Jean Morris

January 19, 2016January 19, 2016 by Jean Morris

Cézanne’s Doubt

Cézanne's painting Mont Sainte Victoire

He comes here daily,
endlessly repeats the same motif,
his whole existence focused
on the mountain, on the struggle
to relate the scene before him
to the one appearing on his canvas,
stays until the light fades,
packs his things and,
unappeased, tramps home,
begins again tomorrow.

Cézanne’s agony, the doubt
he feels about the value of his work,
stems just from this: he starts
not with a given image, ready-made,
but seeks instead to make anew
each time the sense we have
of looking at and living in the world –
and thus creating it.

After Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism? Chapter 8: “A Universe for the First Time Bereft of All Signposts.”

Writer and book blogger Victoria Best recently conducted a long and wonderful interview with the novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici that makes you want to rush off and read/re-read his books – I did, and found the cadences of his critical writing so lovely they were almost a poem.

January 12, 2016 by Jean Morris

Pale blues

photo by Jean Morris described in poem

Skylight, pale light
rains softly on the red silk roses
and the complicated chandeliers,

the turquoise-blue mosaic
and the pale mural where
a pale, veiled woman sits beneath a vine.

This is pretend Morocco, theme-park
Morocco, but gentle and understated,
in the best of taste, like the food
that alludes politely to north Africa –

merguez and hummus and mint tea
on an old brass tray that glints and rocks,
harissa careful to be not
too hot.

December 30, 2015 by Jean Morris

Flooded

“The heart of Leeds should expect to suffer again.”
UK Environment Agency, 27 December 2015

Each house an island in roiling water where the streets should be – we’ve been seeing, from town after town in the North, these biblical images of floods. Last time I was in Leeds, oddly enough, it rained and rained, though not nearly like this. A disappointing trip that was, with so much that had changed too much, and then the rain. I took rueful photos that surprisingly turned out not too badly – the light at least was propitious, the colours saturated (in both senses of the word), the scenarios nicely quirky. It was nearly forty years earlier that the city had entered my heart, and my heart still catches when I hear now that its centre is under water. Looking now, too, at these photos, which still please me, I thought back over all those years and wondered: would things have been different if I’d had this back then to fall back on, this unfailing pleasure and need and obscure satisfaction in making pictures and making word-pictures, this sense of beauty, surprise, composition, irony? And faced with this week’s unbeautiful pictures of flooded streets, shops and houses threatened by the rising water, I remembered how threatened, how all at sea, I used often to feel all those years ago in Leeds, although I really liked living there, and was shocked at first that my thoughts were of this, my own history with the city, and not of people whose lives had been turned upside down by the floods, or of wider and urgent questions of why and of what can we do. And yet, our connections are complex and on many levels. While exposing the travesty of recent climate talks, the Tory cuts in funding for flood defences, the crying need for more trees and less concrete, don’t we also need to expose our own feelings and motivations, how we hate or love this place, my place, my life, my past, my present, to reclaim a sense of home and self as something wider and less purely immediate than the nuclear family and the tiny world behind our own front doors? Isn’t it all one, the turning both inwards and outwards, the personal and the political? This street in the TV news footage that touches me so, that is somehow familiar even under water: wasn’t it here that, a lifetime ago, I ran crying and calling your name?

December 21, 2015December 21, 2015 by Jean Morris

Mind

When you wake in the night again
and the temperature’s dropped
and you’re frosted with anxiety

and you reach for unconsciousness,
but it won’t come because someone
started throwing stuff around

in your aching head, pulling out
one ghastly scenario after another
and waving them in your face so

you try instead to summon all the
places you’d rather be, the walks
you dream of taking, the countries you

long to visit, the beloved who, sensing
your distress, would of course leap
out of bed to make you a cup of tea and

you wonder if imagination is a blessing
or a curse and wish your wondering,
wandering mind would just

Photo: mural by RUN, Dulwich Village (detail)

November 6, 2015May 30, 2016 by Jean Morris

Erasure translation of a poem by Jacques Brault

This entry is part 31 of 38 in the series Poetry from the Other Americas

Visitation, the long poem that begins Jacques Brault’s first collection, Mémoire (short extract with translation in this earlier post), is a complex evocation of cultural oppression and the poet’s sense of exile from self. It’s full of words and images that cannot but also evoke today’s physical exiles, the millions of refugees, and these suggested a much simpler and shorter erasure poem. French, with its changing word-endings, gives less scope for erasure than English, but the process was still an interesting way of engaging with language and emotions.

black-and-white photo of an Antony Gormley figure from his sculpture installation Another Place

Remember

Remember your nakedness, their exile
the man struggling to live

I find myself again at the appointed place
and thirsty for these words

I left my country with little pride
Exile is hard, my fear follows me

Silence is no longer possible – listen
some evening to what I shall say

Come closer and touch my voiceless misery
my faceless body, my silent hope

Poetry has no importance, but it speaks
Sweet violence rises up

My despair arrives with broken neck
no name, no past and harbouring no hatred

Some grey morning a comrade I cannot name
and a beloved country tremble

I shall live weighed down and bent over
my words still resounding from land to land

A shadow will trace the outline
of your pale face when I find it again.

