Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

If This Were Not A Poem But An Actual Garden: Louise Glück

I am still vibrating with excitement after reading this book.  For her titles alone (The Wild Iris, The Garden, Mock Orange), Glück has been on my list of botanical poets to peruse.  The fact that she's won every major literary prize in the country, including the National Book Award for The Wild Iris, made my ignorance of her work even more culpable. 

Plus, very glamorous, no?

Last Monday I had literally half an hour to myself before heading off to campus for a meeting.  I opened the slim volume and began:

"The Wild Iris"

At the end of my suffering

there was a door.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck rise.  I read on and began to breathe more quickly...to pant, as if I were running through the pages.  Soon I had to grab my notebook.  The place in the center of my head that yogis call the "third eye" started to pulse.  I both did and did not know what was happening to me.

The book is a meditation on loss, grief, and mourning.  Poems titled with flower names--"Lamium," Trillium," "Snowdrops,"--times of day or year--"Clear Morning," "End of Winter," "Midsummer"--or aspects of the weather--"Spring Snow," "Retreating Wind"--are, marvellously, narrated by the plant, moment, or weather itself.  The effect is breathtaking.

Hear me out:  that which you call death

I remember.

 

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.

Then nothing.  The weak sun

flickered over the dry surface.

 

It is terrible to survive

as consciousness

buried in the dark earth.

                          ("The Wild Iris")

These plants, while conscious and speaking, are also not human.  The poet/seeker speaks in the verses titled with the names of prayers and poems:  "Matins," "Vespers," "Song," "Lullaby."  This speaker grapples with our oldest questions.  Why, if we must die, are we born to love one another and to love our own lives?  What survives death?  What can art do in the face of death?

                  But John

objects, he thinks

if this were not a poem but

an actual garden, then

the red rose would be

required to resemble

nothing else, neither

another flower nor

the shadowy heart, at

earth level pulsing

half maroon, half crimson.

                                   ("Song")

In The Wild Iris, non-human creation regards our preoccupation with mortality with some bemusement:

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.

                                ("Lamium")

                                    what

has brought you among us

who would teach you, though

you kneel and weep,

clasping your great hands,

in all your greatness knowing

nothing of the soul's nature,

which is never to die:  poor sad god,

either you never have one

or you never lose one.

                                         ("Violet")

I'm enthralled by the form, voice and vision of this book and can't wait to read it over and over again.

 

Poems in the Garden: Little Sparta

Today's post was inspired by a comment from a U.K. reader, Jerome Fletcher.  Mr. Fletcher pointed me to the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who first gained renown in the 1960s as a practitioner of concrete poetry.  Concrete poetry is the kind in which the layout and typography are part of the poem's meaning, so that it is a visual as well as linguistic object.  Here is one of Finlay's "poster poems," called "Acrobats:"

Its language not only describes but enacts tumbling, rendering the materiality of words concrete.

But sometimes Finlay (who died in 2006) actually makes poems out of concrete, or stone, or wood.  At Little Sparta, the garden he created in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh with his wife and collaborator Sue Finlay, garden spaces are designed around sculptural pieces engraved with poems.  (These great photos by Andrew Lawson are all from the Little Sparta Trust website.)

In this way, Little Sparta (so named in contrast to nearby Edinburgh, "the Athens of the North," with whom Finlay had been in decades-long conflict over issues of zoning and taxes) participates in a long tradition of poet-philosophers' gardens going back to classical times and epitomized in the eighteenth century by William Shenstone's The Leasowes.

Finlay's themes include pre-Socratic views of nature, the French Revolution, World War II, and the sea.  (Click on these horizontally-oriented shots to see them at full width.)

He works with master stonemasons and woodcarvers to produce virtuoso works of art.

Little Sparta is open to the public and I can't wait to visit it.

Houston Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is the ultimate sister arts mode:  art about art.  On Sunday I talked my friends Allen and Susannah into a road trip to Houston to visit the museum district and take part in a poetry contest sponsored by the Houston reading series Public Poetry.  I love museums but so often visit them only when I'm travelling; this seemed like a great excuse to revisit the major museums we're lucky enough to have just a few hours down the highway.  Here are some Robert Longo pieces in the fabulous Menil Collection:

The works chosen by Public Poetry for us to write about were in the Museum of Fine Arts.  There were nine of them, ranging from a Mangbetu (Congo) anthropomorphic harp:

to a John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Joshua Montgomery Sears.

