Poetry from Art online anthology 2012, at Tate Modern

Alighiero e Boetti Mappa (Map) 1989 Embroidery on fabric 227.7 × 117.5 cm
Poetry from Art online anthology 2012
Edited by Pascale Petit

The anthology of poems by the poets who attended my Poetry from Art course at Tate Modern this spring is now up on the Tate website. (My next course Shaping Poems: Image-Making, starts on 11th June). Here is the foreword to the spring anthology by Sandra Sykorova, assistant curator of adult programmes:

For over six years now, our Adult Programmes team has worked with the award-winning poet Pascale Petit on a range of poetry writing public courses inspired by works of art in our collections displays and temporary exhibitions. This online anthology is the creative outcome of the Poetry from Art: Starting Poems – Writing course that ran over six Monday evenings at Tate Modern in February and March 2012. 

Twenty-one course participants, from all walks of life, had the opportunity to explore and directly respond to works of art by Alighiero Boetti, Yayoi Kusama and Catherine Yass.

In their encounters with often challenging artworks, the participants discovered new thoughts and experiences that spoke directly to them. We are delighted to share these poems with you. 

The next poetry course begins on 11 June 2012 and you can find more details and book here.

Goodbye to rue Hautefeuille, Paris

Here is the view from my balcony on the sixth floor, over the high plane trees in the square St André des Arts, just behind Place St Michel. The trees are swaying in the wind this morning. The leaves are almost fully out but they were just buds when I arrived ten days ago for my writing retreat. I've never had such a close relationship with the tops of plane trees before. I didn't even know they had globular female flowers. There are about nine trees in the square, sharing the space with a metro entrance, a large restaurant which sprawls under them, parked motorbikes, and various vagrants, one of whom sometimes raises a small tent from poles at night. Bye-bye trees of Paris, bye-be sparrows who cheep on my balcony demanding more crumbs. Bye-bye Easter at Notre Dame and Emmanuel, the Bourdon bell only rung on Palm Sunday, Easter day, Christmas and when peace is declared or a pope dies. 

Every time I come to Paris I discover something new. This time it was Sainte Chapelle. How could I have not known about it? I was born here. Last time it was the catacombs. It's as if Paris, which is built on limestone, opens up more of its caverns on each visit. I went for a walk in the Luxembourg gardens yesterday evening, for the first time as an adult. I must have been there as a child, riding on a stag or giraffe on the old-fashioned carousel, or launching a toy yacht on the pond. I can't really remember. But what I do remember vividly is playing in the sandpit in another square, just behind where we used to live on the Boulevard de Grenelle. I went to see that sandpit again. I walked in the footsteps of a six-year-old, along the side of the park and sat and watched children playing in it. They and their parents looked happy, normal. That sandpit was the place I learnt to be an artist, a sculptor at first, then a poet. In it I created my world, a retreat from well, whatever it is I had to retreat from. I will always be grateful to it and to that simple material, sand. 

Sand and leaves. So simple they are hard to comprehend. As for Sainte Chapelle and its fifteen fifty-feet high stained-glass windows, epitome of High Gothic, how do I grasp that? Or the inside of Notre Dame, and its three rose windows, which I braved often on this visit. Or the ritual opening of the central portal, when I happened to be at the end of my first tour, just by the huge main front doors, which are always closed, when the cardinal and the congregation turned around, and the ritual was performed right under my nose, at the front of the cathedral, and after the organ had boomed out nine knocks, the bolts were drawn back and sunlight streamed into the incense-filled nave.

Alighiero Boetti's Maps: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern week 4

Alighiero Boetti Mappa Photo Lucy Dawkins Tate Photography

Last night the fourth session of my Poetry from Art course was in the map room of the Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan exhibition at Tate Modern. Twenty of us sat surrounded by huge tapestries of world maps embroidered by Afghan women in their homes. The stillness and poise contrasted with the noisy rooms of our last sessions in the Kusama exhibits. When the group was hushed and writing, I could almost hear the lapping of the oceans interwoven with the murmur of the embroiderers' quiet chatter as they sewed in their homes.

Boetti considered the women embroiderers as co-authors of these works, even though he never met them, as Islamic mores forbade contact. He outlined the countries and flags on canvas with Magic Marker, then handed them over to male clan leaders who passed them on to the women and girls who would have learnt their craft from an early age. I laid out photographs of the women at work on the maps, on the bench in the centre.  They were photographed by Randi Malkin Steinberger, who was allowed one day to take pictures of them for Boetti. She has since published a wonderful book of her photos.

