Transformations: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern, Pino Pascali's Trap

When Pino Pascali exhibited Trap at gallery L'Attico in Rome in 1968 he had himself photographed standing inside it for the catalogue. He also included photos of his pet chimpanzee and of himself costumed in raffia like a tribesman. Trap, which evokes rope traps used to hunt animals in the jungle, is made of the braided steel wool found in Brillo pads. He also exhibited Ponte, a ropelike bridge such as would be hung between tree canopies. Pascali was one of the Arte Povera group who made sculptures from cheap household materials but he died at the age of 33 from a motocycle accident, which somehow made this man-sized trap more poignant.

We sat around it and read two poems which have entrapment both in their theme and forms: 'The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford' by James Fenton and 'Net' by Robin Robertson. Both are in free verse but written for the eye so that the shape suggests traps or nets. I've always loved Fenton's Pitt-Rivers Museum poem but it was enlightening to read it in the context of Trap and to hear the group's comments.

The form, despite being free, is structured so that after meandering through an inventory of curiosities in the museum cases, such as "a mask of Saagga, the Devil Doctor" and "earth from the grave of a man / Killed by a tiger and a woman who died / In childbirth", it lures the reader towards the finale of the lonely child wandering into the forbidden woods of his father's estate "MEN-TRAPS AND SPRING-GUNS ARE SET ON THESE PREMISES.' / For his father had protected his good estate." Each stanza begins with a one or two-word line like a door or lid to each room or cabinet of 9 more, longer, lines, containers of 'primitive' artefacts collected in empire times. The visitor to the museum thus enters both history and the forbidden woods of his or her psyche.

Robin Robertson's 'Net' has a narrower focus. A woman loosens her white silk scarf in a restaurant and her companion is drawn back "to another ocean, / another ravishing. // That moment, / at twilight, / when a cloud / of starlings / slip-drags...". The poem, with its very short lines, drifts down the page in billows of indented skeins, until "I found myself / caught, / felt myself / being pulled in." We see a double image of the ensnaring woman and the cloud of starlings "spilling the net of itself".

The task was to write a poem loosely responding to Pascali's Trap, which includes a domestic element and something of the wild, and also to consider how the form of the poem might evoke the theme.

The remainder of the session was spent in feedback workshops. For this we divided into small groups of threes or fours so that each poet would receive a short burst of intensive feedback on one poem in progress. Next week will be our last, in the Lichtenstein exhibition, with the explosions of the 'War and Romance' room, and will culminate in a celebration readaround for everyone to share a poem from the course, to perform it and bring in copies for us all. My next Tate Modern course will be in the autumn.
 

Transformations: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern, Marc Camille Chaimowicz

Still from Orphée by Jean Cocteau

For our second session in A Bigger Splash we worked with Marc Camille Chaimowicz's homage to Jean Cocteau. This non-literal reconstruction of Cocteau's bedroom features a crumpled bed, a two-way staircase, a mirror, a rocking-horse and wallpaper designed by Chaimowicz. There is no attempt at historical accuracy, though the artist did research the Cocteau museum at Menton. The installation resembles a version rather than a translation of Cocteau's imagination, though the group noted that the colour scheme was more Chaimowicz than Cocteau, pastels rather than black and white Gothic fairytale.

Still from La Belle et la Bête by Jean Cocteau

When I was doing my BA sculpture degree my thesis in complementary studies was on Cocteau's films as poetry, so this session was full of transformations for me: film as poetry, installation as poetry, film and poetry as art. We started by finding one object in the room to speed-write about. Then I handed out lines from the screenplays of La Belle et la Bête and Orphée, lines such as "Look at yourself in a mirror all your life, and you'll see death at work, like bees in a hive of glass" from a passage-through-the-mercury-mirror scene in Orphée, and "I am the door to your room" and "it is night in my world, but it is morning in yours" from La Belle et la Bête. These magical films served as guides to our work, as I'd asked everyone to watch clips from them on You Tube as homework the previous week and some even bought DVDs of the whole films. 

Armed with one line from each film (selected from my handouts) and a random line from Cocteau's very surreal poems, which they picked from a French chocolate box I handed around, the task was to write a poem responding to Chaimowicz's installation, and to incorporate these three lines somewhere in the poem. I gave licence to be as free as they wished in their interpretations of the art, in the same spirit as Chaimowicz, who did not worry about being slavishly literal in his rendering of Cocteau's fantasy bedroom. I advised them to focus on one object, make their theme Cocteau if they wished, or simply write about a room of their own. In fact the poems that addressed Cocteau directly worked well, as did the more personal responses. Quite a few used their random Cocteau poem-lines as their last lines and that seemed to supply a surprise element.

