Sound and vision

 

Christian Marclay couldn’t have manipulated the weather, but it’s true to say that the brass band he set in motion, marching through the reed beds behind Snape Maltings on Saturday, would have made less sense in rain. The blowsy end-of-the-pier sound of Suffolk Phoenix Brass rose up from the reeds and heralded the last late burst of summer sun; the sun danced off the polished surfaces of the tubas and French horns and bassoons, gold on gold. ‘Magical’ is an adjective which has lost its magic; it is overused, applied in a lazy PR-sort-of-way to just about anything. But it is difficult to find any other phrase to describe the combination of that crazy, happy music and the evening sun and the bright red jackets of the band and the swaying reeds.

But that’s what Marclay does. He compiles things to show us that what we think of as ordinary, what we take for granted, is, in fact, incredible, especially when we take note of the small details. He starts with a film clip of someone knocking on a door (all we see is a hand, the knuckles rapping against wood) then someone else knocking on another door, then someone else – each with a different style of knocking. Then a drum finds a common rhythm in these ‘knockings’, and the rhythm is picked up by a piano, a sax, a trombone. And you realise that the simple act of knocking on a door is a way of making music. Maybe you don’t normally think about it that way, because the door opens and there is someone on the other side, and you begin to speak, or the person who resides there invites you in, and the isolated moment of knocking is forgotten. But Marclay cuts away from what happens next, presents us with just the door, the knocking, and makes us focus on a single action, a single sound.

That process of isolation is what poetry is about too. You take something out of context and examine it closely, make something new of it. In ‘Manga Scroll’, Marclay has isolated the “action words” (like “KA-BLAM” or “BREEP”) from Manga comics which have been translated from the Japanese for the US market. These collected words have been arranged on a scroll, like an ancient calligraphic text. At this performance, the scroll was brought out, laid on a long table, with two men at either end, one to roll, the other to unroll. The singer (Elaine Michener) stood near one end, took a deep breath, and launched into a vocal interpretation of the text. She reinvented herself as a wide-eyed Anime pin-up, spouting a cartoon opera complete without meaning, but high on drama. 

‘Ephermera’ is another Marclay piece which is about isolating and compiling, in this case, anything with musical notation on it: restaurant menus, advertisements for cars, playbills. These have been reproduced as collages on large-sheet folios, which the pianist (Steve Beresford) opened like a conventional musical score, and began to “play”. The folios can be chosen in any order, and the musician can “play” the images as well as the musical notation he finds there (so Beresford could choose to interpret the sound of the car in the advertisement as well as any actual notes he sees on it). So the piece is always different, always random, controlled by the whims of the person playing it.

For me, this jumble of media is incredibly exciting. It goes beyond the simple definition of ekphrasis, bringing together music, moving image, voice, printed matter, junk shop treasure and human intervention. The result is that you re-envision your world, discover interest in even the most mundane stuff. After the final performance, we returned to the car, and I became completely fascinated just listening to the sound of the car door opening, shutting again behind me, the engine starting, the parking sensors detecting what was in front of us, what was behind … even the car could conspire to make beautiful music.

Small is beautiful

Coming away from last weekend’s Free Verse book fair (laden with my bag of purchases!) I felt truly optimistic for the first time in quite a while for the future of poetry publishing. The fair was arguably an example of something positive emerging from the recession. True, there are a number of small presses which have suffered (and some which will inevitably close) in the current round of Arts Council cuts, but as many if not more have risen to prominence in the last five years, such as Cinnamon, HappenStance, Mulfran and CB editions (whose founder, Charles Boyle, organised the fair). Here is a statement of intent from the programme:

Writing is not being cut – and the job of making is the most interesting, innovative, inspiring writing available to readers is still largely that of the smaller presses. They are flexible; their overheads are minimal; they are run, most of them, by people who are mad – which is in fact their strength, because their madness is a form of obsessions not with money but with the use of language, which is where it all starts …

And so, the Free Verse fair was inaugurated in a spirit of defiance, collaboration and small-scale entrepreneurship. As the larger presses find it increasingly difficult to support their poetry lists, and, as a result, are taking fewer risks on new poets, there is growing scope for small presses (often very dynamically and successfully run by a single dedicated publisher with a vision) to discover the poetic talents of tomorrow.

