The Art Books of Henri Matisse

The Chester Beatty Library in Dublin is currently exhibiting five out of the more than a dozen artist’s books produced by Henri Matisse. I wanted to look at the approach in these books towards marrying the elements of narrative, typography and illustration.

I was a little surprised to learn that they often came unbound, in loose sheets. Jazz (1947) is Matisse’s best-known art book, with bold colours and occasional lithographed text as accompaniment to the images. Jazz is brilliant and large-scale – and in my mind somewhat at odds with the idea of the portability of the book (it was originally conceived as a collection of plates). In terms of book production, then, I found the other exhibits of more interest.

Pasiphaé (1944) is Henry de Montherlant’s retelling of the legend of the birth of the Minotaur. For this, Matisse selected favourite phrases from the text which he interpreted in several ways – though in the book he published only one image per scene. The linoleum-produced illustrations consist of white lines on a black background, forming silhouettes which recall classical Greek representations of the figure; dispersed throughout the book, they contrast sharply with the white pages containing the black lettering of the text. (I also noted that the text incorporates a combination of verse, regular prose and dramatic dialogue.)

an image from Pasiphaé (source: henri-matisse.net)

For Poèmes de Charles d’Orléans (1950) Matisse created a backdrop to the medieval-period poems rather than direct illustrations. What stands out here is the use of his own calligraphic script for the text – surrounded by garlands and rolls; he also decided to vary the colour and motif of the script in order to avoid monotony.

In Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé (1932) he responded to the poet’s stated emphasis on the importance of the white space around the poem by etching “an even, very thin line, without hatching, so that the printed page is left almost as white as it was before printing.” So, like in Pasiphaé, the soft-line images placed on the opposite page to the text form an attractive contrast to the dense black type.

an image from Poésies de Stéphane Mallarmé (source: henri-matisse.net)

And there’s also his illustration of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1935). Most intriguing here is the fact that Matisse chose to illustrate subjects from The Odyssey rather than scenes from Joyce’s text. His pencil studies reproduced on blue & yellow (see-through) tissue are impressive.

The exhibition continues until 25 September 2011.

Spinning Cities, by Kimberly Campanello

In Kimberly Campanello's chapbook Spinning Cities (Wurm Press, 2011) shit is the first but not the last word. Its smell wafts through the twelve dystopian poems, which crawl with impurities, decay, cunt, deformity, rape. Animal parts and bodily functions.

These poems take aim - but never cheaply. Restless but clearly thought out and well stitched together, they make it their business to illuminate recesses of the now, in the process establishing unexpected connections. They force the reader's eyes to stay open. And they retain a wide scope, with varying line length and geography that reflect the poet's pool of raw material.

How credible is my endorsement of the work of another Wurm Press poet? Of course I'll support it! But I do so only because Spinning Cities hits the spot consistently. And it works as a unit. Razor-sharp, exhilarating, and revelling in the power of words and their interaction to grapple with things as they are, to shake up and to unsettle, this is compelling and - crucially - necessary poetry.

Twelve Beds for the Dreamer, by Máighréad Medbh / Catfish, dir. Ariel Schulman & Henry Joost

How beneficial or detrimental to the reading of the poetry is personal acquaintance with the poet? I have known Máighréad Medbh for some years, as a fellow poet and as a colleague, as well as in a social context. While reading her latest collection Twelve Beds for the Dreamer (Arlen House, 2011) I found it difficult to keep my awareness of the circumstances of her life from entering the reading of the work.

I began to write these notes while waiting for the lights to dim for a screening of the film Catfish. Unlike The Social Network, this is a film about Facebook and its considerable impact. And it raises questions about lots more besides: identity, deception, life vs. art, invention, dreams vs. reality… But mostly I see it as being about the idea of personas, an individual’s separate and variable faces, about the fragmentation of the self.

At times, Máighréad Medbh’s poetry sizzles on the page. It is fearless and it is elemental. It is unapologetically feminine, intellectually agile, and it derives from the body. As might be expected from the work of someone primarily identified – for better or for worse, there’s little she can do about that now – as a ‘performance’ poet, there are great rewards in reading these poems aloud. There are turns of phrase and linguistic somersaults that delight. And the collection glitters in its tight unity: as the poet notes in her introduction, this is a quasi-scientific attempt to record her dreams at each stage of the moon’s monthly cycle – while staying more faithful to poetry than to astrology. A sense lingers that this book is the record of a journey out of the domestic – of an un-domestication, or a de-domestication. I’m not sure which.