I often ask the group to start by spending a few minutes quickly noting their immediate impressions of the art, before we discuss it or look at related poems. In this instance, hardly anyone had seen the show before the session, so I wanted them to have a chance to respond to the maps while they were still in the grip of that overwhelming awe and freshness I remembered when I first walked into the room and was surrounded by the colours of the world.

I laid out dozens of A3 photocopies of medieval map-views, complete with sea-monsters and wind-gods, on the second bench and showed them some images by two other artists who have worked extensively with maps, Guillermo Kuitca and Kathy Prendergast. We then read Elizabeth Bishop's poem 'The Map', Moniza Alvi's 'Map of India' and 'Topography' by Sharon Olds. These were examples of how the subject might be approached. Perhaps through close, precise, physical description of coastlines, as in Bishop's poem, intertwined with philosophical meditations on map-making, such as in her line: "are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?", or in Moniza's case, by focusing on one country which is significant for the poet, or they could try building an emotional and sensory map as Sharon Olds did, where a couple fly in from different continents to make love, still bearing the prints of those maps on their skins.

The group then had fifteen minutes to write a poem. I suggested they could assume the voice of the embroiderer, the artist, or even the map itself.  We had thought that Bishop's map seemed be alive enough to lift off the page. They could try using colour as their main motif, enveloped as we were by lemon, pink, silver, black, as well as kingfisher-blue oceans. They could use place names and their sounds. They could zoom in as Moniza had done, in to one country which was significant for them and write about a personal place, bearing in mind that even the most autobiographical voice in a poem is fictionalised, and not the author's quotidian self.

I wondered how they would manage, with so much information and little time to write. There are mostly women in the group, which may account for many choosing to write in the voice of an embroiderer. Needles flashed in and out of their lines as they read back. I'm always amazed how well they write under pressure, after being reassured that they are only expected to produce 'material in progress' and not poems yet.  Hearing them read their responses, as we were bathed in the glow of the tapestries, made me feel as if the world was constantly being remade. Some of the results will later be published in an online anthology on the Tate Modern website.

Yayoi Kusama 2: Poetry from Art at Tate Modern

For our third week and second Poetry from Art session in the Yoyoi Kusama exhibition we focused on two works: Aggregation: One Thousand Boats and The Clouds. Kusama scavenged the boat from Manhattan streets and covered it with what she called phallic shapes made of stuffed cloth and painted white. The boat glows, spotlit in a darkened room, and is surrounded by one thousand print copies. We wondered if it was beautiful or disturbing, dark or light-hearted. Someone saw it as child-like, someone else found it upsetting. We talked about how art can change traumatic experience, as Kusama has said, that the obsessive phallic shapes she covered her sculptures with are her way of working through the childhood trauma of her mother forcing her when she was four to watch her father with his many mistresses and report back to her. We agreed that the 'shapes' also look like coral encrusted on a wreck; perhaps Kusama has succeeded in rendering those shocks harmless?

We read Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre in the best translation I know, Drunk Boat by Ciaran Carson, and compared the French child prodigy's drunken boat with Kusama's. The original poem is stuffed with words that rock against each other in long alexandrine lines which chart 'a systematic disordering of the senses'. I encouraged people to let rip with their imaginations and language, and write a poem responding to the boat in fifteen minutes; they could use Carson's expansive long line if they wished.

But they had a choice, they could either write about the boat or The Clouds, which we also went to see, carefully avoiding leaning over the laser alarms. If they chose  to write about The Clouds then their homework was to write about the boat, and vice versa. These 'clouds' are also made from  stuffed and painted cloth. We looked at them and said what shapes we could see in them. To help write a poem responding to this installation, we discussed 'Falmouth Clouds' by Peter Redgrove, with its series of spawning metaphors, where he sees theatre-chocolates and cathedrals in the sky, bolts of silk unrolling, trapdoors, laboratories and tablecloths, and most unexpectedly, floating coal-mines. What unexpected images could they come up with if they wrote really fast, free-associating? And what form would they use to write a spacey sky poem? Perhaps Redgrove's airy short stanzas separated by numbered sections?

Next week we will be in the Alighiero Boetti exhibition and I think I know what room we will work in but I'm not saying.

The Clouds

We paused to look at Accumulation Sculptures on the way to the boat

High Wire by Catherine Yass: Poetry from Art at Tate Britain

 Our second session of my Poetry from Art course was at Tate Britain in the video installation High Wire by Catherine Yass. The video fills a wall but the first thing you notice is the sound of wind buffetting thirty-one-floor-high tower blocks in Glasgow's Red Road. It's such a cold sound that people could feel the blast on their backs as we sat in a circle in the gallery next to the room. The camera views are mainly ones from the camera attached to wire-walker Didier Pasquette's helmet as he inches out onto the cable strung between two of the buildings.

