Jane Aspinall

I am obsessed with art lately.  I keep looking and looking at colour and wishing I could paint.   After the Hockeny exhibition something in me wants to make something beautiful.   And now,  after having seen the programmes on Damien Hirst – the one with Noel Fielding and the one with the BBC – I want to make (and for me that probably means say in a poem) something meaningful. 

You can't really describe Hirst's work as visually beautiful – it's gross, extreme.  There are instances of great beauty with the colour in the spot paintings, the butterflies or the pills lined up in cabinets, the repetition and the differences are beautiful together, I think, but after seeing the programmes I came away really believing that there is great authenticity in what he does. 

He talked about his pharmacy installation.  I remember feeling sick being in that installation at the TATE Liverpool years ago.  I didnt understand it, I couldnt read it the way art critics do but he made me feel nauseous and crushed in there.   Now, years later I heard him talking about it and saying, in such down to earth words, that art can make you well.  He doesnt get it that there were people out there who dont know they can be healed (not his word – so loaded now with spirituality and costly quacky interventions) by art.  A sceptic might shout Yeah if you had cancer you'd go for Chemotherapy not to an art gallery.  Why not both ?   

Hirst also talked about money. How ridiculous it is to get millions for something you have made; a cow hacked in half with a chain saw in a pool of formaldehyde or a shark in a tank.  He said he was in the pub with his mate playing snooker when phone calls were coming through telling him of the multi millions being paid at auction for his work.   For a while the money blocked him but he said his partner told him to think of it as a resource for making art and that is what he did.  Her words helped him think of it the way a painter might think about tins of paint.   Then, he made the skull, the diamond encrusted abhorrently blingy skull, thinking he would sink 40 million into it.  No sooner had he done that than he was offered 50 million for it.  There's bad stuff in the world and he was responding to it.  " For the Love of God"  His titles are like poems themselves.  His work is dark, ironic but, like Lousie Bourgeois' work, when he shows me what hurts him I believe him.

Did you see the Andrew Marr programme on David Hockney's exhibition at the Royal Academy ?  I wish I had seen it before I saw the paintings. 

Hockney talked about how hard you have to look at a thing to see it.  His colours are amazing and the scale of his work fills your eyes.  Towards the end of the programme he talked about craft, about being a painter, painting with hand and heart and head.  He said that you can teach the craft but you cant teach the honesty that has to go in there…….he called that poetry……

He talked about space.  His paintings are about how we move through space and how the same scene changes and changes over time.   He said the most interesting space is where I end and you begin.   Poems live in that space, I think.   Where I end and you begin.

One of the things I like best about poetry is how difficult it is to describe.  Don Paterson's essays in Poetry Review last year came close to capturing what it is that makes a piece of writing a poem.  

Classrooms, workshops on poems, remind us (often depressingly as we spend what seems like an age labouring over someone's best efforts) how much of our work looks and sounds like it might be a poem…..but something in us just knows that it isn't poetry.   

A visiting priest in my home town talked to our assembled congregation last Sunday about knowledge; how dangerous it is to think that we know something or even fully know each other….. he talked about husbands and wives always being open to learn new and more things about each other.   He was talking about learning as a life force and it struck me that all that he was saying about learning could be said about poetry.   He quoted a writer called Kevin Nicholls who said that   "it starts in wonder, goes on in humility and ends in gratitude".

If a poem doesn't invoke a sense of wonder, awe, curiosity in me so that I want to go on, smaller than the poem trying to find something and thankful at its end that I have and wanting to read it all over again – with even greater wonder -…..then it isnt a poem.  Maybe. 

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Walking late last night back home up the hill from a friend's house I met a fox.  He, I like to think he was he, was muscular and his tail running out in a straight line with his spine was like a sumptuous rug rolled, fibres out, for a journey.     He stopped to look at me.  He stood under a street light, exposed, on the pavement close to the sandstone wall.   He was bigger than a dog and longer from nose to tail tip, than a metre.  His ears were softly erect and he dipped his head to one side as though he wanted to listen.  I dipped my head.  I wanted to listen.  The orange light showered down through the damp air so that he looked as if he were made of mosaic tiles of copper, as though rain might ting on him.