Am I subconsciously reading these poems as autobiography? How much do we gain or miss by knowing the poet personally? When she writes as the poetic ‘I’, we know that this is not the ‘I’ of the historical person Máighréad Medbh speaking: at most – even in the work of the most ‘confessional’ of poets – this may be an approximation of a particular facet of her. Do the poems in which the speaker addresses a ‘you’ or invokes a ‘she’ achieve a distancing effect? Both ‘you’ and ‘she’ appear closer to the Máighréad Medbh I know – and not because of any specific pieces of information relayed. How many versions of ‘Máighréad Medbh’ are writing here – if any at all? The question seems to be one of construct.

I’m not totally convinced that Catfish is as pure a documentary as it purports to be. After all, isn’t it a film about artifice? For me it makes no difference whether it is ‘real’ or a hoax. Whether one knows ‘the truth’ about how the film was made, the personal circumstances of Yaniv Schulman specifically or of Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost, whether Angela Wesselman-Pierce really exists as we see her or whether she was in on the project from the start – this is all immaterial. The crucial thing here is whether the film’s themes and the questions it attempts to raise are constructed in a persuasive manner.

The main one of these seems to be whether Facebook (or any social network) forces its users to appear as the sum of their fragmented selves – a rather reductive state. Or, as it simultaneously seems to promise, whether they can be as many different parts of themselves – or the person(s) they have invented – as they want to be. I emerged from both screening and book with a heightened awareness that what remains undeniable is the body itself, corporeal matter – which is the medium we respond to the world with. That our perceptions begin and end in the body. These are issues that would speak to anyone with an online presence – and more generally to anyone who has more than one way of addressing the world. Which is not just poets, filmmakers and artists, but practically everyone.

this is not a definitive end-of-year highlights list...

An incident in which a woman may or may not have knocked down something or somebody, and then driven off, becomes the starting point in Lucrecia Martel's film The Headless Woman (La Mujer sin Cabeza). Zoë Skoulding's collection of poems Remains of a Future City reflects on our complex and evolving relationship with the European city. Parental fascism, indoctrination, closed societies, under- or mis-information and the violation of language are some of the themes examined memorably in Yorgos Lanthimos' unsettling film Dogtooth (Κυνόδοντας). As part of her installation The Golden Bough in Dublin's Hugh Lane Gallery Katie Holten painted the walls with the 'average colour' of the universe, as determined by astronomers at the John Hopkins University in Baltimore - both the 'incorrect' and the 'correct' versions. derek beaulieu's reading for the Wurm im Apfel series revealed a surprising dimension in conceptual poetry composed through mechanical means. Francis Alÿs' games with cities, international borders and other landscapes was presented as a series of instructions and postcards for the exhibition Le Temps du Sommeil at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). Over a decade after publication, I became engrossed in the complexities of J M Coetzee's Disgrace. Another rather late discovery was the music of LCD Soundsystem. A luminous, labyrinthine construction in Carlos Garaicoa's show at IMMA sparked an online publishing initiative of mine currently in the pipeline. My first foray into the world of TV series box-sets led me to the seductive world of Don Draper and his fellow Mad Men. Daniel Miller interviewed artist Artur Żmijewski for the February 2010 issue of Art Monthly magazine; later in the year Żmijewski exhibited at Dublin's Royal Hibernian Academy. Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void attempts to push the boundaries of cinema, and is visually and aurally stunning. An exhibition of outsider art from Japan in the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris (Art Brut Japonaise) had me disoriented. A Selected Poems by Thom Gunn, which I picked up in a second-hand bookshop some time ago, went everywhere with me for most of the year.

Greek, by Theo Dorgan

Fresh ink, fresh paper, the world
quietly opening to the south
(from ‘Begin, Begin Again’)


On receiving my copy of Theo Dorgan’s poetry collection Greek (Dedalus Press, 2010) my initial suspicion was that the weight of place might overwhelm the poetry. The book design, a glance at the contents page and a quick dip into random poems all seemed to corroborate this impression. Several poems are named after Greek place names (‘Kato Zakros’, ‘Return to Hania’, ‘Nisos Ikaria’), clichés attached to Greek island life (‘Taverna on the Beach’, ‘Morning in the Cafeneion’, ‘Honey Yoghurt’, ‘Bread Dipped in Olive Oil and Salt’) or fragments from the history and mythology of classical Greek civilisation (‘Plato’s Myth’, ‘Nike’, ‘Over Delphi’). And I noticed the repeated occurrence of words such as “salt”, “rock”, “light”, “sea”, “boat”, “heat”, “olives” etc.

