Stretching before and after

Helen Frankenthaler wrote of her 1972 painting, ‘Burnt Norton’: 

I was thinking about Eliot, making order out of chaos, of light and dark. Like Eliot’s poem, the painting’s simplicity is arrived at after a great deal of complexity. My work is never playful. This seemed at the time an especially serious and weighty picture to solve.

The resulting work seems to be a distillation of what she found in Eliot’s poem, deceptively simple in its reduction, until you learn that Frankenthaler worked on the grey-blue horizontal line that interrupts the brown near the lower edge of the picture for many weeks until she got it right. Is that line the ‘still point of the turning world’ that Eliot envisioned, something not fixed, but not static? The line hovers in Frankenthaler’s painting, ‘a white light still and moving’; it could be a body of water, a break in the relentless brown of the hulking shape that dominates the canvas – a dark mountain range. There is a dip, a view through to a lighter horizon tinged with rose (the exact colour of ‘dust on a bowl of rose leaves’), something seen but not quite reached. 

Eliot’s poem is about time, how from the present moment stretches both past and future. In Frankenthaler’s painting, it is tempting to see that line she struggled with for so long as the present, the dark mountain as the past, the rosy glow in the distance as the future. But that is perhaps too simple – a way of desiring meaning from a painter whose vision is never absolute. In that respect, Eliot is Frankenthaler’s perfect poet, dense and difficult in his subjects, but light and lyrical in his words. 

Walking around the current Making Painting show at Turner Contemporary, I was struck again by what a brave painter Frankenthaler was, how she took all those butch abstract expressionist movements and softened them. But that makes her sound uncertain, and her canvases are big, bold, exploring colour and light the way Matisse did, but with the lyrical focus of Monet (I found the show’s attempt at a comparison with Turner distracting – he’s not the first painter I would think of as an influence on Frankenthaler, although when you look at their approach to similar subjects, of course there are some similarities). A film of her working shows her kneeling over a huge canvas placed on the floor – the technique of Pollock’s which freed her. But unlike Pollock, all bravado and splash, her gestures are slow, deliberate. And yet she is not as famous as he is, although she deserves to be. You look at Frankenthaler’s work and see the whole scope of Color Field painting opening up with those first grand gestures. 

Frank O’Hara knew it. Eliot, for all his classicism, would not be the right poet to repay the compliment. O’Hara wrote of Frankenthaler’s work:

she is the medium of her material, never polishing her insights into a rhetorical statement, but rather letting the truth stand forth plainly and of itself.

But Eliot was more in my mind than O’Hara as I came out onto the front in Margate, thinking again of his efforts to connect nothing with nothing, and how Frankenthaler somehow nails it.

Somewhere else

Lately I have discovered that I am most prolific when I take myself away from my desk to somewhere else. This week I have returned (with a small group of poets) to Château Ventenac, where I taught a course on the poetic sequence two years ago. Like the sequence, which has a tendency to reinforce  themes through repetition, I am here at the same time of year, with the wisteria in full bloom. Maybe it is good thing when attempting to write new poems to choose a ‘somewhere else’ which is not unfamiliar. This is actually my third time here, and so I have already made the typical excursions from base: I’ve walked along the canal and visited Carcassone and Narbonne, so I have not felt the need on this occasion to stray much further than the terrace. I’d like to think that I’ve been purposeful, at least as far as new poems are concerned: by coincidence, I am currently working on a sequence of poems to accompany new paintings and drawings by David Harker, for his upcoming show in July.

David’s new work is about provisional places, a good subject for me – I seem to have been almost exclusively situating myself in edgelands for the last few years. My sequence has been influenced by the works, but also by the fact that I am travelling – the idea of travel, of being uprooted in various ways, has given me the central idea on which to hang the poems.

My other silent companion, apart from David, has been Roy Fisher. His urban visions, the dark corners of Birmingham that provide a setting to his poems, might be at odds with the sun-drenched vineyards, the cloudless sky; but what I think of as his no-nonsense description (no excess, nothing that doesn’t ring true, both visually and musically) has given me a model for how to approach my sequence. My poems are short and spare, often without a clear point of view, so that there is a sense (I hope) of being alien, of being unsettled.

