The seafarer

In 1945, WS Graham wrote to Sven Berlin about Alfred Wallis’s paintings: ‘It’s like the work of the angel in the man and both not knowing each other very well.’ In the following year, Graham would write his poem ‘The Voyages of Alfred Wallis’, which begins with the lines:

Worldhauled, he’s grounded on God’s great bank,
Keelheaved to Heaven, waved into boatfilled arms,
Falls his homecoming leaving that old sea testament,
Watching the restless land sail rigged alongside
Townful of shallows, gulls on the sailing roofs.

Only Graham could begin a poem with ‘worldhauled’, an invention, a conflation, heavy and labourious. In it we also see ‘wordhauled’: the idea that language is also heavy, difficult to fathom. Hard to know what Wallis might have made of it (the poem was written four years after his death); he was a man of simple words. He had no formal education. The only book he had read was the Bible (hence ‘God’s great bank, / Keelheaved to Heaven … leaving that old sea testament’). He had no training as an artist. Painting was something he took up ‘for company’ when his wife died. Everyone knows the famous story of how Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood came upon Wallis and his paintings by accident, as they walked past his open door on Back Road West during a drawing holiday in St Ives in 1928; subsequently, how Wallis’s strange naïve pictures of boats askew, his spatially-challenged seascapes altered the course of British modernist painting. Hard to know what Wallis would have thought of his fame, the fact that his paintings have travelled farther than even a seasoned mariner could imagine, or that his rough works – mostly house paint on cardboard or wood – command five figures in auction houses (Wallis died in the poorhouse at Madron).

Graham’s poem predates the kind of fame Wallis was to achieve, although Berlin was already at work on the first serious monograph. Graham explained to Berlin in another letter that Wallis represented ‘a symbol of that energy which manifests itself in all kinds of places, so often when it is shouted for and encouraged by all the gear and disguise of “rolling eye” etc. – not appearing – and at times appearing, as in Wallis, seemingly “in spite of”.’ A typically Graham-like sentence, full of energy, stops and starts, a snaking trail of (il)logic. Kind of like Wallis’s landscapes, which are never accurate maps of a place, but are born out of ‘what used to be … what you will never see any more’ to use Wallis’s description. A life lived on the sea, already in the past when Wallis started painting, reconstructed from memory. That’s why nothing is to scale in Wallis’s paintings; apart from the fact he lacked the formal training of perspective, the huge waves ready to engulf the boat are exactly how they looked to the young mariner; the tiny houses hugging the harbor already in the distance as the schooner pushes out to sea.

Back to Graham. He had been reading the great Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer when he wrote his tribute to Wallis. The strong compound constructions of words come partly from this:

Sitting day-long
at an oar’s end clenched against clinging sorrow,
breast-drought I have borne, and bitternesses too.
I have coursed my keel through care-halls without end
over furled foam, I forward in the bows
through the narrowing night, numb, watching
for the cliffs we beat along.

Graham would have been deeply affected by those lines, a poet who spent his entire life next to the sea, and who understood Wallis’s great respect for its power to both lull and destroy. Graham ends his Wallis poem like this:

Falls into home his prayerspray. He’s there to lie
Seagreat and small, contrary and rare as sand.
Oils overcome and keep his inward voyage.
An Ararat shore, loud limpet stuck to its terror,
Drags home the bible keel from a returning sea
And four black shouting steerers stationed on movement
Call out arrival over the landgreat houseboat.
The ship of land with birds on seven trees
Calls out farewell like Melville talking down on
Nightfall’s devoted barque and the parable whale.
What shipcry falls? The holy families of foam
Fall into wilderness and ‘over the jasper sea’.
The gulls wade into silence. What deep seasaint
Whispered this keel out of its element?

‘Over the jasper sea’ is one of the most beautiful images in Graham. Wallis would have known it well. It comes from a hymn:

Hark tis the voice of angels
Born in a song to me
Over the fields of glory
Over the jasper sea.