I cannot remember a time in the two dozen years I have lived in this country when there have been so many presses producing such innovative and exciting work (‘a disarray of publishers’, as the programme proclaimed); apart from being a bit too young, I was not in the UK during the flowering of the small press and pamphlet movement of 70s – it seems to me from everything I’ve read and heard about that period that it was very much a revolt against the mainstream, whereas the current spawning of new small presses feels far more organic and welcoming. As the diverse selection of voices in Roddy Lumsden’s  2010 Identity Parade anthology perhaps indicated, there are no prevailing trends in poetry these days, apart from a genuine desire to try new things.

So back to the fair. Chris Hamilton-Emery gives a very good account of the atmosphere in the room in his blog: http://blog.saltpublishing.com/2011/09/26/some-thoughts-on-the-free-verse-poetry-book-fair/ . Along with some indies who have been around for a while (such as Enitharmon, Anvil, Shearsman, and my publisher, the aforementioned Salt) there are more recent arrivals, such as Penned in the Margins and Donut, whose books are collectors’ items as well as great reads. I love my copy of Chris McCabe’s Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, which Penned in the Margins produced as a boxed edition of 200, complete with an ‘Inventory of Items Mudlarked from the Thames’ and one of those items (mine is a blue and white ceramic fragment) contained in its own brown paper bag and separately numbered and labelled. I love my growing collection of Donut Press books, beautifully designed and small enough to fit into a back pocket; their mini-edition of WS Graham’s ‘Approaches To How They Behave’ contains that single long poem, a brilliant new introduction by Sean O’Brien, and a selection of quotes from Graham himself (and all for a fiver!).

I am very much hoping this will become an annual event. Judging by the number of people who poured through the doors while I was there (and the number of people leaving with bags as heavy as mine was!) it should be.  

The poetics of space

Tagged along this weekend on one of Paul Carey-Kent’s art walks – which are always exhaustive and exhausting (but in a good way) – on this occasion around some of the West End galleries. Paul’s encyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary art and his personal Baedeker of London galleries ensure that his walks are full of surprises; there are always new artists to discover and secret galleries, often hole-in-the-wall locations without a sign or a window to the street, like the speakeasies of old.

I especially want to talk about two shows we visited which are currently on at Hauser & Wirth’s two London outposts, and which focus (very differently) on space. As readers of this blog are no doubt aware, I am a huge fan of Gaston Bachelard, whose theories of how to consider space in poetry, how to “read” a room, both emotionally and contextually, have influenced my ideas of how a poem should occupy the space of the page. I am currently working on a sequence of ‘concrete’ poems to accompany a new sequence of woodcuts by Linda Karshan; it’s the first time I have consciously tried to work the poem into a predetermined shape (which has been dictated by the size and scale of the woodcuts) so this issue is very much in my mind at the moment.

Phyllida Barlow’s sculptures occupy the whole of H&W’s Piccadilly site. I should mention that the building is one of my favourite art spaces in London because it was once the headquarters for a bank, and so it retains the ornate wood panelling, the elaborate plaster ceilings, and in the basement, the actual vault. It follows Bachelard’s theory that certain spaces retain their past, a “geometry of echoes”, as he puts it. There is something austere and old-fashioned about the space that effects the work that is shown there. When you walk through the door of the gallery, you are immediately confronted by a series of tall structures: styrofoam blocks covered with colourful fabrics, which give the impression of square flags, teetering on wooden stilts sunk into blobs of concrete. Strange totemic towers, which are formal (and therefore match the formality of their setting) yet appear to be constructed from junk (Barlow is famous for recycling her materials, using bits of other sculptures she has scrapped to make new ones). They look like objects which might have had some function or meaning, now lost in the passage of time. I found these structures moving; perhaps because they appear handmade, a bit precarious, as if they might topple any minute. I felt small surrounded by them; they crowded me, it was hard to navigate around them. Barlow talks about ‘sensations of physicality’, an effort to capture the urban experience ‘like something wild or feral.’ And all contained in that slightly stuffy , officious space. The other piece that really made an impression on me was in the (scary) basement, a grouping of plywood and cement hoops, like a crowd huddled in the doorway. Barlow’s sculptures are like three-dimensional versions of Prunella Clough’s paintings (full of the detritus of urban life). There is something poignant and intimate about all of us (city dwellers, that is) squeezed together into these man-made spaces.

