After - Poetry from Art - Ekphrasis My Way

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]

 

 

 

 

Season's Greetings

Another year rolls round. They say it's a sign of ageing if time starts speeding up. Everything is relative, I suppose.

This year has been bonkers: the government has gone mad and we are heading to be the country which shoots itself in the foot.

So, to banish, for a week, all scary thoughts of the coming food shortages and riots, and being controlled by those 3,500 troops who have been mobilised to 'help out', here's my seasonal poem for this year that was given a honourable mention in the Seren Christmas poem competition.

Happy whatever you celebrate. I won't say Happy New Year, as I doubt it's going to be anything that could be so described.

Christmas on the Beacons

This year I want to walk the hills
to a fresh dark –

a summit where I can wonder
on distant coastal towns
in their cliché necklaces
strung bright,

the Blues and Scarlets 
switched on weeks ago to vie
with constant sodium.

And then I’ll turn
to something darker –

the Sky Park is the only
beacon I wish for,
where far away points of light
have a chance to shine.

Years since I came here
for Hale Bopp; my compulsion
westwards behind a star.

Reviewing poetry books - a new thing

My first foray into this kind of thing is out now in esteemed poetry magazine, The North, issue 60.

Here you will find my thoughts on recent books from Ahren Warner (Hello, your promise has been extracted), Rory Waterman (Sarajevo Roses), and Menna Elfyn (Bondo).

English Pen Literarture Festival

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the English Pen Literature Festival in London, a day long series of performances and readings in support of imprisoned and suppressed writers from oppressive countries around the world. We heard of those silenced as a result of their writings, mistranslations of their work, their mere existence and the supposed threat their words represent in regimes afraid of criticism and free speech. The participating writers responded with new work of their own, variously explaining the situation of the writers with whom they were in dialogue. 

One comment that came up more than once was how difficult and uncomfortable it was to make work based on the plight of another writer. One person even called such efforts obscene. I have been considering this for the rest of the weekend and I am not sure I agree. The brief after all was to do just that, and, as we are writers, we ought to be able to write about anything, no? If what was meant was that it is an intrusion to put oneself in the precise shoes or, more likely, bare feet of another writer, then granted, trying to describe torture and deprivation by hi-jacking another person’s experience and emotions, could be seen as distasteful. How, after all, could one know, exactly? 

But there is more to consider in these ethical ambiguities, surely? If a writer has been silenced, is it not another writer’s role, or even duty, to help them have a voice? We are writers and have imagination, and should not too readily censor ourselves. That would be to perpetuate the wrongs. I think what would be obscene would be to try to pass off someone else’s experience and emotions as one’s own, so, yes, the I is I first person should probably be abandoned, if not at least carefully considered in this project. Yet, writing in the third person may seem too distant, or the second, again too knowingly dictatorial, but these are what we have and it is our job to make the best of them.

The work shared on Saturday took many approaches; the most successful in my view were those who tried to use the silenced writer’s words and work directly, either as mash up or, sample, woven into letters and diary extracts, or forming parts of poems, or using the numbers of years or months of a person’s incarceration as the number of elements in the piece of writing, i.e. to control its structure. More traditional ways of tackling a response included using classic/historical depictions of violence and martyrdom, and poems in response to one of the writer’s poems.

It was a marathon of listening and, if this is not the wrong word, enjoyment, appropriate given the sheer number of people deprived of their freedom and voices; things we take too lightly for granted.

Poem for 20 January 2017

The fake beetle

always flounders and, limbs akimbo
falls from his ball of dung.

At night he tries navigation by the stars
but, fixed in their firmament, they do not
stoop, or aid, or grace his stage.

Poem for Armistice 2014

My family is like almost every other in the UK.

Just ask a British friend and they will be able to tell you who of their kin was killed in the First World War.

My paternal great uncle, died of pneumonia during basic training before he even stepped foot in France. Private Howells shivered to death in an army tent in Yorkshire, far away from the home fires of South Wales.

My maternal great great uncle found his way to France but never returned. All we have is a photograph of him in uniform and his geology book.

A hundred years later and after a lot of searching, my aunt and uncle have located his grave.  We are planning a trip to go and say hello.

His name was John Lewis. This poem is for him.

Shrapnel

Autumn, his plough folds the land

flattens mounds, fills trenches, yet

the lines are indelible.

In winter thin ponds form

in summer the clay shrinks

from boards and props.

Some years he doubles back

to level the fields, new steel

just turns up the old, not gull food

inedible scraps, no magpie

glitter in bullet cases

snips of barbed wire, bits of shells.

History’s not erased by work

still he tries to ditch the ghosts.

It’s hard not to see them

from the corner of his eyes.

There, the white plot fenced by firs
daily sight of that great loss.

Poetry News

Starting your Christmas shopping?

Well look no further, I've got you covered with a super poetry book, featuring a lot of famous people (dead and alive), and me.

I am super proud to be in this and rather astonished that Carol Ann Duffy found my poem.

