Concrete Plinths, Poems and Lies, Glorious Lies

I went up to London yesterday to do some research at the National Gallery, take in the exhibition on concrete poetry at the ICA and hear two friends read there in the evening at the Ride the Word reading. I stood for sometime in Trafalgar Square looking at people looking at the latest person to go up on the fourth plinth, who looked back at the people looking at them. An hour is quite a long time on a plinth; there was a man up there with balloons promoting a children’s charity when I first arrived, who gave way to a man throwing T Shirt into the assembled onlookers to advertise a charity who works on projects in South African. I disappeared into the National Gallery and when I came out a while later there was a woman up there painting, complete with an easel. I listened to what people were saying, some thought it boring after a while, some thought it was turning into a charity plinth in which a sequence of charities could publicise their cause, others just seemed to like it and smile. I did eavesdrop on one conversation when an elderly lady enquired of her equally elderly friend why someone was up there. She seemed very pleased that the person was doing it for a charity and then said, “I wouldn’t like to think that I was looking at someone for nothing.”

Many tourists took endless photographs; some posed in such a way as to ensure they were in the picture along with the person on the plinth. I am sure families throughout the world will at some point be regailed with the slide show of ‘Our visit to London’ complete with and here is me smiling at the man who was holding balloons for charity on a plinth. Some people, probably Londoners, seemed to pass by in a hurry going somewhere but even they couldn’t resist a glance up to see who was up there and what they were doing. Driving past at night in a taxi I noticed it was a woman with a cello, floodlit to ensure she could be seen and there were still people crowded round looking. I wonder what those with the 3 or 4 am slot experience by way of audience, the charities must hope for a busy daytime slot, publicity is a little less in your face in the early hours. I didn’t get picked for the plinth for August and looking at the height I was relieved, but my name stays in for September so there is still time to be terrified and appalled at my decision to put my name in, in the first place. I have a charity in mind but also I have to admit I quite like the idea of being a nothing on a plinth or does nothing translate to exhibitionist. It is very complex this world of plinth art, all in the eye of the beholder or is it in the eye of the beheld?

The exhibition, Poor Old Tired Horse, at the ICA was interesting, a romp through some examples of 1960’s textual art/poetry up to the present day. I have a trouble with text as art which is I am sure either the point or the negative point of it in that I immediately want to read it rather than experience it. I am driven to see in symbols some code I can access through the medium of reading. Circular text written on huge ‘sails’ of transparent plastic in the exhibition immediately had me doing the usual wordsearch approach and indeed there were words in there which I think was partly the point plus the slight feeling of nausea that creeps up on you when you try to follow the flow of the text. However I suppose we have become more sophisticated in our approach to what we can do with text and graphics given the computer software that can now allow anyone to manipulate text to produce visual effects of increasing complexity. We’ve come a long way since The Mouse’s Tale by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland and Apollinaire’s work. If you are interested in the interplay of text, poetry and graphics go and have a look at Peter Howard’s Low Probability of Raccoons website here you can see a dialogue (is that a cliched word these days, perhaps more a collision of poetry text, the visual, sound ,animation in fact the whole monty of the human sensual repertoire), although touch is missing but even that can be brought in now with the use of textural touch screen technology I am assured. Here is a link to one of his galleries, you need the latest version of Flash Player but you can download that safely if you go to home on this site and these little poems are interactive so enjoy, have a play with them.

There was a prose poem at the open mike at the reading I attended which involved the expulsion of a tape worm by a fictional character, complte with facial expressions to enhance the fictional experience, it was different I have to give the piece that. I must repeat my mantra three times daily, ‘I will be open to the new, I will be open to the new, I will be open to the new but I won’t totally suspend my critical faculties.’ There is a debate on the Magma Poetry Magazine blog about the default poem i.e a poem that relies on the ‘I’ narrative of personal experience. It seeks to challenge poets to sometimes get out of their comfort zone but then I wonder if a poet is comfortable with something whether they can in fact be producing a good poem, surely a little discomfort provides some of the bite I look for in a poem. Some poets return to similar themes over and over again of course but this does not necessarily make the poems they write ‘default’. I have often heard people saying that a poet needs to move on or they risk becoming a one trick pony but the skill is in how they do that trick. Poets with big issues to explore need room to maneuver and revisit. Default smacks of the automaton, the computer reverting to settings it has established for its own well being. I does not always mean the real I , it does not mean that the real I or the assumed I cannot lie, in fact good polished lies are extremely difficult because the art of a good lie is that it does not seem like a lie at all but something born of authentic experience. I’m all for great lies, superb lies, lies of such depth and colour that they overwhelm me in their own reality.

