The AHRC sponsored conference ‘Writing into Art’ took place at Strathclyde University and Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery on June 18th and 19th 2013. Among the events that took place was a workshop for poets based in Glasgow led by visiting plenary speaker, Cole Swensen. The poems that are posted below represent some of the work produced in advance of this workshop and constitute responses by the poets to paintings and other artefacts selected by staff at Kelvingrove. The organisers of the conference are very grateful to curator, Anne Wallace and to her staff for helping to facilitate this process. Copyright remains with the poets.
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No Rush
After ‘Seascape’, by L S Lowry
Hush hush hush hush
there’s no
hsur hsur hsur hsur
the factory gate
never came today
the crowds of late
appointment keepers
are nowhere to be seen
the only
thing that’s bigger
than the everyman out here
is the sea that sucks
the gravel in
the gravel out
through tides’ tight
teeth sky high
sun blinds kites white
theres no
rush rush rush rush
knowing the
hsuh hsuh hsuh hsuh
Christie Williamson
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Fulton’s Orrery
the dull metallic sun
its painted planets
clouds of hatpin moons
all this is just a sketch
a fragment
of a clockwork universe
where gears are gravity
equations solved in brass
this is a miniature
sculpted in spacetime;
it cannot be seen at rest.
Claire Quigley
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In a museum
After the “Honesty Mirror” made by Frances MacDonald in 1896
worn with looking
the mirror is
behind glass
reflections absent
frame without picture
except the light
enclosed by
pewter plants and
women’s hands
fleshless figures
hung with cloth
of metal
tooled faces
long-fingered
maker’s hands
stylized honesty
seeds beneath
pale silvered skin
sexless figures
flowering
hair becoming stems
pointing
to a seed pod
against the sun
tasteless, scentless
untouchable
in beaten tin
the ageing, spotted glass
has a photograph’s
silvered grace
lean in and see
your father’s ghost
in a weathered window
Ellen McAteer
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Little Brother
(painting by Norah Neilson Gray)
It was done as the sun dipped into evening.
A twist of banknotes, the sticky paper
casked by father’s desk,
a nervous transaction
which faded with the light.
After she’d gone, the musk of her
leeched from the oils.
Don’t touch, I told you.
The wool of your little shirt
softened in my hand, your hair
spun barley-sugar. My milky shoulders
pleased me, yet the finishing
made us dumb.
You tired of our silence;
horses and tin soldiers
trumpeted you away.
Glaze, overworked by time
thickened and blushed,
the roses darkened in our memory.
She said shadows have colours too
but what I thought was skill and fold
seems now to show as tears.
Here, in another hallowed place
chance makes a Mary of me.
Pulls yellow into gray,
and your small forgotten spirit,
high upon a quiet wall,
troubles no-one.
Gillean McDougall
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Violets by Stuart Park (Kelvingrove Museum. Glasgow)
Nothing strange
about flowers
drying in a frame,
I believe I christen these chosen colours,
summer night with an indigo heart,
white of blackthorn blossom,
a lens of vase, in antique lace
and watery turquoise, old petals fallen
in pale funerals of blue.
I relax
towards the edges of the frame
glimpse a fraying of plaster
a curl of aging paint,
I am tired of the pictures in this bland cave,
I am so old in images already
– lost happiness, suffering and disdain,
I want to go out
to the world’s weathering,
to the crumbled masonry of ordinary walls
where salt and wind and rain
yield colours without name,
shapes that are the seeds
of new topographies
– An afterlife, an afterart beyond
these open coffins of thin paint,
the beautiful
formalin
of practised eyes.
Geoff Cooper
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A Window in Glasgow
after Windows in the West (1994) by Avril Paton
i
Look:
violet light
softly reflected by neat
sugar-drift of snow
illuminates
this honeycomb
on the cusp of evening,
Listen:
stored honey
murmurs in holy
tongues
of virtue, value,
models for the faithful.
ii
In the convivial violet glow
guests talk Toshie and Vettriano
charmed by the infinite regress
of reproduced Windows in the West.
iii
We poor shadows on the other side
peeping from a darkened window,
let the artist be our guide,
this is no incidental show.
Come press our noses to the glass;
this is all of honey we need to know.
No one there offers us a glance
yearning outwith the murmuring hive.
Abandon all hope. The honeyed dance
their news of nectar, the honeyed wax and thrive.
William Bonar
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Man In Armour
(Rembrandt) Kelvingrove Museum
Warrior
A flame makes a Saturn of my head; its jewels were bequeathed by owls. I still consider them an honour. The honeys of valour ring in my ears like bells, they are sweet as wood-smoke, but I am falling; like a shipwreck for an old river. No spaniel or pomegranate to is here to share my fellowship, the armourer is gone, all his metals, spent. My arms have turned to vaults. I see the sun shine for chargers orphaned in woods of buttercups, the soil is so porous for fresh game.
Watcher
Her inheritance. Quiet in the rasp of open hours, she thinks Rothko or Klee. Like finds reclaimed from the sea, she scalpels, curious, takes notes to prove our trigonometry. By strokes, she becomes, wants to become. Cow hide, black tulip, wet auburn hair. It is slow work but restorative; like a shipwright’s cautious craft. A new altar, there are acres of room inside.
Amy Anderson
Writing into Art 