Hi all (and thank you so much for such an interesting discussion - I’m learning a good deal from this exchange - and it’s also a lovely excuse to riffle through the books I have on Modigliani.
John, why I like about your poem ‘Cain’s Song’ is that it tells a good story - I particularly like/enjoy the first five lines - there’s a weariness that’s palpable and a sing-song quality. The picture is powerful - a powerful and dramatic rendition of a narrative, so if you wanted to bring that to your poem, then it’s a good choice…but I’m not entirely convinced.
When I read your recent work I do think about Blake, and I wonder if that is the sort of illustration - maybe a bit more contemporary that I visualise accompanying it. Something cohesive, that brings the work together rather than something which presents a linear history - I guess I see the image as being quite a linear storytelling, whilst your stories/strands in the book you’re writing are more complex (whilst being a narrative, still) ?
Michael - Ahhh, but these aren’t my favourite Rothko’s either - like you, I love the massive blocks of colour and have spent a longer time than I’d like to admit in the Tate’s Rothko room (although partly, tbh, it was pretension - I liked to think of myself in the Rothko room, too - in my defence, I was in my late teens/early twenties at the time). I was thinking about your poem when I chose those specific images - your poem, in my reading, is an artefact which begins beautiful and ends up ugly. I was thinking about the image might bring out the elements that I’d missed, too - the Rothko’s I thought about were the powerful/ugly/cluttered ones, rather than the pure solar plexus hit of the colour-blocks? So it was less about an image I liked, more about how to bring that reading across through an image.
I like your Rothko poem, despite my sense of Rothko being untouchable. I like that the poem is brutal in its architecture, and the repetition works beautifully - I think claque/black particularly works well. The sounds of that, with the meaning and the repetition - the sense of isolation - chosen isolation, and a kind of beauty.
Marching Orders - well, that’s an image to take on. Have you tried the age-old thing of culling the poem back to the very bare bones and reworking it, much as the image (for me) worked with the tradition which inspired it and which I can still read in the painting, the reworking of that tradition being, in a sense, part of the image? If you did that to the poem too, what would happen, I wonder?
John, I like the storytelling in your Rothko poem, and the very specific way you’ve described it - and the end. For me, it’s more an intellect-driven commentary on Rothko than a dialogue with Rothko and it’s so interesting the different ways two poets have responded to it. It makes me wonder what I’d come up with if I thought of writing an ekphrastic inspired by Rothko’s work.
Again, your Guernica is so different to Michael's poem - yours, in my reading is again a commentary, in a sense, on the painting, with a clear narrator. I think I’d have to take that approach with Rothko, in a way, too - have myself in there, shadowly, as a frame, with all the cultural gaucheness I had at 20! (Your poem does not show cultural gaucheness, by the way - it’s far more suavely aware of the placing of narratives, and, in a sense, that’s one of the ways the poem works, I think - a kind of meta-reflection on context - the narrator and Guernica placed within a collection of other images and artists).
Ralph! Lovely to see you!
Sarah-Jane
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