PS I sat with friends in St James' Park for sometime watching the geese, coots and ducks on the lake. Unfortunately the pelicans and cormorants didn't put in an appearance but a squirrel did. Of course it was merely a rat who had brought in a great Image Consultant who suggested the whole fluffy tail thing. It set about mugging tourists who unwisely saw this as a photo opportunity and some unwisely tempted it closer with offers of non existant food. They lived to survive the experience and kept all their fingers, but then the squirrel was well aware that in such an up market park savaging the tourists might lead to old Boris Johnson announcing a cull, savage but politically savvy , that's squirrels for you.

The Continuing Psychopathy of Grey Squirrels, Stuffed Things and Northumberland Sojourn

Just a brief post having just arrived back from a stay in Northumberland. Saw daughter and admired her new house which has a great view across the council housing to the magnificent Weardale hills and valleys. Also admired her old and faithful motorbike and then off we went to the coast along with my cousin to enjoy the delights of the Northumberland coast and environs. Photographs above just give a flavour of what took my fancy, beaches, castles ( ruined and restored)and woods. A little museum in Seahouses visited during a downpour was full of knots, old fishing nets, lamps, dummies, tableaux and stuffed things. It had a small sink full of seawater that contained a few shells and a sad looking urchin which they described as a 'touching pool'. I did not feel it invited me to touch anything it contained, especially as the smell of something old and oceanic hung around it. I love these little museums that spring up , often in seaside resorts, they have a flavour of the slightly mad and eccentric about them. The waxwork museum in Great Yarmouth is a real contender for oddest seaside 'museum'/attraction ( friend and fellow poet Anne Berkeley has a great poem about this particular museum in her new collection Men from Praga) but the pencil museum at Keswick could give it a run for its money, along with the museum of wheelbarrows I only saw advertised but alas had no time to visit in the States, but the pictures advertising it alone were worth a look.

Stuffing things was mostly a Victorian and Edwardian hobby and there seemed a few birds and animals in this museum in Seahouses that had seen better days and were not a total triumph of the taxidermists art. The inside of a fisherman's cottage tableau, complete with roaring fire, pot dogs and stuffed pets had a audio play attached which seemed to be acted out by people at gun-point as they sounded a little stiff to say the least. This little 'play' seemed to want to stick in as many Northumbrian words as possible in order to educate the listener in the accent and terminology. This did not make for great realistic dialogue and when Grannie dummy offered to make small boy dummy 'a stoatie to tak' wi yer on the boat'. I thought I was in a remake of 'When the Boat Comes In'.

I also found a poster that serves to confirm my views on the grey squirrel. Just as the old red squirrel tries to re-establish a toe-hold somewhere in his native forests along comes the grey to try and wipe them out. No doubt they have secret germ warfare establishments deep in the heart of Sherwood forest manufacturing this pox and soon weapons of mass destruction will follow.

Found this 'Pieta' ( see above photos) in Alnwick cemetery. I have always been fascinated by this particular religious pose. Sometimes it is called Lamentations but usually this has other figures surrounding the central figure of Mary cradling the body of her son. I saw the Sam Taylor-Wood's 'Pieta', an installation video, some years ago at the Heywood Gallery. It was projected onto a huge screen and you could see every muscles straining in her neck and arms to hold up the body (played by Richard Downey Jnr ). It made my shoulders ache just watching it and the strength necessary to hold up a body in such a manner was brought literally into sharp focus. Since then this particular pose, represented in sculpture by many different artists, has always held a fascination for me. The mother holding her dead child is the ultimate grief, the worst nightmare and to do so after watching them die slowly in a barbaric form of torture makes the action even more horrific and grief laden. In the Michaelangelo Pieta, the most famous, Mary appears very young and her face passive as if in resignation. There is some who suggest that Michaelangelo saw this as a sculpture of Mary cradling the infant Jesus but what we see is the future that she can see unfolding for her child as she cradles him. Perhaps he did want to convey resignation and of course it was long before the time when total realism was seen as part of the artist's brief and he was still mixing the classical form with the new found freedoms of expression the Rennaissance had opened to the artist. However, the small wilted bunch of flowers tucked under the Virgin Mary's arm in the photograph of the Alnwick Pieta above says a little more about grief than a stone expression even carved by a master of the art could ever hope to.