Alfred Wallis: Ships and Boats is at Kettle’s Yard until 8th July
http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/exhibitions/2012/wallis/index.php

I will be running a writing workshop looking at the influence of Wallis on poets such as Graham, Merwin, Clemo and Christopher Reid on Sunday 10th June
http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/education/adults.html#658

Retreat

This week I have been on a writing retreat in Oxford. I told several people before I left that I was going on a retreat, and the general reaction was one of bemusement. Why should that be, I wondered? Perhaps there is something about use of the word retreat that surprised them. In one respect, the definition suits my reasons and goals perfectly: a retreat is ‘a place affording peace, quiet, privacy or security.’ When not directly applied to a location, it is ‘a period of seclusion, retirement or solitude’ (I should mention here that I am not alone; part of the joy of a retreat for me is coming away with my regular workshop group, who are long-standing friends as well as fine poets). It is most commonly associated with religious contemplation. But other definitions bring in a more negative connotation: a retreat is an act of withdrawing, especially from danger, the process of going backward, conceding a position (as in the retreat of a military force). That suggests that a retreat, while being a form of escape, also takes into account the situation one has abandoned, which might be a difficult or unwelcome position. I think of my desk at home in London, and its usual array of paper piles: students’ poems to read, lesson plans, unpaid bills, invites, bank statements. In addition to that, the floor in the London study has now become an acceptable alternative for shelving; some stacks of books are specifically for future projects and teaching, but another is a secondary ‘shelf of shame’ (the poet Julia Bird’s term for a section of the library comprising recently-purchased but still-unread books). I look at my temporary desk in Oxford, and although my habit of creating little piles of paper activity has been continued, the piles are manageable, and they do not contain any documents which pertain to the life of work, bureaucracy or finance. This desk is smaller, a manageable space (almost, dare I say, monastic), a place on which I can concentrate on one thing: writing poems. In a way, the epicentre is my laptop, which is the real container of my life. On its hard drive is my collected works, nearly everything I have written since computers entered my existence. Which makes me extremely portable (most poets are, of course. Wordsworth didn’t have a Vaio, but I assume he carried a pen).

But being away from normal concerns forces one to concentrate on the present moment; London has entered the past (at least for a few days). In Oxford, I have already established a pleasant routine; I go for an early-morning run around Christ Church Meadow, then back for breakfast and a shower, and I am at ‘my’ desk by about 9:30. I have never been particularly disciplined in setting a daily routine for myself in London – there are too many distractions, interruptions, multiple tasks to draw my attention. I make copious ‘to-do’ lists, and I get great satisfaction in crossing things off them. But there are some distractions which for me are necessary. I can’t remember what my life was like before the Internet. You might think that Internet access would be against the principles of a retreat (one thing many people seem to want to retreat from is modern life), especially a poetry retreat. But Google is the great gift to poets – I can find a reference or the right word or term without leaving my desk. There is a danger of creating what some have coined the ‘Wikipoem’, a piece that wears its new-found facts in a blatantly obvious manner. Jenny Lewis, our host this week, is about to go on what I consider to be a serious retreat – a month’s fellowship at Hawthornden, the writers’ centre in Scotland (endowed by Drue Heinz, the American heiress who made her fortune in ketchup). There are strict codes of behaviour that writers are expected to observe (including a no-talking rule during the day) – I have nothing against such restrictions. But when Jenny explained that there is no Internet access, I found myself wondering if I could survive for a month without Google. I doubt it.

Ok, you may laugh. But I’ve written three poems since Wednesday, and I’m working on a draft of a fourth, which for me is an extraordinarily good rate of success. So as long as there is a broadband connection on that desert island, I’m fine.

High Line highlights

A sunny day in New York last week, exploring the Chelsea galleries. I have a folk memory of Chelsea (from my undergraduate excursions to far-flung diners and cavernous night clubs) as the unchartered periphery of the city, rubbing up against the Hudson River, a hinterland of piers and warehouses. It still has that rough and seedy feel (despite the incursions of high end designers like Comme des Garçons and Balenciaga); the galleries mixing with garages and light manufacturing units, happily ignoring the other in the jostle, but still borrowing from their industrial neighbours a certain aesthetic: all concrete and brick, unadorned, no-nonsense.