Four of my collections are now available on Kindle

My publisher Seren has made four of my collections available on Kindle and e-readers, that's all my Seren books, starting with The Zoo Father (2001).

The Zoo Father on Amazon.co.uk

The Huntress on Amazon.co.uk

The Treekeeper's Tale on Amazon.co.uk

What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo on Amazon.co.uk









All Kindle editions are also available from Amazon.com

Transformations: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: Ibrahim El-Salahi

Our second session of Transformations: Poetry from Art was in the Poetry and Dream galleries, working with the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi's painting Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I.  I'd been looking forward to this, despite having a heavy cold and feeling distinctly unwell last night, the sheer pleasure of looking at this painting carried me through. The title alone sets the imagination going. 

Instead of our usual initial speed-writing I asked everyone to slow-write, to really concentrate and look. What could they see in the shadows, the lights? They should make a careful note of this but spend a few minutes just looking and listening, because it's the sounds of childhood dreams.  When they sat back down in our circle I asked each person to pair up with their neighbour and exchange impressions then make a note of their neighbour's observations. Some saw horses, fish, a whale, skeletons! Then we discussed some background: how El-Salahi had painted this on returning to his homeland after studying at the Slade. We studied three poems which attempt to capture the nature of childhood.

Kim Moore's 'Give Me A Childhood', published in the inaugural issue of POEM magazine, is a magical search for what it is to have a child's imagination and live as owls do "on silent wings. I will wear my heart / as a face." The owl-soul and the journey by car are as shadowy and haunting as El-Salahi's painting. We also read Mark Strand's 'Where are the waters of childhood?' which also embarks on a magical journey. Through a series of imperatives a life is unreeled back to a time before birth: "Now you invent the boat of your flesh and set it upon the waters /... Now you look down. The waters of childhood are there." Our last 'childhood' poem was 'The Small Boy and the Mouse' by DH Maitreyabandhu, which won the 2009 Keats-Shelley prize for its evocation of the power of a child's imagination.

To write a poem everyone had to include an observation by their neighbour about the painting, as well as something from their own notes and write a poem on the childhood theme. They could use the imperative form as Mark Strand had, or make a journey, or involve an animal, and listen to the sounds of childhood as well as its sights.

Homework was to get acquainted with Jean Cocteau's films Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus for next week's sesssion in Marc Camille Chaimowicz's Jean Cocteau room in A Bigger Splash. There are snips from both on You Tube.

Transformations: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern, Lucy McKenzie

Last night was our first session of my new course at Tate Modern – Transformations: Poetry from Art. We worked in A Bigger Splash, in the last room, surrounded by Lucy McKenzie's trompe l'oeil room sets, with their wallpaper stains and cloudscapes. These wall-sized paintings were prompted by Muriel Spark's novella, The Girls of Slender Means about a Kensington townhouse converted into a boarding house for down-at-heel women in the post-war era. The house vanishes by the end of the story, but I won't spoil it by saying how. McKenzie interprets this with an illusion of a half-sky half-house.

Our task was to transform a visual art work based on literature, back into literature, a tall order for twenty-five people in one and a half hours. 

I started the class by asking them to speed-write their response to the installation without knowing any of its background. They had five minutes to do this, and could write anything that came into their heads. The important thing was to write. I suggested they focus on one detail. We then sat down and introduced ourselves, offering the group one phrase from the speed-writing as a gift. We followed this with a discussion of the art and McKenzie's intentions.

We studied poems which are set in a room. In Cavafy's 'The Afternoon Sun' the vanished furniture of a room turned into an office is evoked, "Beside the window the bed; / the afternoon sun used to touch half of it" and a lost love is mourned through the furnishings. In the Hebrew poet Amir Or's short poem 'Home' a philosophical meditation on ideas of 'home' ends on a shocking surreal image: "Faceless night covers with its wings    the fish's spasms on the hook". A poem can make an abrupt tonal shift and tell more of its intent through the image of a fish caught in a giant hook as if in a doll's house. I'd brought lots of examples of poems that have a house as their central focus, including Margaret Atwood's 'Morning in the Burned House' and Marie Howe's 'The Attic', but we only had time to discuss one more, Marilyn Nelson's praise poem 'Dusting', a good example of how to narrow the focus to a microscopic level, in this case dust, so as to make a larger statement.

