Spending fairy gold

I’m so used to the idea, or first line, of a poem coming to me while I’m in the bath that I usually take a notebook and a biro into the bathroom with me. Maybe it’s to do with the neither-here-nor-there driftiness of wallowing in warm bubbles while staring at the ceiling, now graced by spotlights in the approximate shape of the Plough, a whim indulged when the house was rewired. What’s more unusual, for me at least, is an entire, somewhat water-blotched poem materialising, via divine dictation. On the few occasions this has happened, I’ve learnt to regard the apparently finished article with suspicion. It’s not a trustworthy creature.

The sensible option is to put such poems to one side and rework them later, but when it happened last October, I ignored my  own advice and spent my fairy gold before it could turn into dead leaves, packing it off to seek its fortune in the 2018 Plough Prize Short Poem Competition. I figured that when it came nowhere, I’d decide whether it was worth polishing up or fit only for compost. I was not a little stunned, then, to learn the poem I'd called 'Oystercatchers' had won first prize.

And consternated. For some reason unknown to me, the poem came with an epigraph, namely the famous first line from ‘L’étranger’ by Albert Camus: Aujourd'hui, maman est morte. Which is not quite as notorious as the second line, but even so, how would this play with my 90-year-old mother, should someone unhelpfully provide her with a translation? Possibly not well.

I decided to work out where the poem might have come from. I recalled that when it arrived, I'd just had a sequence of poems based on four paintings by Leonora Carrington accepted for publication. The Giantess, who is depicted arriving on an alien shore in an echo of Botticelli's scallop-born Venus, is definitely still hanging about in this poem, with the wayfaring geese flying from her opened cloak transmuted, for some reason, into eponymous oystercatchers; and spookily, she was referenced by the judge, Pascale Petit, in her thoughtful, intuitive report. 

But what about Meursault, Camus' emotionally detached protagonist. How does he fit in?

Bath water. A warm sea. A glaring, African sun. It's been 40 years since I read 'L'étranger’. What, exactly, was the link between Meursault's mother's death and his subsequent, murderous behaviour? How true is his conviction that he was sentenced to death for not crying at his mother's funeral, rather than for murdering an Arab on the beach? 

Is this 'betrayal' his real crime, as far as the society that sits in judgment of him is concerned? 

I started thinking about when my grandmother died 28 years ago: the feeling that the ensuing generations had all shuffled one step forward towards death. I and my (many) cousins were no longer ‘the youngsters’. Some of us were already parents, myself included, and our children were taking our former place in the junior rankings. Meanwhile, our parents had unceremoniously become the old ones. And now, all these years later, they’re the ones who are dying, among them my father. I already have the sense of disembarking in a strange land.

Is it only when you’re parentless that you finally stop being a child and become your true self? I think so, even when family relationships are relentlessly uncomplicated, or contact with a parent is minimal. Perhaps my poem is suggesting this.

Whatever, when it does happen, I promise I won’t drive down to Severn Beach and shoot someone on the bleak and muddy foreshore.

Oystercatchers

‘Aujourd’hui, maman est morte’

                           ‘L’étranger’, Albert Camus                             

One day

the day she’s been waiting for will come

and she’ll take these words with her to the sea

unzip her coat, pull open her ribcage

let them fly as purposely

as oystercatchers

pulling the strings of the sky

and tide

lifting the weight from each blood cell

giving her permission       


©Deborah Harvey 2019



'Oystercatchers' will be published in my forthcoming collection from Indigo Dreams, entitled 'The Shadow Factory'

'Armed with Madness': A sequence of poems after Leonora Carrington

It was my visit to Tate Liverpool in 2015 to see the comprehensive exhibition of art across several media by the celebrated surrealist Leonora Carrington that made me want to write a sequence of poems about her.  

I set about reading a lot of her stories and autobiographical pieces, as well as the novel based on her life by Elena Poniatowska, and the more I learnt about her resilience and her drive to be true to herself, the more I saw in paintings I'd thought I already knew quite well. Eventually I wrote a sequence of four ekphrastic poems exploring aspects of her extraordinary life through four portraits she painted at key points:

Self-Portrait: Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937-38), painted at the time of her elopement to Paris with Max Ernst, when she left behind her family's suffocating expectations of her.

Bird Superior: Portrait of Max Ernst (1939), painted while the couple were living in the South of France, prior to Ernst's periods of internment at the hands of the French authorities, and then the invading Germans.

The Artist Travelling Incognito (1949), painted after her escape to Mexico, following a brutal stay in a mental hospital in Spain and her parents' attempt to force her back to England (by sending her nanny in a submarine to abduct her!)

The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c1947-50), which I construed as a mythical depiction of her arrival in Mexico, where she was to live out the rest of her long and fascinating life. 

These poems have now been published in issue 18 of the fabulous journal of creative arts Riggwelter, and can be read here, but if you'd like to see the poems alongside the paintings, they're also below. (But do visit Riggwelter, because there's great stuff in it.) 

‘Armed with madness for a long voyage’ *

After four paintings by Leonora Carrington

I   Self-Portrait: Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937-38)

It’s lost its mane and tail

but she’s set that old rocking horse rocking

so hard it is lifting, hovering in the air

as if it might follow its living self

the one that has leapt through the frame

and is cantering into freedom.

And yes, it’s a dawning

Leonora, seated on a satin tongue

her demon hyena at her feet,

will soon be gone

as desire materialises beside her

casts a shadow, erases lines

that would confine her.

