Some visitors to this web log may be interested in joining "Poetry and Pictures England." It is a group curated by Tina Negus and I, which shares poem-pictures from the UK.
The accent is on the pictures more than the poems.
People are allowed to create images for poems by other poets, not just their own work.
http://www.flickr.com/groups/poetryandpicturesengland/
It is easy to join. You simply join Flickr and ask to become a member.
You might also wish to look at Tina's new book of poetry and pictures published by Indigo Dreams. I am more than happy to quote from the book cover.
"I tried very hard the other day to think of gifted people who were both artists and poets; there's Blake of course – and David Jones the great painter and calligrapher comes to mind, then there's Mervyn Peake of course but he's better known for his Gormonghast trilogy than for his poetry – and now there is Tina Negus.
Her painting and photography goes right to the heart of things, is unfussy and uncluttered and has that element of truth that feels just right. No Emperor's suit of clothes with her work, you know there's no Oz wizard behind the curtain pulling the strings and shouting down a megaphone. It's the same with her poetry, the words resonate but not in any show-off way; the style is direct and urgent and goes straight to the heart of the matter.
There are people who quietly beaver away producing gems and joys and sharing them."
Tina Negus is one of them.
Mike Harding
http://www.indigodreamsbookshop.com/#/tina-negus/4567933899
Monday, 10 September 2012
Giles Watson: updated poem for performance
Mark-Maker
Both kinds of work are ancient labours
Born of sweat, by beauty bound:
The billhook and the aching back,
The hand, the burin and the brain.
Born of sweat, by beauty bound:
The billhook and the aching back,
The hand, the burin and the brain.
Both work a tangle into strength,
A scribble into something more,
Coaxing split stulps into growth.
Both cut the quick to find the form.
A scribble into something more,
Coaxing split stulps into growth.
Both cut the quick to find the form.
Both hack for life, and neither kills.
This bites with acid – that, a blade.
Both leave marks, both are cruel;
Both make life by spilling blood.
This bites with acid – that, a blade.
Both leave marks, both are cruel;
Both make life by spilling blood.
Both gouge ways in wax or wood,
Both smell of stubble, burn like thatch.
Leaves burnish both; both are wild.
Both know the health of cutting back.
Both smell of stubble, burn like thatch.
Leaves burnish both; both are wild.
Both know the health of cutting back.
Poem by Giles Watson, 2012. Inspired by a display of engraving instruments alongside the plate for Robin Tanner’s ‘Wiltshire Hedger’ (1928; reworked in 1971) in the Ashmolean Museum, and the art of hedge-laying itself. Whilst the picture shows Tanner's work, the poem must necessarily be dedicated to Samuel Palmer, whose work has inspired generation after generation of English engravers.
A replacement for my poem 'Arrowheads', inspired by Charles Collins's 'Convent Thoughts', which I was to read in the Ashmolean on October 6th - but which is now on loan to the Tate Britain.
Saturday, 8 September 2012
Profile: Vahni Capildeo
Vahni Capildeo (b. Trinidad, W.I.) has lived in the UK since 1991. After studying English Language and Literature at Christ Church, Oxford, she pursued a doctorate in Old Norse. Her first book of poetry and prose, No Traveller Returns (Salt, 2003), was completed during a Research Fellowship at Girton College, Cambridge. Undraining Sea (Egg Box, 2009) was Highly Commended for the Forward Prize (individual poem category) and shortlisted for the Guyana International Prize for Literature. Working for the Oxford English Dictionary Etymology group inspired Capildeo’s subsequent books, Dark & Unaccustomed Words (Egg Box, 2012) and Utter (forthcoming). Capildeo reviews for the Caribbean Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. She has been appointed to teach at the University of Glasgow. She is interested in mixed forms and in the layering of time, place and voice.
Poem for Performance
MUSEUM STANDS IN
…for lone student mandir.
Arrived in the era of
paper
with no means of making
fire,
I searched – how long?
This was pre-Internet.
Just the telephone book,
its ringbark absence of
marble.
So: the museum, in lieu
of a temple.
In these my gods’
basement days,
stone seemed torn wildly:
Nobody was using this
archway,
whispered a disappeared
jungle.
Now with renewal,
removal,
my gods have changed
their storey:
scarlet walls and ochre,
flat-out perilous, higher
than height. The face
from a tower
eyeballs my thought
towards hugeness.
A ceiling boss of
swordsmen
rearrayed, redraws me.
The opening circles of
sight…
[Room 32, India
Profile: Jalina Mhyana
Jalina Mhyana is a two-time Pushcart nominee and graduate of Bennington College’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Mhyana’s second poetry collection The Wishing Bones was chosen for publication by Pudding House Collections’ 2006 Chapbook contest. Her work was also a finalist Perigee’s 2004 poetry contest. Mhyana’s first chapbook Spikeseed was published by Bad Moon Books in 2004.
Major Jackson wrote, "One admires the high-spiritedness and Dionysian spirit that sings loudly in [Jalina's] poems as well as the large-scale intellect that ranges over various cultures.”