Dylan Thomas for St. David’s Day

Actually, this poem has nothing whatsoever to do with St. David’s Day other than the fact that I am writing about it today. So whilst the nation is busy sporting daffodils, anthem singing, dressing up in national costume of dodgy provenance and being rightly proud of itself (Wales 27, France 6, just to remind you), I am sitting in rainy Paris, reading.

The force that through the green fuse (pg. 13) deals with the big issues life, love and death which haunt most of Dylan’s poetry. The force, and yes, you can think Star Wars here if it helps, seems to be the notion of universal energy. It is both life giving and life taking as the poem is packed with these opposites from the natural and human world, every stanza has this.

The poem starts with a repetition of the title in the opening line. It’s striking these days how archaic this structure seems to be. It’s unnecessarily repetitive and something most current poets try to avoid. That said, what of this mysterious ‘green fuse’? Young spark I think we might say more clunkily, but it’s arresting and functions to call the readers’ attention from the start – you are going to have to read this one carefully.

As well as the pattern of opposites, the poem focuses on the poet being silenced – the word ‘dumb’ is used in each stanza, but, of course, this is an irony as the poem is anything but silent on its topic. Perhaps it is better to think of this less as silence and more as an inability to articulate fully.

Key words, because they are repeated, are water, blood, love, hang, force, crooked and wind; the basic elements of life and death, if you will. This writing is again in contrast to contemporary practice where we tend to eschew non-patterned word repetition, but we are forgiving readers and can luxuriate otherwise in the imagery.

The antecedent poem that this brings to mind, and which Dylan acknowledged, is Blake’s Sick Rose, with its invisible worm, both of which Dylan makes crooked here:

O rose, thou art sick:
The invisible worm
That flies in the night
In the howling storm

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy.
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

I once went to a lecture by Germane Greer, who talked for over an hour about these eight lines of Blake’s, so Good Luck trying to explain that in one short blog post. Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus.

 

Dylan Thomas - On War

Among those Killed in a Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred: longer than a newspaper headline, this poem (pg. 112) has a title that tells you everything you need to know of the subject matter before you even start reading it. It is a deliberate shock tactic in its bluntness and the reader's eyes move down to see how Dylan is going to handle the matter.

Well, there is no sweetness in the first two lines which are matter of fact and end with 'he died.' Then the poem explores the horrifying sight of the old man knocked off his feet in the street by focusing on the broken aspects of the physical scene: 'the burst pavement stone,' 'the slaughtered floor,' and the man's broken body: 'the craters of his eyes.'

The sonnet, for that is what is is, continues with imperatives: 'Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun' and 'Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.' It cries  ('O') a wish that the man is spared from a pauper's grave and ends with a repletion of morning and on an uplifting note that humanity will continue: 'A hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.' A wonderful and striking image that.

One of the finest poems written about the war? Probably.

Dylan Thomas - Childhood, Religion and Countryside

Yes, probably Dylan's most beloved poem, Fern Hill, (pg 134)  and read here by Richard Burton, has all these elements. It is both hymn of praise and love song to a rural upbringing 'Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs.'

Apple tree related images are just one of a number of motifs that repeat themselves throughout the poem, as does the colour green, green also in the sense of innocence in this paradise, emphasised, as if that were necessary, by his mention of 'Adam and maiden' and indeed the apple tree itself.

Other religious imagery also appears in every stanza ('his eyes,' 'the mercy of his means,' 'blessed,' 'fields of praise,' 'follow him out of grace,' 'lamb white days' and so on).

But the poem changes tack in the last stanza with the lack of foreknowledge that 'time would take me' out of innocence and to the final couplet: 'Time held me green and dying/though I sang in my chains like the sea.' What exactly does Dylan mean? It seems to me that this is the adult reflection of the illusion of childhood as not as idyllic as we might remember, green but a kind of death to the will perhaps, and happy enough to ellicit song, but still be enslaved. Perhaps that's why he called it a 'poem for evenings and tears.'

Things to be enthralled by in this poem are, as always, the lush and beautiful imagery. Who doesn't wish that they had thought of 'the sabbath rang slowly/ in the pebbles of the holy streams,' or describing a farm on a winter morning as 'like a wanderer white/with dew?' Lovely.

Dylan Thomas - On Childhood

Dylan is famous for many things, one of which is his fond, tender and playful writings about childhood, especially his own, or more specifically boyhood, since girls are those other creatures with whom snowball throwing boys waiting for cats to appear on the garden fence have little to do. See the stories in Quite Early on Morning, for example.

Dylan's memorial Stone in Cwmdonkin Park

The Hunchback in the Park (pg.93), does what it says on the tin. Here I want simply to point out the imaginative, original and arresting nature of Dylan's descriptive powers:

- in stanza one, the notion that the unlocking of the gates 'lets the trees and water in'

- in stanza two, the accuracy of observation 'the chained cup that the children filled with gravel'

- in stanza three, the simile 'like the water he sat down'

- in stanza four, the image of the park  as a 'loud zoo'

- in stanza five, the brilliance of 'the boys among willows/made tigers jump out of their eyes'

 - in stanza six, the simile 'straight as a young elm'

 - in stanza seven, the simile 'the wild boys innocent as strawberries.'