If I had taken the car, I would have missed him.  And I would have missed the way the new frost made the pavements glitter around him.  I would have missed the chances I had to make, unwittingly, the small decisions we all make about when to move, where to walk,  where to cross, what tune to hum.  I felt the fox was a visitation.  I sang out loud to him a song I remembered from my childhood but didn't know I still knew.  My soul is filled with joy as I sing to God my saviour He has looked upon his servant He has visited his people and Holy is His name, through all generations, everlasting is His Mercy to the people He has chosen and Holy is His name. 

The fox waited for me to finish then bolted up and over the wall, his tail not touching anything.  I wondered where he would go, where would he lay down and let his tail curl about him ?  Would there be a vixen and cubs waiting in a hole somewhere up in the woods on the hill for his return.   I feel sure when something lifts someone, when one human is visited, then the whole of humanity is strengthened.  Strange, that being so alone with the fox in the cold, dark night ju st a few hundred yards from home I felt connected to everything.

This seems to be the time of year when people in my home town and globally go about congratulating each other and themselves on their wonderful successes.   Red carpets are rolled out in Hollywood and in my home town poets name the competitions in which their poem was highly commended or shortlisted.   They tell me the names of other poets who like their work as though this will persuade me to join that Happy Band of Brothers –  and I am happy for them.  I have done it myself.  Who hasn't put a blurb on their book from someone whose name we all know or visited a web site repeatedly to see their name in (their own) fonts !  

But how much better it would have been if we had waited for someone else to notice and mention our success to us, or not.  The vast majority of the poetry I read, poems that have truly changed me (and I am not just talking about feeling moved by something….  I believe the science of neuroplasticity can prove that our brains are changed, physically, structurally changed by the stimuli we expose them to)  go unmentioned to anyone else, let alone their poets.  I get the chance to gush now and then but mostly, as poets we don't get or give much feedback.  Reviews are few and far between and far from democratic.   

In my home town the poets I know continue to tell me when I ask them how's their writing going, the list of their near misses, as if  just getting a mention deserves a mention ?  Is our self esteem so low ?  And when did self esteem become the measure of anything ?  I am no stranger to self help, there's a holistic health centre in my home town where I have spent many an hour and tenner getting needles stuck in me or stress massaged out of me.   I have  done Mars, Venus, Chicken Soup, Celestine, Yoga, power walking, running, Buddhist meditation, mindful eating and chanting and I have single handedly propped up the practices of many self employed gurus trading from rented rooms with  dusty surfaces bearing tea lights and tissues……and even I am beginning to conclude that self esteem is overrated.   It's had its day as the root cause or label for our inherent unhappiness……I am going to back off, not give it house room, stop thinking about self esteem and success and continue - as one therapist put it – to stir the mud.    I prefer to think of  that hole in the centre of me…….that utter emptiness that sometimes swells up and might choke me….not as hole I need to fill with compliments fished from friends ………………but as the space where the poems come in.   

I have been listening again to Garrison Keillor and thinking about the ordinary everyday stuff of our lives that literature is made of,,….

The news from my home town this week is that some of the trees are down, some are not.  I particularly like the greying spruces lolling unlit in my neighbours windows.  Their sitting rooms must smell piny and their hoover bags will be bursting with needles and spewing out the smell of woodland floors in other rooms.   These trees confirm something I think I have always known…not many deadlines are deadlines.   Up on the hill the wind has taken down the old and woody and in the woods our usual tracks are lost among shrapnel ends of broken branches.  The dog loves it.  She gambols over sticks and into undergrowth, emerging with twigs as hair clips and bobbles.   I like the space up there in the winter.  The trees are further apart than you think and the light comes in.  It's so bright the sea looks dull.  It's communal up there…..a well kept secret in my home town is the view out to the sea, the island with its single windmill generator and the sand bank beyond where the seal colony basks.  Sometimes if you listen carefully and the wind is just right you can hear them calling.