My first blog of 2022 and I’ve already broken my promise to blog every week. Oh well. Such is life.
The first two weeks of 2022 have been spent getting into a routine, finding a way to work and work. ie finding a way to do all the money paying stuff that pays my mortgage and bills and find time to write which does not pay my mortgage and bills, but is essential to me calling myself a writer, and has the potential to help pay my mortgage and bills later down the line. Growing a career as a creative writer is very much about offsetting time, working out what is worth and not worth doing. I am behind with answering emails (apologies if you’re waiting to hear from me, it’ll be this week) I’m behind with promotion stuff, and planning stuff and…
I apologise for my insensitivity in dealings with potential contributors. I meant to give them a voice and leave all the choice of what work they wished to present to them. My messages got garbled, leaving them feeling unsafe and uncomfortable so that they withdrew their work and all other associations with me. I intended exactly the opposite. For this place to be safe and comfortable, and unthreatening. I am so sorry this has happened. I need this to be a safe place.
-Darryl Lovie
-Val Bowen
Bios And Links
Amazon Author Page
This is a very vital work for a variety of reasons. Prose and poetry are juxtaposed and interrelated as Jeremy Hooker acknowledges he has occasionally undertaken since hisWelsh Journal(2001) and it is very revelatory in that regard. The prose records four visits to hospital Hooker, nearing 80, experienced having been affected by a serious kidney condition, and by the end we find he is not yet receiving but anticipating dialysis. The play of the book is between hospital diaries and poems Hooker wrote during the same passage of time, and it is fascinating to note the mutual influences, one upon or against the other.
There is a long opening stretch of prose, about 30 pages, which can acculturate the reader to Hooker’s style and voice. Here one very pertinent assertion is made early on where our author cites Barry Lopez saying that ‘All great art tends to draw…
Here is the Youtube link: This is age appropriate:
Tintoretto: Susannah and the Elders
‘She is not naked as she is. She is naked as the spectator sees her.’
Enter; Shame
Shoshana means lily. My white toes glimmer through cool water. I shed my sweaty wifely garb and slide right in, safe in my garden pool from lustful eyes that seem to say, ‘you owe me’. Until the sheltering leaves above me part and reveal – two old and uninvited faces . . . I could have died! Thank God dear Daniel saw them, and reported.
-Sarah Watkinson
The Nude in Art, or Berger’s Women
I stand in front of the mirror with my clothes off. Don’t worry; there won’t be a description. I am trying to see where I fit in the parade of women I have been watching on the screen.
The narrator says that women are obsessed with their own appearance.
The camera plays slowly over a naked woman, curled around herself, shown tastefully at a distance, while the nature of woman as an object is explained. She looks vulnerable. I wonder if she chose the pose. I wonder if she was cold.
The narrator says that classical art showed women with mirrors as a representation of vanity.
Although as every painter knows, painting mirrors is a painterly trick, as if the painter has not chosen to include the mirror to show off what he can do (they are almost always he).
The narrator shows the film to some women.
He asks their opinions. He is charming, and only leads them a little. He does not, however, tell us their names, or who they are, or how he knows them.
I will tell you.
Anya was his wife. Before she was his wife she was a Russian émigré who had lived in Vienna, was Sigmund Freud’s neighbour, worked for the UN and spoke six languages. After she was his wife, she still could.
Eva came to London as a child refugee in the War, endured exile and fear, wrote experimental and feminist fiction about ‘Patriarchal Attitudes’ and showed not a trace of irony.
Jane was a Cambridge graduate, Socialist, writer about women, publisher, scholar, activist. Polite contributor to the debate.
Barbara, artist, communist, founder member of the Communist Party Artists’ Group, Seventy-six at time of filming, Reasonable. Controlled, Was that a flicker of frustration?
Carola was an artist. No picture is available. No sample of her art. No record of her ideas. Nothing but a young head, dark, bent, low-voiced, apologetic, speaking seldom and quietly overlooked.
Somebody decided to list their names in the credits.
Otherwise you and I would never know who they were. When you watch the film online the replay skips the credits and goes straight to the next film. I am trying not to find this ironic.
