Judyth Piazza chats with Pascale Petit on Cinco de Mayo

Today is Cinco de Mayo, Frida Day! To celebrate it, Judyth Piazza, host of the American Perspective Radio Program, has interviewed me for the Student Operated Press. You can hear the 15 minute interview here:

Judyth Piazza chats with Pascale Petit, Author of "What the Water Gave Me"

It was snowing when I arrived in New Mexico last Sunday but now the sky is the deepest sapphire and sacred Taos mountain is the only white peak left.  I have seen robins building their nests and heard a nightingale-wren in nearby Rio Grande Gorge. The houses here are rich cinnamon shades of adobe earth against the blue, so they seem to melt into the landscape.

I will be reading from What the Water Gave Me at the Metta Theater tonight (1470 Paseo Del Pueblo Sur, El Prado, New Mexico 87529) at 7.30pm. If you live nearby please come and say hello and chat about your experience of Frida after the reading when there'll be time for informal audience discussion. 

My south west tour continues in LA this Sunday 8th May when I'll read with Mariano Zaro at the Ruskin Art Center at 3pm (800 S. Plymouth) and on Monday 9th May for Moonday Poetry at Village Books at 7.30pm (1049 Swarthmore Ave., Pacific Palisades), when I'll be reading with the wonderful Lois P Jones, and with the visual accompaniment of Frida's paintings.  My last event is at Bookshop Santa Cruz at 7.30pm on Tuesday 10 May with Rebecca Foust (1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz). 

US launch readings from What the Water Gave Me (Black Lawrence Press)

This April the US edition of What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo is being published by Black Lawrence Press. I'll be flying to New York on Wednesday to do four readings there (see below for details) and one upstate in the Catskill Mountains. The first week I'll be in a friend's place in Tribeca, spend Easter weekend at the Bright Hill Center at Treadwell, then stay near Riverside Drive. I'm really looking forward to returning to NY, but I'll also be taking my notebooks with me to work on my writing in between gigs – heaven!

On 1st May I fly to New Mexico to do a reading and workshop, and after that, LA for two more readings, and I'll end up at Santa Cruz on 10 May to do a return reading for Dennis Morton's Poetry Santa Cruz. I wish the California part wasn't so rushed. New Mexico will be an adventure as I've never been there before. It will be good to see old friends and make new ones, get acquainted with their poems. Please come if you are near any of these places and free, and do say hello. I'm very touched by all the dear friends who have organised these events for me and helped to make this tour happen.

Launch readings from What the Water Gave Me (Black Lawrence Press, April 2011)

Bowery Poetry Club, NYC  6pm Saturday 16 April 

Bertha Rogers and Pascale Petit 

308 Bowery, NYC

mail@bowerypoetry.com Phone: 212 614 0505 http://www.bowerypoetry.com 

Juniper, Brooklyn, 5.30pm Sunday 17 April

Margot Farrington & Pascale Petit

Juniper, 112 Berry Street, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NY 11211

Bright Hill Center, Catskills, NY, 7pm Thursday 21 April

Djelloul Marbrook & Pascale Petit with illustrated reading 

94 Church St, PO Box 193, Treadwell, NY 13846

wordthur@stny.rr.com Phone: +1 607 829 5055 

http://www.brighthillpress.org

Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, 7pm Thursday 28 April

Sally Bliumis-Dunn, William Olsen & Pascale Petit

143 Seventh Avenue, Park Slope, Brooklyn, NY 11215

events@communitybookstore.net  Phone: (718) 783 3075  

http://www.communitybookstore.net/events  

Cornelia St Café, NYC, 6pm Saturday 30 April 

Mark Doty, Melissa Stein & Pascale Petit

29 Cornelia Street, New York, NY 10014

info@corneliastreetcafe.com  Phone: (212) 989 9319

http://www.corneliastreetcafe.com  

Metta Theatre, Taos, New Mexico, Thursday 5 May

Veronica Golos, Andrea Watson & Pascale Petit reading for Cinco de Mayo

1470 Paseo Del Pueblo Sur, El Prado, New Mexico 87529 

Ruskin Art Club, Los Angeles 3pm Sunday 8 May

Mariano Zaro & Pascale Petit reading

800 S. Plymouth, Los Angeles, CA, 90005

Email: Ekduende@cox.net Phone: (323) 755-3530

Moonday Poetry at Village Books, LA, 7.30pm Monday 9 May

Lois P. Jones & Pascale Petit (illustrated reading)

