The Beauty of the Modern
Sally Festing investigates some plastic arts and their poetic parallels
Earlier this year I batted down the banks of the Thames to an exhibition of the German sculptor, Eva Hesse (1936-80). She was influenced by several seminal isms of her period that don't especially grab me. I wasn't sure what I'd make of her work. But she lived only 34 years; I wanted to know how she had made a reputation in so short a time.
The immediate impact was one of variety. Multimedia installations ranged from small, intense, abstract paintings, boxed-in and subdivided, to cobwebby loops and tangles of suspended rope and cord, waxed to assume permanent positions against a wall or simply hung in space, like mobiles. Fluidity of style was matched by a flexible approach to the components. Hesse took drawings apart and reassembled them as collages. Returning to them later, she might play with the collaged elements, move them again or turn them upside down.
How like Matisse's cut-outs. “They are parts of an abstract system in which the artist can save, reuse, and rearrange specific forms the way a poet reuses and recombines previously discarded words, phrases or images”, I read in Jack Flam's compilation of the artist's letters. “Their imagery occurs, like that of poetry, ‘in the mind’.” Or like Auden who, on occasion, arranged the best lines from a number of discarded poems to create a new one.
Poetic parallels didn't end here. Hesse had a studio at an early stage in her career in an abandoned textile factory strewn with remnants of cord and old machinery. Ever open to new possibilities, she began to draw machine parts, subtly transforming them from industrial objects into inorganic quasi-anatomical shapes. Her opportunism struck me as being like that of a poet I heard give a memorable reading. Katrina Porteus has always written poems, of which her first were a naturalist's evocations of wild life. After graduating in history from Cambridge, she took the map of the Northumberland coast where she lives, the local idiom and journalistic material from a dwindling fishing community - transforming the whole into rich, fervent narrative poetry. Alice Oswald has done something similar in Dart. The more versatile the poet, the more able is she or he to use what is at hand.
The most poignant of my somewhat random recognitions from Hesse's exhibition was prompted by a sculpture called Hang up, a name that surely invites a poem. The work is composed of a great loop of wire protruding from the middle of a giant empty frame. The wire swings out towards the viewer as if trying to scoop up the space in front of it. “The absurdity of this pictureless picture is enhanced”, the blurb says, “by the obsessive bandaging of the frame and the wire”. Hesse considered it an important early statement.
Patently, the work is bizarre. But for me, the sculptor's awareness of the fact is even more interesting. “It is the most ridiculous sculpture that I ever made, and that is why it is really good. It has a kind of depth I don't always achieve and that is the kind of depth or soul or absurdity or life or meaning or feeling or intellect that I want”. Her success lay, Hesse was acknowledging, in absurdity.
That same day I got round to reading last year's TS Eliot award winning poems, Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband. Anne Carson lives in Canada, where she was until recently a professor of Classics at McGill University, Montreal. Since 1998 she has published a book a year, to widespread (but not universal) acclaim. Nurtured on The Glass Essay, the opening sequence of poems in Carson’s earlier collection Glass and God, and having read Magma 23's unfavourable review of The Beauty of the Husband, I was prepared for the poet's sometimes abstruse interwoven text, by turn narrative, didactic, semantic, and classical. In The Glass Essay, Carson contemplates simultaneously her mother’s aging, her father’s senility and her own vulnerability at the end of an affair by interleaving domestic scenes and hospital visits to her father with a series of re-readings of Emily Bronte and a dream sequence.
Robert Hass, American poet and critic at Berkeley, California, identifies three streams in current North American poetry: a central tradition of free verse made out of both romanticism and modernism, “split between impulses to inward and psychological writing and an outward and realist one, at its best fusing the two”; then a metrical tradition, basically classical; and lastly, experimental poetry, “usually [my italics] more passionate about form than content, perception than emotion, restless with the conventions of the art … and intent on inventing a new one”. To my mind, Carson pulls from the first and the last. “I'm conserving the past”, she told the New York Times. “It's what classicists are supposed to do… One way is to say ‘Nothing new is any good’. ...you don't learn anything when you're still up on the window ledge, safe. The other way [by inference, her own] is to jump from what you know into empty space and see where you end up.”
“Jumping” can be read as Carson expanding the narrative of The Beauty of the Husband with far-flung references that might come straight from encyclopaedias. For example, to the seventeenth-century writer, Nahum Tate, who came up with his own version of King Lear because he reckoned the original was too miserable, or the sober statement that more than 90% of all cultivated grapes are varieties of Vitis vinifera. Occasionally these references sound so far-fetched that I felt bound to check them. The poet is, of course, always right. She would not have permitted inaccuracy. I can get lost among her quicksilver connections and associations, but I am willing to maintain receptiveness to her turns of direction in the same way I do with the plastic arts. Otherwise I would miss the edgy eroticism, the strangeness, the possibilities I also find in her work.