We set sail with Columbus in La Niña in 1492. In 1992, Sylvia Wynter decides to work on a new interpretation of 1492. Wynter says Columbus went ‘beyond the orthodox geography of the time’. She says social status, desire for wealth, lust for gold makes him deconstruct beauty and valour in Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, isolating the girl so she’s central to a portrait and not part of the allegorical mechanisms Botticelli intended. She’s beauty, he’s valour, surviving storms by praying and sending a letter to Ferdinand saying belief saves him, which keeps his rich patron happy, or he’s just lucky, we will never know. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger shows that to continue to isolate the girl so the bigger picture is lost, is to believe Mandeville’s 1357 Book of Marvels and Travels, to make a mountain of unmet urges, to kiss dragons, to make opaque our desire to conquer damsels with too much treasure to leave lying around in vaults in castles, to have it for ourselves and to be lord of her and those islands we know as the Caribbean. Mandeville doesn’t meet Hippocrates’ daughter. The reality is there’s no Sir John Mandeville, that a travel book of desires is constructed out of fantasies our minds continue to trick ourselves into believing. On its own, Berger’s gap between words and seeing reveals human agency, self-delusion buried deeply along with any sense of what it feels like to be human. We respect Columbus for his valour, for his success in charting the way, to draw a map of what it is to be Western, but his programming ensures he doesn’t know what human is, and being set adrift in oceans beyond ‘humanity’ ensures his reprogramming never happens. He sails into oblivion with no sense of how he cheats himself, blinded by potential riches our Western world still thrives on, not facing up to his own declining ecology, not curbing his own desires for excess, not realising how his behaviours are the problem, but succeeding in putting into the minds of others how they should be transformed when we ourselves need to be agents of change the planet needs. So, I set sail on this adventurous project and wonder how to celebrate John Berger’s fifty years—the word that comes to mind first and last is We.
-Cy Forrest
Cy says: “A golden shovel that uses Sylvia Wynter’s call for ‘deconstruction of the mechanisms by which we continue to make opaque to ourselves the reality of our own agency with respect to programming and reprogramming of our own desires, behaviours, minds, ourselves, the I and the We’.”
I lifted it from p192 David Scott‘s The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter:
is a lost kiwi living on the Isle of Mull. Poet, author, librarian and escaped botanist: her poems are intimate and personal, and often link the natural world with mythological themes. She is especially fond of selkies.
Her first collection, The Knitted Curiosity Cabinet, won the Britwriters Prize for Poetry in 2012. She is fascinated by the interface between human mind and the physical world, and her poems often have a scientific or mythological theme.
-Cy Forrest
is from Manchester but now living in Wiltshire. Poems in the Honest Ulsterman, IceFloe Press and The Wombwell Rainbow. Poems due to appear in Stand in 2022.
-Sarah Watkinson
is an Irish citizen, mycologist, and painter’s daughter. She lives in Oxfordshire, and has published two poetry books: Dung Beetles Navigate by Starlight, Cinnamon Press prizewinner 2017, and Photovoltaic, out this year from Graft Poetry.
The Milkmaid (Dutch: De Melkmeid or Het Melkmeisje), sometimes called The Kitchen Maid, is an oil-on-canvas painting of a “milkmaid”, in fact, a domestic kitchen maid, by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer. It is now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which regards it as “unquestionably one of the museum’s finest attractions”. According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, it was painted in about 1657 or 1658. Jan Vermeer; October 1632 – December 1675) was a Dutch Baroque Period[3]painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle-class life. During his lifetime, he was a moderately successful provincial genre painter, recognized in Delft and The Hague. Nonetheless, he produced relatively few paintings and evidently was not wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death.Vermeer worked slowly and with great care…
lives in Cumbria where most of her poetry is rooted. Her two poetry collections are with Indigo Dreams Publishing. Her biography Kay’s Ark published by Handstand Press. Her poems have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies and have won or been short listed in several competitions. Kerry’s third collection (joint winner of the Full Fat Collection, Hedgehog Press) will be published in 2022.
