-Kerry Darbishire

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.

Here is the original 2019 interview

https://wordpress.com/post/thewombwellrainbow.com/11335

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.

Here is a link to a Google search for images of women as portrayed in 1972 advertising: https://www.google.com/search?q=1972+images+of+women+portrayed+in+advertising&sxsrf=AOaemvJzgDDc5bJJHbfy94cMNXNKRhOY6Q:1641052576342&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj23_qe9ZD1AhWMM-wKHZJhAwsQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1367&bih=809&dpr=2

How does it differ from today’s advertising?

https://www.adcouncil.org/all-articles/10-historic-ads-that-moved-culture-forward-for-women

Chapter Two and Three, Women and Art

What It Feels Like To Be Human

A Golden Shovel

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:

https://serendipstudio.org/oneworld/system/files/WynterInterview.pdf

-Cy Forrest

https://poeticoceans.wordpress.com/2022/01/10/in-response-to-mr-paul-brookes-challenge-john-bergers-ways-of-seeing-day-2-women-in-time-and-changing-environmentswork-is-similar/

-Anjum Wasim Dar

 

The Ghul

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,

National Gallery, London

The first episode of the television series expanded on ideas from Walter Benjamin‘s 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction“, arguing that through reproduction an Old Master‘s painting’s modern context is severed from that which existed at the time of its making. Here is YouTube link: https://youtu.be/0pDE4VX_9Kk

-Sarah Crowson 

Sleep and Dream Again

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.

 

-©YMarjot2022

https://poeticoceans.wordpress.com/2022/01/08/in-celebration-of-fifty-years-since-john-bergers-ways-of-seeing-was-broadcast-in-january-1972-how-we-might-ekphrastically-comment-on-the-artworks-he-looked-at-particularl/

-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.