They now had fifteen minutes to write a poem, incorporating one of the gift phrases. I asked them to consider three things: that they were not expected to write well, they had permission to write badly, because good writing might come from that, from having the freedom to experiment. The second thing was that they shouldn't feel constrained by the artwork, they should use it as they wish, and if they needed to stray far from that source then so be it. Being dutiful can hinder. However, it was there to help, instead of a blank page, so they might have a go at first. The third suggestion was that they try to remember a home they have lived in, and write about a relationship through that home and its furniture, doors or dust. It's hard to write a good poem if the writer is not fully engaged with the subject, so they should look for their way in to it.

Fifteen minutes is not much time, not enough to worry and get self-critical. Everyone read their poems back; it's always fascinating to hear how different they all are. I heard poems, germs of poems and rich material for poems, a satisfying start to the course.

Next week we'll be in the Poetry and Dream wing, looking at the Sudanese painter Ibrahim El-Salahi's haunting work 'Reborn Sounds of Childhood Dreams I', which I am very much looking forward to.

The Zoo Father & my next collection My Father's City

The Zoo Father, my second collection, was published in 2001 and was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize. It was also Boyd Tonkin's poetry highlight of the year in the Independent and Les Murray's book of the year in the TLS. It was selected for the Poetry Book Society Next Generation promotion, was a PBS Recommendation and won two Arts Council awards while in progress. It charts a remarkable event in my life, when my estranged father contacted me and I met him in Paris while he was dying of emphysema. I hadn't seen him for 35 years. Those visits to his cramped flat in the Latin Quarter were difficult as he had abused and abandoned his family. He told me he moved from place to place during his life, including the Kabylie Mountains in Algeria and Marseille, as well as hotels where he had lived for years just opposite Notre Dame. The only way I could write about him then was through imagery of the Amazon jungle, which I'd recently journeyed to. The poems are a series of Amazonian animal masks of us both and use rituals from the tribes I met while there, or read about later.

Twelve years after his death I started writing new poems about him, during many stays in Paris, the city of my birth. When I stay there the poems come daily. It is an extraordinary experience falling in love with the city that I hated and feared as a child but I am quite obsessed with it, and every time I go I discover something new to love – museums, parks, squares, that radiate from Notre Dame, the core of the quartier latin, his quartier, which he knew during the jazz age. When he was young he lived in a pension a few doors down from the Hotel Cristal and knew Django Reinhardt and his nightclubs. Later, when he was disappeared, he lived just opposite the cathedral, and I imagine him overlooked by the gargoyles and chimeras on the towers. 

The resulting poems of this second collection about my father will be published by Seren in 2014. The working title is My Father's City. I'm very grateful to have a grant from the Arts Council again, to support me while I finish the book and to enable me to spend a month in Paris in spring.

Hand-feeding Birds in Paris

Hand-feeding the birds in Paris is compulsive. I do it every time I go. My favourite are the sparrows. On one visit I would wander down to Notre Dame square every evening with a madeleine longue, rice or birdseed bought in the nearby bird market. I love the sensation of their tiny gripping claws, and I talk to them of course. There are regulars who feed them every day, every year, that the birds know, who attract a flock as soon as they arrive with their carrier bags full of seed or bread. If I don't have any food on me I'll ask them for a hand-full of theirs, and chat to them about the ways of sparrows, or gulls, crows, pigeons, starlings - they all take their turns. 

 

When I was four I lived in a children's home south of Paris called the Mésangerie – the tit-house – and the birds of Paris I encounter now remind me of those infants in their nest-like dormitories, and also of Annette Messager's sculptures The Boarders and Knit for Sparrows, with her sparrow corpses obsessively dressed in knitted capes and crocheted bonnets, laid out to sleep in boarding rooms. The sparrows – or moineaux – seem miraculous to me, as I live in east London, where they have virtually vanished, though they were plentiful when I first moved here twenty-five years ago. A special treat is to see them having a dust-bath just by the privet in front of Notre Dame, which I remember they used to do on the pavement outside my house once, so often I didn't always marvel at their ritual.

Me hand-feeding the sparrows on the parvis of Notre Dame, over the box privet, I took the photo on my iPhone with my other hand.

The gull man this Christmas on the Pont au Double. He has trained them to eat from his lips as well, I love the queue!

The crows of the Jardin des Plantes, at twilight, closing time, this Christmas. A woman arrived with a bag of bread and hundreds crowded around her.

This man must be a regular. He was so engrossed in his sparrows it was captivating. I did ask for a hand-full of breadcrumbs from him and they devoured them instantly.

The pigeon man of Notre Dame

The pigeon woman of Notre Dame offering rice, Christmas 2011