He blew his mind out in a car

Another poem from my Pollock sequence. Pollock wanted James Dean to play him in the movie of his life, which would be like getting James Franco (brilliant as Ginsberg but far too beautiful) to play him now instead of Ed Harris, who was tough, edgy, tortured (and not too beautiful), and who had enough of Pollock’s physical attributes to pass for the real thing. Pollock was attractive to women, but he was a bruiser, with a heavy, hangdog face. He looked like his paintings look: difficult, untidy, unpredictable.

But you can see why when Pollock looked in the mirror, he saw Dean. His ego (and a reasonable amount of drink) allowed him to envision himself as a film star, an idol, and the press agreed. When Life magazine ran a photo feature with the headline, Is This the Greatest Living Artist in the United States?, Pollock knew the answer was YES. It was 1949, long before Basquiat and Tracey Emin were even born, but it was Pollock who gave them the model for artist as temperamental star; so that the art and the personality become intertwined in people’s minds (and sometimes the personality becomes a greater force).

But there was an inner Dean in Pollock too: the biker-jacket-and-Marlboro aesthetic, the tormented genius. Pollock recognised Dean as a kindred spirit. He also recognised someone who knew how to “manage” his image. And they crossed into each other’s worlds; Dean wrote poetry, Pollock was the star of Hans Namuth’s films where painting becomes an action sequence (like a fight or a car chase).

They were both killed in car accidents, within a year of each other. Dean died on 30th September 1955 at the age of 24. His Porsche 550 Spyder, known as “Little Bastard” was completely destroyed in a head-on collision. Rebel Without a Cause was released posthumously. In that film, Dean’s character, Jim Stark, is challenged to a “chicken run”, a drag race towards a cliff edge in stolen cars. Pollock was a fan of the movie. It is commonly accepted that his “accident” was probably not an accident. On his way back from a party on 11th August 1956, he drove his Oldsmobile convertible into a tree. He had been drinking. He was 44. One of his passengers, Edith Metzger, was also killed, but his lover, Ruth Kligman, survived (earning her the nickname “Death Car Girl”).

So here’s the poem. The passages in italics are lines from Rebel Without a Cause.

Rebel without a Cause

Lights. Camera. Action. Paint
whirls off the brush, as he drips
and dives:

GREATEST LIVING ARTIST IN AMERICA

Posing with his new Oldsmobile,
itching to take her out
for a spin, take in a matinee.

At the Regal lights dim
on the plush red, Jimmy’s face
reels on the screen:

Once you been up there
you know you’ve been someplace.

The boy in Warnercolor, the boy
in the newsreel. Wheels
spun out, Porsche scrapped.
Like the magic trick, sawn in half.

The artist slumps in the row at the back.
He’s seen this flick before:

I don’t know what to do anymore.
Except maybe die.

Good trick:
exit stage right
before you crash and burn,
because tomorrow you’ll be nothing.

Better to be a dead hero
than a deadbeat. Plush red,
lights dim.

You can wake up now,
the universe has ended.

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.

Mind over matter

 

This visual poem by John Furnival cheers me up every time I look at it. I keep it on my desk, a talisman against computer crashes, “to do” lists, rejection letters, the hundred daily annoyances and setbacks – the usual stuff that gets to writers, or anyone who works for him/herself (at home, alone, where you have no one to complain to). It reminds me that the things I worry about are not that important in the great scheme of life. It calms me down, it makes me smile. But it is difficult to say how Furnival achieves what he achieves: how does it work, why does it work – this simple, playful placement of just four words?

Well, there’s something about colour. NEVER and DOESN’T are in black, so that your eye is confronted with a solid column of negativity. But this is lightened by MIND and MATTER in green. MIND is lightest, so that it is the word you notice the most, lighter than matter, which makes sense if you think of their respective meanings (more on that in a minute). Green is soft, natural, peaceful; it is a contrast to all that black, to all that negativity. Even though black is darker, it is the green which you see more clearly. A beacon.

And to meaning. MIND and MATTER can be nouns or verbs. As verbs, they have similar meanings, to be concerned or worried. But as nouns, they are very different: the mind being the faculty of consciousness or thought, and matter being physical substance, distinct from mind or spirit. One is internal, one is external. But the mind can ponder over matters, which are also problems or issues. And the mind is also described as ‘grey matter’. So that to read across gives us a multiplicity of meaning: DOESN’T MATTER NEVER MIND is the first phrase you see, the one which gives you hope, a bit of perspective. MATTER NEVER MIND DOESN’T for me has a hidden comma after NEVER, a phrase which says you shouldn’t care about things, because deep down, the mind has more important concerns. In the next line, the first thought is reversed, but means the same: NEVER MIND DOESN’T MATTER. And then a contrast to the second statement, a double negative: MIND DOESN’T MATTER NEVER, a phrase which says that intellectualising won’t get you anywhere.

