Sound poems

I spent some considerable time this year explaining "what is poetry?" to undergrads. No, it doesn't have to rhyme, it doesn't have to have a narrative thread, etc etc - but does it have to make sense? In fact, does it even have to use words? Seahorses and Flying Fish had my class in hysterics, and I still can't decide if I think it's poetry. I like multi-media work, so this is interesting in that it juxtaposes image and sound, but....well, there are lots of buts. In some ways it's closer to music - perhaps.

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

I saw The Culture Show programme on the RA Summer Exhibition (you can see it here) and am very pleased to have found a willing friend to come with me to see it next week. I'm fascinated by the large shiny blue egg - aka Jeff Koons' "Cracked Egg (Blue)", left, which won the Charles Wollaston award for the most distinguished work in the exhibition. Not sure I understand it but I like the colour...will report back when I've seen it in the flesh, so to speak.

I've never been to the Summer Exhibition before so am strangely excited by it!!

And another thing...

The point of my re-vamping my blog was to re-inspire my interest in things cultural, basically. (And possibly to procrastinate in writing a hellish conference paper). A very apt poem by Dorothy Parker says

Travel, trouble, music, art,
A kiss, a frock, a rhyme -
I never said they feed my heart
But still they pass my time.

twilight is not good for maidens is about the things that pass my time - and perhaps feed my heart a little too :-)
Incidentally, I read somewhere recently (Frieda Hughes in the Times last week?) that no-one can say they don't like poetry; it's just that they haven't found the right poem yet. That does sound a bit like the gut-wrenchingly vomit-inducing phrase "There are no strangers here, only friends you haven't met yet", but I applaud the sentiment.

Research proposals

At the moment, I'm going through the infamous mid-Ph.D. slump, when I'd rather do pretty much anything (including marking GCSE papers, and, apparently, updating my blog) than actually get on with my thesis. However, this is what my thesis is supposedly about:

Thesis title: Christina Rossetti and the Influence of Gothic
Director of Studies: Professor Fiona Robertson
My original title was "Representations of Pre-Raphaelitism in Criticism and Fiction", and I proposed to examine the myth-making process instigated by the Brotherhood themselves, and subsequently perpetuated by their biographers, who were often related to members of the group or had axes to grind. It became apparent early on in my research that such a study would not be manageable in the context of a Ph.D. Having reviewed recent secondary literature in the field of Pre-Raphaelite studies and the Rossettis, I concluded that there is increasing critical interest in Christina Rossetti's poetry, but that existing scholarship neglects the important influence of Tractarianism and Gothic literature on her work, and tends to ignore her both her early poems and also her later explicitly devotional poems. I thus decided to make Christina Rossetti the main focus of my research, since this is an area which touches on several developing trends in nineteenth-century studies, such as the increased attention paid to Victorian women poets and the "poetess tradition" since the mid-1990s, and the associated revival of interest in nineteenth-century religious culture, within which women played a central role.
Further research into Rossetti's poetry from her early poems, often dismissed as juvenilia, which refer to her reading of the Gothic novels of C R Maturin, and the apocalyptic prose of her last years, suggest a Gothic sensibility. Few critics have examined her early engagement with the Gothic, notably through the works of Maturin and Ann Radcliffe, and also through 'The Vampyre', a tale written by her uncle, John Polidari. Both her poetics and her subjects reflect this interest in Gothic literature, and my research will cover much new ground by considering Rossetti's poetry in terms of the Gothic, and exploring her use of the tropes of Gothic, such as fallen women, doubles and spectres.
My planned chapters are:
Christina Rossetti and Gothic Literature (Introduction and literature review)
The Maturin poems and the early influence of Gothic
‘Goblin Market’ and its multiple interpretations
Spectres and spectrality
Gothic and Rossetti’s devotional poems and prose
Gothic, Sing Song and children’s literature

The Mitford Sisters

A few years ago, I read The Mitford Girls by Mary S. Lovell - mostly because The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford are two of my most re-read books. I wrote this about it when I read it:
This has to be one of the most enjoyable biographies I have read for a long time. Although it's not a short book, it makes easy reading, written as it is in Mary Lovell's delightful style that is strongly reminiscent of Nancy Mitford's books. If you know her books, you'll love it for the insight into her life behind the books, particularly the girls' fascinating childhood; if you don't you'll be intrigued by the ups and downs of the family fortunes and their friendships with notable figures from Hitler to the Kennedys. This book is not just a biography of a famous and remarkable family, it is also a panoramic view of the history of the last century. Whatever happened, a Mitford was there - the war (both in Germany and Britain), the Communist movement, and so much more.Reading biography is almost as much an art as writing one, in the way each reader relates personally to the characters with whom they become intellectually involved, and in the reading of this book it is easy to become very involved indeed and, unlike many biographies, it does not seem to fade away towards the end; Mary Lovell's writing retains our interest right until the close.