Tiffany Atkinson, Neil Rollinson followed by Thunder and Lightning

The Boo and a writer friend are working on a project that involves global warming. It is always difficult for me to think of global warming big scale, I sort of glaze over on a close up shot of Al Gore's face, it is something ‘out there’ huge and running away from me down an increasingly steep slope and I try not to think too hard about what’s at the bottom of the slope for my child or her children and their children ( see I have already run that sentence on out of control at the mere thought of it). Coastal erosion and flooding are features that might increase as a result of this and I have seen at first hand the effects of floods, front rooms sticky with mud and sewage and a stench that soaks into the walls ( let me tell you dear reader it is not the water it is the smell that gets to you like a thousand unflushed toilets being emptied onto your Axminster), a child’s doll and a bird cage ominously empty,floating serenely down a high street. I have also walked along the Norfolk coast and seen abandoned houses teetering on the edge of cliffs where once there were back gardens and men in badly fitting shorts mowing neat and well kept lawns. I have photographed broken old sea defences sticking up from the sand like rotting teeth. Things encroach and perhaps this erosion on the Norfolk coast is a metaphor for how we as the human race react to impending change. Some ignore it, the more socially active and closely effected insist that better sea defences, flood defences etc will hold it all back. They believe that modern engineering and ingenuity , if only the money was thrown at it, can allow us to be Canute standing at the turn of the tide and saying thus far and no further.

We may be able to do this for a short while, we may be able to shore up the eroding coast line and continue to believe that global carbon emissions is nothing to do with small Norfolk communities and historic windmills saved from the encroaching sea. We all like to look at the smaller picture because that is something we can hold in our hands, we as individuals can touch and hold on to it. The bigger picture we have to leave to the nation states to work out, the canvas is so huge it can’t be hung anywhere where we can see it all in one individual eye sweep over human misery. I try to be a good greenish person, I wash at 30 degrees, turn out lights, use low energy light bulbs, try not to buy fruit and veg with high air miles, once used a brick in the toilet cistern until the plumber took it out and told me I was at risk of something that sounded like a plumbing disease of the pipes but I still tend to think this is useful but in the end, even if multiplied by thousands of others like me, not the ultimate answer. It is like the inhabitants of those Norfolk coastal villages, I can protest and be vocal about what should be done but in the end nature will answer those statements we have hurled in its face both in the past and now. It will probably always have the final say and the trick is to keep the dialogue going for as long as possible if we can.

What brought all this on? Perhaps a drive back from a Poetry Trust reading in Suffolk (which featured Tiffany Atkinson and Neil Rollinson of that more later) in apocalyptic weather, thunder, lightning, torrential rain. Weather is spectacular, weather can make you feel very insignificant, it can make you realise that the human species, can harness it, divert it, generally faff around with it but in the end it is a force not to be reckoned with but will reckon with us as a species. Weather and the planet are an intimate relationship, they are so intertwined that what falls or burns from the sky is only an expression of the earth’s state. I always find it interesting that in most mythologies the earth is always female and the sky or things of the sky are male. The thunder and lightning on Thursday night seemed very male, lots of rumbling and stomping around accompanied now and then by quick flashes of magnificent illumination. I like storms, there is something pure and magnificent broad brush stroke about them but this is from a choosing perspective, when forced to be in them they can take on a different hue. I eventually pulled into a small lay-by in the forest (yes I know parking near trees when lightning is about could be seen at tempting fate, I think poets struck by lightning is a low actuarial risk) and watched it all happen, admired the ability of an individual raindrops to be so heavy it can shake a car and contain within its surface tension such a huge amount of water that my sun roof started to leak and I had to resort to sitting in the car with my anorak on and my hood up. I became fascinated by how quickly small rivulets formed on the falling camber of the road and within minutes small streams with tarmac beds were hurling themselves in the same direction. Weather and the earth not to be taken lightly, not to be ignored, not to be viewed under a leaking sun roof.

Poetry reading was good, Neil Rollinson read some of his hall mark erotic poems which you can read here if you are in that sort of mood
but for me his other poems asked something more of me and I liked to be asked to think and feel something north of the waistline by a poem ( that is not to say that visceral sexual feelings elicited by words are to be sneered at, the art of the erotic is extremely demanding if it is to avoid soft porn clichés and avoids making you feel that at any moment a TV Repair man, or a plumber will arrive at the door with a six pack, off the shoulder dungarees and a took box). The other poems on his website are worth a look to get a flavour of his whole range. Tiffany Atkinson’s work comes at you from left field (is that a cricketing derived term?) and is rich with quirks and surreal images. Here is her poem Rain that seems appropriate considering the events of the drive back

I have been looking at this gallery of photographs under the title earth that were submitted for a competition. They are well worth a look if you too find the power of the photograph sets off trains of thought at full speed (so much more green, the train, than being driven to something).

