Preview of two poems from Poetry from Art at Tate Modern

Here is a preview of two poems in the Poetry from Art pamphlet anthology, launched at Tate Modern this Saturday 25 September. The poems by Karen McCarthy Woolf and Seraphima Kennedy both respond to installations by Francis Alÿs in his recent exhibition A Story of Deception.

The Tornado Chaser
after Tornado by Francis Alÿs

The tornado chaser is superstitious.
He wears a tornado like a cloak of lightning.  
His dreams are dark tunnels with stars slipping down them.

He can find a tornado blindfolded.
He smells the fresh-torn redbud tree, the earth’s spores offered up to
      the elements.
He catches the vacuum with his bare hands, wrenches sap from flying 
      timber.

The tornado chaser sleeps with sand in his eyelashes.
His foxbrush hair has been drowned in Florida saltwater.
He has been baked in mud in the Mississippi.
He has tripped through scrubclaw in the Texan panhandle and been 
      thrown to the sides of the orange-dust caldera.

He has seen a tornado unwrap the night sky like a handkerchief.

He has been in red and turquoise and gold tornadoes.
He has been in tornadoes made of ocean.
He knows tornadoes that spin him in different directions above and   
      below his fault lines.
He knows the heart of the sky is the dark back of the mirror, and the 
      space between constellations.

He has known tornadoes shimmer like sirens.
He has known tornadoes slice him open like crazed turbines.
He knows one day a tornado will strip the flesh from his bones.
He will feel his skin split open, his eyes spread out wider than his skull.

He has looked up the length of the tornado in fear.
He has looked up the inside of the tornado in longing.

He has seen the dark vaulted cathedral above the tornado and prayed.

Seraphima Kennedy

Three Inches Closer
after When Faith Moves Mountains by Francis Alÿs

All we want to do is go backwards,
like the toy cars the kids make
from old mantequilla de cerdo cans

but I've got my foot down on the pedal
driving into a mirage that disappears
every time we get nearer; it's a river

not a road, wet and shimmering, white
on the horizon, with unknown currents
that curl around our ankles

and what looks like it's on a loop, no what
feels like it's on a loop isn't, each frame
is very slightly different, so we know

it must be real and having another baby
is a mythic type of effort,
like the five hundred men in white shirts

an artist asks to move a sand dune
three inches closer to the sea, across a desert
with plastic buckets and spades.

Karen McCarthy Woolf


Everyone is invited to the launch  at 6.45–9pm this Saturday 25 September, in the East Room, Level 7, Tate Modern, Bankside SE1 9TG. Free entry, wine, illustrated readings, great views. The booklet contains poems by 24 poets who attended my Poetry from Art summer course in the galleries and costs £4.95. It will be for sale at this event and only available from the Tate Modern bookshop afterwards.

The contributors are  Karen McCarthy Woolf, Naomi Woddis, Malika Booker, Rowyda Amin, Matthew Paul, Anne Welsh, Sarah Salway, Rebecca Farmer, Zillah Bowes, Cath Drake, Rishi Dastidar, Beth Somerford, Roberta James, Cath Kane, Kaye Lee, Lynn Foote, Seraphima Kennedy, Ali Wood, Julie Steward, Elizabeth Horsley, MJ Whistler, Andrea Robinson, Angela Dock, Beatriz Echeverri.

Launch of Poetry from Art at Tate Modern

Launch of a pamphlet anthology: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern edited by Pascale Petit

18.45 – 21.00 on Saturday 25 September 2010

East Room, Level 7, Tate Modern

Free entry, there will be readings, great views, wine. All welcome, booking not required.
(Tornado by Francis Alÿs)

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/talksdiscussions/22322.htm

This pamphlet anthology of twenty-four poems was written on my Poetry from Art summer course in the galleries at Tate Modern, the third of three six-week writing courses this year. The pamphlet includes poems after Mona Hatoum, Francis Alÿs, Joseph Beuys and Mike Nelson.

In the Francis Alÿs exhibition A Story of Deception, we sat in the darkened and at times ear-splitting Tornado room, watching the artist running into tornadoes in the Mexican desert over a period of ten years, searching for the calm at their core. There are six responses to this included in the anthology, as well as responses to his other video installations. 

Working with Mona Hatoum's Home was an equally intense experience, where a gurney-style kitchen table was laid out with cooking implements, all wired up to a live electric current. This, and two other disturbing pieces which accompanied it, also inspired another set of poems in the booklet, some dark and some humorous. 

We spent one session at Tate Britain, in Mike Nelson's labyrinthine The Coral Reef – a network of fifteen interconnected rooms for the dispossessed, and everyone did get lost in it before emerging to write a poem in fifteen minutes, using Derek Mahon's 'A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford' as a possible approach, focusing on one object in the rooms, as he did in his shed, to tackle such a big theme. 

There are also poems in response to Joseph Beuys' The Pack, Sophie Calle's The Hotel series, and more (see below for more images). The publication will be available to buy at the launch then for sale only in the Tate Modern bookshop for £4.50.

