anapoetics

emergency brushstrokes

I went to Ottawa last week to see the Van Gogh: Up Close exhibition. This painting was included.

 

Vincent van Gogh, Iris (1889)
(National Gallery of Canada)

It was remarkable in real life, as is all of Van Gogh's work that I've seen so far. The unbloomed stems were much less blue than in this image.  They were almost absent, ghost-like, as if they would someday emerge from the air rather than grow. 

"like a sort of soul-compass"

The book I just bought last Saturday at a used bookstore (The Art of Sylvia Plath, edited by Charles Newman (1970)) includes reproductions of several drawings by Plath (as well as a selection of her poetry, most of which was uncollected at the time).  And then today, across my feed reader comes a link to a slideshow of Plath drawings being shown at a gallery in London. 

This one's cute:

Looking at some of the drawings suggests that the process of re-creating objects on paper can help a poet "see" them in a way that's different from the sensory, and therefore (ideally) interesting but not wholly foreign.  In other words, the process of drawing can inform the process of writing and constitute study for both.  (Not that many of us have time for that.)

Here's one from my book:

Rock Harbour, Cape Cod (detail)    

I don't have sufficiently comprehensive knowledge of Plath's body of work to connect this drawing to any particular poem (nor does my book attempt to do so).  Some of the other drawings in the slideshow are quite thought-provoking if you stop to study them.

[via]

"a lost or dimmed sense of bodily immediacy"

From Kenneth Baker's most recent column, a painting that "outruns conscious intention":

"Le Voeu Secret" (2011) by Edwidge Fouvry (Dolby Chadwick Gallery)

The French word "vœu" means vow or wish.  A death-wish?  Pride & Prejudice & Zombies?  A face wiped clean of skin?  "She seems to want to reawaken a lost or dimmed sense of bodily immediacy that may have belonged to her medium in less image-riddled times."

"never misses color"

From Kenneth Baker's "Galleries" column in the Chronicle Saturday:  "The rich, camera-fed drawings of Bay Area painter Richard Ambrose at Hespe remind us how little work an automatic medium - photography - may actually spare an artist who relies on it."

Richard Ambrose, "Fiesta" (2009)

Similarly, little work is spared the poet who draws on visual art, nor do we notice the absence of color in the poems that result.  The mind supplies it.

"the whole chain of formal and metaphoric connections"

Last Friday's San Francisco Chronicle had a review by art critic Kenneth Baker of a retrospective of photographer Lee Friedlander's work, now at the Fraenkel Gallery.  This photo of a live oak was on the front page of the "Datebook" section:

Lee Friedlander, "California" (1996; printed in 2000) (detail) 

The photo is a poem waiting to happen. Is it two trees or one? Are they embracing, fighting, dancing, posing? Do the branches, as Baker says, "structure the picture space like organic architecture and reawaken the idea of a tree as the core of existence"?

ekphrasis in the age of Google

Today's poem on Poetry Daily is an ekphrastic poem, "The Dark Figure in the Doorway" by Morton Marcus.  It takes only a couple of Google searches to find the art work in question ("Las Meninas" (1656) by Diego Velázquez). Being able to pull up an image of this painting, virtually on demand, certainly changes the experience of reading Marcus' poem.