Mosquitoes, Brown Hens and Jimmy Cagney on the Fourth Plinth

I have been bitten by the mother of all mosquitoes; it must have staggered away from my leg with at least a hundred times its own body weight of my blood. I attract things that bite me, I must give off exactly the right pheromone that attracts blood sucking things. Should vampires exist I am surprised they haven’t found their way to my door. I have sprayed myself with all sorts of stuff over the years in an attempt to keep the blood suckers away but nothing really works. Someone once suggested raw onion but I think that would drive everything and everyone away and make me the complete Nelly No Mates. Once bitten , despite the application of various medical preparations I swell up and turn a vivid red , not all of me of course, although it feels like it as I feel I become merely the pale bloodless thing attached to the mossie bite, I am simply its means of transport through the world. The mosquitoes in the USA where built like jump jets, could be heard three blocks away and could penetrate Kevlar. The English mosquito, however tends to use stealth as its main weapon and usually makes its getaway before you start to itch. As I quietly swell I contemplate where that mosquito has dined before, dung heap, dog, cow, the kind of person you wouldn’t want to exchange bodily fluids with. I have wondered whether allergy can be conquered by sheer will power and anti histamine alone, why can some either not be bitten or others have minimal reaction? I am obviously the bug fine dining experience, I came away from a picnic last year covered in insect bites whilst the people with me were totally unmolested. Such things tend to make you paranoid and deeply melancholic about the joys of al fresco summer activities. Picnics usually mean flapping the wasps away from the food and finding sand in your sandwiches. The idyll of lying by a babbling brook in long sweet smelling grass under the shade of a spreading chestnut tree is the sort of ‘happy place’ talked about in all those guided meditations. You know the kind of thing, imagine it is a warm sunny day, you are lying beside a cool river, birds singing etc etc. I can go along with it so far but then something bites me….end of meditation, happy place is transformed to itch and scratch central. It is hard not to take this personally, the insect world no doubt has not got my name on its Most Wanted list but it feels like it some times. The insects over the past few years seem to be more virulent perhaps the eco system is so out of balance that they have had to up the anti to survive. On the other hand it may be that my resistance has diminished, should I make old bones they will be bones placed carefully inside one walking fluid filled mosquito bite. I will now stop my rant about insect bites as you may be eating your tea , dear reader.

I have just applied to go on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square as part of Anthony Gormley’s art project. It was an impulse thing but then I thought this may be a way to combat my very real fear of heights which for one so tall is ironic. I do tend to fall off things and trip over things but if the point of this art piece is to represent Great Britain in all its diversity and strangeness then watching someone try to overcome fear may be interesting. I have thought no further than that, I am presuming of course that given the lottery of selection and the amount of people who have applied I will not even have to put my money where my mouth is and confront my fear. Even the blessed Jill Archer in Ambridge failed to get a place so I tend to think I will not be deemed worthy. I will keep you posted meanwhile I do keep having a peek via the webcam at the goings on the plinth and most of it is quite boring but then so is life so if it is meant to be representative a large proportion of it will be but now and then someone does something rather odd or interesting, I liked one man who sat and sketched very quietly and the woman with the green balloons. A lot seem to spend a great deal of time on their mobile phones , presumably saying ‘Hi, guess where I am, I’m on the fourth plinth.’ Should I get up there I think I would be muttering quietly to myself, ‘I’m going to die, I’m definitely going to die’. Of course sheer exhibitionism will be present why else would anyone be so stupid as to place themselves on a really high small platform in the middle of a busy public place. That’s what I want to know, why would I stick myself up there when I can get dizzy just peering over the edge of a teacup. Is it the ultimate Jimmy Cagney , White Heat moment, ‘Look at me Ma, top of the world’? Of course that film character fell off. I am perhaps engaging in a little bit of Russian roulette, hoping of course that when that lottery draw happens on 1st August I won’t get picked. Do they have insurance for people that go up there? Do you have to pass a medical? Is anyone with vertigo automatically excluded? Is anyone who puts themselves up there who suffers from vertigo automatically excluded on the grounds of sheer stupidity? We shall see, well maybe we shall see.

Meanwhile whilst I await my name not to be pulled from the plinth hat I am happy to inform you that my friend has named one of her new chickens after me. It is brown and rather small and I am egotistical enough to think she will produce wonderful eggs. I hope the fox and the cat will do her no harm and she will be content to just eat, scratch around and roost quietly up on her perch, hopefully she will not fall off it. I don’t think chickens can suffer from vertigo, although come to think of it they don’t seem to like flying a lot.