A fellow poet advised me once that all you need for a really good poem is one astonishing image, metaphor or simile. I am glad to say that this is otiose here.

Read the poem too quickly, blink, and you will miss Dylan's sparkle and might be in danger of dismissing this poem as a piece of over-sentimental froth. Not so, I say, not so.

Dylan Thomas - On Writing

In my craft or sullen art (pg. 106) Dylan expostulates on writing. He explains the thankless nature of his solitary, nocturnal labours (alone being one of the meanings of 'sullen' here), with what has to be his tongue firmly in his cheek, that is not for 'ambition or bread,' of ' the strut and trade of charms/ on the ivory stages,' but the 'common wages' of lovers' hearts. It is on the one hand a piece of unreliable autobiography and wishful thinking if ever I read one, yet the fear of going unremarked surely haunts all writers, especially the egotists amongst us.

Laugharne Castle

Structurally I find this poem interesting in that it has the feel of a palindrome. This is not precise in any sense of course, but is by way of inventive repetition in the phrases, objects and images; a working over and around of the limited palette: moon, lovers, griefs, arms, wages whereby form aligns with argument; as well as the rhyme scheme, which although irregular, is approximately similar between the two stanzas, and the opening and closing lines being very close. Note the word sullen disappears at the end.

Images that especially appeal are 'singing light' as I could certainly do with one of those when I am working; 'spindrift pages' because it is an interesting one - the idea that pages are either waves or snow being blown by the wind, either way they are white and unfilled with ink; and I enjoy the side swipe at his predecessors: 'the towering dead with their nightingales (Keats, presumably) and psalms.'

Dylan Thomas - On Immortality

Find yourself the Everyman edition of Dylan's Collected Poems (ed. Davies and Maud), which collects the poems he chose to keep and publish in 1952. I am using the 1993 edition if you are trying to follow my page references. And Death Shall Have No Dominion (pg. 56) was Dylan's first published poem (at the tender age of 18), although he edited it heavily later in the version we now have.

It varies a well known bible verse from (St. Paul's Epistle to the) Romans 6:9 as the repeating phrase at the opening and closing of each of the three stanzas. This repetition and the insistent rhythm gives the poem its power as a meditation on immortality. If you're going to say something more than once, make it something worth hearing.

Boats at Laugharne

Most of the lines elaborating the theme are end-stopped, so it's interesting to focus on those that are not as they break that pattern and draw attention. There are three enjambed lines, one in each stanza:

'Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon.'

'Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily.'

'Where blew a flower may a flower no more
lift its head to the blows of rain.'

In each of these there is yet more repetition (man/man, winding/windily and flower, repeated even on the same line). Is this lazy writing? Perhaps the last one as the object is the same, but not the others I think as these add to the circular effect of the poem turning over its ideas on themselves.

I am curious as to the nature of the man in the wind and the west moon. We know of the man in the moon, but not in the wind, so that seems a playful variant. But the man in the west moon? What does he mean by the west moon. Literally there is no such thing, we only have one moon. The moon over Wales i.e. in the west perhaps? But why? As illustration of the poem's panthesism is one suggested explanation.

As to windings/windily, this jars for me rather badly and if it were my poem, I'd have edited that out. The flower line on the other hand is interesting, or rather the blows of rain are a clever conjuring of the wind and its punches and is imagery extended in the next to lines: 'dead as nails' and 'hammer'. Dead as nails seems again to be Dylan invention, we know deaf as a post or thick as a board, but not this.

The mention of the unicorn myth and its abilities to dispel evil in stanza two is rather suspect and undermines the poem from within, even more so as this is the only line in which the syntax is tortured. I am inclined to smirk at this image, and that's me being unkind and reading it eighty years after it was written, but it does give the poem a risible register. This is a pity, but yet, classic Dylan imagery is at work here: moon, sea, stars, bones, all busily resisting death.

Poetry News and a wish

Next year sees an important anniversary.

It's hard for me to become in any way excited about the continuous bruhahah that is going to hit our screens, airwaves, and streets next year in celebration or commemoration of the outbreak of the First World War. It's going to be as bad in France as it is in the UK. All sorts of fun and games.

I refuse to join in, as a life long pacifist, my contribution is limited and predictably poetic. I am pleased to have been asked to contribute a poem the forthcoming Two Rivers Press anthology, The Arts of Peace. I also offer you this poem about my grandfather from my forthcoming book, I-spy and shanty  and wish you a peaceful new year:



Armistice

Timed for his homecoming on Rhymney Bridge 
that November day, my grandfather flung 
his banded ribbons into clouds of smoke.
Then, nothing - 
as if all his barbed-wire memories of lice, 
blood-stench, mud left him that second, 
passed out skywards and were gone.
As a child on his knee when I leaned against
his tarry tweed and dared to ask - silence.
A boy with a metal detector, idling home
over the river one too-hot summer’s night,
is deafened by the screams of those bronze discs.
So I keep a vigil, a daily eBay search:
A.N. WWI medals - to date, no hits.