"Art is the air pocket in an upturned boat" Jeanette Winterson
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/
For the past few years I've been writing on available surfaces - walls, backs of envelopes, scraps of paper, occasionally my skin...
This autumn I' decided it's time to start pulling the fragments together. In no particular order...some are dated, some I remember from where I wrote them, or what ink, pencil or lipstick I used...there doesn't need to be logical progression in writing, any more than there's logical progression in how we perceive the world. We are living fragments, and around us the world takes shape through own imagery. Some of those fragments are mysteries to me. Surprises from my own life and my own art.
Two poems from A Little Black Notebook
- works in progress, y'dig
[@ National Portrait Gallery, Dublin. 2007?8?9?]
Dead art, voices of dead men
A hung rabbit, slaughtered
Cocks, lobster boiled blood red.
These are their banquets:
Old men's faces, dead hearts
In dark oils. Breughel
Lays his venom of venious
Life in layers of paint.
the darkness of the soul -
No life or beauty leaps out
But sinful dark and wormy age.
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[@ County Clare...can't remember the place name...]
Lake's like the Lady with her mouth wide open
Calling from the bottom of her throat
Calling 'come and swim here' calling 'come and fall'.
You can't resist it, taking up the note
Water pulls like gravity: reed coils.
When you hear Her, the world begins to slip
Slick and smooth, she breathes and draws you down
Rope of reed and rushes tightens and is pulling
Don't resist it, follow up the call...
Road coils down below you, sticky...
Lake's like the Lady with Her mouth wide open
Calling from the bottom of her heart.
Calling 'come and swim here', calling 'love and fall'
Lake is like the ending or the start.
Ache with the loss of Her watery redemption
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