1049 Swarthmore Ave., Pacific Palisades, California

pero@earthlink.net Phone: (310) 454 4063

http://www.moondaypoetry.com 

Poetry Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, California, 7.30pm Tuesday 10 May

Rebecca Foust and Pascale Petit

Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz

info@poetrysantacruz.org Phone: (831) 464-8983

http://www.baymoon.com/~poetrysantacruz 

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern online anthology 2011

Last night was the final session in our Poetry from Art Shaping Poems spring course at Tate Modern and was a celebration reading. An online anthology of poems from this term is now up on the Tate website. This is a selection of twenty-three poems from many the participants wrote in the galleries during five classes, responding to Gabriel Orozco's Obit Series and Lintels, Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds, Do Ho Suh's Staircase III and Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass. 

Many of the poets read their Sunflower Seeds poems last night, as a mark of solidarity, as we had so enjoyed working with Ai Weiwei's field of sunflower seeds in the Turbine Hall and we are very concerned that the Chinese authorities won't disclose his whereabouts since police detained him at Beijing airport on 3 April. Some new poems after Do Ho Suh's ethereal red staircase also emerged, even though we'd only worked with that installation the previous week and this turned out to be another favourite. 

Do Ho Suh's Staircase III and Duchamp split page exercise

 

  Staircase, Do Ho Suh

This is a a fascinating film about the Korean artist Do Ho Suh's Staircase III, just opened at Tate Modern, with Suh explaining how and why he made it. We'll be working underneath it tomorrow, for the fifth week of my Poetry from Art course, and I'm sure it will take me a while to fully absorb the strangeness of this red transparent nylon stairway hovering at ceiling height. It is an exact replica of the staircase in an apartment Suh once lived in, and he says how it took him six years to get to know his landlord well enough to take the precise measurements of the original stairs to recreate this 'memory'. 

But first I've asked the group to bring in their poems based on last week's session, when they responded to Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass. I gave them a 'split page' exercise, with excerpts of Octavio Paz's description of the sculpture, which includes the bizarre notes Duchamp made to describe the Bride and her nine Bachelors, on the right hand side of each page. Everyone had to write their own love story or relationship story very fast on the left hand side. We then cut down the centre of the pages and jiggled the personal stories against notes from Duchamp's The Large Glass aka The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, and hunted for any resonant lines that materialised from the juxtaposition of the personal and the given phrases. I've already read some of the resulting poems as I'm now rush-editing our online anthology. I'm hoping the online publication will be published on the Tate website by the end of the course next week, if I can edit it by Wednesday and Tate can display it in time. As soon as it's up I'll post a link.

Poetry from Art at Tate Modern: Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass

Tomorrow we'll be working with Marcel Duchamp's The Large Glass or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, with the help of Octavio Paz's detailed description of the sculpture in his book Appearance Stripped Bare. Paz drew from Marcel Duchamp's extensive notes in a later work The Green Book. The language is a gift: "The Bride's names are Motor-Desire, Wasp, and Hanged Female, dragonfly and praying mantis..." and "The differences between the Bride's and the Bachelors' respective universes are vast. The Bride has a life-center; the Bachelors have not. They live on coal or some other raw material, drawn not from them but from their not-them..." (see below for a key to the realms of the two sexes).

I have long been drawn to this artwork, and it informed my practice when I was a sculptor. The version now on show at Tate Modern is a reconstruction by Richard Hamilton but I remember seeing it before Tate replaced the cracked bottom pane. So when I made a large glass construction influenced by it I incorporated cracks. Duchamp made this over a period of eight years then announced it definitively unfinished. The combination of his declared subject of the relation between the sexes and his "playful physics" makes its an endlessly fascinating study. Another source book for Duchamp's notes is a long heavy hardback Notes and Projects for The Large Glass by Arturo Schwarz, where Duchamp's original notes (in French) are scrawled like poems on the right and the English translation provided on the left. The notes, sketches and diagrams are an entire looking-glass world I can get lost in for hours.

Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds and Yang Lian's porcelain poem

For our third session of Poetry from Art at Tate Modern we worked in the Turbine Hall, with Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds installation. These 100 million sunflower seeds have been individually handcrafted over two years by the artisans of the city of Jingdezhen, famed for its production of Imperial porcelain. Ai Weiwei has spoken about how the work is a commentary on the 'Made in China' phenomenon. I brought the poem 'Father's Blue & White Porcelain' by the 'misty' poet Yang Lian as a way in for the group to write about the installation. Yang Lian, who now lives in London in exile from China after the Tiananmen massacre, is as experimental an artist, and like Ai his work engages in a critical dialogue with Chinese tradition and history. 