For more information about the launch see the Tate Modern website

Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG. Phone 020 7887 8888.

The contributors are:

Karen McCarthy Woolf, Naomi Woddis, Malika Booker, Rowyda Amin, Matthew Paul, Anne Welsh, Sarah Salway, Rebecca Farmer, Zillah Bowes, Cath Drake, Rishi Dastidar, Beth Somerford, Roberta James, Cath Kane, Kaye Lee, Lynn Foote, Seraphima Kennedy, Ali Wood, Julie Steward, Elizabeth Horsley, MJ Whistler, Andrea Robinson, Angela Dock, Beatriz Echeverri.

Francis Alÿs Tornado

Mona Hatoum Home (detail)



Mona Hatoum Home


 

Mona Hatoum Incommunicado



Sophie Calle The Hotel Room 47

Mike Nelson The Coral Reef (details)

Joseph Beuys The Pack

 

New video of poem from What the Water Gave Me

Here is a new video of me reading 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)', from my new collection What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo:



And here is Frida Kahlo's painting my poem is based on, the very surreal What the Water Gave Me or What I Saw in the Water:

The bathwater contains visionary glimpses from her life and art. There are six poems about this painting in my book, some describe it closely, but in this one I wanted to show her dramatic cremation, when the force of the furnace made her sit bolt upright and her hair caught fire in a halo around her head.

A Poem for Frida Kahlo's Birthday

Here is a poem for Frida Kahlo's birthday, from What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo. 'Flower of Life', like all the poems in my book, has the title of one of her paintings. The Mexican mandrake is a cactus flower and through it Kahlo seems to both celebrate the life force and mourn her inability to have children.

Flower of Life

I flip the love plant

upside-down, release a starburst

of stamens and stigma –

insecticide yellow

to ward off scorpions

from our marriage bed.

And around the ruby mandragora

I let the rosette of leaves

bare their petticoats –

the business of what’s inside

and under the fireworks.

Is that an embryo’s fontanelles

in the petalled womb

or Diego’s fountain-flower?

It isn’t roots someone’s pulled

shrieking out of the ground,

but my torn fallopian tubes.

Karen McCarthy's Open Notebooks

The poet Karen McCarthy will be launching her groundbreaking Open Notebooks project this Wednesday 30 June 6.30 – 8.30pm at The Photographers Gallery 16 – 18 Ramillies St, London W1F7 LW. This fascinating online project was commissioned by the literature development agency Spread the Word and explores how writers use the notebook as part of the creative process. Karen interviewed me while I was writing What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo and has made a video about my drafting process on Open Notebooks:


Pascale Petit on What the Water Gave Me for Open Notebooks from Karen McCarthy on Vimeo.

Karen is also one of the ten poets selected for The Complete Works, a two-year project to support talented Black and Asian poets, and will be included in the much awaited anthology Ten, edited by Bernardine Evaristo and Daljit Nagra, to be published by Bloodaxe and launched Friday 17 September, 7pm 8.30pm at The Tabernacle, Powis Square, London, W11 2AY, tickets £7. This much needed anthology reflects the truly multicultural make-up of contemporary Britain and contemporary poets.

Ruth Padel reviews What the Water Gave Me in the Guardian

Ruth Padel has reviewed What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo in today's Guardian. I didn't know it was to be reviewed so it's a lovely surprise. Here is an extract:

'Petit's collection is not a verse biography, but a hard-hitting, palette-knife evocation of the effect that bus crash had on Kahlo's life and work. "And this is how I started painting. / Time stretched out its spectrum / and screeched its brakes." WH Auden, in his elegy for Yeats, tells the Irish poet: "Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry." Petit's collection, exploring the way trauma hurts an artist into creation, celebrates the rebarbative energy with which Kahlo redeemed pain and transformed it into paint.'

This is the painting on the cover of my collection. Six title poems 'What the Water Gave Me' are threaded through the book and respond to Kahlo's  surreal painting What the Water Gave Me or What I Saw in the Water, where images from her life and paintings float around her in the bath. The floating scenes refer especially to the devastating bus accident she suffered as a teenager and its traumatic aftermath which she countered with art. 

I'm busy preparing for the second session of my Tate course Poetry from Art this weekend, when we'll be in Mike Nelson's powerful installation The Coral Reef at Tate Britain, then Seren will launch my book at The Horse Hospital this Thursday.

 

Five poems recorded by PoetCasting

Alex Pryce has just published recordings of five of my poems on PoetCasting. Three are from What the Water Gave Me – Poems after Frida Kahlo: 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)', 'The Little Deer' and 'Remembrance of an Open Wound'.  I'll be reading these and others from the book at my London launch this Thursday, 17th June, at The Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury, London, together with a slideshow of the paintings. I'll also give an illustrated reading at Lancaster Litfest on 23 June. As well as the three poems from my new collection, Alex recorded two from The Zoo Father: 'The Strait-Jackets' and 'Self-Portrait with Fire Ants'.

PoetCasting is a poetry podcasting project which works with poets throughout the United Kingdom. The project features published, performance, emerging and established poets reading their own work online and out loud.