(words and phrases culled from Jacques Brault’s nearly 900-word-long poem, Visitation)

Souvenez-vous / de / votre nudité / de leur exil /
de celui qui a mal de vivre /

Je me retrouve / au / rendez-vous /
J’ai soif / de / ces paroles /

J’ai quitté / le pays / peu fier /
L’exil est dur / ma peur / me suit /

Je ne sais plus / me taire /
Ecoute / ce que / je / dirai / un soir /

Approche et / touche / ma misère / sans voix /
mon corps / sans visage / ma silencieuse espérance /

La poésie / est / sans importance / mais elle / parle /
La violence / douce / se relève /

Ma détresse / arrive / le cou brisé /
sans nom / sans passé / et sans haine /

Un matin gris / une /compagne / innommable /
et / un pays aimé tremblent /

Je vivrai / lourd et penché /
Mes mots / vibrent encore / entre terre et terre /

Une ombre / tracera /
ta figure blanche / retrouvée.

Image: Another Place — photo by Jean Morris, 2007

November 5, 2015May 30, 2016 by Jean Morris

Nameless as the rain: two poems by Jacques Brault

This entry is part 30 of 38 in the series Poetry from the Other Americas

It was raining in London – serious rain with fast-flowing gutters and burst water mains – and I’d stopped serially internet-dating “Other-American” poets in order to hang out for a while with Jacques Brault. Both of these are from his first collection, Mémoire (1965).

abstract black-and-white photo of water by Jean Morris

Nameless

Here on the streets the water wails its old lament
Seagulls crash-land

I do not know your name know nothing any more
All these human shapes barely floating now in the gutters
Fingernails marred by eyelids
Smiles in the hollow of a groin
Jumbled faces in old windows

So many dead unadorned unlabelled
Melting in the sweet water
April casts its light and shadow on their graves

Water mingles our little hopes
Mutely agile not a bubble or an eddy
A volley of laughter rains down on the streets
Oh watery folly

The water’s soft lament against the tide of time
This murmuring of pale lips this wrinkling of old skin
All those who leave here are undone

And you scattered to the four winds
You whom I seek among these long tresses swept towards the sewers

But water runs its own business in its own way
A fine embroiderer of death’s complex designs
Water sews and re-sews a lovely length of fabric
As it flows

Anonyme

L’eau dans la rue se plaint d’une vieille plainte
Où se cassent des mouettes d’eau

Je ne sais ton nom je ne sais plus
Tant de formes humaines à peine coulent encore dans les caniveaux
Doigts à l’ongle embué de paupières
Sourires au creux de l’aine
Visages disjoints de vieilles fenêtres

Tant de morts sans collier ni bannière
Fondent en la douceur de l’eau
Avril sur les tombes met une ombre de lumière

L’eau raccorde les petits espoirs
Agile et muette et sans bulles ni remous
Une volée de rires qui s’abattent dans la rue
O folie de l’eau

La plainte de l’eau tout bas à contre-courant de l’heure
C’est un murmure de lèvres blanches un froissis de vieilles peaux
Tous ceux-là que s’en vont se défont

Et toi éparse çà et là
Toi que je cherche parmi les cheveux qui s’allongent vers l’égout

Mais l’eau mène bien son ouvroir et sa façon
Brodeuse fine des morts aux dessins compliqués
L’eau coud et recoud fait une belle étoffe longue
Et coule

abstract black-and-white photo of water by Jean Morris

Like All Those Others

You are the one invented by my gaze
like the shape of an ink blot on paper
and I am unafraid to speak my love
for you the way you are just as I fashion you
as my hands find themselves again upon your body
and the greedy expectancy of every day
the annunciation of a world scarcely beginning
the gestures of morning on a street corner
that snatch at a vagabond’s one instant of light
and this folly of feeling like your newest unborn child
I love you like all those others yesterday tomorrow
still learning this old refrain learning it always
I love you in the future wind in the rubble of fear
love you in the little life of hair curlers
love you in these paltry ecstasies these meagre glories
love you alone and abandoned by myself