So, at Easter this year I commenced reading The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters, edited by Charlotte Mosley, while I was on holiday. A word of advice: for goodness' sake read the paperback. I started this in March; I finished it yesterday. The only other book that's taken me that long to read is The Golden Notebook - but that's another story... Anyway, the problem is that the hardback Mitford letters is so heavy that my usual reading-places - the bath and the bus - are out, so I got through it reading about ten letters a night in bed. But I have to say, it's been worth the slog! Sometimes reading editions of letters is about as exciting as reading a shopping list, so I've been trying to work out why this one kept me interested. Well, as the review above notes, they did know everyone, which is interesting in itself. More, though, it's their acerbic wit - no qualms about being rude, about others or to each other. I loved their names for everyone (the Queen Mother is Cake, because of a comment she made about a cake); and the little anecdotes they tell each other, very amusingly (such as Roy Hattersely's teeth falling out in the middle of lunch).

The book is highly entertaining; but it's more than that. For one thing, as an only child I just don't understand sibling relationships, so for me it was an interesting insight into the wildly differing relationships they had with each other. The letters are also very telling in their frank, sensible way of discussing marriage, children, society dinners and the trials of old age - the latter being particularly moving, especially as the sisters die. Another intriguing aspect was their concern - particularly Deborah, Diana and Jessica - for their public face - the books they wrote and that were written about them, and their desire to protect the memory of their parents and sister Unity.

The letters are sensitively edited (Charlotte Moseley is Diana Mitford's daughter-in-law), with footnotes explaining in-jokes or obscure references, and the volume is also indexed, which must have been a labour of love. It's well worth reading - it just shouldn't take three months to do so!

Brontean Abstracts

Cornelia Parker at the Ikon Gallery
Last weekend I went to see Never Endings, Cornelia Parker’s exhibition at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham (on until November 18th). My attention was particularly caught (unsurprisingly) by Brontean Abstracts, her work which came out of the artist’s time at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth. The exhibition guide talks of Parker’s "forensic interest in the stuff of the Brontes’ lives", and this section of the exhibition features photographs taken through an electron microscope, displaying in the most minute and scientific detail a pin hole made by Charlotte Bronte, the hair of the three sisters, their nibs and needlework. I was fascinated by the level of detail, presumably representative of a "never ending" search for the essential, real Brontes, the people behind the novels, because that seems to be what we, whether as literary critics or the reading public, want. One might assume it’s a modern obsession, this consuming interest in celebrity, wanting to be close to those in the public eye, but as I have previously mentioned in the case of Tennyson, this has been going on for a long time now. And, of course, wanting to know every minutiae of the life of the Brontes is arguably a very different proposition to wanting to know who Kate Moss is going out with and which moisturiser Victoria Beckham wears; this, one can argue, is a "literary" interest, one for the erudite, the well-read. It isn’t, really, though. I wonder if Parker was really suggesting that we are trying to get too close, that the scrutiny of biography and reworkings of history is all a bit much, extraneous, almost. What impact would that image of the pinhole have had if it had been made by Mrs Jones of Cardiff who lived and died in obscurity? But then, what material value would be placed, at auction, say, on Mrs Jones’ nightdress, for example, when compared to Charlotte Bronte’s? It’s all about association, and Parker is making us question, uncomfortably, if we have over-emphasised these associations – it’s cynical, but celebrity sells; is it right that these anonymous pictures become more interesting because of their associations? It’s an idea Parker plays with throughout Never Endings, in works such as Stolen Thunder, handkerchiefs with smudged marks on them which come from contact with tarnished metallic objects such as Dickens’ knife, Nelson’s candlestick and a suit of armour belonging to Henry VIII. Stolen thunder is exactly what it is – an almost religious iconography lent to everyday objects by virtue of their illustrious owners. The catalogue suggests that:
"Just as the perception of a religious artefact is transformed by belief in its reality, Parker’s treatment of the objects she selects often plays off the possibility of cliché that characterises cultural memorabilia."
Perhaps what Parker is commenting on in contemporary society is a frightening tendency to replace traditional religion with celebrity-worship, in which mortals become deities.
What particularly caught my eye here, however, was a framed series of photographs, twelve in all (I think) of deleted words from the manuscript of Jane Eyre. Only academics tend to look at manuscripts in such detail, so it’s thought-provoking to see these deleted words turned to their own use, as art. The materiality of the text is thrown into relief here, as words become meaningless as signifiers, taken out of their context (and some barely legible) but exist purely as pictures, the lines of handwriting becoming strokes of paint on a canvas which exist for the purposes of decoration only. The frames seem to break up the continuity of the text, until one recalls that since these are random, deleted words, they had no continuity and little textual status anyway. It forces the viewer into a different relationship with the text, and provokes discussion about the place of text-as-object, and, in the context of the exhibition as a whole, the object-as-text, in which an inanimate object provides a "text" for the viewer to "read".
You can read about the Brontean Abstracts exhibition at the Haworth Parsonage here.