The first poem, ‘Begin, Begin Again’, aims to introduce us to a new location by making parallels to the one left behind, and allows us a glimpse into a process of renewal: “The ships at twilight in the roads at Pireaus / are ships that sat heavy with night on Penrose Quay…” Here, Munster blends into Attica , and vice versa. This, we are led to understand, will be a book about the sea, travel, change.

And love. The book’s first section (‘Undying’) is a meditation on the process of seeing again and seeing anew, often facilitated through love – with the beloved re-opening the poet’s eyes by example:


You have the hunter’s steady lope, ready to go
anywhere, risk anything on instinct,
and I need water, I need courage, I need rest.
(from ‘Kato Zakros’)


laughter a remedy for the deep fault
under the streets, the reek of ancient stone.
(from ‘Taverna on the Beach’)


In section two (‘ Islands ’) the lyric line or phrase takes over. The poems here operate like postcard-poems in the sense that words aiming to recreate landscapes or moments at specific and remote places are written for the benefit of absent eyes. One could wonder whether what is being described is a romanticisation of Greek island life that is projected to and visible only by the outsider, or the display of actual pockets of resistance against westernisation. A traveller or newcomer to a group is in possession of a detachment that the permanent dweller has no access to, and this puts them in the arguably privileged position of observer. It is also a limited position, but a valid one nonetheless, which can offer insights unavailable to the member of the settled group. Do we get such insights? The poems are well-crafted, with an attractive surface, and are often punctuated by wit and the appearance of ghosts from Modern Greek history or classical mythology. Our attention becomes dominated by a handful of sharp images:


A boy comes backlit through the entrance arch,
a carefree, sunny child, all smiles and puppy fat.
(from ‘Alexandros’)


… a loud
and beautiful shambolic drunk, heart full of joy.
(from ‘Morning in the Cafeneion’)


… comedy ripped down the crooked
street like a string of firecrackers…
(from ‘Cross-Country Bus’)


Mortality and ageing lurk unmistakeably behind the lines here, as in much of the book: an abrupt understanding of the impermanence of things. ‘Return to Hania’ (from section one) is a clear exponent of this: it is an especially Cavafyesque poem in which – at first – the aged poet looks back over life, remarking “it has not been what we expected”. The concluding stanza, however, begins “It beggars breath to speak of it; …” and ends with a sense of affirmation that the here and now is what matters, and it ought to be made the most of:


I thought my life a catalogue of loss–
now, without meaning to, I see it all as gain;
I am dizzy with hope, stunned – so much laughter
and love, such joy come round again!
(from ‘Return to Hania’)


Section three (‘Sappho’s Daughter’) comprises a long narrative poem replete with themes of travel, mythology and the sea, and where the poet equates falling in love to being seduced by a siren’s song (Odysseus is never far in this collection). The narrator tells of being used so that the woman may bear a daughter, a sequence of events which he ultimately does not regret because of the experience of pleasure it has left him: “I can see now I was had. / … / if I had known then what I knew after / I’d still have stepped over that threshold …”

Specific place, then, carries less weight than is at first apparent: openness to the accumulation of experience seems to me the message in this collection. What Dorgan is (didactically?) hinting at throughout is that we ought to be prepared to confront our fate while staying ready to use what we have learned to recognise events and voices directing us to it. It is surely no coincidence that he ends the book repeating a line whispered previously:


Nobody knows what may happen in this life
(from ‘Sappho’s Daughter’)

Nobody’s Home, by Dubravka Ugrešić

While in Berlin in October 2008 it struck me that the changes brought about by the fall of the wall may have been presented in rather simplistic terms. The general assumption has been that the Western way of life is on its way to obliterating the ways of communism, that capitalism has flowed into the Eastern Bloc and set upon liberating everything: the availability of goods, the ability to purchase them, information, opportunity, colour…

This last one, at least, is a construct. Is it possible that the growing indistinguishability of the two former halves of Berlin points to something lurking behind such constructs, something more unexpected?

In the title essay of Dubravka Ugrešić’s essential book Nobody’s Home (trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać, Telegram, 2007) the author suggests that communist systems of behaviour are alive and well, and are to be found in traditional bastions of capitalism: officialdom, bureaucracy, surveillance, fear, the failure of democracy, the restrictions of political, religious and other freedoms, long queues, half-empty shops… The essence of communism, she writes, was “the repetitive degradation of the individual in everyday situations, the opaque mysticism of things that have been banned, the impossibility of dialogue and mediation, the everyday smashing of heads against the blind wall of the absurd.”

Maybe there is something of the rant in this: but it doesn’t preclude its validity. When the flow of goods and information Eastwards (or outwards, if you imagine The West not so much in the west but in the centre) is not counterbalanced by the equal freedom of human movement Westwards (or inwards) then the inherent injustice of this will at some point, inevitably, come to the boil.

