Journals etc.

Just looked at my last two blog posts and realised that I have failed hopelessly in my mission to post a fragment of writing every day. I have however been endeavouring to write morning pages, and I am managing to keep up a visual diary - although I am not managing to do it every single day.

This week I have been reading Claiming breath by Diane Glancy which is a book of prose poems written over the course of one year. During this year Glancy's mother dies and also her house is broken into several times. Although these are important themes in the book, the over riding theme is that of the writing process and the idea of self and identity - and ultimately how all these things fit together. It is a fascinating and inspiring book, moving between prose proper and more experimental poems where Glancy plays with the form and with language itself.

It made me think that I would like to keep some kind of poetic journal myself, and seeing as it is my birthday this weekend - that seems like an ideal time to start. I will keep the journal for myself - but I am hoping that something good - some poems, or some kind of personal insight might come out of it.

On other matters Anna De Vaul and I are editing the next issue of Lighthouse - something that I am looking forward to and feeling nervous about in equal measure.

Blind Pen Portrait

the mirror reflects a self
unrelated to the one
who parties on the inside

Resolutions and Bits of Poems

I am doing well with my new year's resolutions. I have sent some work out - not much - but some. I have been doing my morning pages most days and I have started a visual diary too. I started the visual diary for two reasons: 1) I miss making art, and 2) I want to see if it enhances my writing. More creative stuff has got to be good right? I have also been trying to put whole days aside to work on my poetry, although I think it would be useful if someone confiscated my broadband modem on those days!

Today I had the bright idea of writing a small poem about writing every day and posting it on my blog - well realistically it won't be every day, but a girl can try...

Here is today's effort:


Memory fragments -
the way smells can take you back
and fill your head with words.

More about the fork

Fork detail courtesy of George Hart 

To know something anew in language is almost impossible.  In art the idea of painting an object without bringing in your pre-conceived idea of that object is more achievable. In painting you can focus on the negative space around the object thus building the object almost accidentally.  You can also break the object down to its component parts, or you can focus on the colour or the light.  The very act of naming something brings with it,without our even meaning to, the whole weight of what we know about the object being named, and our own personal history with it. Natty Peterkin (an illustrator) commented that "in art you are constructing an object whilst in writing you are de-constructing it - breaking it down to its individual elements." Naming an object is an act of translation: we are translating the object out of its original form and into another.  And if we translate the name of the item from one language to another we are still bringing with us the weight of what we already know about it.

I have also found myself wondering if some objects are just so "of themselves" that they are harder to liken to anything else, or think of in abstract terms. For example, I have been writing a series of small poems about domestic objects - some of those objects I found relatively easy to write about, but others were really hard to get to grips with.  The one I struggled with most was the fork.  I found myself asking questions: what is the fork like? Is it like anything else? A comb? (not really) A trident? (a kind of fork) A garden fork? (still a fork)  A seed head? (maybe) A claw? (better) A telegraph pole? A tree in a nuclear winter?

 Forks can be changed in works of art - I have seen mobiles and sculptures made with them - but they are still immediately recognizable as forks.  For some reason it is really hard to disguise a fork, whereas some other objects can be changed more easily.  A friend recently showed me a beautiful silver bracelet - after I had looked at it for a minute or so she told me that it was made from silver sugar tongs - I could then immediately see that it was indeed made of sugar tongs, but on first look the sugar tongs presence was not obvious.

Does the problem I have with the fork stem from the fact that it is the most used item of cutlery? (at least in our house). I think that's why I found Padrika Tarrant's book The Knife Drawer so compelling - the idea that something so embedded in our culture and everyday lives as cutlery could come to life and turn on us is profoundly disturbing.

Hughes, Plath and that Eureka Moment

I don't think that there can be a female poet in America and the UK that hasn't been influenced, at least a little, by the work of Sylvia Plath. When I first read Ariel seventeen odd years ago I have to confess that I didn't much like it. I found her work audacious and arrogant - I suppose I judged it how many people did at the time it came out. I was affronted by the ugliness of her imagery and her seemingly casual comparisons between her own life and that of Jews in the concentration camps.