We saw the building opposite veer vertiginously down to the ground, shake then steady itself. And he's off, walking on air, all the time the gusts getting stronger. He walks like a ballet dancer, surely and at a fairly smart pace. A gull flies past him and he stops; his long metal pole dips too low one side. His mouth is moving and later we realise he's shouting that the winds have defeated him and the wire is moving too much. There is nothing he can do but go back and the slower backwards ballet seems impossible but must be done.

A gull flies past him just before he stops

After watching the sequence we talk about the history of wire walking or rope-dancing as it was once called, how some wire walkers perform domestic feats in the air, such as cooking a meal, almost as if they are making a home in the sky. I quote Jean Genet who wrote that the role of the wire walker is to bring his wire to life: 'you will perfect your leaps...not for your own glory, but so that a dead, voiceless steel wire at last may sing'.

Yass' project was set up by Artangel and they have published an excellent book with stills and essays about it where they said: 'We had this clear image of finding these streets in the sky'. Yass has written:

When I was a child I climbed out of my bedroom window, on to the roof and up to the top. It was about six in the morning. I sat astride the rooftop, exhilarated and frightened. Coming down was harder as the tiles kept slipping, making me lose my foothold.

High Wire is a dream of walking in the air, out into nothing. But it has an urban background and the high-rise buildings provide the frame and support. The dream of reaching the sky is also a modernist dream of cities in the air, inspired by a utopian belief in progress.

Every time I see Didier turning back I remember hearing him shout, from where I was standing on another rooftop, 'C'est pas possible!' But something was possible, he returned safely. And something emerged from the actuality of the walk, which was a moment when reality became more of a dream than the dream itself.

 We then read Tony Hoagland's poem 'From This Height', and discussed how he opens up time into historical time, telescoping into the past and also outwards, broadening the view, from within the constrained space of the couple on "the eighth story of the world" as they hear the wind which "rubs itself against the walls of the condominium". I wanted the group to feel that they didn't have to restrict themselves to writing literally about the installation, to be inventive and open it up into any direction that served to make the poem matter for them.

Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern: Poetry from Art

Last Monday my new Poetry from Art at Tate Modern course started in the Yayoi Kusama exhibition. Twenty six of us sat in her colourful recent paintings room (they're like a cross between outsider and Australian aboriginal art and exquisitively colourful and organic), between two installations: Infinity Mirrored Room: Filled with the Brilliance of Life and I'm Here, but Nothing. We read excerpts from Kusama's autobiography where she recounts her childhood 'hallucinations' and how these have served as obsessions for her art. We wondered if they were really hallucinations, or perhaps a glimpse into dimensions where the ego's boundaries are blurred. She says her ego was obliterated when the room she was sitting in when she was a child was taken over by polka dots and flowers, and in her parents' propagating fields where violets and pumpkins spoke to her. When her dog spoke Japanese and she barked back was she experiencing an extreme degree of negative capability?

The Infinity Room was everyone's favourite. The video doesn't do it justice. It's silent, and the endless mirrored reflections of the viewers are like dark matter between the constellations of her fluorescent dot-worlds.  We went in ten at a time, parting the black curtain to step onto a path bordered by mirrored floors which turned out to be water (we could smell the chlorine). The illuminated dots pulse with waves of colour then suddenly go out and you have to stand there not daring to move, trusting they'll come back on.

We started the session by nonstop writing to the paintings which surrounded us, then everyone offered the group a gift phrase from their lines and they could incorporate one of these as well as a phrase from Kusama's poems into their response. The group then had ten minutes to write a short poem about anything in one of these three rooms that resonated for them. I brought in some short poems from Bunny by Selima Hill, as Kusama's work reminds me of the cut-glass-coloured voice of Hill's teenager who is haunted by a lodger.

The homework was to write a 'mirror' or 'specular' poem. This could respond to Kusama's Infinity Room or be about any subject. We read a superb example of the form by Julia Copus: 'The Back Seat of My Mother's Car', where the window at the back of the car works as the mirror hinge of the poem before it reverses back on itself. The second part of a 'mirror' poem is the same as the first half but the lines are in reverse order; only the punctuation can change.

Tonight we will travel to Tate Britain for our second session, to work with a brand new exhibit (in the twentieth century British art rooms) which stunned me when I went there last week for a recce, but I'm not saying what it is. Like the Infinity Room it will be a surprise.

