Poetspeak: a self-reflection
by CLAIRE CROWTHER
| Poem: | Display on Sussex Ward | |
| Published in: | Stretch of Closures (Shearsman Press, 2007) |
Like a lot of contemporary British and North American poets, I have tried writing ekphrastic poems – poems about visual images, paintings in particular. Nudists, a poem I wrote in 2004, arose from contemplating a photograph of the same name by Diane Arbus which I saw in a show at Tate Modern. Through such poems, I started to think about the impact art shows make on us when they are not in galleries but elsewhere in our daily lives. Art displayed in hospitals is one example of a therapeutic use of visual imagery in a setting where I, personally, would value a poem hung and as easily readable as the poems in the Poems on the Underground project – simple graphics, large enough to read from a little distance and carefully chosen for a capacity to induce reflection rather than unease.
Some years ago, a friend of mine showed several works of embroidery at a show in Henley on Thames . I went, not knowing much about what contemporary embroidery could achieve, and was stunned. Her capacity to texturise a panel with the look of a landscape in wind or sun was extraordinary. I started to write a poem about this – the poem which became Display on Sussex Ward. These works of stitchery weren't displayed in a hospital but in an old fire station, made into an art gallery. However, I wanted to set my poem in a hospital and, last year, spent time in Chelsea hospital, London , which has made sculpture and paintings part of the landscape of its corridors and vaulted roof areas. I was not ill myself but visiting a woman giving birth. I spent hours meditating on a giant silver fish and on a framed, glazed straitjacket. But when I wrote my meditations into poetry, it was the texture of cotton thread that crept into my work. Perhaps because it was so similar to the gowns that patients were wearing, those loosely-tied gowns which seem to render capable men and women vulnerable and lost.
I set my descriptions of my friend's stitchery in a hospital, in a fictional ward. I thought her panels of colour had most in common with – or rendered more visible – the paper or cotton gowns hung behind cubicle doors waiting to turn a patient from viable member of the outside community to passive recipient of this desperate indoor community. The ‘emerald hills' so precisely evoked in cotton thread were actually just tied down stitches. And stitches were everywhere in the hospital, uniting patients with nurses and doctors through the artwork of the operation.
In the end, Display on Sussex Ward is a short poem, juxtaposing embroidery with naked patients waiting to be clothed in something disposable – cotton or even paper. I wanted to show how art surrounds the vulnerable though it never saves them. Poetry is a witness, like visual art.
Claire Crowther's poems and reviews have appeared in a wide
variety of journals including Ambit, the Liberal, PN Review, Poetry Review,
the Times Literary Supplement. She has just published her first collection,
Stretch of Closures, from Shearsman Press. She has a pamphlet, The Glass
Harmonica, published by Flarestack. She teaches part time and is
completing a PhD at Kingston University.