My first article on After-ing in poetry dealt with inter-textuality. Here I look at making art from an existing work of art. In the writing context, this means writing from a work of plastic art, using it as a creative impetus. There are various approaches to this.
I prefer to move away from the rather ordinary idea of simply describing the art work. My heart sinks more than a little when I see a poem called after the artwork itself, or with an epigraph ‘after xyz by abc’ – so much more can be done than this. Plus, I hate being interrupted in my reading by being required to go away and look up a painting, sculpture etc. if I don’t know it. I don’t think you should need the visual aide.
In my collection, Goldhawk Road (Two Rivers Press, 2023), I have a number of examples of such work, but you’d probably be hard pressed to identify them all. I like to use an artwork as a starting off point and go somewhere else and do something else with it. For example, Dancing the blood – starts with Australian rock paintings and co-opts work by Tracey Emin, but it is doing something more with them:
Dancing the blood
Let’s start with the women
who dance the red on the rocks
rich in iron in Pilbara.
They jump and stamp in a corroboree
of bouncing breasts as the blood
flows from them in streams
and ponds, lakes and rivers.
They are birthing the land,
right there at our beginnings.
Skip millennia to the no shame
women who dance the red
on the marathon streets of the city;
their iron steps proof that
if we run like Kiran Ghandi, our
wombs will not, in fact, fall out.
Blood overflows their shorts
blazing a wonderful trail.
Even Tracey’s used tampons,
artful behind glass, the red
beginning to brown, are
dance step notations for blood.
Look. These are the old/new normal.
Another approach is to engage directly with the artwork and have a conversation with it. Examples of this include part VI of Each night in jasmine sleep, which, light-heartedly, takes on Tracey Emin’s iconic bed (currently on show again this summer at Tate Modern if you haven’t seen in the flesh) as a device to make a political point:
VI
She dreams she’s telling off Tracey Emin: Don’t you know
it’s no good throwing the duvet any-old-how?
The sheets need changing, boiling back to virgin white,
original. Why haven’t you stripped it and put them
in the laundry basket? I would’ve put a load on for you.
Why not use the waste paper basket? It’s not as if you actually
have to empty it yourself, now, is it? How many times
have I told you not to smoke in bed? As for clipping
your toenails, haven’t you yet learnt how disgusting that is?
And the carpet, Tory blue, that will have to go.
Morphology of the black/white places is a lyric riff from any number of Georgia O’Keffee paintings of the desert around her home near Taos in New Mexico:
Morphology of the black/white places
Every time I see hills under a crystal sky, I see
hills crystalled with salt and thunder. Black.
Forensics reconstructed. I see bone, salt-white
in the hills with slices of dark flesh, every time flayed
and crystals cut to cover the black blood of stab
wounds. Skin layers I see whitening into scar tissue
fading into folds on the backs of knees, between toes
white knuckles flat as saltpans, hills of stomach, hips,
darkenings of labia, or every time thundering black
like ear canals, old necks, curled crystal tongues.
I see crystal skies where hills salt body after body
after body. Black. Thunderous. Every time I look.
Yet another way into such writing is to imagine the narrative that a painting provides. I am nothing like domestic comes from the painting, Neighbours by Stanley Spencer. It imagines the background to the scene of one woman handing another a bunch of tulips over the hedge separating their gardens in one far-flung and wildly imagined possibility.
I am nothing like domestic
When my neighbour kisses me
I often forget the surprising third,
the cheeky one that says I’m Dutch.
After, Jan tells me he misses real
Gouda, cumin seeded in green rind
cinnamon biscuits at Christmas time,
dark wheat beer, and thin light
in a vast cloud sky.
That’s why his good wife plants
tulips, wax lips to blaze and crazy
their river garden in spring on days
when I don’t cut the privet, leave it
for nesting birds.
Did I say he’s fond of swan’s down?
Handed over the hedge, my reward’s
a bunch of scarlet. It burlesques
my kitchen table, petals flash
black triangles as lifted skirts
pollen teases the oil skin cloth.
I like to disguise my writing, for example you’d never know these last two poems were prompted by artworks – one a striking black and white photograph of African women, and the second a painting at an environmental art exhibition. The latter I attended with friend, Cath Drake, and she wrote a very different poem from the same painting, which attests to the sheer variety of work that can be generated from such approaches.
Woman Clothed
gods and thunder
gods and thunder
it’s always gods and their thunder
hurling lightning in sheets
angry gods rolling the sky
for a thousand years
vengeful gods
and their crackling dogma.
Break this circuit.
Black out. Enough.
This wardrobe’s not hell’s mouth
not a substation charged
with evil light.
It’s just where I keep
my coverings
some small, some full
as I choose.
Entering here should not cause
death, not even one tiny shock.
Learning Bottlenose
cl…cli…clic…click.
Nice try, Dr. Doolittle. Pity
you didn’t think of this ages ago.
We could’ve saved you so much time.
All you had to do was ask
about our version of Morse code.
We’d have told you all about
the burns on our skin, and which
waters prick and scald us.
Here’s a clue: we’re no longer
swimming there, nor are the fish.
Click. Click. Doctor.
But you’re too tone-deaf to listen
to our flipper slaps, preferring
the unfortunate amongst us
to turn tricks in tiny pools
and open our mouths, so you
can pretend to brush our teeth.
How to get started with this kind of writing: If you can’t get to your nearest museum or art gallery, then flick through books and magazines – I’d avoid the internet as screen staring has something of a different quality to my eye. Let an image catch your attention. Spend time with it. What does it say? What associations does it bring up for you? What about colour, form, shape, light, patterns? What about its title? Let your imagination have full reign. Don’t start writing too soon. Go beyond the obvious. Take your time with it and the words will come. Enjoy!
[Art works by Emma Talbot from her exhibition Everything is Energy at the Arnolfini, 2025]
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