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]

 

 

 

 

Cultural appropriation - some thoughts

Hitherto I have been dismissive of the censorship that the criticism 'cultural appropriation' demands of writers. After all one should be free to write whatever one likes. And if I want to use my imagination to write in the voice of, or from the point of view of, someone from another culture, ethnicity, sex etc. to my own, who is to say that I cannot?

The logical result otherwise would be that I am left only to write autobiographically - literally what I know from my milieu. That might make for rather dull reading, and the degree of introspection required does not necessarily interest me that much as a constant way of working. I live in a world full of any number of people and things. I have travelled to any number of places. Why can I not write about and from them? Must I be forced only to use the literal first person, me, in such work?

The obvious answer is, no.

But then, I was brought up short recently by what seems like the tiniest of things. The current Places of Poetry project from the Poetry Society invites poets to pin place-specific poems onto a digital map of England and Wales. It was introduced to me by a poet friend and was something I was interested in being part of. She mentioned her contribution was about the Welsh mines. My immediate reaction was - what? that's not your subject? I speak as a Welsh person and the granddaughter of a collier. Very quickly I chastised myself. I don't own this subject at all, and certainly not any more than my English friend. I have no more rights over it than she or anyone else has. I am interested in and sympathetic to the subject given my family background, of course, but I have no unique insights. What a foolish response, I told myself.

Yet I started thinking - you know how you only begin to really understand something when it happens to you? In this small, but quickly and roundly dismissed way, I had an inkling of what others might be getting at when they object so vehemently to a writer's work as having appropriated someone else's culture. Not that I will ever agree that the said writer does not have the right to do so. Never.

The question then is, with an increased sensitivity in mind, how does the writer proceed. I think the answers here start with respect for the subject, involve research; book, place and talking to people; trying to be as authentic as possible to it, but always bearing in mind that writers make fictions; and growing a tough hide. There will always be someone ready to throw a brick bat - how can you set a story in a country you've never visited? how can you speak in man's voice? etc. Easy, I have an imagination. What is really meant is: how dare you? Answer again, easy - because I am a writer in a free country. But what I will try to do is be more consciously aware of the way I am proceeding and try not tread too hard or unnecessarily on other people's toes.

Lionel Shriver's lecture on this subject is well worth your time. She gives a number of examples of writing that would not exist if writers had indulged in over-zealous self-censorship. And I am with her when she says: "I am hopeful that the concept of “cultural appropriation” is a passing fad: people with different backgrounds rubbing up against each other and exchanging ideas and practices is self-evidently one of the most productive, fascinating aspects of modern urban life."

The end of Ms Corporate, the beginning of Ms Full Time Writer

I walk out of the office for the last time, early, as there is precious little point hanging around with nothing to do. It’s a sunny and actually hot afternoon. London looks oddly different. That might be because my head is held high and I am actually looking at the city’s architecture for once, not scurrying home with my eyes on the chewing gum spotted pavement.

It feels like the day I left school: other girls were crying, for reasons I simply couldn’t fathom. I veritably skipped down the school driveway with a huge sense of relief. No more stupid rules controlling my days. After 35 years of heavy duty consulting work, there are again no more stupid rules or obligations, ever. I feel completely relieved of all responsibilities for anyone or anything other than myself. Hurrah.

I’ve dreamed of this for years, on every one of those days I toiled through ten hours at a desk plus at least a two hour commute on a packed train or Tube. I realise I am lucky, a tail-end baby boomer with the benefit of a good education. But wait, I’m not going to feel guilty about hanging up my calculator, I’ve worked my arse off, tolerated years of misogyny, having to work so much harder and better than the men around me, and butted my head against the reinforced glass ceiling until it bled.

I’ve bought a house, privately educated two children – my choice – and earned enough to save for a modestly rainy day. I’m 56, tired of dealing with other people’s unchanging and repeated BS, - it's not the work, it's never the work, it's the people, Sartre's hell, and so I am unfurling my umbrella.

Colleagues, who don’t know me at all, think I am mad. ‘What are you going to do with yourself’ is the crassest of questions, and in recent weeks I have been sorely tempted to say something, but I’m too well brought up. So, what am I going to do with myself?

Starting tomorrow morning I am going to catch up on my sleep. A long lie in with a samovar of tea and the cracked spine of a new book is in order. My father reminded me he slept for almost a month when he retired. He advises planning to do very little until I am better. I wonder how long it will take me to feel normal again, assuming, of course, I actually recognise what that is.