Update for Paul Brookes at Wombwell from Kerry Darbishire
Since our conversation in 2019 I’ve been busier than ever. Possibly to do with the Pandemic which could have put a halt to creativity but then I thought, sink or swim and consequently adapted by enrolling on workshops, keeping up with my local poetry groups: Dove Cottage Poets, Write on the Farm, and the Kendal Brewery Poets for workshopping poems. Deadlines are a good thing for me, something to aim for. Also buying and reading many different styles of poetry, joining zoom readings, and open mics has been a huge inspiration. And through zooms etc., and one of the best things, is meeting poets from all over the world. I’ve had acceptances in anthologies and placements in several competitions. I jointly won the Hedgehog Press collection competition this year with my new and third collection Jardinière, which I’m very excited about. I’m also currently working on three pamphlets.
Due to copyright concerns I cannot reproduce exact copies of the photo essays in John Berger’s book of the TV series. Hopefully what follows is in the spirit of those essays.
We set sail with Columbus in La Niña in 1492. In 1992, Sylvia Wynter decides to work on a new interpretation of 1492. Wynter says Columbus went ‘beyond the orthodox geography of the time’. She says social status, desire for wealth, lust for gold makes him deconstruct beauty and valour in Botticelli’s Venus and Mars, isolating the girl so she’s central to a portrait and not part of the allegorical mechanisms Botticelli intended. She’s beauty, he’s valour, surviving storms by praying and sending a letter to Ferdinand saying belief saves him, which keeps his rich patron happy, or he’s just lucky, we will never know. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger shows that to continue to isolate the girl so the bigger picture is lost, is to believe Mandeville’s 1357 Book of Marvels and Travels, to make a mountain of unmet urges, to kiss dragons, to make opaque our desire to conquer damsels with too much treasure to leave lying around in vaults in castles, to have it for ourselves and to be lord of her and those islands we know as the Caribbean. Mandeville doesn’t meet Hippocrates’ daughter. The reality is there’s no Sir John Mandeville, that a travel book of desires is constructed out of fantasies our minds continue to trick ourselves into believing. On its own, Berger’s gap between words and seeing reveals human agency, self-delusion buried deeply along with any sense of what it feels like to be human. We respect Columbus for his valour, for his success in charting the way, to draw a map of what it is to be Western, but his programming ensures he doesn’t know what human is, and being set adrift in oceans beyond ‘humanity’ ensures his reprogramming never happens. He sails into oblivion with no sense of how he cheats himself, blinded by potential riches our Western world still thrives on, not facing up to his own declining ecology, not curbing his own desires for excess, not realising how his behaviours are the problem, but succeeding in putting into the minds of others how they should be transformed when we ourselves need to be agents of change the planet needs. So, I set sail on this adventurous project and wonder how to celebrate John Berger’s fifty years—the word that comes to mind first and last is We.
Cy says: “A golden shovel that uses Sylvia Wynter’s call for ‘deconstruction of the mechanisms by which we continue to make opaque to ourselves the reality of our own agency with respect to programming and reprogramming of our own desires, behaviours, minds, ourselves, the I and the We’.”
I lifted it from p192 David Scott‘s The Re-Enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter:
I am called an attractive woman. The male gaze stalks me.
Men say they need me. They can’t do without me.
Tell me I give meaning to their lives. I politely refuse, but they push.
Until they tell me I become monster, When I say “No.” They tell me I snap their bones,
braise their sinew and muscle over fire, Sup their blood. When I say “No” they say
I gouge out their heart and chew it raw In front of their faces. When I say “No“,
they say I lick their bones dry, break them To suck out their marrow.
They say I have goat horns above my gorgeous face, a shaggy haired body and bandy bairns legs.
They can’t accept my refusal.
-Paul Brookes
Bios and Links
-Cy Forrest
is from Manchester but now living in Wiltshire. Poems in the Honest Ulsterman, IceFloe Press and The Wombwell Rainbow. Poems due to appear in Stand in 2022.
Acknowledgements
Nude by Picasso,
Nude by Modigliani, 1884- 1920 , Courtauld Institute Galleries, London38
Nevermore by Gauguin Courtauld Institute Gall eries, London 1848- 1903 ,
Nude Standing Figure by Giacometti , Tate Gallery, London
Bathsheba by Rembrandt van Ryn , 1606- 69 , Louvre , Paris
Judgement of Paris by Peter Paul Rubens , 1577- 1640,
The Key to Dreamsby Rene Magritte was painted in 1930, and this picture made a huge step towards this French artist becoming a leading member of theSurrealistmovement. Surrealism defies logic. Dreams and the workings of the subconscious mind inspire surrealistic art (French for “super-realism”) filled with strange images and bizarre juxtapositions. Features of Surrealistic Art Dream-like scenes and symbolic images Unexpected, illogical juxtapositions Bizarre assemblages of ordinary objects Automatism and a spirit of spontaneity Games and techniques to create random effects Personal iconography Visual puns Distorted figures and biomorphic shapes Uninhibited sexuality and taboo subjects Primitive or child-like designs.
