The Lost Words - Forget-Me-Not Exhibition

We spent a wet afternoon enjoying this fascinating exhibition, installed in the gallery at the Lettering Arts Centre Trust, part of the Snape Maltings complex. Robert Macfarlane's book, The Lost Words, illustrated with superb art by Jackie Morris, has taken the nation by storm, finding its way into schools, libraries, concert halls, festivals, homes and hearts across the land.

Most will know by now that the book was prompted by the sad fact that a significant number of key nature words - acorn, bluebell, conker, to name but three - were replaced (or superseded) by ones deemed more valuable in the current age, like words to do with technology, in the last edition of The Oxford Junior Dictionary.

This situation has prompted many responses involving music and the other arts. Those who were engaging with aspects of the book for this particular exhibition had used stone-carving techniques to present a number of the lost nature words, such as 'otter', 'fern' and 'newt', in fresh and meaningful ways.

How, I wondered, would these letter-cutter artists prepare a significant piece when each had just one word to interpret in, on or through the medium of stone? I find artistic process fascinating, and I particularly enjoy the creative sparks that fly when one artistic form confronts another in an ekphrastic way.

I know little about stone carving, though I have been interested in the properties of stone for many years. As a child I had a stone polishing machine (in days before we knew it was best to leave stones on the beach). We made jewellery from polished stones at my church youth group for a while when I was a young teenager. Holidays in Cornwall introduced me to serpentine and soapstone - and to sea urchin spines in the sand which I mistook for strontianite!

So I approached the exhibition with curiosity, and was richly rewarded. The exhibition was curated by Lynne Alexander and the exquisite and informative exhibition catalogue, The Lost Words - forget-me not, was edited by Suzy Powling and Lynne Alexander. Not surprisingly the book opens with Forewords from Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane. There is a third Foreword, from Matt Gaw, of Suffolk Wildlife Trust (whose Nature Summit I am about to attend have now attended).

Each of the exhibits has a spacious entry in the catalogue, with an image of the stone artwork of the  Lost Word on each recto side, and prose about the piece opposite, with name, definition, origin and text. Each Lost Word now tells a story in stone: Fiona Flack, who created the artwork for FERN tells how a fossilised fern was her inspiration. Annet Stirling's NEWT caught our eye because she has demonstrated the creature's amphibious 'under water - over water' lifestyle and its precarious existence (presumably as a word and as a creature) by splitting the word horizontally through the middle. Iain Cotton's arresting rendering of OTTER caught my attention because the otters and stone base blend so perfectly. I was not surprised therefore to find that this word was carved on a slate beach pebble from Islay, where otters can sometimes be seen. The pairing of pebble and Lost Word in this instance seemed to be in particular(ly poignant) harmony. I'll end by mentioning Jo Sweeting and a part of her inspiration for her lithe rendering of LARK:

'larks building spires above spires into the sky'

The South Country  

by Edward Thomas

• My previous posts about the nature words are here and here.

Immagine e Poesia: the 2017 Anthology of Poetry and Art Pairings can now be downloaded

Zennor mermaid chair (dating from 1400-1500) in St Senara's Church

One of the joys of poetry is the opportunity to experiment and create collaboratively either with other poets or with practitioners in another art form. For the last few years I have submitted a poem to the annual eBook produced by Immagine e Poesia, based in Italy. Aeronwy Thomas, Dylan and Caitlin's daughter, became Patron of the Immagine e Poesia movement in 2007.   

The annual eBook contains pairings of poems and visual art from across the globe. My poem in this year's anthology was written in response to an artwork entitled 'Voice of the Sea' by South Korean artist, Jongo Park. There have, of course, been many takes on the mermaid-meets-mortal story, but this Zennor mermaid was uppermost in my mind. Zennor is one of my favourite villages in Britain. It lies on the Cornish coast in West Penwith, between Land's End and St Ives. The village has many literary connections, including 'Zennor', a favourite poem of mine by Anne Ridler (which was once played at my request on BBC Poetry Please).

This year's anthology, containing contributions from visual and word artists from 35 countries, has been produced by Huguette Bertrand and Lidia Chiarelli.

You are invited to download a copy - here.

Cookham Festival Launch of 'Stanley Spencer Poems: An Anthology' (Two Rivers Press)

me (left), Jan Dean (middle) Alwyn Marriage (right, with red bag)

We have just returned from a wonderful launch and reading event at the Cookham Festival in Cookham Dean, Berkshire. A big thank you to all who organised the evening.

The launch with readings took place in the Village Hall at Cookham Dean, which is opposite Cookham Moor, a large area of grass (like a village green) in the care of the National Trust. 