Our unhealthy sleep patterns are forever in the news and, as a chronic insomniac,  I am looking forward to no stress, interrupted nights, lighter circles around my eyes, and getting out of bed actually eager for the day.

Second is doing something about myself. I mean fitness and weight. Decades of sitting have left me with accountant’s bottom, and having my time eaten up by work means I am hopelessly, and possibly dangerously, unfit. A recent blood test told me I had elevated cholesterol and my GP said the word statins to me. I seldom walk 10,000 steps a day and riding my bike for five minutes in each direction to the Tube does not count for anything.

I’m not proud of this, but quite when you are supposed to swim, or go to the gym, or whatever when you have had a job like mine, children and a home to run, has been a mystery. So, it’s no more cheese sandwiches, crisps and four o'clock sweeties for me. I am going to fix the cholesterol with diet and exercise. I just need to figure how. Friends are telling me to use a personal trainer. I’ll let you know how that goes, once I locate my nearest gym.

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.

Oscar Wilde in Paris

On Thursday night I had the great pleasure to listen to a lecture given by Oscar Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, at the Irish Cultural Institute. He spoke on Wilde and subversion, with particular reference to Dorian Gray, that so offensive novel, today given to A level students to read as an example of fine prose writing.

Oscar's "mistake", he explained, was, unlike other visitors to the culture Paris represented, to take it home and publish it, putting himself at risk of ostracisation for being a purveyor of decadence.

As we all know, his critics bided their time until he broke the law and they could rid society of a rebel who 'called out' hypocrisy; he had pushed Victorian society to the limit of its tolerance, Holland concluded. A fascinating event.

Last evening, I visited the Oscar Wilde exhibition at the Petit Palais, which Merlin Holland curated and for which he wrote the (in French only) catalogue. It is small, rather too small in terms of physical space, which is why the weekend queues are so long, but it is very worthwhile. Book and get there as soon as you can.

Chronologically it presents Wilde's life and writings using related paintings, photographs and prints; everything from portraits of the actresses to whom he addressed sonnets, to the Pre-Raphelite paintings he wrote about as an art critic, to Beardsley's wonderful prints for Salome and so on. The manuscripts on show include those of Dorian Gray, various of the plays, and De Profundis; his script in the latter smaller and more careful, as paper was a rationed commodity during his incarceration. First editions are all there, dedicated to the influential and famous, along with many letters. I enjoyed reading them all, or as much of them as I could through their perspex protection. The highlight for me was exhibit A from his libel trial - the infamous Queensberry calling card.

Punk and my writing

The first word that sprang to mind as I was thinking about this piece was nostalgia: not the soft focus hankering for things or days past, but a reminder of where I came from, of formative influence. I can no more forget the importance of punk in my personal and artistic development than I can my ethnic cultural heritage. 

My poetry is rooted in the rhythms and language of Anglo-Welsh, not in a conscious or contrived manner, it's just how I write and what seems most natural to me. These are the patterns of language I learnt as a child. I cannot, and have no desire to, unlearn them.

So I am saddened by people who want to expunge their punk past. Why? It was the most exciting thing to happen to British culture in the Twentieth Century and I say that not just because I was peripherally there. Why would you want to forget it?

Punk informs my writing. I need and ask no permission to write whatever I want: whatever topic, in whatever style, using whatever language I choose. I can swear and be 'offensive' and 'outrageous' if I like, whatever these terms mean, without self-chastisement. I am not using naughty words or excusing my language, subject matter or approach to myself or anyone else. I can break all the rules of poetry if I want and still make work that is pleasing. To do this I have exorcised my internal critic. J'etais toujours Charlie.

And I don't really care what the reader thinks. I am not writing for any particular audience. Poetry by poll or committee can never produce anything of merit. No, I write to please myself and I am gratified that my work touches other people or that I hear the sigh of recognition or a peal of laughter from the crowd at a reading. Even if I was in an audience of one: me, alone, that's all that matters. I am doing it by and for myself. And that's a punk thing.

Murdering your darlings or being brave enough to edit

It’s a great line, paragraph, idea, beautifully phrased with a surprising, arresting, new image. 

But it just doesn’t fit with the rest of the poem, story, piece.

It’s time to whip out your sharpest knife and cut it out.

Huge sigh.

But your writing will be the better for it. And all is not lost. Save it for another day and another piece of work.

I have an inspiration file of some of my best homeless bits that I dip into every now and then to find ideas for new poems and stories. I try challenging myself to start a piece with some such, or write my way towards one, use it as an organizing principle or a piece of dialogue. The possibilities are endless, just not where I first though to put it.