What I admire about Fisher is how much he is able to say with very little, as if somehow the places he writes about, restrictive as they are, have only permitted him a reduced vocabulary to describe them. There’s something about travelling on one’s own (although I have arrived to good company and lively conversation) that also serves to contain thought.

This is a small poem of his which just does it for me. It’s so simple, but also very moving. It’s about a moment, observed, captured, and tells how the poet felt, without stating the emotion. It’s about brevity, not just of the moment, but of time, one’s time in a place:

Dusk

The sun sets
in a wall that holds the sky.

You’ll not
be here long, maybe.
 

The window
filled with reflections
turns on its pivot;

beyond its edge
the air goes on cold and deep;
your hand feels it,
or mine, or both;
it’s the same air for ever.

Now reach across the dark.

Now touch the mountain.

Yesterday, I sat on the terrace, not writing, not reading, but simply looking at the view of the Pyrenees in the distance,  through a cloud of wisteria, enjoying the moment.

Walking London: the MP3

To celebrate the launch of the Poetry School’s first-ever MP3 psychogeographical / literary walking tour of London (led by yours truly) I have a guest post on the Poetry School blog. You can read it here.

http://campus.poetryschool.com/taking-a-poem-for-a-walk/

Bloodlines

In his essay, On the Natural History of Destruction, WG Sebald describes he RAF and US Air Force raids on Hamburg on 27^th July 1943. The aim of the operation was to destroy as much of the city as possible:

Within a few minutes huge fires were burning all over the target area, which covered some 20 square kilometres, and they merged so rapidly that only quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Another five minutes later, at 1.20 am, a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible arose. The fire, now rising 2000 metres into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all their stops pulled out. The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising hoardings through the air, tore trees from the ground and drove human beings before it like living torches.

It is hard not to think of the wholesale destruction of Hamburg (and of so many German cities) even now when you are standing in its spotless squares. After all, it is only seventy years ago, still within living memory, that these unthinkable acts occurred – thousands of civilians simply set alight in their homes and on the streets.

Undoubtedly, the city bears its scars, if you know where to look. Sebald talks about the reluctance of many Germans, then and now, to speak of the air raids – perhaps for Sebald it was easier to face, as he was an infant when the war ended, and he spent much of his adult life in the UK, where the war is still very visible, constantly reassessed and discussed.

Hamburg, to a casual visitor’s eye, is a very peaceful and friendly city. We arrived at the Hauptbahnhof in the late afternoon, just as the light was fading. I was thinking a lot about Sebald after my walk around the East End of London a few weeks ago; I was inspired to reread Austerlitz, whose eponymous hero is a connoisseur of grand train stations. Parts of the Hauptbahnhof were bombed during the war, but it is still an imposing building, a symbol of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Imperial might. 

As most of the station remains, it is easy to picture what this bit of the city would have looked like in 1938, before it was destroyed, when hundreds of children were put onto trains heading for the Netherlands and France via the Kindertransport. Eva Hesse was two years old when she left her native city. We think of her these days as one of the most radical New York sculptors of the sixties, in her cold water studio in the Bowery (back in the days when the Bowery was truly edgy), shaping latex and plastic into strange almost-organic forms. She must have carried Germany with her – although too young to remember Hamburg, something of the fear of the small child fleeing a war-torn place stayed with her. The attempt to use salvaged and post-industrial materials is all about taking things which are discarded, which do not appear to have an intrinsic value, and making something new of them. The spectre of death is everywhere – there are boxes she makes us peer into, like tombs; messy strands of rope-like tendrils that might have risen from some hellish swamp. Her mother survived the camps, and made it to New York, but committed suicide a few years later, when Eva was still a child. Eva faced illness as something inevitable – she died at the age of 34, but left a huge catalogue of work behind, as if she knew she had to work fast before her time was up. 

