly beyond the boundaries of the page is liberating; to know that there is a world of poets and artists making objects which are books, but also go beyond the confines of what we understand as a book, gives me hope. In an age when we are constantly being told that the book is dead, isn’t this an ethos for its revitalisation and renewal?

The image is a work by the book artist Georgia Russell.

http://www.rgap.co.uk/index.htm

http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk

http://www.englandgallery.com/artist_group.php?mainId=32&media=Constructions

Things being various

As seen in Aberystwyth this summer. Having just discussed the tawdry splendour of Asbury Park, it seemed appropriate to mention Aber. Aber is, of course, much grander than AP, being a strange mingling of seaside resort and university town. But the first time I visited and strolled along the front, it was oddly familiar, comforting even. I knew where I’d washed up; I could face west and scan the Atlantic for signs of home.

There’s something comforting too about knowing you can get chips with just about anything; the heady scent of salt and vinegar that fills the air (and mixes with the salt of the sea), unlike the sickly sugar-spun cotton candy and toffee popcorn atmosphere of the Jersey shore.

Thinking about the various permutations of chip suppers available in this picture also reminds me of a lecture given by the architectural critic Jonathan Glancey on ‘found poems’ in London, illustrated with slides showing blackboards outside cafes offering similar permutations (adding tomato, bacon, fried bread, black pudding, etc. to the equation), but also the destination boards on the fronts of buses, City street names like Threadneedle and Cheapside and Puddling Lane.

I’ve managed to move from the Jersey shore to the Welsh coast to the centre of London in just a few short sentences! These places are linked for me by my movements through them, and away from them (as Bachelard says, 'our past is situated elsewhere’). I carry little snippets of these places with me, my mental scrapbook, and I spread them before me when I think of ideas for poems. There are endless permutations …

The pleasure of ruins

Someone came up to me after a reading once and said you’re obsessed with abandoned buildings. Until then, I’d never thought about the disturbing number of poems set in ruined or desolate structures, but once it had been pointed out, I decided to explore the reasons. I don’t know how common this is, but I have a recurring dream of returning to my childhood home, in the dream in ruins, although I know the layout of the rooms intimately, as if the map of the house is ingrained in my feet. Gaston Bachelard writes about ‘the land of Motionless Childhood’, contained in the house we grew up in, which is 'physically inscribed in us … each one of its nooks and corners a resting-place for daydreaming.’ I suppose I didn’t start having the dream until I was well into being an adult, until the house was long-closed to me. The house is still standing, but much altered, and I suppose I wouldn’t really like to go back. As Bachelard says, 'the first, the oneirically definitive house, must retain its shadows’. And besides, the house stands in another country far away, a country I hardly visit these days, a country I haven’t lived in for over twenty years. A country which is foreign to me. So the fact the house is a ruin in my dream may have to do with the old cliché of 'burning bridges’, the brutally true statement of Thomas Wolfe’s: you can’t go home again. But Bachelard says you can, through dream and memory, the way we carry aspects and angles, scents and shapes with us always (for Bachelard, it’s a deep cupboard which retains 'the odour of raisins drying on a wicker tray’). Also, there is no denying that the poet has hit middle age, with all its threats and petty gripes; if the circus animals haven’t deserted me yet, sometimes they seem to be just visible through the haze, bobbing up and down on the merry-go-round in Asbury Park that I used to ride on as a child.

Asbury Park was already crumbling when I was little, once a thriving seaside resort which eventually fell out of favour and was left to decay. Although it was in no way romantic or imposing, like Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, I loved the air of somewhere forgotten, somewhere that was hard to love. That may be why I like Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of ancient storage silos and water towers (as a child, I was also obsessed by water towers, the old-fashioned wooden ones you used to find near barns or atop buildings, the kind that Rachel Whiteread recently immortalised in New York), always in black and white, suggesting an industry which had been superseded. Asbury Park was always a sad place, even when the sun was shining. And that sadness was extremely attractive.

I’ll return to this subject, obsession that it is for me, very soon … in the meantime, links to sites which feature the work of the photographer Camilo José Vergara, whose book American Ruins is one of my favourites:

http://www.slate.com/id/2241211/

http://invinciblecities.camden.rutgers.edu/intro.html

photo credit of 'Tillie’, on the side of Palace Amusements in Asbury Park:       Andrew Mills/ The Star-Ledger

Slow world

The painter Ian McKeever says this about the process of photography:

’ … one begins with the fullness of what is seen in the world, looking through the view finder of the camera. This is then reduced, first to black and white, then to light and shadow. It is a process of distilling and stilling.’

This could also refer to the process of writing poems. Poets (like artists or photographers) develop innate view finders which allow them to focus on what is essential. The poem is the reduction of that focus, distilled and stilled, sometimes so much so that a single object loses clarity, becomes an abstract of itself. That’s what I find in McKeever’s photographs; a way of developing which exaggerates light and shade, which makes us see the shadow rather than the thing which casts it.

McKeever photographs interiors. There are windows in his rooms, but they are never visible. The shadows of their panes are cast over walls and chairs, a hint of an outdoors which can never come indoors. In his rooms it is always late afternoon, there are never any people.

Writing this suddenly makes me think of the poem ‘Snow’ by Louis MacNeice. I like the 'suddenness’ of my recollection, because his poem is about a 'sudden’ vision:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay window was
Spawning snow and and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

Both a photograph and a poem slow the suddenness of the world, stretch an instant to something timeless. MacNeice said that 'Snow’ was 'almost a piece of factual reporting … I was in fact on the day which occasioned the poem sitting in my room beside an open fire eating tangerines and there were roses in the window and outside it did begin to snow … What excited me was the sudden awareness that all these things were going on at the same time in their own right …’ The photograph too is a piece of factual reporting: this light on this wall at this hour.

As I look out the window where I sit, no snow, but a light mist of rain.

http://www.ianmckeever.com/
http://www.artofeurope.com/macneice/mac5.htm