The dedicatory page of The Beauty of the Husband is a fair sample. Carson immediately identifies two contributory streams: Keats “for his general surrender to beauty”, from whom a short quotation introduces each of twenty-nine “tangos” (conserving the past); and the narrative, including dialogue, about a dilatory and subsequently painful marriage. Often, the poet knows, it is uncertainty that causes most distress.
Quite what Carson implies by calling her sub-divisions tangos is open to speculation. A cross fertilization between Argentinian Negro origin and Parisian developments? A dance-like quality? Jauntiness? “It has long gliding steps and intricate poses”, World Book informs suggestively. The tango was popular on dance floors in the 1920s and 30s and had, I know, for my mother, connotations of sexual freedom.
In established tradition, Carson starts with an analogy. Keats studied medicine. He never practised since he had decided to become a poet, but at one time he considered signing on as a ship's surgeon. From medicine, Carson takes 'wound' and its mystery: “A wound gives off its own light”, she points out in tango I. Likewise, a fractured marriage can wound and illumine. Carson amplifies the connection by drawing in the plastic arts, following the wound reference by introducing the most famous painting of the early twentieth century modernist, Marcel Duchamp. What could be more appropriate, more fragile (wounding/wounded?) than The Large Glass, a pseudonym used to refer for brevity's sake to a work conceived, executed and left unfinished - The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. The painting-cum-sculpture, painted on glass, took three years to plan, and called on subjects, according to the artist's notes, as diverse as contemporary maths, technology and even alchemy. The introspection implied by this, art historian Norbert Lynton tells us, “is as important as all the cleverness, the wit, the dandyish air of detached superiority that strike us first and tend to dazzle”.
Duchamp’s theme is sex – dream, inspiration and longing, motivating energy, and symbolising spiritual aspirations. As in Carson's poem, the sex finally fails. Bride and bachelors (wife and husband/ lovers) don't come together. The painting is cryptic and sad. Surely Duchamp's technique, liberating the reader/viewer from preconceptions, is what Carson is doing eighty years afterwards. “I think”, she says, “you only learn things when you jump”. As with the Dadists, a group of painters with whom Duchamp identifies, her effects are a mixture of careful consideration and chance.
Expectations roused by Carson’s dedication to The Beauty of the Husband are not disappointed. Far from finding the poet's language flat or unimaginative (as Laurie Smith does in Magma 23 – see pp. 43-6), I discover once more the lyricism I first admired in her Glass Essay.
what is more fragile... what is more true
than a snowy night, down it comes
sifting over branches and railings and the secret air itself,
down the steep, down the stops, down the deepenings, down the
grooves in the nails.
They fall asleep and dream
of muffled corridors,
greenish glow
along the edges of mirrors, faces, cities.
Snow spins over it, down over it all.
Something of my excitement seems to have parallels in my reactions to Carson as a relative contemporary of Hesse (born in 1950, 14 years before the sculptor). Carson, for instance, gives us images which could have been fed from a factory workshop:
He sought her in her virginity everywhere in it (frayed and fled)
from top to bottom
of the little looms and the whitish green and the shivering.
She uses imagery that might have been prompted by the same source as a string mobile:
'WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE DANCE CALLED
MEMORY
Rope
let down from heaven to draw me up out of not-being: Proust used
to weep over days
gone by ...
In tango XXVII, laid out as a prose poem, Carson even gives an image reminiscent of the sculptor's Hang up:
to combat the swaying silence of a winter night in Nono's kitchen
under the clandestine glare of the forty-watt bulb that is looped up
over the red-and-white checked oilcloth on the table by a knotted
cord and seems to be always slightly ... vibrating though everything
else in the world is still...
Criticising Carson as “fanciful” is derogatory. To be sure, her vibrant juxtapositions are absurd, but to me this is also her strength.
… All in all my husband was a man who knew more
about the Battle of Borodino
than he did about his own wife's body, much more! Tensions
poured up the walls
and along the ceiling.
“How ridiculous”, the poet might have reasoned, with Eva Hesse, “and that is why it is really good.” Perhaps what poet and sculptor share, above all, is versatility. Maybe that is why both excel at using what is at hand.
Page(s) 37-41
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The