Villanelle inspired by
Piero di Cosimo’s
Forest Fire
Circa 1505, oil on panel
Ashmoleon Museum, Oxford
___________________________
The Villanelle, a poetic form that focused on pastoral themes, became
famous during di Cosimo’s time - the Italian Renaissance of the 1500’s.
___________________________
Exodus
It’s been burning five centuries. Beasts long to escape
the painting’s few feet of imaginary damnation.
But hoof and wing are fenced by the frame’s dire
straits, a fence they pray will fall to di Cosimo’s fire.
They dream of the wall’s green meadow—a migration
into Michelangelo’s verdant Virgin and Child, to escape
the hemorrhaging paintbrush. The artist was inspired
by Lucretius, one candle lit by another, a conflagration
of Renaissance thought. di Cosimo painted flame directly
onto wooden paneling—only arsonists would conspire
to burn so brightly. Ironic the artist’s benign flirtation
with fire, as he ate his meals raw in the chill to escape
flame within the frame of his home, a pyre
lit in his nightmares. Better the forest’s prostration
to terror: he traps his fear inside the frame’s dire
embrace and watches it consume his empire.
Animal instinct turns man to beast—a translation
even cave men could understand as they escaped
caves of small skulls painted with shadows of fire.
_______________________
Profiles of poets; Giles Watson
Giles Watson was born in Southampton, but emigrated to Australia with his parents at the age of one, and lived there for the next twenty-five years. He has been writing poetry and taking photographs for as long as he can remember, and has more recently experimented with painting and film, in order to indulge his fascination with the relationship between text and image. Giles also writes prose essays on natural history and mediaeval visual culture, is an avid walker and amateur naturalist, and has a keen interest in theatre. His academic work has included a doctoral thesis on religion and culture in England during the Second World War. As a secondary school teacher, he has taught English, History, Drama, Sociology and Film.
Please check the update on Giles and his poetry.
ARROWHEAD
Stamped with characters of beauty, their veins
Like waters at a confluence of streams, arrowheads
Point heavenwards. The traceries of their leaves
Are essays in divine proportion: three lobes
Of an arch, mirrored in the initials
Of her half-forgotten, inverted Book of Hours,
In the stained glass of her chapel, in the niche
Of the piscina where her fingers dipped
Before the benediction, and mirrored also
In the shadow of one leaf, which makes
A window to the riverbed. I too wish to dip
My outstretched hand in that dark and holy water.
Source material: The poem refers to Charles Collins’ painting, Convent Thoughts, currently housed in the Ashmolean museum. John Ruskin praised the leaves of Alisma plantago-aquatica, the Water Plantain, as models of “divine proportion” which endorsed his theory of gothic architecture, claiming in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) that they are “shapes which in the everyday world are familiar to the eyes of men, [and with which] God has stamped those characters of beauty which He has made it man’s nature to love”. In a review in which he defended the aesthetic merits of Collins’ painting, Ruskin maintained: “I happen to have a special acquaintance with the water plant Alisma Plantago ... and as I never saw it so thoroughly or so well drawn, I must take leave to remonstrate with you, when you say sweepingly that these men [Pre-Raphaelite painters] 'sacrifice truth as well as feeling to eccentricity.' For as a mere botanical study of the Water Lily and Alisma, as well as of the common lily and several other garden flowers, this picture would be invaluable to me, and I heartily wish it were mine.” Unfortunately for Ruskin, he had made a grave error of identification, for there is no Alisma in Collins’ painting, but there are Arrowhead plants (Sagittaria sagittifolia), in the bottom left hand corner of the painting. For a more detailed discussion of Ruskin’s mistake, see Elizabeth Deas, "The Missing Alisma: Ruskin's Botanical Error", Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (Fall 2001): 4-13, and for a reasonably good reproduction of the painting, see:commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
I am grateful to Jeannie for her companionship on our several visits to see this painting, and for her assistance in my research. Poem by Giles Watson, 2009.
Profile: Paul Surman
Paul Surman was born in Oxford in 1947, and has lived there all his life. He has been writing poetry for most of that time, and his work has been widely published. In 2012 his poems have appeared in 14 Magazine (the sonnet specialist) and Acumen, and further poems will appear in the next issues of Cake and Magma soon. He is a long time visitor to the Ashmolean.
THE ROAD TO EMMAUS
It was the weather of a dream,
like some rough fabric we wore
that chafed, a thin lightning
crackling uninvited
through the general disturbance
of our flesh: but our thoughts
were worse; stumbling past
images of things in a hopeless
sweat, the road ahead a blind
curse, narrowing into infinity
with us alone on it, barren,
speechless with mutterings.
Through the squint of seeing
the landscape was only the heat
shouting obscure sayings
from a book of the inert, a text
of light on rocks, repeating—this
is all there is: then he was there,
a stranger asking us what it was
we had just said; cruel, calling us
fools and slow of heart, quoting
scriptures, as day turned to a heavy
night that blundered along with us,
until on arrival we asked him in
for something to eat. That's when
the dull pressure of fear and heat
was released—and we were amazed
by sudden recognition, not of man
or god, but of a gesture, plain as
the blessing and breaking of bread.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)