For now, argues Ugrešić, what we get is a cross-pollination of systems of behaviour which catches us unawares: the relative newness of capitalist rituals in Budapest or Tallinn with their care of service and air of opportunity – and the growing overcrowdedness in Amsterdam or Berlin with the resulting resentment towards migrant types peddling things or applying for state handouts.

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Among the treatment of many other topics, Nobody’s Home includes a series of essays that consider the notion of ‘national literatures’, exposing the shaky ground it now stands on. Ugrešić then goes further to wonder whether labels for writers such as herself – ‘transnational’, ‘post-national’, ‘cross-border’ or ‘para-national’ – really mean anything.

The biographical note on the cover states that Dubravka Ugrešić “entered self-imposed exile when Croatia’s late president, Franjo Tuđman, proclaimed Croatia to be ‘paradise on earth’ in the early 1990s.” The implied sentiment alone did much to persuade me to pay attention to this book: a highly-readable, witty, often caustic and provocative look at a world in transition and instability, multiple realities and conflict, familiarity and strangeness. Nobody’s home, indeed.

Red Riding Hood’s Dilemma, by Órfhlaith Foyle

About halfway through Órfhlaith Foyle’s first full poetry collection, Red Riding Hood’s Dilemma (Arlen House, 2009), there is a poem entitled ‘And Where Else?’ which reads like a biographical inventory, a listing of the poet’s places of residence from birth up to the present. It ends with:


…we’d say
our parents are Irish
but really,
we’re from somewhere else.


Órfhlaith Foyle’s poems are “from somewhere else”. And they spring from several elsewheres. There are poems here remembering time in Africa (‘After Sunday Mass in Malawi’, ‘Italian Nuns’) and Russia (‘Later in Leningrad’), as well as ones celebrating place (‘Romance with Paris’, ‘Missed Opportunity’, ‘I was Banned from my Great Aunt’s House in New York’). In each of these poems the sense of place, fragmented as it is in its portrayal through an immature lens – particular stages in personal development – remains ultimately elusive. Taken as a whole, however, they reflect the contemporary condition of the migrant who crosses borders and infiltrates cultures unknown to her – to grasp them fleetingly and assimilate them incompletely before she moves on again. They read like a rediscovery of humanity’s wandering instincts.

What facilitates this search is a self-empowered voice of a woman speaking through her experiences from girlhood through to adulthood. She confronts notions of love and its multiple failures, and records events mostly through the eyes and ears of an innocent. There is, indeed, a strain of naïveté running through this collection with its sometimes awkward line endings and forced rhymes – hinting perhaps at an attempt towards a process of re-birth. There are several visceral poems kicking out against a kind of straitjacketing imposed largely by religion – whose imagery is both played with and put under destructive force – and also by the traditions of patriarchy and family:


An uncle condemned me
– you invite the devil to sit down beside you
(from ‘Jesus in the Painting, Mary in Blue’)


Foyle, however, understands that as much as our new, looked-for experiences it is our background and early influences that shape our responses to the world:


I come from the fear of God also
and my mother’s tears
and my father’s sharp dreams
buried down
into mine and
mixed with words
that would like to
Burn – It – All – Down
– Sometime.
(from ‘I Come From’)


On occasion the collection is blemished by excessive introspection; there are poems making use of abstract language in an attempt to decipher the meaning of love, or dissect the break-up of a relationship, or examine concepts such as morality, evil, and our modern condition. One or two didactic poems have crept in which, irrespective of what they convey, sit uncomfortably within the language and mode of composition that defines the rest of Foyle’s poetry.

But this is perhaps all the more so because she often spoils us with morsels of simple, clear, forceful writing:


He moves about on strong feet.
His clothes smell of sweat.
He likes what my pen paints.
He knows I want his passion.
(from ‘Van Gogh Visits’)


But I spat out their goodness
like spare vomit from my lungs.
I developed my own Blasphemy.
(from ‘Someone Crept up to Me’)


Imagine me in a man’s arms
the buttons of my dress pressed into his shirt.
Music and evening sun
the kind of heat that gives sheen to everyone’s skin.
(from ‘Dance’)


And then there is the closing poem, ‘Experiences of a Man in Great Debt to Esther’, which gives a hint as to where Órfhlaith Foyle’s poetry might be moving towards as it evolves further: when she allows herself to look outwards, having re-imagined herself into an independent position and armed with all that she has gathered in her way, she promises a spate of poems of sustained richness, clarity and vividness.