We arrived very early, not wanting to be late on account of the Friday rush hour in Maidenhead, which gave us the chance to visit the churchyard and Church of John the Baptist.

There were several Red Kites overhead, but they were a bit fast for my camera!

This is the evocative view of the churchyard, with the Berkshire countryside rolling out into the distance.

We felt there were a lot of excellent poems read out during the evening. Congratulations to those whose work has been shortlisted for the three Stanley Spencer Competition prizes, which will be awarded on Friday 19 May. Eleven out of the 79 poems in the anthology made the shortlist. 79 out of over 200 entries made the anthology.

I read my poem, which was inspired by Spencer's painting, 'The harbour, St Ives' (1937).

St Ives - rather an old photo as I haven't been there for rather a long time!

• The anthology costs £9.99, and can be bought from Two Rivers Press - here

Poetry and Pinhole Photography at Arlington's Poetry Cafe

Jaywick Martello Tower

This Martello tower...

solid, strong and undefeated

from 'The Rifleman's Ghost' by Judith Wolton

I attended the April gathering of the Ipswich Poetry Cafe last night. Essex poet, Judith Wolton, and photographer, Alan Hockett, treated us to a presentation of poetry and pinhole-photography from the Essex coast. I am always fascinated by the extra spark of creativity that is invariably produced when two dedicated practitioners collaborate on a project.

The shared work had resulted in a book, Words from the edge and other Drosscapes (Estuarine Press, 2016), in which Judith's evocative poems complement Alan's striking pinhole photographs.

Judith's poems, springboarded into being by Alan's images, feature mythology, topography, local culture, birds, barges, batteries and narratives of the imagination. I love the way in which old buildings like the Playdrome have been given personalities. In 'This old show girl' we find the 'old dame' of a building with...

her lipstick smudged,
her wrinkles showing. 

It was fascinating to learn a little about Alan's practice as a pinhole photographer. Some of the swirling effects were achieved by shaking the chemicals during the development stage. Apparently the photograph failure rate is quite high, but for every few failures, an experienced pinhole photographer like Alan can achieve a couple of stunning and unique images. I came away still not quite sure whether his recycling bin was actually as full of old bean cans as he would have us believe! If you click this link you will see how to make a camera from a Coke can. There are secrets that can be (and indeed were) shared, but it is surely a good thing in art when the viewer feels that some dots have been left unjoined. The photographs themselves have a misty, ethereal quality about them, somewhat reminiscent of the paintings of John Atkinson Grimshaw or perhaps works in Whistler's series of Nocturnes. 

I was struck by how different, how very different, the chosen places were to the leafy inland areas of Suffolk and Essex that comprise Constable Country, especially when you realise that Manningtree (which features in the book) and Flatford are near neighbours on the map. Essex has a wild and windswept coastline, haunted by pirates (and at this point Baring-Gould's Gothic novel, Mehalah, comes to mind), ghost boats and rusting bolts of iron.

Appearances can be deceptive to the traveller, but those with local knowledge and an artist's eye are less easily fooled into believing that the drosscapes presented in the volume have had their day. Piers and cranes may have become bare skeletons, but the tide is constantly re-shaping, recreating, the coastline – a process mirrored in the work of Judith and Alan. These artists have given a sense of new life to some of the forgotten stretches of shore along the county's zigzagging sweep of 350 miles.

Essex Coast

'Immagine e Poesia' International Ekphrastic eBook 2016

Atlantic Puffin (at one time 2000+ spent part of the year on Puffin Island)

I am delighted to have a poem, 'Penmon Song', about Puffin Island off Anglesey (itself an island off the north-west tip of Wales) in the new 2016 Immagine e Poesia eBook anthology produced and edited by Lidia Chiarelli (Italy) and Huguette Bertrand (the Canadian representative of the Immagine e Poesia movement).

My poem has been paired with artwork by Jongo Park from South Korea. 

The eBook is free and can be downloaded from this link.

Anthology Alert ~ Pre-Raphaelite Poetry II ed. Serena Trowbridge

There is a new poetry anthology out from the Pre-Raphaelite Society, edited by Dr Serena Towbridge. The blurb on the back runs as follows,

'Collected here in Pre-Raphaelite Poetry II are the entries to the Pre-Raphaelite Society's second poetry competition. The poems offer a myriad of pleasantly surprising responses to the Pre-Raphaelites, their successors, paintings, poetry or lives.'

The anthology contains my sonnet, 'Strayed Sheep on our English Coasts'. You can see the painting of 1852 by William Holman Hunt that inspired the poem by clicking the link here.

