Briggs on Hein

Today’s guest post is from David Briggs, whose excellent first collection, The Method Men, was published by Salt in 2010. This is the first airing of this poem, which has been accepted for an anthology to be published by Bristol University based around public art.

‘This poem is a response to a sculpture by Danish artist Jeppe Hein called 'Follow Me’. It stands in the Fort House Gardens at Bristol University. This is a place I go sometimes in my lunch hour to walk, smoke, think, etc. away from the bustle of work. The gardens themselves were designed by the landscape architect Humphrey Repton (famous for the red books in which he sketched out his clients’ designs); the piece was a commission offered by the University in 2009. Hein says his mirror maze of 76 vertical, polished-steel panels is inspired by the University as a place of self-discovery. In my response, I wanted to take a more sinister line on the idea of self-discovery, especially as the idea of a labyrinth, in Classical Literature anyway, suggests something bestial or sinister lurking at the centre. The mirror effect created by the polished steel has other resonances too, of course.’

Follow Me

after Jeppe Hein

It beckons you down the slope

from the Fort House, a great magnet

drawing you in, past picnicking students

lolled on the bank as on chaises-longue,

past cedar of Lebanon, pond and narcissi

reflected in its polished-steel panels –

the Mirror Maze.

And though the route’s not difficult –

a two-years child could crack it –

the specular planes add another dimension,

and that dimension is you, or me,

whoever we might be, out for a stroll

and a smoke before post-prandial seminars.

Once in, you meander the anterooms

of your own psyche, the reflection

of your reflection of your reflection

echoing out to infinitude,

your sense of self unravelling

like thread from a spilled bobbin;

thread that charts the path back (you hope)

to the reassuring routine

of a Bristol Tuesday in May  

still happening, out there, in Repton’s garden;

to traffic, the coffee-machine, the stack

of unmarked red books on your desk.

But right now you’ve other concerns;

and, what rough beast you hear slouching

from the centre, coming your way –  

hirsute and cloven like a bad Jesus,

or tame as a castrated pup –

depends almost entirely on you.

The red hill

The drawing was by Elisabeth Vellacott, a landscape, red charcoal on paper. Typical of her style, spidery, gentle strokes; from a distance, it had the quality of a sepia photograph. It depicted the curve of a hill (possibly in Wales, I was told later) with some trees at its slope and a house just visible within them, slightly hidden by the hill’s ridge. I think it was signed in pencil, but not dated. I don’t remember if it had a title. The drawing belonged to Richard Luckett, the Pepys Librarian at Magdalene College; Vellacott had been a friend and had given it to him many years ago. I can’t remember how he came to offer it to me, on loan for the duration of my residency, but I suspect it was during a conversation over lunch, and I’d happened to mention seeing some of Vellacott’s beautiful drawings in Kettle’s Yard. The drawing was in storage (although Richard had two more in his rooms, both charcoal portraits); at one time it hung somewhere else in the college, but had since been replaced by another picture, possibly of an old Master or benefactor. Richard arranged for it to be brought out and left in the porter’s lodge for me to collect. It was larger than I’d expected, and the glass was covered in a solid layer of dust. I was unable to see the picture properly until I dragged it back to my rooms and wiped the surface with a towel.

And there it was, the red hill.

A previous occupant had left a single nail in the wall above the desk, the perfect location on which to hang it. I remember staring at it for a long time, then wondering how I would ever be able to part with it when the time came to give it back. For the whole of the autumn, I stared at that picture, which I imagined was itself a autumnal scene, the trees sparse and spindly. Near the end of my residency, I took a photograph of it, possibly on my phone, but the image and the memory card that it was on have somehow been misplaced. So much for technology. The image here is another drawing of hers, one which is equally haunting.

What remains is this poem. I always knew it would be the only way I could preserve the drawing in memory; the poem itself is about memory, written in a place where I was a temporary resident. I have never been able to explain how the hare crept into the poem; he was there from the very first draft, and stayed, although he was not in the drawing. I gave the poem to Richard as a parting gift for his kindness. His face altered as he read it, and I wondered if perhaps he felt I had taken liberties in placing my own emotional landscape into the one that I’d been loaned. But when he finished reading he looked up in amazement and told me that he had once given Elisabeth a hare’s skull which had remained in her studio until her death.

I don’t know if the drawing has gone back into storage. If so, I hope someone will bring it out again and dust it off and hang it on the wall. I’d like to see it again.

The Red Hill

(after Elisabeth Vellacott)

The midmorning ridge, dreaming

fields. Harvest. A harvest moon

last night, and today, a hare

balanced on the edge, briefly.

Remember this. It may not

come again, the razor sky,

the trees, rust and leaves

in the air. Perfect stillness.

Commit it to yourself

so that it enters your blood,

returns as a heartbeat

the second before you move

forward, and it is shattered.

Your mark will be erased

by wind, hard rain,

by the way you race

from one place to another,

wanting so to lie down,

to fit the earth around you,

taste the ferrous clay.

Remember this, before

it shifts to brick, asphalt,

to a white curtain, a bare room;

many rooms will clutter your head.

Beyond the ridge, the little house,

the fire lit. In it are people

you love. They are waiting.

You close your eyes

and the field breaks into lines,

a sketch of a field, it blurs

and aches, gives way

to white. You fill in the rest.