For now, the elements that comprise Red Riding Hood’s Dilemma add up to an intoxicating collection, unafraid to hunt for juxtapositions of images and sounds that aim to touch hitherto unutterable depths. Whether they sometimes fail is almost immaterial: the process yields something valuable for both the writer and the reader.

Do Poems Carry Passports?

Occasioned by the opinion piece 'Poetry in a Multicultural Ireland' by Celeste Augé, published in the Poetry Ireland newsletter of March-April 2010, I include below extracts from my (unpublished) response to the first of the annual 'Best of Irish Poetry' anthologies (Southword Editions, 2007):

*

There are several problems with this concept, of course. First and foremost: what defines Irish poetry in the here and now? What is an 'Irish' poem (apart from one written or spoken in the Irish language)? Does it speak in a particular accent? Do poems carry passports? Should the collection of poems that greets the reader have any uniform characteristics? And if so, who decides what those are? Can anybody impose a boundary around the experiences that define Irishness in poetry, or in anything else for that matter? To be fair, in his introduction editor Maurice Riordan acknowledges a certain "cultural cohesion" in his selection, going further to wonder whether this is a good or a bad thing. But could this "cultural cohesion" be a result of his failure as editor, the collective failure of poetry editors in Ireland and the failure of the country's artistic community to produce and publish poetry that does not adhere to a limited set of concepts?

There is also the issue of judging the fifty 'best' poems from a pool of poetry. How could someone possibly do that? Is the writing of poetry, like gymnastics or figure-skating, a competitive endeavour?

The argument may be that one has to simplify things for a general readership. But at the same time we ask our readers to be knowing and alert - and they expect us not to patronise them. Unnecessary explanations or clauses dilute the poem and weaken the experience of its reading. Why not then treat these same readers with the respect they demand and give them something challenging to work with?

One solution might have been to employ a number of editors coming from different poetic backgrounds and modes of practice. That might have given a variety and freshness in the selection, something which I think is lacking in this volume. In following the taste of a single editor (however diligent, respected or experienced) the publishers have produced a (mostly) uniform volume which suffers from "cultural cohesion".

One More Year, by Sana Krasikov

This is a frustrating book. There's no question that these stories need to be told: stories of the instability of the lives of immigrants and emigrants, repatriates and natives of a vastly- and rapidly-changing world in a post-Soviet landscape. Krasikov makes sharp observations on everyday objects and gestures that reveal much about a character's history or aspirations. She understands the needs that lurk behind each desperate act, the circumstances and cynical mindset that engender such desperation and the drive for self-betterment that often overwhelms love and kindness.

And yet... Far too often a story or a section of one begins with a short piece of dialogue, which promptly gives way to a filling-in of the back story. The following is a typical example:


"No one told you about me?" Gulia said. "Half of Fergana knew, and you didn't?"
"I thought we could get along. My uncle has two wives in one house, and they live like close girlfriends."
"I'm not interested in your family or how you were raised."
"And how were you raised?" The woman started up off her chair. "To become a divorced prostitute and keep a man away from his children!"
Again, the children. Nasrin had announced her first pregnancy just weeks after Rashid and Gulia's own wedding party, when they'd gone to a mullah and then invited their friends...

(from 'Asal')


It's as if the author suddenly becomes self-conscious or loses her nerve, or doesn't quite trust the reader to read between lines, so she feels forced to explain to us, in a linear fashion, almost always in the third-person narrative from within the mind of the central character, how we got here. It's as if she is straining to make her story plausible. She begins with a sharp line-drawing and ends up with a photoshopped picture complete with neat foreground and background, coloured-in and with labels for everything.

On several occasions her stories feel like set-ups designed to take us to a pre-determined climax (which on occasion is, as in the story 'Maia in Jonkers', profoundly moving). These are cinematic tales, sometimes told from an imaginary camera's point of view (on several occasions a section would end with a description of a depleted landscape or of the view from a moving window).

I propose that most of these stories (with the notable exception of the last in the volume, the excellent 'There will be no Fourth Rome') might have been better served constructed differently: with much more specific detail, whose implications we might not quite be able to understand instantly, but which would leave us with enough hints towards interpreting the motives of the characters and the delicacy of their predicaments. This is a world that deserves to be shown on its own terms rather than forcibly made accessible to an American (or generally Western) readership.

It may seem unfair to complain about a book because of what it isn't. But there's a fascinating writer at work here with a terrific vision: Krasikov is a well of essential stories, with a profound understanding of this particuar juncture in history. It's a pity that the method of the telling leaves us (this reader, at least) unfulfilled.

Review of 'Round the Clock'

Melissa Lee-Houghton has published a review of my poetry chapbook 'Round the Clock'.