Copies of the anthology are for sale here.

Book Review of Ekphrastic Poetry ~ Immagine & Poesia by Lidia Chiarelli

Image: Caroline Gill

'A windmill of sounds and fluorescent colours' *

Immagine & Poesia (subtitled 'The Movement in Progress') is a beautiful book in which the poet, Lidia Chiarelli, has placed her bilingual English-Italian poems alongside the work of artists. Aeronwy Thomas described the result in terms of 'moments of cross fertilization', for something unusual happens when Chiarelli's lyrical lines are read in their assigned context. The words and the artwork have been paired with great care and imagination. It would be fair to say that many - perhaps most - of the artworks are in some way described in the lines of their accompanying poems, as is demonstrated on p.40 when 'the Statue of Liberty raises her torch'; but these poems are more than descriptions of art. They could doubtless stand alone; but in this book, each poem becomes something greater than the sum of its parts when it connects with its image. It is as if a firework and a lighted match have come together unexpectedly to ignite the poetic landscape by releasing a multitude of coloured sparks.  

This exciting volume has been published by Cross-Cultural Communications (editor Stanley H. Barkan) in New York. The selected artworks represent a wide range of media, from pen-and-ink (Boats by Marsha Solomon) to fine-art photography (Traces of Pollock No. 3 by Adel Gorgy). The images have all been beautifully produced on quality paper and it is good to be able to see both the English and Italian language versions and their accompanying image on a single double-spread. Abstract images (Cerulean Shorelines by Carolyn Mary Kleefeld) are interspersed with more concrete pictures (the 'wonder wheel' in Coney Island by Alessandro Actis), creating a not only a pleasing sense of balance but also that important element of surprise.

Chiarelli is fond of epigraphs, and these range from a Dylan Thomas quotation to a description of water by Lao Tzu, penned in the seventh century BC. Dylan Thomas and his daughter, Aeronwy, have been significant influences, in addition to American poets such as Walt Whitman and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Chiarelli's style, however, is very much her own. Her lines are often short and her stanzas burst with light, shade and colour.

* quotation from 'Coney Island' p.46



About Lidia Chiarelli ...

Lidia lives and works in Torino in the north of Italy. She is one of the Charter Members of IMMAGINE & POESIA, an artistic literary movement founded at TEATRO ALFA (TORINO) on November 9, 2007.
See: Saatchi online

Lidia Chiarelli Immagine & Poesia -The Movement in Progress - A Cross-Cultural Communications Edition, NY, 2013 ISBN 978-0-89304-994-2

Collaborative Conversations ~ a meeting with Suzanne of Lemonkitten Design

Ipswich Waterfront ~ a Creative Place

I had a very enjoyable meeting some days ago with Suzanne Franks of Lemonkitten Design. Back in the summer Suzanne mentioned that she might like to work on some poetry illustrations, so we thought we would have a preliminary chat and see whether it could perhaps lead to some sort of collaboration.

I first encountered Suzanne's designs when we moved to Ipswich two years ago. I am particularly drawn to her crisp use of colour, her exciting sense of pattern and her clean lines. Suzanne, it seems to me, draws a fair amount of her inspiration from animal and plant life, so although it is early days and we are keeping an open mind, I am feeling excited about the possibility of combining aspects of our work.

You can find Lemonkitten Design on Facebook ... by clicking here! 

Poetry Publications: Pre-Raphaelite Poems

This is actually Sandymouth in Cornwall (rather than the Kent coast), but I like the theme of sheep on the sea cliffs ...

Congratulations to Deborah Harvey for winning the Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition!

I heard last night that my entry will be included in the new competition anthology. My poem is an ekphrastic one inspired by the 1852 Holman Hunt painting, 'Our English Coasts' (aka 'Strayed Sheep').

Last year's anthology can be bought (and previewed) here. 

The 'Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde' Exhibition is on at Tate Modern in London until 13 January 2013.

International Echoes (15): IMMAGINE&POESIA

The Boat House, Laugharne, South Wales, UK ~ childhood home of Aeronwy Thomas

I have just had the pleasure of having a poem published on IMMAGINE&POESIA, an international site run from Italy by Lidia Chiarelli, coordinator and ideologist of this global and ekphrastic artistic and literary Movement. 

IMMAGINE&POESIA was founded in Torino, Italy, in 2007, under the patronage of the late Aeronwy Thomas, daughter of Dylan Thomas. If you follow the link here, you will notice some familiar names - such as Peter Thabit Jones (The Seventh Quarry Press, Swansea, Wales, UK) and Stanley Barkan (Cross-Cultural Communications, New York) - among the members of the Movement.   