Comme tant d’autres

Ton être que j’invente du regard
comme une tache d’encre sur le papier
je n’ai pas peur de nommer mon amour
tu es comme je t’aime telle que je te fais
avec mes mains retrouvées sur ton corps
et l’espérance goulue de chaque jour
l’annonciation d’un monde qui commence à peine
le geste du matin au coin de la rue
qui reprend à la rôdeuse un instant de lumière
et cette folie d’être en toi un nouvel enfant à naître
je t’aime comme tant d’autres hier demain
cette vieille rengaine je l’apprends encore je l’apprends toujours
je t’aime dans le vent du futur dans la pierraille de la peur
je t’aime dans la petite existence en bigoudis
je t’aime dans les pauvres extases dans les chiches gloires
je t’aime seul et déserté de moi-même

November 4, 2015 by Jean Morris

‘Upscale apartments within a Victorian façade’

Horrid slogan on a building-site hoarding

They did well for themselves the Victorians
No better monument to their efficiency and progress

than these enduring streets of red-brick and yellow-brick houses
We find them surprisingly comforting and congenial

Hard work hard money they speak of and we admire that
but find ourselves worthy of more and better
We are scaling up!

Our new homes behind these old walls
will have bigger rooms especially bigger kitchens
lined with appliances the Victorians never imagined

We must have as many bathrooms as bedrooms
We keep ourselves cleaner than they did

Our windows will be triple-glazed and won’t open
We don’t care about the world outside because
it’s not our private property!

We don’t care about fresh air because our air will be conditioned
and as for daylight – the lovely leaf-dappled light
of a hundred and fifty suburban springs and summers and autumns –

we shan’t care about that either when our eyes are fixed
on our high-definition immersive TV and computer screens

We care for nothing and no one for we have the best of both worlds:
Upscale apartments within a Victorian façade!

October 24, 2015 by Jean Morris

We sat outside

photo of sycamore-leaf shadows on the pavement

We sat outside the café,
stretched our legs

and soaked our feet
in the pool of sunshine

that dimpled and flickered
with the shifting

and whispering
of the sycamores overhead.

We forgot that tomorrow
the clocks go back,

that wet leaves will plaster
the chairs and tables.

October 19, 2015February 15, 2016 by Jean Morris

Three-step

This entry is part 5 of 5 in the series Art and about

Dulwich Picture Gallery

This beauty’s not for everyone
blind windows like a prison
said a friend indifferent
to Soane’s genius
but I exult in it.

The honey-coloured bricks
and the harmonious outline
are earth and air.

It’s here that I come
to be grounded in a space
where sorrow and regret
can be felt but can’t annihilate
where hope can briefly soar.

The new Dulwich Picture Gallery in bright sunlight

The sheer heft lovely lines
unchanging serenity
are what I love
so the old photo was a shock.

Many bombs fell on south-east London
You can see the places still
where a modern house interrupts
a Victorian terrace.

Around Dulwich small plaques
give the date the names
and ages of the dead

and in July 44 the gallery took a hit
that reduced its heart to rubble.

In this picture no sweet geometry
The honey drips
a waterfall of chaos
a radical artwork depicting
the horror of war.

Today’s fine structure
bears few traces
but once seen never forgotten
The rebuilt harmonies become a hymn
to resilience and repair.

black-and-white photo of Dulwich Picture Gallery reduced to rubble in Word War II

On the corner by the pub car-park is a new mural
after van Dyck’s Venetia Lady Digby on her Deathbed.
Let me count the ways this work based on a portrait
of a dead woman fills me with paradoxical happiness.

Huge and bright and apart from the rose mostly blue,
it’s by the German artist MadC – C is for Claudia,
a woman of bold vision and talent and about the age
Venetia Digby was when she died in her sleep in 1633.

The painting was the muralist’s choice: a clever project,
these “old master murals” by street artists talking back
to their chosen works in the gallery have flashed up
on blank walls and gable ends all over Dulwich, but

none has taken my breath, none makes me stop and
smile and ponder each time I see it the way this does –
a mistressful meeting of past and present, private and
public art, death and unrestrained but not unthinking life.

MadC's Dulwich mural

Links:
Dulwich Picture Gallery
John Soane, the architect
World War 2 bombs in Dulwich
Venetia Lady Digby on her Deathbed by Anthony van Dyck
MadC (Claudia Walde), the muralist
and her Dulwich mural

October 10, 2015 by Jean Morris

Dahlias she said

en masse
they weren’t
her kind of flower
so cultivated stiff symmetrical
such vulgar uncoordinated colours
but one late bloom surprised her
with its strange translucent fingers
splayed to catch the sun
a fragile old soul suddenly
not like the dahlias
she’d had in mind
at all

Dahlias by Jean Morris