Gothic Landscapes

Hockney On Turner, Tate Britain, 11 June 2007 – 3 February 2008
I’m happy to admit that I don’t know as much as I should about Turner (or Hockney, for that matter, though I love his trees - see Bigger Trees Near Water, right). Turner’s affinity for wild landscapes seems to be the focus of this exhibition, displayed through sketches and watercolours to the more finished-looking oils for which he is most famous. What had not really occurred to me before, though, is that Turner paints the landscapes of which the Gothic writers write. I am at the moment programmed to find the Gothic in everything, and the Gothic landscape is at the forefront of my mind – critics see it as the representation of the inner eye, a depiction of the mind, as well as indicative of the heights the hero/ine needs to scale to succeed. Yet it is these heights which help the protagonist to achieve the sublime, that state where they are stronger than their opponents and see the world’s frailty for what it is. When Turner paints St Gotthard, for example, and Snowdon Valley, the craggy splendour both terrifies and uplifts (if you are in a Gothic frame of mind like me) and his Gothic eye seems to me to be painting the indistinct period of overlap between the Romantics and the Victorians. Consider the towering, bleak landscape of St Gotthard (below), and compare it to this extract from The Mysteries of Udolpho:
"At length, the travellers began to ascend among the Apennines. The immense pine-forests, which, at that period, overhung these mountains, and between which the road wound, excluded all view but of the cliffs aspiring above, except, that, now and then, an opening through the dark woods allowed the eye a momentary glimpse of the country below. The gloom of these shades, their solitary silence, except when the breeze swept over their summits, the tremendous precipices of the mountains, that came partially to the eye, each assisted to raise the solemnity of Emily's feelings into awe; she saw only images of gloomy grandeur, or of dreadful sublimity, around her; other images, equally gloomy and equally terrible, gleamed on her imagination."
Of course, for the Gothic writers the landscape can depict the awe we feel at the creation of the world, and combine it with the terror of the unknown which lies within it. The natural landscape, with no sign of human occupation, spoke to the readers of Gothic romances as the work of God; and yet Gothic horror is very much the work of mankind, with the bad things that happen being rarely actually supernatural but machinations of the scheming world. Those paintings here which cover manmade scenes (Interior of a Prison, left, for example) still display a towering strength in which a carefully-constructed edifice encloses the space and traps the viewer (particularly when the interior is empty of human figures – it is designed to enclose or confine something other than empty space, so if there’s no-one there then it is you that it encloses). This is of course particularly reinforced when the structure is a prison.
Even in the freshness of his mid-period, his watercolour washes with their pastel colours and intense immediacy, with the brush-strokes apparent, there is a lurking threat of gathering storm clouds: this seems to be the pastoral image of the start of a Gothic novel, where all seems tranquil but the reader knows that something must threaten the happiness of the as yet undeveloped characters. Gothic has strong overtones of temptation and fall, and as such Milton is considered to be a great influence on writers of Gothic, so perhaps the apotheosis of the Gothic that I saw here is in The Temptation on the Pinnacle, which illustrates Milton, though the illustrations for Scott’s Poetical Works come close, depicting the untamed Scottish scenery of which Scott was a masterful illustrator in words.