Alchemy

For many years, I would go to museums and stare at the Pollocks on the wall and think to myself I don’t get it. And that was the problem; I was trying to find a narrative. Certainly there are early Pollocks in which you can find figures, mythologies, symbols; but when he hit his late phase, the paintings become wholly about gesture, they are fluid, like a dance on a canvas. I finally ‘got it’ one summer in the Guggenheim Museum in Venice, standing in front of a painting called 'Alchemy’. The light reflecting off the canal was latticed through the window onto the floor. The heat of the day was deflected against the cool marble. Everything was sensation, movement, as in his painting. In that decadent Palazzo, Pollock suddenly made sense, in that I wasn’t trying to 'understand’ him anymore, his painting simply affected me in a way I couldn’t explain. This poem is about that damascene moment.

Alchemy

Guggenheim Museum, Venice

Just when I think nothing can move me,
room after room of Tintoretto, Veronese, Bellini,
the Virgin granting me her doleful eyes,
her pearly tears,

I enter a cool white palazzo,
find his huge canvas, which shows me the truth
of water and fire, in this place
of canals and candlelight, a city he never saw.

What he made was a world
in perpetual swirl, violent red, yellow bile,
the way the galaxy might look to a man stranded
in space, before science and logic takes hold.

And I stand before this picture,
the man who painted it
dead, like the masters shut away
in these palaces of art, their works their tribute;

wanting to pin beauty to the canvas,
dusty and flightless. But this picture lives, black
against the midday sun, legions of day-glo tourists
bobbing along the canal,

and I feel tears
welling up before I can make them stop.
I don’t know why; I’m tired,
vulnerable in my light summer clothes,

he and I foreigners to a faith
which isn’t ours: Christ on the cross,
the martyrdom of the saints, spelled out in
blood and gold.

New year’s resolutions?

The sculptor Henry Moore was perhaps most eloquent on the subject: ‘I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the year’s’. For the artist or writer, it is virtually impossible to set such restrictions on how to create, for so much of our practice is based on (I hate this word) inspiration. Inspiration is just a heightened term for not really knowing what is going to happen next, when suddenly, it just happens. There are writers who swear by schedules: you must be at your desk at a certain hour for a certain length of time, and in that time, you must produce a certain number of words; so that writing becomes like any office task. And that discipline works for some writers, although I would imagine it is more suitable for prose writers than for poets. Definitely not suitable for me; I have never been a disciplined writer. When I was working on my (still unpublished) novel, I would find twenty reasons not to be writing, perhaps because it felt too much like hard work. I have always responded best to spontaneity, writing myself to an answer when I didn’t know the question in the first place. In his poem ‘Lesson’, Eamon Grennan describes that moment:

and I began to understand
how a poem can happen: you have your eye on a small
elusive detail, pursuing its music, when a terrible truth
strikes and your heart cries out, being carried off.

I wish I could sit down at my desk every morning and start writing and know that by the time I get up again I will have something meaningful, something worth pursuing. Poets seem to be particularly slow and inconsistent workers in the artistic world. I have several theories about that (all of which apply to me): poets have short attention spans, they are lazy, they are not good at closure, their negativity leads them to believe that nothing they write is of any poetic merit (and that no one is reading their work anyhow, so what’s the point of continuing?).

But one thing is true for all of us. Time is the enemy of art. There is never enough of it. As Hippocrates said, ‘ars longa, vita brevis’. Editions of collected works by dead poets depress me, especially thin ones. There will never be more. I see myself in terms of page numbers. Neil Rollinson has a great poem about his anxiety over the open brackets after his birth date in anthologies. But at the risk of sounding terminally gloomy at the beginning of this new year and new decade, I recognise that Time is also what links me to the poets and artists I love who’ve come before (and those who will come after) and what lives of me in print will live beyond me (even when the brackets are closed).

And so, I will start the year with a quote from WG Sebald, which should stand to remind me why it is I do sit down at this desk every day (but not always at the same time), why the effort is worthwhile:

It was only by following the course time prescribed that we could hasten through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other.

The image is by Jasper Johns

Why I am not a painter . . .

although I have always wished I could be. In a place like Antibes you can’t help but notice the clarity of the light, the jewel-bright hues (not like the washed drab of London). You want to grab a brush rather than a pen; there are not enough words for ‘blue’ in the English language to do justice to sea and sky, it is so easy to drift into cliché. This is a landscape for painters, remade by Matisse and Miró and, of course, Picasso.

Perhaps painters don’t see the difference between brush and pen in the same way? Picasso was interested in the representation of things: ‘I want to SAY nude. I don’t want to do a nude like a nude. I just want to SAY breast, SAY foot, SAY hand and belly.’ His nudes are about the complexities of women as well as their appearance, his intellectual and emotional relationships with women.

‘Painting is just another way of keeping a diary,’ Picasso said. He came to Antibes in the summer of 1946 with Françoise Gilot and their young son, Claude, and was offered a studio in the Château Grimaldi (now the Musée Picasso). He immediately immersed himself in his work. Gilot recalled that he ‘spoke especially of the white light which brings out shapes rather than colours.’ But the colours are striking — as if the artist has emerged from darkness (the darkness of the war) giddy with the richness of everything around him. Even in still life (much more dramatic in French, nature morte; the emphasis on ‘death’ rather than ‘life’) his fish and flowers are buzzing with energy; the vivid spikes of les oursins. When asked what attracted him about sea urchins (which are everywhere still, on market stalls, outside restaurants) he replied ‘the eyes like being surprised.’

