Three New Fledgling Poems

They're just tryouts, you understand. Feel free to give me feedback, I can take it. I think.

Concordance

Sky and Sea meet, 
in a concordance of colour
a string of understanding connecting them.
They know one another's needs and they move together,
finding in one another
a perfect lovers' kind of peace.

Wave-Walker

I watched her walk into the waves
slowly heading for the horizon
her back was straight, her hair
long and untamed,
her eyes fixed on everything 
and nothing.
She walked until her feet 
were lifted from the earth
and the waves took her
back to the place where she
was born.

Whittle

Whittle Me Away; just try!
Like driftwood, 
I'll often move with the tide
But I'll always have
My Own Form.

Findings

On a recent, fleeting trip to the US (to Idaho, no less, a place of which I had zero expectations, and left more than pleasantly surprised), I honoured what has now become a travelling-through-the-US-custom, and bought myself some twizzlers and a copy of New York magazine. During the 50-odd hour roundtrip journey from Barcelona to Boise, I devoured both, along with a book gifted to me by my friend Lo-Sal called Findings, by Kathleen Jamie.

Jamie is first and foremost a poet, who writes about observations in the natural world; in this case the collected essays published are all about Scotland. Her poetic prose is easy to read, loose-fitting, casual, comforting - but no less affecting for it. She said in an interview once that Findings was notoriously difficult to classify - both for her publisher to take it on, and for bookstores to try to decide which section to put it in, but that her readers don’t seem to mind. And I didn’t. It’s like someone pulling a big chunky cable-knit woollen blanket over you and while you’re starting to fall asleep, telling you stories about what they can see from the window. Whilst stroking your hair.

Her style is so natural - of course, for someone who chooses to write about the natural world, this is essential - but her ease with words also makes for comfortable reading.

“Fancy - day after day of summer sunshine, in April. The house grows dusty and neglected because we all spend so much time outdoors. It’s unseasonal, but all weather is unseasonal nowadays. The plum blossom is coming and next door’s old pear tree is a perfect triangle of greenish-white froth. They do this like a conjuring trick, the old trees. They’re brittle and cronish all winter, then blossom issues out of them and fills the tree slowly, like a dancehall filling on a Saturday night.”  Peregrines, Ospreys, Cranes, [Jamie, K. Findings: (Penguin, 2005) p.32 ]

Findings is all about looking for things, and what I’ve been looking for is a way to focus my writing, and find the time and dedication needed to finish things. I think that’s why Lo-Sal chose this book to gift to me. He said that my writing reminded him of Jamie's, a huge compliment, but of course my style doesn’t hold a candle to hers, all unbalanced and gawky and newborn as it is. However, immersing myself in someone else’s writing style inevitably gets me thinking about my own, if indeed such a voice exists.

Happily for me, and my fledgling written voice, an article in New York magazine, my other long-haul reading material, introduced me to Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way. Cameron is a screenwriter, poet, playwright and general all-round creativity guru whose seminal aforementioned work has helped to “unblock” the creativity of countless artists around the world. (She was also briefly married to Martin Scorsese in the late 70s, a factoid which to this day seems to define the poor woman; not that in our fair, equal society a woman is the sum of whoever she happens to have been married to, but it does seem to captivate her audiences).

It’s billed as a self-help book, which does make me shudder a little, and the full title : The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity may support some of its detractors’ claims, which is namely that there is a little bit too much God in it. Having said all of that, two main ideas have caught my interest: Morning Pages (every morning without fail, upon waking, writing three pages of stream-of-consciousness-flow by hand) and the Artist’s Date: a once-per week time set aside, and guarded fiercely, to do something that gives you inspiration, not necessarily an artistic pursuit per se, but perhaps time in a food market, a library, a bookstore or the cinema, the idea being that it’s a safe space for creative thoughts to come to you with a relaxed brain. 

