Poem on Francis Bacon

Putrefying flesh; the spirit of an age

and the life of Bacon’s Man

Poor, mean, ugly, British and short

With a nod to Hobbes’ Leviathan

My work is not violent

Reality does that so much better

Fifty years ago

Bacon was elevated to the status of a God

while showing us everything most vile

about sex between man and man

“You are born, you fuck, you die.”

It made me mad, it made me want to cry.

Fifty years from now

I want to see these pictures

on the walls of Auschwitz

a lasting, memorable tribute

to man’s inhumanity

to man  

his flesh so pink

not cooked

just melting

in the pan.

The subject is subjected

pinned

he squirms, twists, turns

to not be seen

obscene.

He took the perfect order

beauty in the images he found

and “messed” with them

distorted them

disturbed them

till the goodness

oozed

like blood and puss

upon the ground.

His crucifixions

are self portraits

they stare back at us

not in transcendence

but to condemn

the ones who dare to gaze upon

man’s violence

perpetrated

on his fellow man.

We are voyeurs, not viewers

holding on to what would not be held

within our looking, in our gaze

his victims desire escape

they try to vanish

seeking to be lost in a haze.

He gives us antidote to beauty

a kind of porn that is not porn

for everything that could be beautiful

is smudged or torn.

He tells us we are born

just to fuck

and die

yet this is what our galleries

and muse-eums

are keen to buy

I wonder, why?

©Nick Owen                                             December 2013

Vanity confronting truth

So, 

this is truth, who has arrested me,

just when I was  trying to escape?

She holds me fast

and forces me to think.

The hairs start rising on my nape.

The artist is a master of 3 D.

I’m gripped

by the illusion;

she reaches out to me.

If truth is beauty,

beauty truth,

what hope remains for those of us

who have let go their youth.

The artist leaves behind no name

and yet his work survives by standing here.

Perhaps she paints herself,

and thus lives on for ever more;

or maybe he, in jest,

immortalised his whore.

My vanity requires that I dwell here.

Let me be famous, not an empty skull;

admired by my friends

and everyone who feels my pull.

I see your face.

It shines astonishingly bright.

I see your face is shining

Even in the confines of my dreams at night.

Is this a Goddess that I see before me,

fingering the frame above my head.

Wait.

I do not see myself.

The mirror just reflects the skull instead.

There’s only darkness where there should be light.

The deepest darkness sits

where I  should find the very brightest light.

That can’t be right.

I’m so afraid that truth

will find me light weight on her scales,

I have reflected me within the picture frame.

I truly think that this might work,

if my poor poem fails.

Copyright      nick owen

The Kore Ignores the Deeds of Artemis

         http://www.flickr.com/photos/29320962@N07/8729609336/in/photolist-eipwHN

I'm supposed to stand impassive
while the arch-eyed Artemis wades
in with shins thick as cedars, stops
the gobs of her horn-eared dogs
with giants' heads. I have averted
my gaze for centuries, as stone sweat
drips from big-men's armipts when
the canines sink into their brains,
and as if by reflex, their index
fingers gouge out eyes. My mouth
is stretched into the most artificial
grin I can muster, my hair done
in braids, my nipples perpetually
raised beneath the muslin-alabaster -
and my arm, knocked off long ago
by some clumsy jobsworth, still
proffers an invisible hare. I do it
by staring without pupils, so I
cannot see the moon. Last night,

I dared to look - and as the giants die,
a bead of blood runs down my inner thigh.

Poem by Giles Watson, 2013. Inspired by a fortuitous juxtaposition in the Cast Gallery at the Ashmolean Museum: a group of Korai (women depicted in the height of late-archaic fashion, with brightly-painted clothes, holding out offerings of small animals) from the Athenian Acropolis, stand opposite an extraordinarily visceral cast from the Great Altar at Pergamon, depicting the battle between the Giants and the Gods.

Poem by Peter Malin for 5th October

Object     Ennui, painting by Walter Sickert (1917-18)

Gallery 63      Sickert and his Contemporaries

Poem

All Over

The scene’s mundane, banal; love’s at an end

In this drab room

Whose sickly décor wears the ochre hues

Of autumn’s fading.

Here we view this man, this woman,

Studiously absent from each other’s gaze,

Reiterating their thoughts’ tormented libretti

As the room plays and replays

Its sullen symphony of brown.

SHE: We thought love star-begotten, angel-blest,

Needless of nurture: lovers’ grained-in fault;

And so we squandered starlight unconfessed,

Smudged its bright promise to this yellowed vault

Where, joined but separate in the artist’s eye,

We thank our stars there’s nothing left alive to die.

HE:   My gaze aspires to space’s lightless vault,

Aches for the joy of universal dark,

Thinks to oblivion all that was my fault

In snuffing, quenching, love’s defenceless spark.

The artist’s palette paints our lives to brown,

But cannot limn the void where, lost and deep, we drown.

New poem by Paul Surman for gallery reading on 5 October.

STILL LIFES

A red drift veined in the marble table top,

the plump lustre of those grapes.

Studied inflorescence in a vase,

that knife not carelessly laid down.

The spiralled curl of half-peeled fruit

placed purposely to test the painter's art,

the drop of water that bulges inside

its surface tension. They are not the story.

After obsessive precision, long hours

of patient lingering over details,

they are merely a collection of surfaces,

shine and sheen, transparency and glint.

But painted objects lend weight to the mind

as if they or thought could be grasped

Painting by Claire Peeters 

Room 48

summer school images

Poetry confronting art; update

Just a couple of places left on the summer school at the Ashmolean exploring ekphrastic poetry.

We will be seeking assistance from forces in the unconscious to find a piece of art which moves us and create a poem that does it justice.

The schedule will be flexible, but goes approximately like this.

Day 1  7th August

10.30 welcome with tea/coffee.

10.40 Introducing ourselves

10.50  Presentation: Poetry at the Museum

11.10 Psychological Induction for exploring the museum with a poet's inner eye.

11.30 Finding your art work. Visiting the museum galleries.

12.30  Reconvene  in the lecture theatre. Discussion of the story so far.

12.45 - 1.30 Lunch break; tea and coffee available at 1.30.

1.30 - 3.15 Putting your ideas on paper. Form and content. Shaping words into poetry

3.15 - 3.30 Archetype and image. The core experience of poem and art.

            

 

Day 2.   8th August

10.30 Dream and daydream - sharing creative processes. Tea/coffee

10.40 Using a camera or visual ideas to enhance writing. Poem-picture making. Ekphrastic poetry.

11.00 Revisiting the art in the museum. 

11.30 Your poem takes shape. Individual coaching.

12.45 - 1.30 lunch Tea/coffee on return

1.30 - 3.10 Writing with support.

3.10 - 3.30  Sharing work, feedback and goodbyes.