Shades of grey

I walk through the galleries at Tate Modern, and through the window, I find a rectangular slice of London; grey river, grey sky. The principal colour of this city. I am wearing a grey jacket, grey skirt, which recalls the school uniform of my childhood, and I can almost feel charcoal wool chafing my skin. On the walls are paintings by Gerhard Richter, which resemble the sort of photos you might discover in an ancient dusty album – monochrome and blurred, but blown large, projected, distorted (as memory is, by necessity). Richter is the painter of ‘damaged landscapes’ (Dresden bombed) and figures in those landscapes who are obscured by time, by newspaper half tone (the funeral cortege of the Baader Meinhof gang). The alps are obscured in a heavy mist, for as Richter says, nature is always against us. His is the century of the photograph, as a way of conveying (catastrophic) news, capturing a face (like a rose pressed in a book). He finds a photograph, makes a painting of it that in turn, looks like a photograph, and in that act he is saying something about filters. We see the world through a camera lense, and so there is always the lense between the real and how the real is fixed. Richter stacks layers of glass in the gallery and through them the Thames fractures, a river of ice. I find myself in his mirrors, a study in grey. Richter says: Grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, absence of opinion, absence of shape.

And so we head into winter, the grey season. The clocks go back this week, and then we will be plunged into black. So maybe it is best to remember what Richter’s compatriot Goethe said: All theory, dear friend, is grey, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.

After apple picking

 

It was one of those perfect autumn weekends, when you think warm days will never cease, to quote Keats. Light and sunny, but with a sharpness to the air, an early frost on the grass. And yes, mists over the river. We had gathered at Mendham Mill, on the border of Suffolk and Norfolk, to talk about the theme of harvest in poetry, and the apple as metaphor for all sorts of things …

There is sin, of course (‘the sacred fruit forbidden’, as Milton had it) and desire: the apple being likened to the breasts in Tasso and Spenser, in early 20^th century American slang, to a woman’s sex. There is good health: (‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’) many legends feature apples which guarantee immortality; one of Hercules’s labours was to steal the golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, in Norse mythology, Loki nicks the apples which are meant to keep the Gods young and the Gods immediately wither and age. There is beauty: the Anglo-Saxon word “aeppel” meant both “eye” and “apple”, both the beholder and what is beheld. There is this world and the next: the roundness of the apple like a globe, high on a branch pointing ‘toward heaven still’.

So we talked, and tasted. The Tydeman’s Late Orange had a sweetness that stuck to the teeth like cotton candy, but the Worcester Pearmain had a tarter finish. The Suffolk Pink was light and fresh, the Laxton Superb had very white flesh. We tried them with cheese that crumbled in our fingers, and washed it all down with Aspall’s cider. And we walked; through the village of Metfield, into the fields beyond, obeying Thoreau’s dictum on the best way to enjoy wild apples:

“These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit. They must be eaten in season, accordingly,–that is, out-of-doors … To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air. The out-door air and exercise which the walker gets give a different tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields, when your system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. What is sour in the house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be labelled, ‘To be eaten in the wind’.”

We ended up on Wakelyn’s Farm, where we found ancient varieties, as if we’d stumbled onto a garden out of another time: the Leathercoat Russett, around since 1500; Shakespeare might have bitten into one when he was writing ‘How like Eve’s apple doth thy beauty grow’ (although probably not; it’s twisted and brown, certainly too ugly for the shelves of Tesco’s). Or the Coeur De Boeuf, blood-red, nearly black on the tree, and first cultivated in 1200. The apple of the Troubadours.

And we read poems. The one that stays with me is Frost’s, so beautiful and strange. The orchard as a ladder to heaven, and dream:

But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.

Photo courtesy of Rachel Kellett. Her account of the Apple Walk here:

http://www.metfield.org.uk/htm/MS_appleday2011.html

And thanks to Rochelle Scholar:

http://mendham-writers.com/

Robert Stein on Redon

 

Today is the first of what I hope will be an occasional series of guest posts from poets discussing their responses to visual art. Robert Stein’s first collection, The Very End of Air, will be launched on 9^th November at the Betsey Trotwood in London. Here is a poem from the collection informed by the work of the French Symbolist artist Odilon Redon, who Huysmans described as ‘the Prince of mysterious dreams …’

Robert says:

I often write about paintings, or rather write about an interior, a mood, an imagined narrative ignited by a painting. I do so because writing in this way is a prompt, a forced turning of the head, to see the world as if I were another. That impossible question - what is it like to be someone else? - I have always found compelling.

On this occasion, I did not sit down to write about Redon’s work. Instead, I was simply noting down the titles of some of his pieces at an exhibition; partly because I liked the images, partly because the titles themselves were attractive and redolent. Since many of the works were in a series about angels, the titles were often alike, and thus a kind of poem with its own ‘rhyme-scheme’: made by the repetition of words, phrase-lengths and rhythms began to appear.  The finished poem borrows only I think one actual title from Redon, if that, the others follow their own trajectory from his starting-place.

Fortunately, as happens sometimes, the poem wrote itself, with images of darkness, water and fallenness recurring with a slowly-building intensity that cannot break out of its compelled vision. The poem pretends to be a list of titles that might be suggested to the painter. Of course it is no such thing.

 

 

Titles for Redon

The sad angel, who has folded his wings.

The sad black angel with wings unfurled.

The black angel slowly unfolds his sad wings.

The unfurled wings of the drowned angel.

The angel who has drowned.

The flightless bird.

The sad, aimless man.

The forgotten black man, drowned.

The heavy evening by the dark canal.

The poor moon with an archangel, waiting.

The night has seeped right through me. I am drowned.

http://www.overstepsbooks.com/poets/robert-stein/