Allen had the best line of the day about the contest.  I had printed out some information about it from my women poets list, and the person who sent it wrote that we should get discounted admission to the museum as participants.  So I mentioned this at the front desk.  The older South Asian lady behind the desk looked dubious but consented to take the papers I had and looked through a big binder with them in her hand.  Nothing.  So she called her supervisor.  Still nothing.  No one had ever heard of the contest or Public Poetry.  She sent us down an escalator and through a long underground art installation called the Wilson Tunnel to a building at the other end of the block, to the main membership desk.  There too the young blonde Houston socialite behind that counter had never heard of us and could not find a key on her cash register with which to give us a discount.  "Are you with The Art Crowd?" she kept asking, because apparently if we were, she could let us in.  No, not with The Art Crowd.  So she called HER supervisor who flipped impatiently through our by-now-dog-eared printouts, tossed them back across the desk, and pointed to a key on the register:  "Free admission.  Just give them free admission." 

Allen said, "We are going to win this contest."  Because no one else has ever heard of it.

 

If Gardens Are Art, Who Is The Artist?

Yesterday I had the very great pleasure of participating in a panel discussion on my book, Sister Arts.  Several of my graduate and undergraduate students were there, including Max, an especially engaged member of my lower-division Introduction to Creative Writing class.  Max asked the first question and it was probably the most productive of the whole discussion:  "If gardens are art, who is the artist?"

In some ways this is a very American question.  There is a long and distinguished tradition of English garden historians who have made careers out of studying gardens as art, an equation that is rarely questioned in English academic or museum contexts.  When I participated in a workshop at Sir John Soane's Museum to help plan the Mrs Delany and Her Circle exhibition, the group of about twenty curators and academics included a specialist in the history of grasses, one who studied shellwork, and Mark Laird of Harvard, who had just finished re-creating the eighteenth-century plantings at Painshill Park.  

But by the same token, the English themselves make a distinction between garden designers, whose work is studied by historians of landscape architecture like Laird,  and gardeners, those who carry out the "simple job" of maintaining the garden.  I've written here and here about the status of gardening as England's national pastime; working-class men who in America would be fixing cars on the weekends instead tend their roses,

or as in the case of this 2009 winner of the Scarisbrick Parish Best-Kept Garden Competition, their petunias.  At most, this work is regarded as craft rather than art; at least, as property maintenance, a kind of outdoor housework.  In the sister arts tradition of confounding the line between amateur and professional, art and craft, garden and landscape, we want want to claim these blokes as sister-artists.  (Wouldn't they be surprised.)

In answering Max's question I talked about three kinds of garden makers:  the wealthy patron of taste who envisions and funds the project of a major garden, such as Jane, Duchess of Northumberland, whose Alnwick Garden, which I wrote about here,  is the most ambitious contemporary landscape design in Europe:

the celebrity designer, like Capability Brown (1716-1783), seen here in a Nathaniel Dance portrait:

and the groundskeeper who actually plants, weeds, trims, waters and sweeps to keep the garden looking as intended, as here at Alnwick.

One of my favorite examples of how this third, often overlooked garden artist can affect meaning is on the UT campus just outside the English department.  UT's landscape is liberally strewn with statues by Pompeo Luigi Compini, dating from the early twentieth century; many of them are of rather dubious figures from Confederate history.  On the plaza in front of the Main Building, topped by the infamous UT Tower, two statues face down the quad to the Texas State Capitol a few blocks away:  Woodrow Wilson to the east, and Jefferson Davis, former President of the Confederacy, to the west.  

The plaza's axial design means that the statues were meant to be a matched set, equally visible from the quad.  But over several years of teaching a course called Sister Arts in which I take students around campus to look at its design features, I've noticed that someone has trimmed the trees beside the Davis statue so that branches obscure its face when viewed from the quad.  You can see Woodrow Wilson just fine, but Davis has been literally thrust into the shadows by the anonymous garden artists of the UT groundskeeping crew.