Both of these ideas, I like. And with the next two months of relative freedom from work constraints rolling out ahead of me, and a close friend’s insistence that I really ought to try and finish some proper fiction, and set myself some solid writing goals (quite right, MF, you’ve always been a super editor), I’m very tempted to skip reading the book, take on these two main tenets as experiments in upping my creative output, and set the timer on myself (t-minus 2.5 months) to see what comes forth.  

The Barbican Centre, Barbican

Thursday 21st May, 2009

The Bitter: A gift shop selling a set of salt and pepper shakers for £60

The Sweet: The sunlit terrace, replete with wandering mallards and all kinds of people to watch

5. From Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris to Le Corbusier

A colleague and I were talking the other day about what we had done before coming to our present jobs, and she mentioned working for several architecture firms in New York before she arrived in London. I mentioned a fleeting relationship with one particularly analytical architect, and although it was a relief to not be with someone so critical, I confessed I missed the opportunity to learn from someone who was passionate about his surroundings. I liked that a walk was never just a walk with him, but a tour of all the little details I’d never notice on my own. I was encouraged to look up at the city around me; and to keep thinking, always thinking, about why and how and when.

In theory, I like the idea of being with someone both creative and (mildly) critical and ordered; someone who has a keen sense of what they do and don’t like, but is open-minded enough to try new things. I can imagine that architects, like all other creatives, must need to be on the lookout all the time for new ideas and inspirations – something I find incredibly appealing.

Much more importantly, my newly single colleague was rather keen to check out the architectural talent here in London, so we decided to catch the Le Corbusier exhibition during its last weeks at the Barbican.

I didn’t know anything much about Le Corbusier except that he designed some iconic chairs (that and what I managed to wikipedia a couple of hours before the exhibition), but culture is so important to me, and has been such a big part of my life since escaping the cultural black hole of Orpington (I blurted it all out here) - that I am always more than happy to surround myself with art in all forms, whether I know I’ll get it, or not. The most interesting fact I found on the great man's wiki entry was that his name was a pseudonym:

in 1920, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret adopted Le Corbusier, an altered form of his maternal grandfather's name, "Lecorbésier", as a pseudonym, reflecting his belief that anyone could reinvent himself.

What a twonker, I thought. But then, hardly any writers use their real names, so I should stop being such a judgemental cow. And it's true - anyone can reinvent themselves. Just why though, do people want to?

We went during the late night opening on a Thursday and the place was heaving. A queue formed from the ticket desk all the way out to the lifts, full of quirkily-dressed designers in black thick-rimmed glasses. Maybe I was tired. Maybe I wasn't in the right frame of mind. I'm probably just a philistine. I tried my best to look at his early works - paintings that seemed to ape Picasso (although they were probably earlier);

sculptures that looked like children's toys;

the wooden models of Chandigarh, and the Unité d'habitation in Marseilles, and feel something for them, but I was left cold. The standout point of the exhibition for me was seeing the heinous 'Plan Voisin' for the beautiful Marais and feeling angered and relieved all at once that this pretentious man with the 11-letter pseudonym hadn't gotten away with it (good work, Parisian planners).

My colleague was noticeably more interested in our fellow exhibition-goers than the works, so we took the lightest of tours, cooed at the chaise longue, and then headed for the gift shop, where we saw a pair of exorbitant salt and pepper shakers for £60. They looked a little like dumbbells, but that was it. They were still just salt and pepper shakers.

They, in some neat way, summed up the entire evening surrounding the artist himself - just a little bit bloody ridiculous. Why did M. Jeanneret feel the need to change himself anyway? Why did I? I might not have understood the point of much of that exhibition, but what was pulling at me to go and see it anyway? Who was I still trying to impress?

The two glasses of wine that followed, sipped on a sunny terrace, (watching our fellow culture vultures discuss the works they'd seen like their lives depended on it, then seeing the mallards waddle by, oblivious), made everything seem right again.

Reinvention? Who needs it, anyway...?