Perhaps it’s easier to capture happiness in paint than in print? Our host, Lynne Rees (aka ‘The Hungry Writer’) takes us to her favourite picture in the museum, Joie De Vivre, and poses that very question. And the painting is joyous, a celebration by the seaside. We know Picasso was happy in the months he lived in Antibes: the war was over, he was in love with Françoise and his little son, he was productive, he had a studio in a castle overlooking the sea.

Sometimes words aren’t enough for all that. And if we are unable to paint it, then perhaps it’s enough just to live it (and allow the eyes to be surprised) and store it in our memory for later …

http://www.antibes-juanlespins.com/eng/culture/musees/picasso/actualite/index.html

http://www.lynnerees.com/

Cedar nights

Another poem from my Jackson Pollock sequence, this one about the legendary Cedar Tavern in New York. ‘We often wrote poems while listening to the painters argue,’ Frank O’Hara said. There is nowhere in the world now where such a place could exist, tolerant and cheap and nondescript enough for artists to gather in that way (tolerant to a degree: Pollock was banned for tearing the door off the men’s room in a drunken rage).

Cedar Nights

Kerouac baptised the ashtray with his piss,
Rothko gazed into his glass, lost
in a haze of smoke (later he would slit

each arm, two razored lines, maroon on white),
while Gorky picked a fight with every stooge
who strayed within his reach (his wild eye,

hangdog face, peasant hands, the dreams
he couldn’t shake). De Kooning pontificated
over water (bastard) and by his lead

women shattered into pieces, all lips
and tits. Klein splattered the bar in black,
while dizzy Ginsberg’s angelheaded hipsters

swore, and sang, and toppled off their stools,
then hurled themselves into the negro streets;
Frank was brashly erecting something new

from shreds of Rauschenberg and Lady Day.
And Jack? He was painting up a storm,
(when he was sober), admiring his fame

from the summit of the Gods, until the night
she breezed into the Cedar, all ass
and attitude, looking for a guy,

and there he was, the prize, the mark, the Jack
of Hearts, the cover boy. She sidled over:
what’s a girl gotta do to get a drink?

The listening sea

To St Ives, with its twisting cobbled lanes and whitewashed cottages, for a retrospective of the artist Peter Lanyon. Unlike Hepworth or Nicholson or Gabo or most of the artists associated with the town, Lanyon was born in West Penwith. It was the landscape of his childhood, one he ‘knew in his bones’, according to John Berger. Berger says of Lanyon’s painting ‘Trevalgan’:

It is a painting, not of the appearance, but of the properties of a landscape: properties only discovered when one knows a place so well that its ordinary scenic appearance has long been forgotten.

And so into his landscape. From St Ives we drove along the coast to Zennor, stopping in the churchyard to find the graves of Patrick Heron and Bryan Wynter. We continued along to Gurnard’s Head, and made a visit to the pub, where WS Graham and Roger Hilton used to drink all night and then beg the long-suffering barmaid to cook them breakfast in the morning. Then to places I knew from Graham’s great poem-eulogy to Lanyon, ‘The Thermal Stair’: Levant and Morvah, with their worked-out tin mines that loom like ghost castles along the cliffs; Botallack, St Just, and then inland over the bleak, bleached-out wintery hills to Lanyon Quoit, that strange, ancient structure. These were the landscapes Lanyon painted, but as he said, ‘I paint places but always the Placeness of them.’

And we could find Lanyon’s palette in the landscape: the grey of slate, of smoke, of the sky on the verge of storm; the green of algae, of spring fields, of the ‘jasper’ sea (to steal a phrase from Graham); the white of chalk, of cloud, of wave-caps; the brown of cliff edge, of burnt heather. Once he took up gliding, his colours changed, became brighter, faster; racing blue, pure white, occasionally a bold strike of red as he reached higher and higher, not content with the familiarity of the ground, the contours of the land he knew so well. Gliding enriched him as an artist, but also brought about his early death, at the age of 46, in 1964.

Back to Graham’s poem, one of his most haunting and lovely, where the poet asks for a ‘thermal to speak and soar to you’, his dead friend. So many of Graham’s poems are about the search to find clarity through language, and here, he finds a common ground between the writer and the artist:

The poet or painter steers his life to maim

Himself somehow for the job. His job is Love
Imagined into words or paint to make
An object that will stand and will not move.

The poem is the object which will stand, as will Lanyon’s paintings and sculptures. These works ‘stand’ for a way of expressing landscape and our ‘stand’ as humans in the landscape. For Lanyon, the West Penwith coast wasn’t just a place of beauty, but a place of particular industrial history, the dark history of tin mining in the region. Lanyon talked about making a ‘pilgrimage from inside the ground’ to represent the lost mines, the dead miners. Lanyon said: ‘Images in painting do not stand for things. They are things.’

Tacita Dean writes of the shift in Lanyon’s work after he took up gliding: ‘his paintings begin to lose anxiety and something of the heaviness of earth and the old land.’ It was in the sky, she says, that Lanyon found his ‘elsewhere’. Graham understood this too. It was what they shared, an intimacy with the land, and the constant struggle to find a medium, and a ‘stand’ within that medium, to express how they felt.

Graham’s call to Lanyon is transformed into a tolling bell at the end of the poem:

Remember me wherever you listen from,
Lanyon, dingdong, dingdong from carn to carn.
It seems tonight all Closing bells are tolling
Across the Dutchy shire wherever I turn.

http://www.tate.org.uk/stives/exhibitions/peterlanyon/default.shtm

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=7508