So once inside the vast empty space of Ameringer McEnery Yohe, Suzanne Caporael’s small and delicate collages might have been lost. But they had a powerful cumulative effect. As I approach, I realise there is something familiar about the paper they are on, until I’m even closer and realise from the reassuring greyish white that they are pages from The New York Times, identifiable, as some still contain snippets of text or the date. The title of each piece is taken from the particular location in small-town America where it was created, where the out-of-town artist took solace in finding the familiar paper, a daily ritual. The collages are all about ritual, tracking time (there even in the paper’s name, not just ‘time’ but the ‘times’ in which we live) recording place, each the same size. I like the suggestion of important news about to be imparted, instead replaced (or obscured) by these Matisse-like blocks of colour. The New York Times has a particular madeleine-like resonance for me as my parents’ paper of choice, the symbol of accurate information and correct politics to me as a child (my mother, although four years in London, still reads it every morning online). So I understand Caporael’s use of the paper as a base for her collages: newspapers mark not only ritual, but the beginning of the day, waking to what is happening in the world over orange juice and coffee. As a displaced east coast American, I can understand what it is like to find the Times, like an old friend, somewhere far from home (I have the same feeling now when I seek out the Guardian on foreign newsstands).

Her work chimes for me with the drawings of Anne Truitt, on show at Matthew Marks. Truitt was a sculptor, who’s experience as a nurse’s aide in the 1940s made her acutely aware of the human body (she made her first-year art students draw a skeleton and read Vesalius). She said ‘the true space you are living in is inside yourself, not on the outside .’ Interesting, then, that her drawings seem to be about architecture – geometrical constructions that explore three dimensions in two, unlike the flat planes in Caporael’s collages. However, what Truitt and Caporael have in common is in their attempt to understand special relationships through colour. After discovering the paintings of Barnett Newman, Truitt felt that ‘color rose up and towered over me and advanced towards me.’ Truitt talks about ‘metaphorical color’ the sense of ‘color having meaning’, and I know what she’s on about. If you put blue on the page, you are stating all the associations of blue – with melancholy or sadness, or truth or fidelity. So the drawings are about spaces, not actual physical spaces, more like mental states, planes of discovery, moments where things become lucid, make sense through seeing (and seeing brings awareness).

Here is Truitt, writing in 1950, about the experience of driving 270 miles through the night on a Texas road from San Antonio to Midland:

The road was absolutely straight in front of me, and had broken lines, or yellow lines, which helped. There was a big space on either side of the road, which was a Macadam road, and then space on either side, and beyond the space there were fences and behind the fences there was tumbleweed. It was very beautiful really. And every now and then I’d see those little eyes, these little eyes of rabbits in the headlights. And I’d just drive. Sometimes I’d drive for five, ten, fifteen minutes without seeing a living thing, or even any lights. And then I would see way off in the distance, I’d see one light. Which meant somebody was alive out there. The rest was completely flat, like being a pea on a skating rink. Above me was this huge arch of sky. My whole concept of space changed during those hours. Luckily I was alone. There was no radio. I wouldn’t have played it if there was one. Complete silence, and the wind, and this wonderful space. One of the happiest memories I have. Hard to get enough space in life. So that changed my life.

I think of the lines and planes of roads as I come away from those drawings, back into the street, and then up, on to the High Line; a place that didn’t exist (well, at least not in its current form) the last time I was in the city. The High Line was built in the 30s as an elevated track to move freight trains. Joel Sternfeld took beautiful photos of the derelict line in the 80s, an eerie, abandoned place, already a park of sorts, but not an official one. Now it is beautiful again, in a different way, with ornamental grasses and flowers growing in between the tracks. Rus in urbe. From here, you see the city differently than from street level; not so high you can’t see pedestrians below, but high enough to give perspective. A whole block is laid out before you, the city’s grid exposed along four corners. At one point suspended over the road you can sit on a bench and watch the traffic on Tenth Street passing beneath. True, it is calmer than street level, but the city rumbles on, as ever, on below.

The fullness of time

Just back from a week at the glorious Château Ventenac http://www.chateauventenac.com/ where spring had arrived before us, and the wisteria was buzzing with fat black bees. We came together to discuss the poetic sequence, especially in relation to space (but also place) and time.

We started by looking at Georges Perec’s funny little book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a treatise to writers on how to observe, but also on how to immerse oneself in the moment. Perec recorded everything he saw in the place Saint-Sulpice over the course of a weekend (positioning himself, as any self-respecting Oulipo poet might, at various café vantage-points) without editorial comment or censorship, so that even the most mundane or pedantic details are faithfully listed. It reads like an exercise because that’s what it is. When we get down to the business of making experience into poetry, we select, so that certain details might be singled out, highlighted as significant. It is interesting to consider what we cross out in the process.