Coming back to Plath all these years later I find that I am reading her with new eyes and a much more open mind. It might be because I am older and have had more life experience. It might be because I now a mother. It might simply be that I am much better read than I was and I know a lot more about poetry. Now I find her work refreshing and inspiring. Her imagery is arresting and surprising and her sense of alienation is something I can both relate to and that I aspire to in my own work.

Ted Hughes is an altogether different kettle of fish. I first looked at Hughes work through the eyes and words of Crow in the first year of my degree course. At that time I didn't like his work at all. I found Crow to be heavy and overly masculine in both its imagery and language. I found it clunky and ugly and far beyond anything that I could relate to.

Three years later and with a lot more poetry and critical reading under my belt I find that I have somehow found my way back to Hughes. The first sparks of interest were ignited when i read the poem Do not pick up the Telephone, which was recommended to me by a tutor who saw some similarities in a poem that I had written. Next I came across the poem Wolfwatching on the Internet and I was hooked. I liked it so much that I immediately bought the book on ebay. This led me, in a round about way, back to Crow. I had been writing some semi-mythical poetry myself based on the idea of the trickster and I though that as part of my research and support work I would re-visit Crow - so back on ebay I went and bought a copy. This time I was pleasantly surprised to find myself enjoying it and found myself wondering why I had been so closed-minded to it before.

I think that doing the BA has really opened my mind. I thought before I started that I was open to abstract and unusual imagery, but I realise now that my open-mindedness was more limited than I imagined. I had to move beyond my comfort zone and broaden and deepen my reading. I am reading poetry now that I found difficult and sometimes inaccessible when I started the course. I can only liken it to the way my taste in art developed. When I was a teenager I was attracted to the romance and bright images of the Pre-Raphaelites - I didn't really like or 'get' most abstract art. It was as if I had to move through appreciating several different art movements before abstract became the movement that I liked and related to - a kind of visual evolution.

With poetry I had to go through a similar evolutionary process. As a child I moved from nursery rhymes to nonsense rhymes and limericks, then onto humorous and epic tales and as a teenager I found myself in love with poems like Tennyson's The Lady of Shallot and Noyes's The Highwayman. These were I suppose the poetic equivalents to the Pre-Raphaelites and a little akin to the romantic novel. I still retain a fondness for them now and because of their rhyme schemes and rhythm they are particularly good poems for both memorizing and reading aloud. Next I moved on to readily accessible poems: love poems, Auden, Betjeman. And later those whose economy of words and simple but beautiful images I found arresting like Lorca and Neruda.

Since I started the BA I have read and read and read. I have been like a child let loose in a candy store. I have tasted a little of everything and found that there are some sweets that i come back to again and again. Some of it took a little while for me to warm to or to 'get' and sometimes in the first year I found it to be overwhelming or felt inadequate for not getting it. But I am so glad that I have persevered and I sometimes wonder if some of my peers who gave up poetry as being "too difficult" would have also had a eureka moment like I did if they stuck at it. The joy of suddenly connecting with something, to have evolved to the point where Simic, Popa, Hughes etc make perfect sense to you is amazing. I want to roll over and over in it like a dog in shit, rejoicing in the simple beauty, concrete detail and elements of surprise that they deliver time after time.

Simplicity

The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.

(Hans Hoffman)

When Hoffman said this he was talking about painting but I think that this quote equally applies to poetry. Good poetry is all about eliminating the unnecessary words and creating space (like Hoffman's light) for the ideas to breathe and grow in. The words are like colours in a painting if you pile to many on or crowd them too close together they become muddied and lose some of their beauty.