You can read my poem here, juxtaposed with the magnificent photography of Adel Gorgy. I won't say more as you may prefer to form your own impressions of Adel's work.

My poem, 'Thalatta, Thalatta', is a Folding Mirror Poem. The form was created by Dr Marc Latham, and appears - along with my poem - in The Book of Forms by Professor Lewis Putnam Turco (see e.g. entry for 4 May 2012 if you click the link to Professor Turco's site). The book is now available in its 4th Edition, published by the University Press of New England (and here). This new 'revised and expanded edition' has as its subtitle, A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms, and Marc's Folding Mirror Poetry form constitutes one of these.    

• My post about The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics Including Odd and Invented Forms
• Marc's post on his Folding Mirror Poetry site 
• Tenby in South Wales as inspiration (or why I wrote this poem)
• Some thoughts on Ekphrasis, a subject that has long intrigued me. It was also a key topic in my Quill and Parchment interview of January 2010 with USA poet-artist, Kay Weeks.  

Postscript ... another magnificent Adel Gorgy photograph has now been added and paired with Professor Lewis Turco's exquisite 'Flower Moon' poem. Do take a look here.

Ars Poetica (2): Ekphrasis

Leicestershire: Grace Dieu (above)
and nearby Coleorton (St Mary's Church below)

Wordsworth was influenced artistically
by his patron, Sir George Beaumont,
who played a key role in the founding of the National Gallery in London
and lived at Coleorton Hall

I have had cause on two recent occasions to consider the nature of ekphrastic work, so I thought it might be a useful moment to formulate some (personal) thoughts and air a couple of queries on the subject.

From my undergraduate studies of Classical Greek, I know that ek corresponds to out, and phrasis to speak. We find ek or ec in English words like ectoplasm. We also find it transmuted to ex in words like external. We know phrasis, of course, from words like phrase and phraseology. Ekphrasis, a rhetorical technique, is therefore a combination of these word-parts, which when combined give a meaning of speaking out or proclamation - or to put it another way, of calling 'an inanimate object by name' [Wikipedia - see also a number of definitions garnered by Ryan Welsh at the University of Chicago].

The majority of ekphrastic poems (I believe) shed light on a picture without the two art forms being physically conjoined. They do, however, build an imaginary bridge between the 'verbal' and the 'visual'. Take, for instance, the iconic example of Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. What is important here is that the poet brings a 'notional' or 'allusive' - rather than an 'actual' - image before our inner eye and makes us question what we visualise. There is no need for us to see the urn (which may or may not be a single artefact) portrayed in a given medium alongside the poem. The words alone do the work, conjuring up the object in our imagination.

We occasionally encounter ekphrasis in poetry as an actual and symbiotic pairing of word and image. That is to say, for example, that a poem text and piece of corresponding 'visual art' work in tandem to form a fusion or new creation. The one art form elucidates and illuminates the other in some manner - and this is a two-way process. We can all recall our childhood story and poetry books in which the bold and colourful illustrations added so much to each tale or poem. I consider this powerful marriage to be ekphrasis at its most basic (and on occasions at its most potent) level.

In these multi-media days of collaborative enterprises and opportunities, we are familiar with countless instances of art forms impacting on other media. Ekphrastic poetry could be 'illuminated' or 'enhanced' (I hesitate to say 'illustrated') by 'actual' painted work, pen-and-ink drawings or photographs. It may be of interest to note that a union of photography and poetry has appeared in the Poetry Book Society bulletin as Photoetry, but I see this as a form of ekphrasis rather than as something different again.

The questions lingering in my mind are ones of definition and distinction:

• Are all 'visual' poems ekphrastic?
• Are all 'illustrated' stories (like those in the children's picture books mentioned above) ekphrastic?
  

And in each case, if not, then why not?

* * *

Previous Coastcard posts touching on Ekphrasis can be found here and here. My Photoetry entry (with a couple of book recommendations) is here.

You may also like the following:

• Ten of the best: examples of ekphrasis by John Mullan, The Guardian, Sat. 14 November 2009
  
• Tim Liardet on Ekphrasis and Ekphrasis, New Welsh Review, Number 72, Summer 2006 (in which the author makes reference to the classic example of the Shield of Achilles in Homer's Iliad). This is a compelling, lively and contemporary survey - and comes highly recommended!
• Wikipedia article, with extensive bibliography
• Ekphrasis - a Poetry Journal
• Digital Ekphrasis - Cecilia Lindhé
• Wordsworth, ekphrasis - and the (artistic) patronage of Sir George Beaumont (see here for Grace Dieu and Coleorton)