And that’s where the idea of a sequence comes in. One poem is sometimes not enough to contain all the things we need to show. Why not more? After all, poets love numerology, the idea of splitting language into a neat package of lines or stanzas. So why not five poems (like the fingers on a hand) or seven (like the deadly sins, or the days of the week), to show different points of view, angles, timeframes, narratives, etc? We moved from Perec to Stevens, and his Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which gives us such variations, like a Cubist painting or a jazz riff put into words. We thought about the symbolism of the blackbird, the number thirteen, and what Stevens is saying about fate and how language tries to express big things like mortality – and often misses – unless we can focus on the small details. We agreed that his blackbird never feels like an omen, an harbinger of bad luck (after all, Stevens is a champion of the commonplace rather that the fanciful – no nightingale for him) but rather a presence that is alive and moving in a static landscape …

Although it was actually the hoopoe who was sighted, sunning in the lower terrace, and of course, the resident black swans of the Canal du Midi. I include them here because I’m often asked what I have against swans – it’s their romanticising I resist. The black ones have a sort of mythical quality about them, although these two are hardly mysterious – they are used to being fed by tourists on longboat holidays, so they will swim right over to you, and demand attention, trumpeting loudly.

We attempted a group exercise (based on Anne Berkeley’s wonderful versions of Baudelaire’s Pipe) to identify the different ways we perceive language. We all looked at the same poem by Eluard, and came up with our own versions, ranging from fairly faithful translations of the original, to surreal statements based on a complete ignorance of French – increasingly more unstable as comprehension and meaning fly through the window.

And flying is what time did too. It seemed like a lot to pack into a week, and so it was. Naturally, it passed very quickly, in the excited mix of poems and chat, and food and wine. And suddenly I find myself back at my desk in London (where spring seems to have been and gone).

I began my week in the walled medieval citadel of Carcassonne, a place which is sealed in time, and so I end with a photograph, taken by poet Sue Rose, of a motif of decorative carvings – remains of larger structures – arranged on a wall to celebrate pattern and light. Like a good poem, or a series of poems, each one a little bit different than the one next to it.

The other side of language

I came across this quote from WS Graham today – “a word is exciting because of its surroundings” – hunting for some clarification on the poem Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons (in preparation for my course at Chateau Ventenac next week) while pondering the very strange image near the end when the famous flutist Quantz tells his pupil, Karl:

One last thing, Karl, remember when you enter
The joy of those quick high archipelagos,
To make to keep your finger-stops as light
As feathers but definite. What can I say more?

In 1977, Graham wrote to Fraser Steel, a radio producer at the BBC, who had queried the use of ‘archipelagos’ in the poem, assuming it was a typo. Graham replies:

Of course I mean ‘arpeggios’. That’s why I said ‘archipelagoes’. It is making a quick little entertainment by putting down one word in stead [sic] of the other and both words making an exciting sense. At least I hope so. Again, I think we know he is playing a quick flourish of islands.

A lot of the poem has the strangeness, the not-quite-rightness of something translated awkwardly from German into English (Graham read Quantz’s famous 1752 treatise on playing the flute, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen in its English translation, leant to him by Rose Hilton). But the use of ‘archipelagos’ is typical of Graham, because he wants us to think of art – in this case music, but of course also poetry – as a means of transport to another place. So there is the sense of two words, the ‘correct’ one, but also one which is close in sound but carries us further in metaphor. And isn’t it funny how playing or listening to arpeggios on a flute sounds a bit like hopping quickly from one little island to the next (and trying not to get your feel wet in the bargain)?

John Cage, whose music I was listening to this afternoon (a chance collision between Cage and Graham – both of them would have liked that) said that music should be ‘purposeless play … not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.’ Graham certainly felt that way about words, was always acutely aware of their power to both confuse and clarify. Which is what he is constantly doing in his poems, sometimes all at once.

And anyhow, ‘archipelago’ is one of the most beautiful words I can think of, so it’s good to have an excuse to put it into a poem …