Down the road at Hauser & Wirth’s Saville Row site, a huge pristine cube of a space, were Roni Horn’s new sculptures, ten discs of “solid cast glass with as-cast surfaces on all sides (fire-polished top)”. The media is a poem in itself. They are beautiful, inscrutable structures, like rounded blocks of ice, cold and perfect, apart from the scarred sides, which show the viewer the cast of their making. They are isolated, distanced from each other in the enormous empty room. Their glassy tops are pools, circles of nothing, still and impassive. Bending over one to find myself reflected in its surface, I was reminded of the Sylvia Plath poem ‘Mirror’:

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful –

The eye of a little god …

But there is another literary association attached to the work which had us puzzled. Although the piece is untitled, its ‘subtitle’ is an excerpt from a letter (which may be from Anne?) relating the story of a “nasty-looking” comb that belonged to Emily Brontë. The comb accidently fell into the fire the moment Emily died and was retrieved by Charlotte: “There it is to this day, a bit burnt. One of the most horrible things I ever saw”. So how does this emotional, dramatic account relate to these cool, controlled sculptures? I’m still puzzled, but what strikes me is how those glass discs are ‘sealed’, solid, as if they are preserving something inside that we can’t see (only the reflection of ourselves on the surface). So maybe both the letter and the sculptures themselves tell us something about the act of preservation. I’m still trying to work through it.

One thing I do know is that both Barlow and Horn have a deep connection to poetry. Barlow is married to the poet Fabian Peake (their daughter Clover is also a poet). Horn is a fan of Dickinson and Stevens; both poets have been referenced in her work. A connection between them, and back, once again, to Bachelard.

Paul Carey-Kent's blog: http://paulsartworld.blogspot.com/)

Hauser and Wirth: http://www.hauserwirth.com/

Indian summer

Why is it that most of my poems are set in winter? I have been told on a number of occasions that my poems are far from cheerful, and maybe the weather that enters them is a metaphor for a particular chill mood. When I do write about summer, it is usually from the perspective of a wintery present, recalling the heat of the past. Maybe that reflects my change of homeland; when I was growing up, summer felt as if it would last forever, days and days of baking heat, and the shift into September and autumn was discernable with that first catch of frost in the air. As an adult, I have lived through summers of rain in this country of ‘temperate’ climate. This year has been no exception; a July and August marred by grey skies. But today, although there is a slight autumnal breeze, it is proper Indian Summer, one last brief foray into holiday brightness before autumn descends.

I am reminded of this, the final poem in my most recent collection. It’s an odd poem which went through numerous drafts, and was rejected by every magazine I sent it to, but for some reason I still like it (at one stage I was even going to call my collection ‘Decorum’, which came from a reference in the penultimate line). My fondness for the poem probably stems from the fact that I remember the context in which it was written very clearly. It was almost exactly four years ago, September 2007. I wrote the first draft while sitting on the steps outside the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge. It was lunchtime, and I was taking a break from a workshop I was running in the museum based around their Howard Hodgkin exhibition. Hodgkin often gives his works titles that suggest a time of year, a type of weather. It was one of those fine September days when summer makes a brief comeback, and you wish you could hold off winter for as long as possible. I was reminded of autumn 2005 when I lived in Cambridge, and we went from shirtsleeves to down-filled coats in the course of a day; winter arrived and stayed. But the first month I was there it was glorious, and I still think of the city in the glow of that late summer light. A stern, serious place letting its hair down. And adding to that, those Hodgkin paintings of discovery and passion (some set in India), those hot, fast colours confined in formal frames. How appropriate then to remember that Indian Summer is also a metaphor for a late flowering, or a flaring of something which has been lying dormant.