At the Kunsthalle, the recent retrospective of Hesse’s work was paired with a new show of pieces by Gertrude Goldschmidt, known as Gego. Hesse and Gego share many similarities – both were strong-willed Jewish women artists who fled Hamburg to escape the Nazis – although Gego is a generation older. When the two-year-old Eva was boarding her train at the Hauptbahnhof, Gego was soon to follow, but by then she was twenty-six, already trained as an architect. She scanned the globe for somewhere she would be accepted, and chose Venezuela as a destination because it seemed to be the sort of place she could practice – a country that embraced modernism (at the same time that the Nazis were destroying any art they labelled as ‘degenerate’), where the war was a distant episode. The Caracas she arrived to was a vibrant and growing city, full of opportunity. It was here she made a name for herself designing a number of public projects, developing her ideas of kinetic movement, ‘drawings without paper’.  

By putting these two artists side by side, the Kunsthalle created a dialogue between them – one that begins with the line as a vehicle for connection and cohesion, a way of finding a wordless order within the chaos they both fled. Gego continued to work until her death at the age of 82. She remained in Caracas her whole life, but like Hesse, never forgot her roots.

Creed’s creed

A month ago I posted in preparation for my Hayward course, The Point of the Poem, inspired by the Martin Creed exhibition What’s the point of it? Now I am posting at the end of the course, which seemed to pass very quickly – perhaps in the way that Creed’s work is often about something that can happen in an instant, a sudden revelation.

As predicted last month, we did go a little crazy, reciting Schwittersesque sound poems (even having a communal performance of laughter in the middle of the gallery), discussing Snowballs after experiencing the Balloon Room (or to give it its proper title, Half the Air in a Given Space), talking tempo after viewing a film of the rising and falling of a male organ (projected on an outdoor wall on a balcony of the Hayward – without doubt the strangest experience I have had in all my years of teaching). We ended the course on a good old fashioned debate about Creed’s work – its detractors labelling it puerile, tedious, shallow; its supporters calling it playful, humorous, celebratory.

And we did look at some fabulous poems along the way. From this sonnet by Edwin Morgan, a variation on a statement of John Cage’s (considering Creed’s use of repetition in his work):

Opening the Cage: 14 Variations on 14 Words

I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry – John Cage

I have to say poetry and is that nothing and am I saying it
I am and I have poetry to say and is that nothing saying it
I am nothing and I have poetry to say and that is saying it
I that am saying poetry have nothing and it is I and to say
And I say that I am to have poetry and saying it is nothing
I am poetry and nothing and saying it is to say that I have
To have nothing is poetry and I am saying that and I say it
Poetry is saying I have nothing and I am to say that and it
Saying nothing I am poetry and I have to say that and it is
It is and I am and I have poetry saying say that to nothing
It is saying poetry to nothing and I say I have and am that
Poetry is saying I have it and I am nothing and to say that
And that nothing is poetry I am saying and I have to say it
Saying poetry is nothing and to that I say I am and have it

To a dash of e.e. cummings (thinking about Creed’s obsession with counting:

one’s not half two

one’s not half two. It’s two are halves of one:
which halves reintegrating, shall occur
no death and any quantity; but than
all numerable mosts the actual more

minds ignorant of stern miraculous
this every truth-beware of heartless them
(given the scalpel, they dissect a kiss;
or, sold the reason, they undream a dream)

one is the song which fiends and angels sing:
all murdering lies by mortals told make two.
Let liars wilt, repaying life they’re loaned;
we (by a gift called dying born) must grow

deep in dark least ourselves remembering
love only rides his year.
                                          All lose, whole find

To this riff on the letter ‘A’ by Christian Bök (examining the way Creed uses chance operations in the work – for example, his stripe paintings, the length of which are dictated by the length of the brushes in his pack)

from Chapter A
(for Hans Arp)

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard
as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an
alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars
all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A
madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh – a hand-
stamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a
mark that sparks an ars magna (an abstract art that
charts a phrasal anagram). A pagan skald chants a dark
saga (a Mahabharata), as a papal cabal blackballs all
annals and tracts, all dramas and psalms: Kant and
Kafka, Marx and Marat. A law as harsh as a fatwa bans
all paragraphs that lack an A as a standard hallmark.

Mostly, I wanted to pick up on Creed’s love of experimenting, of having fun – entering the work from a place of indecision, indeterminacy, just waiting to see what would happen next. What happened for us was that a collection of surprising and extraordinary poems were generated. We have Creed’s crazy vision to thank.