II   Bird Superior: Portrait of Max Ernst (1939)

Far away

in a gilded country

where the forests are deep and dark

she paints maestro Max

all flounced out in feathers and fish tail,

his stinging stripy socks,

Leonora’s shaman.

He paints her

tangled in briars and vines

she paints herself

frozen in the background

              watching him walking out of shot

                             helpless to stop him.

Even before war is declared

she knows

                      he’s leaving

taking her light

trapped in his lantern,

the egg he will hide in the ice

of this barren lifeless mountain. 

   

III   The Artist Travelling Incognito (1949)

Why so paranoid?

asks the Spanish psychiatrist

She straightens the citadel on her head,

rearranges the extra eyes she’s borrowed

from her cat’s remaining lives

They’re coming to get me, she explains

In a submarine

Lord Candlestick with his strictures

Mother painting biscuit tins

punishing nuns, suitors, the spies of the Gestapo

entitled artists who would use me

as their muse

I’m sticking my necks out

my real head’s the decoy

                                      it will parrot

what you expect   I’ve kept

my umbrella in case it rains

                     I don’t know why

I’m in disguise

         none of them see me.

IV   The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c1947-50)

No foam-born Venus blown ashore on a shell

She crawled straight from the mouth

of the whale

turned her back on the map of her journey

freed the geese that led her

to her unknown home.

As for the terror

that overwhelmed her

she’s put it behind her

so let waves rise, mound themselves into hillocks

miniscule men fight monsters

saplings sputter flame.

She is brooding mysteries in her head,

her unhatched visions sprout strange

feathers in their egg.

© Deborah Harvey 2019

* Paraphrased by Leonora Carrington from the inscription in Mary Butt’s novel, ‘Armed with Madness’

This sequence of poems will also be published in my poetry collection, The Shadow Factory, due to be published by Indigo Dreams later this year.

'Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter' at the RWA

I shook off my post-Christmas torpor and went to two fascinating exhibitions in Bristol today: The Staffordshire Hoard at Bristol City Museum, of which more anon, and 'Strange Worlds: The Vision of Angela Carter' at the Royal West of England Academy. 

You'll find far better photos than mine of the exhibits online, but I'll share some anyway.

'Castle' by Sarah Woodfine, right and above

Any exhibition with paintings by Leonora Carrington, Marc Chagall, Stanley Spencer, Holman Hunt, Dame Laura Knight, Paula Rego, Karl Weschke is going to grab my attention, but the more modern pieces easily hold their own. 

'Women's Place' by Juli Haas, above

As Carman Callil writes in the preface of the excellent accompanying publication, Carter was herself an accomplished artist, so it's not surprising that her writing should conjure fantastical images in the minds of these artists. 

'The Fairy Tale' by Di Oliver, above

Some of it is really quite creepy. 

This - 'The Shipwrecked Bride' by Katarina Rose - struck a chord and made me shudder. 

'Not waving but drowning' by Wendy Mayer

Heather Nevay's The Murder ...

... and 'The Lesson'

Details of Tessa Farmer's 'The Perilous Pursuit of a Python'

I was disappointed to see that the writing workshops associated with this exhibition are being on held on weekdays, which means I've no hope of getting to them; still, the exhibition itself runs till 19th March so and I hope to return to the RWA to see it again. 

'Blue Circus' by Marc Chagall

'The Pomps of the Subsoil' by Leonora Carrington 

'The Banquet' by Ana Maria Pacheco

Leonora Carrington at Tate Liverpool

Liverpool on Friday was as grey as any city which had just witnessed the re-election of a party with an official 1980s policy for its 'managed decline' would be.  

I love Liverpool and was glad to be there with my Firstborn (here having an impromptu Marilyn Monroe moment).

We'd travelled over from Leeds specifically to see the exhibition in Tate Gallery of art by one of our favourite artists, Leonora Carrington, the English surrealist who lived and worked in Mexico for most of her long career.

Carrington is possibly more famous for her colourful life than her art and this is a travesty as her work, which draws on the collective unconscious as well as Celtic and Mexican legend and folklore, is rich and endlessly fascinating.  

Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg), c1947

The Pomps of the Subsoil, 1947

The House Opposite, 1945

In her 2010 interview with her cousin, Joanna Moorhead, Carrington warns against intellectualising her work in an effort to understand it - it should only be approached, she believes, through one's feelings.  

I sat in front of this huge canvas for a long time. I reckon if I'd stayed there all night, I'd still keep seeing something new and intriguing, and in fact, this was the joy of seeing so many familiar paintings for real instead of in books - those tiny, often amusing, always provocative details.  (Here on my blog they are frustratingly small.)

The Magical World of the Mayas, 1964

Do you know my Aunt Eliza?, 1941

There were also masks and costume designs for Much Ado About Nothing and the Tempest, amongst others, and this amazing cradle painted for the daughter of José and Kati Horna. What a lucky baby to sleep in this!

La Cuna, c1949

After a time the concentration of colour and image became dizzying, and we were both reminded of when I'd taken a 12 year old Firstborn to see Chambers of the Imagination, an exhibition of work by William Blake at the then newly renamed Tate Britain in 2000. Such was its impact that my girl had woken up screaming in the night and been physically sick.  Thankfully there was no repeat of this on the two hour plus return journey over the Pennines to Leeds through unremittingly torrential rain.  It felt like the whole of the north was crying for another five years of bullying misrule, and we felt lucky to have had the respite of a blissful few hours of sumptuous colour and intrigue and fun.    

The Artist Travelling Incognito, 1949