In response to the first prompt I have chosen the following photographs from my own work by the modern camera. As John Berger says that the invention of the camera changed the “way” we look at various objects and life around us.The world appears different and gives new…
I am The Key Of Dreams by Magritte. I surveil my audience via facial recognition and eye tracking, and I see desire for completeness: a bird is not a bird until it flies, a door is not a door until it opens, a horse is not a horse until it rides into the sunset, a clock is not a clock until it counts down time, my audience only exists if I can see it, my poem only exists if the Poetry Book Society recommends it, history only exists if there’s a concluding episode tomorrow, and John Berger shows time not unfolding on the horizon where it’s still 1492, and Christopher Columbus believes his eyes and thinks he’s arrived in India when actually it’s the Caribbean – This miscalculation, these miles of ocean, this way of seeing, this gulf of unobtainable desires is right in front of me now – and thousands of native nations still tell Columbus the name for plants means ‘those who takes care of us’ – Now, go to sleep and dream again.
-Cy Forrest
Perception
I am looking out of my kitchen window, neck craned slightly to gaze upwards at the pines overtopping the house on the hill. Their tops are swaying, caught in a wind I cannot feel from my sheltered spot. I watch their movement, understated at this distance, until a black speck or two rises from the branches: ravens, tossed in the wind which must be stronger than it seems.
I imagine myself in the raven’s eye, high above the canopy, looking out over the cliff edge to the sea, to the far shore, to the distant mountains, the tallest of them crowned with fresh snow. I feel how very tiny I am.
From the cupboard I pull out the birdseed bucket and fill a jam jar. I open the back door and step into the garden. The frost is hard on the grass, and a small flock of chaffinches whizzes up from under my feet and scrambles away into the hedge. A blackbird shouts in panic, warning everything in earshot that a stranger is come.
But the robin freezes on the fence-post, one black eye fixed unerringly on me, watching to see what I will do. And all of a sudden I feel huge, monstrous, out of all proportion. A giant intruder in the small, intimate world of the garden.
Who am I? The clumsy invader of songbird space? The mote in the raven’s eye? How is it that birds can transgress the boundaries of perception, where we earthbound wonderers get stuck in our ruts, forget to see ourselves in any other way than the way we have been imagining since the last time we looked in the mirror?
The bird’s eye is a perception filter. And I am only the image of its fear.
-Anjum Wasim Dar (Link to a combination of images and words)
That Horse Is (a response to Magritte’s “The Key of Dreams” “La Clef Des Songes” 1935 version)
the door, sometimes left ajar, sometimes shuts out the gust. has a lock you must find the correct key to open.
That clock is
the wind. A wound up gust whose hands move at different speeds, mark duration by their flow.
That jug is
the bird that all pass by. If it contained milk they might pour out a mouthful or two before it flew away.
That suitcase is
the valise. It may be packed, ready for the wind to be right, for opening and riding away on the door, emptying the bird to fly like a jug.
-Paul Brookes
Bios And Links:
-Cy Forrest
is from Manchester but now living in Wiltshire. Poems in the Honest Ulsterman, IceFloe Press and The Wombwell Rainbow. Poems due to appear in Stand in 2022.
-Yvonne Marjot
is a lost kiwi living on the Isle of Mull. Poet, author, librarian and escaped botanist: her poems are intimate and personal, and often link the natural world with mythological themes. She is especially fond of selkies.
Her first collection, The Knitted Curiosity Cabinet, won the Britwriters Prize for Poetry in 2012. She is fascinated by the interface between human mind and the physical world, and her poems often have a scientific or mythological theme.
-Darryl Lovie
-Val Bowen
Bios And Links
Amazon Author Page
The Wombwell Rainbow 