First, we watched the 15 minute film Tate made of how the porcelain sunflower seeds were manufactured, from the men mining and pounding the kaolin to the women expertly painting each seed in three or four strokes, Ai there among them, answering tweets on his mobile phone as he chatted. He is an unpretentious teddybear of a man and his warmth somehow made the installation more accessible and human-scaled. We then returned to the Turbine Hall bridge and I passed around some large striped, black sunflower seeds from Dakota, bought at my local international store, to feel as we discussed Lian's poem:


Father's Blue & White Porcelain

a small jar of night      a thousand frontiers carrying him

the sky of old age continues the firing in the kiln

continues arranging this pot plant      lamplight

a glazed hand      refines a blue cough

in his flesh he embroiders the fragile whiteness of posterity

turns around a thousand times      the little

room a snake's stomach swallows the longest diameter of life

his night-long waking      like the sleep-talk of the whole world

awake and not looking at humans      not even waiting for

a cup of darkness tea      four walls softly slide up

a small iron table sinks in to a venom-coated shaft

another red-hot circle sealing

his book      its unread wings tightly closed

how many bloomings and fadings of seventieth birthdays have been fondled

startling a container with petals that cannot be rubbed away

lying down      revealing again the birthmark of day  
  

Yang Lian translated by Brian Holton

Riding Pisces: Poems from Five Collections (Shearsman, 2008)
  
A few of us thought there was the ghost of Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' when we looked at the way the father and his room are overlaid on and in the porcelain in a double exposure, the human pageant in the glaze. The images start out ordinary enough, but they soon morph: "a jar" turns unto "a jar of night', "tea" is a "a cup of darkness tea". Someone pointed out that the poem contained a deep well of history in it, both through the tradition of porcelain and in the layering of the past in the complex images: "the sky of old age" and "bloomings and fadings of seventieth birthdays". 

I asked the group to sit around the Sunflower Seeds installation and write a poem about it incorporating one phrase from Lian's poem, such as "a glazed hand", "the sleep-talk". As his poem is made in a collage mosaic of images and thoughts, I wanted them to start a collage poem. I then read out quotes by Ai Weiwei when he was interviewed by Juliet Bingham and Marko Daniel (Tate curators), such as:

"In China, when we grew up, we had nothing... But for even the poorest people, the treat or the treasure we'd have would be the sunflower seeds in everybody's pockets."

"For me, the internet is about how to act as an individual and at the same time to reach massive numbers of unknown people.... I think this changes the structure of society all the time – this kind of massiveness made up of individuals."

As well as a phrase from Lian's poem, the group also had to incorporate a phrase from something Ai Weiwei had said in the interview. Homework was to carry on searching for phrases to include in a collage poem. They could find them from failed poems, notebooks, letters, anywhere. Then to print the results large, cut up the lines and rearrange them until they made a new sense. Some of the results will be published next month on the Tate Modern website in an online anthology of poems written this term.

Celebrating Frida Kahlo on International Women's Day at Monmouth

Yesterday I gave an illustrated reading from What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo for Monmouth Women's Festival to celebrate International Women's Day. The Monmouth Shire Hall was packed to capacity even though the tickets were £15 (the event included a delicious Mexican buffet lunch. I gave a 45 minute reading and talked about Kahlo's extraordinary life and paintings, showing the paintings each of my poems is based on. There were many Frida fans in the audience and some had travelled quite far to attend, not least my editor from Seren, Amy Wack, who, despite her busy schedule, comes to many of her authors' readings. Amy took this photo of me signing books.

It felt right to celebrate Kahlo on International Women's Day, and include my poems about those radical paintings My Birth and Henry Ford Hospital with their depictions of childbirth and miscarriage which still have the power to shock. So when Mandi, one of the festival organisers, asked me later as she was driving me back to Newport train station, if I thought Kahlo was a feminist, I replied yes.  Feminism as such wasn't yet a defined movement when she was painting (she was born in 1907 and died in1954), but what makes her so groundbreaking as an artist is how she bravely painted exactly what she wanted to paint, how she wanted to paint it, regardless of anyone else's approval. Which makes her a great role model. 

 Henry Ford Hospital (The Flying Bed) Frida Kahlo 1932