But reading down is interesting too. We’ve already talked about that ‘negative column’; what negates the negatives is MIND over MATTER, MATTER over MIND and the place in the centre where they weave together, team up. And that’s the magic, that place where things get worked out.

And it’s repetitive. A chant, a mantra, something to keep saying to yourself, over and over, again and again. We like repetition. That’s why we like verse forms that keep swooping over themselves like starlings; the villanelle or the pantoum or the ghazal. It is lulling, soothing. The more we say it, the more we believe it.

http://www.englandgallery.com/artist_group.php?mainId=135&media=Prints

Oslo of the mind

 

As of this morning I’ve booked tickets to fly to Oslo in April.  I have never been to Oslo before, and so I am already imagining what the city will be like, in the way we often piece together places from snippets of films, or books we’ve read.  British friends who visit New York City for the first time invariably return to say it’s exactly how they had pictured it – so immersed are we with the ‘idea’ of New York, its Deco towers and sharp-suited men. What I’ve just described is, of course, the cliché of New York, but one which is based on iconic images: photographs by Stieglitz or films like The Sweet Smell of Success. These clichés are based on the way the integrity and excitement of the city is distilled, in an attempt to capture its spirit. And so, New York is familiar to us before we ever get there, because we know it so well in two dimensions.

Oslo, of course, is slightly less iconic. I have been to other Scandinavian cities, Stockholm and Helsinki and Copenhagen, and I like their small scale, the architectural mix of the simple vernacular juxtaposed against the grand imperial and the austere modernist (one of my favourite buildings of all time is the Helsinki Central Rail Station by Eliel Saarinen – a monument to Finnish mythology and brute strength). I like cities which are cold in the winter, which are serious about icy pastimes and deep darkness, and meet the long nights with candlelight and strong drink. I tend never to be in such places in the summer, so I have yet to experience the joyous midnight sun.

But I will be visiting Oslo in the Spring, and it looks like the sort of city where you can walk everywhere – the city centre fits neatly onto a one-page map in the guidebook, not like the immense sprawl of London, where even after nearly twenty-five years, I still need to take an A to Z with me when venturing beyond my usual areas.  Oslo looks like the sort of city where you might be able to wander aimlessly. In her wonderful book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit quotes Walter Benjamin: “Not to find one’s way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance – nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city – as one loses oneself in a forest – that calls for quite a different schooling.” Solnit goes on to say that in Benjamin’s terms “to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery.” The difference between being lost and losing oneself. Solnit points out that the word “lost” comes (appropriately) from the old Norse los, meaning the disbanding of an army, the moment when the fight is finished and it is time for the soldiers to disperse; suggesting that we are “lost” without a cause, a position in a regimented society. And sure, I will have an itinerary, a list of places I’d like to see, but it’s often the places you aren’t expecting in a new city that you will remember.

So I look forward to losing myself, to placing myself in the map I am staring at; I’m imagining myself there already, in three dimensions.

Fine lines

On the lower-ground floor of the Redfern Gallery on Cork Street is a small display of twentieth-century woodblock prints by seminal British artists such as Gill and Ravilious. Monochrome figures and landscapes against the stark white walls. But my eye is drawn to the back wall, where two contemporary prints hang side by side: against a vibrant black ground (the black is almost shining), delicate white ladders appear as if they’ve been conjured from nowhere. But these are not ladders you might climb; they are unstable, unreliable, crooked.

I haven’t seen these prints “in the flesh” since the day Linda Karshan showed them to me in her studio. These two are from a set, five of which were reprinted in my last collection, Fetch, as a way of splitting the book into discreet sections. The title poem, a film-noir-style narrative about a woman who creates a “fetch” or doppelganger to seduce a former lover, was divided into five installments, interspersed throughout the book, each “chapter” introduced by one of Linda’s striking woodblocks. In the two which are hanging here, there are two ladders in each, twinned, but not identical, but as the series progresses, the ladders multiply, become dense, more difficult to negotiate or separate. As my unnamed narrator sends her fetch out to do her bidding, the coupling becomes a triangle. It felt right to accompany my strange poem of betrayal and disillusionment with these spiky, odd, imperfect images.

Thinking about the process of woodblock printing, the artist chisels into the block along the grain to create what will appear as white on the page; what remains uncut will take the ink, appear as black. Of course, when the block is inked and transferred onto paper, the image will appear in reverse, a mirror image; this also felt appropriate when thinking of the fetch, the familiar, the doppelganger, perhaps the “reverse” of the speaker.

Linda is about to embark on a new set of woodblocks, and I will be writing a new poem to accompany them. A mirroring of her process, perhaps? I think of Heaney’s famous analogy of “digging” for the crafting of the poem; what we poets do is a kind of cutting away until the line is shaped.