Eyes of Mine Yayoi Kusama 2010, acrylic on canvas

Chinese Water: Yangzhou and the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony

Our last weekend in Shanghai we caught a 330 kilometres an hour train to the city of Yangzhou, north west of Shanghai and across the vast Yangtze River. The train station was big as a Heathrow terminal. Yang Lian upgraded our first class tickets to super first with just one word whispered in the conductor's ear, so we settled in the sleek, private, dragon-head of the train and got to work. George Szirtes and I had one hour to write our translations of the Qing Dynasty 'Poem for the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony' by Wang Hang – a devil of a quatrain in strict classical form, with a flood of info stuffed into the first two lines and what boiled down to two very short last lines in English. The original has seven characters per line and a strict tonal rhyme scheme. We did not yet have the literal translation, so most of the hurtling of the train ride was taken up with Lian giving us his version of the gist. 

We would have one hour for 'polishing' in the hotel before going out to banquet with our hosts, then an early rise to read our efforts at the 9am ceremony.  I'm a dedicated free verser, so my failure to meet the challenge wasn't important, as long as I tried to produce something and made the gesture. 

Shortly after dawn, we settled into our gaudy gondola and set off across Slender West Lake, the subject of the poem, which is about its naming, and warmed our hands on porcelain mugs of hot green tea with cozy lids, as banks of willow, bamboo and lily grass slid past and a girl played the zither. Rainbow bridges and curly pavilion roofs with tiles like dragon scales came into view; the water was photogenic as it always is even though it's often not itself and famous here for reflecting a fairy moon. We disembarked on a dreamlike lawn where I imagined there might only be a small huddle of poets reciting to each other. People were gathering beyond the bonsai tubs, but surely nothing to do with us. 

Our hosts led us towards them and we stood in a line facing the crowd. Beautiful slender girls in purple costumes gave us sprigs of lily grass and scented red silk pouches to hold. Then a round table materialised decked with familiar glasses and I knew that a toast was imminent with the white liquor baijiu, which, thankfully, must be downed in one gulp. Perhaps the baijiu arrived after the readings – it's all a blur now – though I do remember that I had to read my attempt first, relieved that none of our hosts would understand it. Here it is, with some later amendments:

Poem for the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony

The willow leaves trail to where lily grass yellows,
the fang of flying geese and arched bridge paint echoes.
Here in this crucible where the sun's molten gold flames
we should call our own haven Slender Western Lake.


And click here for George Szirtes' translation, in his blog. Later, he read his haunting sonnet 'Water', which begins "The hard beautiful rules of water..." and includes the magical line "That it shall arch its back in the sun". I read my poem 'What the Water Gave Me (VI)', which was translated into Chinese by both Lian and Kaiyu, so there was a distinct watery theme to our visit. As we only had a few of our poems translated during the fortnight, I heard George's 'Water' many times, that cat-like back-arching echoed by rainbow bridges. From our dragon-boat I spied waterfalls and wished we could stop to see them up close, though I suspected they were man-made.

Last time I was in China, in 2007, I flew from Shanghai to Beijing and from Beijing to Chengdu, and saw just how Shan-Shui China is with the almost continuous vistas of mountains, lakes and rivers that unfolded beneath my window. Yet the two mountains I climbed then – Huangshan (in Anhui Province) and Qingcheng (in Sichuan Province) – were both extremely wild and extremely tamed, with steps carved into every slope and sheer wall. On the summits of Huangshan there were otherworldly cloud- and mist-seas floating between the striated rock cliffs, there were also hordes of people squeezed onto the narrow paths of each jagged peak. Which reminds me of Victor Hugo's opening chapter to Notre Dame of Paris, where crowds surge along the streets, bridges and squares of medieval Paris like floodwater, as if humanity is alien as water and water is human as home.

 A lunar arch for viewing the Five Pavilions Bridge

 Many pleasure boats ply the Slender Western Lake

 Our dragon driven gondola

 A boat and a mirror-boat

 A crowd gathers behind the bonsai tubs for the Red Bridge Autumn Ceremony when Wang Hang's poem is recited and we add our translations

 Trailing willows like being behind a waterfall

 Is this tree painted or real?

Watery zither music on the boat

 These beautiful slender musicians were waiting for us in an upper room of one of the many stately homes we visited

 Portraits of poets with beautiful musicians, from left to right: George Szirtes; Zi Chuan, editor of Yangzte River Poetry Review and our host; Xiao Kaiyu; Tang Xiaodu eminent critic and poet from Beijing.

 Upstairs in the daughter's quarters of a stately home, light on the floor

 The daughter's bathtub, for light-bathing.

The Daughter's Bedroom

 These rocks are real but glued together. In another part of this garden there was a grotto retreat, complete with rock chaise longue, stone table, bookshelves and toilet!

 We cross the road back to our minibus

The evening ends with another banquet followed by calligraphy. Here is Xiao Kaiyu drawing the ceremonial poem on rice paper, watched by George and Clarissa.