Gone on, release your inner Medea and feel the burn. It’s called catharsis.

How to handle rejection

It's not you, it's the work, stupid.

Unless...it is you, in which case NEVER submit to them again, NOT EVER, not even if they grovel.

If you can wallpaper your apartment with rejection letters and are still upset about it every time, here's my top ten tips for coping with editors and publishers whilst retaining dignity and sanity:

1. Stonk around the room, pull the blade from your heart, curse and shake your fists at the sky, but recall that no-one has died. Cathartic moment over, then

2. Grow the hide of a rhino, a ducks back etc. Get tough and get going on sending your work somewhere else.

3. Remind yourself you are not telepathic. You cannot know what the editor was looking for in advance, so it may have been nothing more than the subject matter that was wrong. It will find the right home eventually.

4. Remember we don't all have the same taste in style, tone, form etc., and this includes editors. Your narrative is someone else's nightmare. There are people who like narrative elsewhere.

5. Edit yourself. Look critically at what you submitted, polish, rewrite and send it out again.

6. Expect nothing and you won't be disappointed, and that includes any advice about your work. If anyone bothers (and generally they don't) to offer suggestions for improvement when replying, look at these generously, they are meant kindly.

7. Don't write back. NOT EVER. The editors are not entering into correspondence, they are simply saying thanks but no. They don't want to receive comments on how they can improve their abilities as editors, or hear excuses or opinions on their parentage.

8. Be patient. Eventually you will get into the magazine of your dreams. It may take many, many tries. My record was over seventy poems in ten years and the magazine has ceased to exist without ever taking one poem from me. Oh dear, but meh.

9.  If the editors asked to see more of your work in the future, send them some. They are not winding you up and do not do this for people from whom they do not wish to hear.

10. Remember it's not you, it's the work, stupid. Never take it personally.

If you can't do these things then, perhaps seeking publication is not for you. Here, have a tissue.

Amsterdam Writers Guild

It was a pleasure last Sunday to read for the newest guild of writers in Amsterdam as guest poet before their annual slam competition. They are an impressive group, all writing poetry expertly in their second language.  Check out their events next time you are in town.

I am especially glad that I sold so many books. That's just what the unloved poet most wants: people to listen, but then actually buy my words. Thank you all, and for the opportunity to actually read from behind a circular bar - a first.

Ian McEwan - Maison de la Poesie

Shameful though it is, I have never darkened the door of La Maison de al Poesie until now, which is of course ridiculous as it's just ten minutes from my house, but that's largely because they have few anglophone guest writers - surprisingly enough this is France - and I can only just about cope with bi-lingual things.

Ian McEwan was in town last night to promote his newly translated latest novel Operation Sweet Tooth or in French, Operation Sweet Tooth (acute accent on the e in operation), which, as you can guess by the title, is a spy novel. a genre he has written before and might again. In response to a question (from me) he explained that emersion into the genre involved reading Somerset Maugham and Le Carre (acute accent on the e) in order to learn and follow the conventions. On Le Carre he hopes that he will be considered a major literary novelist eventually and gave a lovely vignette of him when working at MI5 and never being sure of whether his colleagues were brilliant or totally stupid.

The novel is set during the Cold War, a period in time, he thinks has become sufficiently contained by its effluxion in order to be written about in the way he does. Little of the plot was given away, and certainly not the ending, instead McEwan talked about the activities of the CIA. The agency was paradoxically funding culture, like concerts of A-tonal music in Paris, the Boston symphony orchestra and exhibitions of abstract expressionism, in order to have free and open culture, whilst at the same time the Soviets were busy elevating the importance of writers by incarcerating them.

For McEwan Orwell is the most effective anti-totalitarian writer and Animal Farm and 1984 are the most eloquent writing in this cause.  He went on to question our love affair with irresistible and addictive machines, which have the capacity to change human consciousness and give us two enemies, the state and ourselves, as we are becoming more vulnerable to being watched and listened to, and which have banished our capacity for solitude. These are the kind of machines of which Orwell never dreamed.

Sound bites to take away and chew over:

I don't create literature, I am the inheritor of literary tradition. 

In a free society, writers should be free to do what they want.

Writers are spies - we all try to read each other all the time and control our own narratives.

History is the construction of narrative.

To the question as to whether McEwan reads poetry, he replied that the poets he reads most are Auden and Larkin. Nothing contemporary then, which rather disproves his claim to be an avid reader of the form. Pity, but an interesting evening with a writer whose work I much admire.

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.