Word as image

From a distance, Alice Attie’s drawings (which I came across for the first time this weekend at the London Art Fair) resemble tornados, storm clouds, funnels – swirling gray patterns committed to paper in a spidery hand. You have to get up close, practically put your face against them, to see that her patterns are shaped through minute letters, meticulously hand-drawn. I think of medieval monks patiently transcribing texts into tiny missals. The image I’ve shown here is comprised from the whole of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in Ulysses, forming a continuous circle of longing, a full moon, a breast.

Do we call these extraordinarily delicate works ‘art’ or ‘literature’? Can we ‘read’ them, or are we meant to see them from the perspective of distance, so that words blur into image, become something more than recognisable letters? Can we ascertain meaning simply from the patterning of words? In answer to the latter question, yes, to some degree poetic form can make an impression before we even begin to read the poem. The reader knows a sonnet by its shape, a box to contain an elegy or a declaration of love or a meditation on devotion. The broken, indented lines of a Jorie Graham poem suggest a mind at work, the process of thought detailed on the page, with all its hesitations and diversions.

The importance of shape, of using the whole page, even the white space and its implied silence and stillness, is something both poets and artists have in common. It is this convergence that Attlie’s work explores so lyrically.

A piece which explores the links between poetry and sculpture is now on the South African web journal of poetry and photography Incwadi:
http://incwadi.wordpress.com/imaged-a-space-to-explore-the-interaction-of-word-and-image/

More images of Alice Attie’s work can be seen on the Foley Gallery website:
http://www.foleygallery.com/artists/artist_ins.php3?artist=30

Exorcizing traumas

The Maison de Balzac is a modest house surrounded by a small garden in the 16th arrondissement. It is, like other writers’ homes in cities (I’m thinking of both Dickens’s and Keats’s houses in London), a surprise to find intact, among the low-rise Deco blocks of Passy. The guide describes it as an ‘intimate setting’ for the exhibition we are about to see; not so much “intimate” I think as dark and relentlessly gloomy, an appropriate atmosphere for Balzac’s emotional tragedies.

Louise Bourgeois chose the house not just as a location but as an active element, a corresponding narrative, for her current installation (her last major work before her death) based on Balzac’s novel Eugénie Grandet. Bourgeois says of the novel, ‘I love that story. It could be the story of my life.’ In Eugénie’s life, Bourgeois sees ‘the prototype of the unfulfilled woman. There can be no blossoming for her.’

In her etching ‘The Smell of Eucalyptus (Ode to Eugénie Grandet)’, Bourgeois has written phrases in pencil (in a small shaky hand; the hand of the elderly artist, but also the voice of the oppressed woman hardly able to speak her suffering) which emanate from tendrils, like random thoughts. The text reads as an accompaniment to Balzac’s; a poem chronicling lost opportunities:

I have never grown up
I am standing near the window
I have spent my life making curtains
to hide the dirty glass
I have spent my life making curtains
while watching the building across the way
I have spent my life waiting …

The litany of misery continues, the phrase ‘I have spent my life’ repeated again and again, a chant of regret; “spent” suggesting occupation (the making of curtains, the washing of dishes, the shortening of dresses) but also a price paid, something used up. Bourgeois writes ‘I have spent my life making a trousseau / I who have never been trussed up’.

In the next room are small needlepoint works, some which hold plastic flowers in their stitching, one which arranges a into a circular pattern simple dressmakers’ hooks, like dangerous barbs. These are domestic objects stranded in this strangely empty and cold domestic space, the last sad statement of an artist who achieved greatness in her work, but whose final piece relates a story of unfulfilled hopes.

Balzac had an unhappy childhood, and attempted suicide as a young man. He suffered from chronic health problems for most of his life, struggled through periods of debt and personal trauma. There is a darkness that hangs over his house and that permeates his novels, his view of humanity. In the same room as the desk where he created stories that would ‘arrive at the truth’, Bourgeois has written:

My work is a succession of exorcisms. There you have the real motivation of what I do. Every morning when I start work I exorcize a trauma – it’s not too strong a word. But this isn’t something you talk about, it’s something you do …

This is the first of two posts about current exhibitions in Paris. My companion was Vici MacDonald, former editor of Art World magazine, aka ‘Art Anorak’: http://twitter.com/artanorak

‘I, Eugénie Grandet’ is on at the Maison de Balzac until 6th February 2011. Here’s a piece by Phillipe Dagen which appeared in the Guardian earlier this month:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/jan/04/louise-bourgeois-eugenie-grandet-review

A short stroll

‘The rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it.’

(Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit)

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

(‘Tea at the Palaz of Hoon’ by Wallace Stevens)

'A walk is just one more layer, a mark,
laid upon the thousands of other layers of
human and geographical history on the
surface of the land. Maps help to show this.’

'A walk traces the surface of the land,
it follows an idea, it follows the day
and the night.’

(Richard Long, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, 1980)

'What justification is there for comparing a poem with a walk rather than with something else? I take the walk to be the externalization of an interior seeking so that the analogy is first of all between the external and the internal. Poets not only do a lot of walking but talk about it in their poems: 'I wandered lonely as a cloud,’ 'Now I out walking,’ and 'Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day.’ There are countless examples, and many of them suggest that both the real and the fictive walk are externalizations of an inward seeking. The walk magnified is the journey, and probably no figure has been used more often than the journey for both the structure and concern of an interior seeking.’

(‘A Poem is a Walk’, A.R. Ammons)

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

(Paul Klee)

The poet’s process

I have had a particular postcard on my desk for many years, a bit yellowed now. It was originally sent to me by the late Richard Caddel, who was at the time the co-director of the Basil Bunting Poetry Centre at Durham University library. It lists Basil Bunting’s advice to his students in Newcastle in the early 1970s. Like Bunting, I have passed this on to my students; over the years I must have shared this with nearly 300 beginning poets. It remains for me the best advice on how to write a poem:

I SUGGEST

1. Compose aloud; poetry is a sound.
2. Vary rhythm enough to stir the emotion you want but not so as to lose impetus.
3. Use spoken words and syntax.
4. Fear adjectives; they bleed nouns. Hate the passive.
5. Jettison ornament gaily but keep shape.

Put your poem away until you forget it, then:
6. Cut out every word you dare.
7. Do it again a week later, and again.

Never explain – your reader is as smart as you.

What poets must achieve is the ‘congruence of line and sense’, to quote another Newcastle-based poet, Sean O’Brien, who spoke on the poet’s process last night at the launch of the new issue of Poetry Review at the Freeword Centre in London. To balance form and content is the challenge in every poem, and each poem presents a different set of challenges. The poem is a jigsaw puzzle, a formal maze, a crossword, a mystery to be solved …

Poetry makes nothing happen

That oft-quoted line of Auden’s came into my head again this morning. Oft-quoted, but so often out of context. Here are the lines in full, from ‘In Memory of W.B Yeats’:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

What Auden is really saying is that poetry isn’t like gunfire or a bomb blast, it cannot change the world beyond recognition (like war can) but it survives violence and strife to give us something to believe in when it is hard to believe there is anything left. It is a way of finding meaning, keeping sane in the modern world. Auden was writing in memoriam to Yeats, whose ‘gift survived it all’, whose political commitment was never separate from his poetry, whose poetry is still spoken and read today.

I thought of Auden and that poem this morning while listening to Congressman Raúl Grijalva on the radio talking about ‘civility’ in the wake of the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Congressman Grijalva said it is ‘civility that is needed in both our discourse and our debate.’ He went on to say ‘words have meaning’; it is the discourse of hatred that has brought about the horrendous state of affairs in America today. The shock jocks, the teabaggers, the birthers are fighting their campaign with words – angry, bilious words. Words are not guns, but they can fire the imaginations of those who carry them.

And conversely, words can provide solace in times of financial despair and continuing war. It is language and discourse (and poetry) that make us civil. Auden wrote those lines for Yeats in 1939. Later in that year he would write a poem commemorating the start of WWII on September 1st. Here are the last two stanzas:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Sixty-two years later those lines were being sent round the world through the internet (I think Auden would have approved) in the wake of another September catastrophe. Why? Because they are still relevant, still powerful, still important. If it seems that the world is unable to live by them, then at least we can continue to repeat them, as a way of showing an affirming flame.

Photograph of Auden in New York in 1960 by Richard Avedon