Opposition in Art and Poetry

"In dialectical terms we claim that there is a continual state of opposition and interaction between the world of objective fact - the sensational and social world of active and economic existence - and the world of subjective fantasy. This opposition creates a state of disquietetude, a lack of spiritual equilibrium, which it is the business of the artist to resolve. he resolves the contradictions by creating a sythesis, a work of art which combines elements from both these worlds, eliminates others, but which for the moment gives us a qualitatively new experience."
(Read, H. in Germain, E.B. Surrealist Poetry in English, 1978)

The Self and its obsessions

"Marcel Duchamp and John Cage use chance operation to get rid of the subjectivity of the artist. For Cornell it's the opposite. To submit to chance is to reveal the self and its obsessions. In that sense Cornell is not a dadaist or a surrealist. He believes in charms and good luck."
(Simic, C. Dime Store Alchemy - The Art of Jospeh Cornell. New York: New York Review Books, 1992, p.61)

Art as Poetry

For some reason, this evening I found myself thinking about the work of Robert Rauschenberg - not the collages of iconic images of the twentieth century which he is most famous for, but his other works - paintings with objects incorporated into them.

I like the idea of juxtaposing surreal or abstract imagery with concrete everyday images (or objects) . This is something that I try to do with words in my poetry - making the mundane surprising (for example licking a photograph). Through a process of defamiliarization we are forced to see things in a new way. Shelley describes this process as making "familiar objects be as if they were not familiar’ by stripping ‘the veil of familiarity from the world" Viktor Shklovsky called this ostranenie (making strange).

Rauschenberg does this by juxtaposing abstarct painting with everyday objects like clocks and electric fans. He creates a kind of visual poetry - although mostly without words. Arman too creates a kind of poetry with his art owrks although in a slightly different way to Raushenberg. In his works the objects are the main focus - in effect they become the art. My particular favourite is a collage made of old typewriters pinned to red painted board.

Visual Poetry - Where Next?

I have been trying to decide where to go next with my visual poetry. The first thing I need to decide is what the product is - is it the photograph or is it the poem itself in whatever context it has been placed? This is a difficult question, when I was placing the text it felt like it was more about the actual text and the context - which would mean that the photograph was merely a record of what I did. However when I printed out some of the photographs the ones I most liked were the ones that were close up fragments of the text. I especially like the one I posted yesterday with the red and white text, which is reminiscent (although unintentionally) of some of Barbara Kruger's works.

Being a big fan of collage I have looked at Kruger's work before. Kruger places text over blown up photographs usually taken from advertising or the media (see picture). I have often made collages in a similar way to this but with my visual poetry I wanted to place the text into a more physical environment than that of a flat page. I also liked the idea of putting the text/poem into an environment that was related in some way to the text. The fragment photos though are definitely remininiscent of Kruger's work. They almost look like advertisments or posters.

Looking at the photographs again has posed more questions - is the content of the text the important thing or is it the context that the text is placed in that is most significant? or are both things of equal importance? Clearly putting text onto the object changes the nature of the object somehow. The object becomes a blank canvas or the equivalent of a blank page. If the poem was about the object itself that would also change the nature of it - making the viewer think about and maybe re-evaluate their relationship with the object.

Another option would be to write the poem as a still life like Popa's poems in "Bark." These poems "start as descriptions and then proceed to withold the usual attributes of the thing being described. They defmamiliarize perception." (Simic, C. in Popa, V. "Homage to the Lame Wolf" Oberlin College Press, 1987).

Recycling Day

This is part of a poem that I collaged onto boxes that had been put out for recycling. To use the whole poem seemed too much, it would have made the image too busy. I tried the image in black and white but actually I think that I like the slightly cropped colour version better. I was trying to write in response to the situation so that the poem related more to the context in which it was placed whilst (hopefully) standing up as a poem in its own right. I still feeel that the text is somehow seperate to the background and I am wondering if I should try writing on objects and leaving them ouside for a few days to weather them.

Visual Poetry

I got a great gadget this week that makes embossed letters on plastic tape and I started playing around with the idea of using it to make visual poetry. This is my first attempt so it isn't all that great but I can already see that there is great potential in the idea. This one isn't really a proper poem - just something that I came up with on the spur of the moment that was in keeping with the wall on which it is displayed. The problem for me with this piece is that the text seems too removed from the wall that it is displayed on I really wanted it to look more as if it belonged there. However that is very hard to acheive and maybe I am approaching it the wrong way. Maybe I should make the alienation of the text from the medium it is placed in more an integral part of the piece.