Indian Summer in the Old City

Sun finds my face, so long in shadow,
drapes me in gold.

Brick softens to flesh, columns that framed our serious lives
are light enough to carry.

Pale boys shed their blacks, flowers
still in bloom.

How could it ever end?

No monument to mark those autumn nights,
pink flowers glowing in the dark core of me.

Stone retains its decorum, cold
under my hand. It will last.

The shadowy cave

I continued my tour of faded seaside resorts this weekend with a trip to Margate. We had intended to visit the new Turner Contemporary Art Gallery, only to discover that they are currently between exhibitions. So after a mooch around the gift shop, we were at a loss as to what to do – we’d already had our lunch, and the wind was strong enough to prevent us from walking along the front (although Robert was keen to see the shelter where Eliot wrote ‘On Margate Sands. / I can connect / Nothing with nothing’). And then I spotted a flyer advertising the famous Margate Shell Grotto. The others were less enthusiastic about the prospect, it has to be said, but since we were in Margate on a blustery grey Sunday afternoon with nothing better to do, they went along with it.  

I am a fan of a good grotto, as celebrated by Pope and Akenside. But my interest is not exclusively poetic; it stems from a fascination with caves and crevices and (especially) catacombs. Anything subterranean, hidden, possibly forbidden. A shell grotto has that extra dimension of obsession; the one in Margate incorporates 4.6 million shells, the leaflet proudly declaims. Shell grottos represent a single-minded and rather insane venture; they are without any real value apart from novelty – a kind of outsider installation art on a grand scale.  

And it’s a great word, grotto, suggesting both “gritty” and “grotty”. I was excited to find this piece on the derivation of the term on Wikipedia:

The word comes from Italian grotta, Vulgar Latin grupta, Latin crypta, (a crypt). It is related by a historical accident to the word grotesque in the following way: in the late 15th century, Romans unearthed by accident Nero’s  Domus Aurea on the Palatine Hill, a series of rooms underground (as they had become over time), that were decorated in designs of garlands, slender architectural framework, foliations and animals. The Romans who found them thought them very strange, a sentiment enhanced by their ‘underworld’ source. Because of the situation in which they were discovered, this form of decoration was given the name grottesche or grotesque.

And who wouldn’t want to visit Nero’s underground chambers?! Although as we walked up the hill, away from the sea and Margate’s small concessions to tourism, the streets became less appealing, grotesque in their own way. There were a few guys sporting neck tattoos and cans sitting outside a dilapidated cafe. There was a scappy, treeless park. My companions were even less certain, but no one suggested going back. We had come so far, a whole ten minutes from the sea front.  

The Margate Shell Grotto is no doubt less grand than Nero’s digs, but impressive nonetheless. At one time the chambers would have been gas lit, which would have added to their eerie quality, but even with the few electric lamps, the grotto was wonderfully creepy. The other couple who had ventured there (possibly by accident, having rolled up at the Turner Contemporary as we had) were keen to show us the odd acoustic trick they’d discovered. The man made us stand under a dome with a small round skylight (a diorama of passing clouds, like a James Turrell), the only source of natural light, while he passed through the adjoining chambers, demonstrating his Mongolian throat singing abilities. The strange, disembodied noise caught in the dome, which acted as a sort of stereo speaker. In the upper display room was a black-and-white photo of a séance held inside the grotto at the turn of the century. The woman behind the gift shop counter introduced us to her three-legged Siamese cat. The place was a perfect fit for a sort of Aleister Crowley-type occultism, complete with capes and spells, and I wondered if Crowley had ever visited (after all, he ended up in Hastings, just further along the coast). Robert also reminded me of the Romantic fad for hermits, who would often hole up in grottos or follies. I wondered too if Eliot had wandered off the beaten track as we had, away from his solitary shelter on the front, and discovered that odd underworld …

photo courtesy of Amy Stein