Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Mouth Carved Shut: Ekphrastic Poems

I wrote last month about the road trip I took with some friends to visit the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and participate in the ArtLines Juried Competition.  This week I've been working on those poems.  Here are three of them, along with the works that inspired them.

ANTHROPOMORPHIC HARP
Wrapped in the trunk of a Sapele tree
I heard an elephant bathing in
the rainforest bai.  Light poured down through the leafy
canopy; every beam sugared carbon
strings into mahogany heartwood.  This
was before the sawmills, the tree
hewn by hand, bush cricket my first music. 
Forged copper scraped me a hollow body,
elegant neck, elongated head achieved
by binding the infant skull.  The sharpest
blade cut me a mouth.  The green mantis
folded its arms and prayed.  I was made to be
African elsewhere.  I never learned
Mangbetu language, its voiced and unvoiced
trill.  I speak only with a mouth carved shut.

 

JADE HAND

This is my blade hand, cutting through
    rainforest vines
    enemy flesh
    false hope
    flattery
on my way to you.

Before it can fade, hand over
    the cheek slap
    what’s in your wallet
    peony bouquet
    our love
and I’ll keep it safe for you.

This jade hand-shaped pendant, look at it
    blue-green translucent
    ripple like ocean waves
    stiff with regal power
    empty to the gods
now drilled with holes, waving at you.

 

ALLEGORY OF EUROPE

It’s a gamble, a gaming
purse tossed on the floor
and open for business.

Blue velvet and the ace
of spades, space available
in another place not here.

Riches by chance, bitches!
Advance token, pass go,
past those other monkeys.

Keys to the city withheld,
meld Igbo and Bantu pell-
mell into Africa.  Scramble.

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.

 

Yedda Morrison: Stilled Life

In the artwork of San Francisco-based artist Yedda Morrison, distinctions between natural and artificial, botany and imperialism, art and decoration, inside and outside and reality and fantasy are pleasingly troubled.  In one project, "Specimen Drape," real flowers of made-up species (Flora Facticius, fake or fetish flowers; Flora Exotica, rare orchids, ferns and tropicals; Flora Familia, English garden blooms; Genus Colonia, exclusively white flowers) insinuate themselves parasitically, and beautifully, into existing architectural elements.

In another series, "Bioposy," Morrison uses the tackiest artificial flowers she can find to create "mutant strains, improbably and permanent hybrids." She asks, "If a real plant is a statement from another time, are we already `after' nature?"

Morrison explores "the long and complicated relationship between the decorative arts, imperialism, and the so-called natural world" in a project called Extinction Parlor.  Working with a list of 264 common flowering plants of New York compiled by the University of the State of New York in 1921, Morrison creates beautiful, fully functional, and purchasable wallpapers.

In 2008, Morrison points out in her artist's statement, 27 of these flowers are considered endangered.  Extinction Parlor "imagines a future without access to `real' flora, where leaf has been reduced to motif, plant to pattern, and nature itself to interior decor," what the artist calls "stilled life."

As the excertps above indicate, Morrison is also a talented writer.  She has published three books of poems, including one, Darkness, in which the text consists of the first chapter of Joseph Conrad's 1899 novel Heart of Darkness--with all the words whited out except those referring to the natural world.  Whether in image or text, Yedda Morrison beautifully and provocatively examines the fraught relations between empire, labor, and nature.

 

Still Nature: The Sculpture of Beverly Penn

One of the delights of my walk from the parking garage to my office is that I get to pass by DBerman Gallery (http://www.dbermangallery.com/).  I was sad to learn that they are closing next month and moving to the beautiful hill country town of Wimberley.  A few days ago, even though I was in a rush, I thought, "I'd better pop in there while I can."  From the street I could see Austin's legendary Pat of Ruby's Barbecue peering at some wall sculpture.  The lady knows barbecue and art too--she was enjoying the spectacular exhibition of Beverly Penn's metalwork. 
This is just the kind of thing I love:  decorative, mysterious, witty.  Penn, who teaches at Texas State University,  is interested in systems of classification and their arbitrariness.  She's a sister Linnaean, in other words.  She's attracted to weeds, like the hydrilla she renders in bronze in the piece pictured above.  Hydrilla is considered a menace in San Marcos, Texas, where Penn lives; it chokes the river and clogs the city's drainage systems.  In Penn's rendering, it looks both threatening like barbed wire, and ornamental like Victorian grille-work.  These sculptures mess with our ideas of what counts as a pretty plant. 

Penn is known for site-specific work, and this piece was originally created for the pediments in the main gallery at Laguna Gloria Museum in West Austin:
Titled "Genius Loci:  Villa," the piece refers to classical architectural and landscape design principles; "Genius Loci" is "the genius of the place," the special character which eighteenth-century designers said had to be discovered and respected by the landscape gardener when creating work. 

Penn's use of color on some smaller pieces is spectacular.  She works with metal patinas with a painterly delicacy.

DBerman has displayed all these pieces superbly, designing unidirectional lighting to create cast shadows that add to their mystery and depth.

Penn shows us the roadside weeds of Central Texas we never knew:  architectural, resonant, and important.

Be sure to catch this spectacular show before it closes FEBRUARY 26!

A Lesbian-Feminist Storybook Garden

Yesterday I got the best present in the mail.  I received the page proofs of my book, Sister Arts:  The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes, and they are gorgeous.

 

I love what the designers at the University of Minnesota Press have done with the luscious botanical and garden images, including a wonderful mash-up of Mary Delany botanical illustrations for the chapter headings—a kind of collage of collages.  In celebration of this next-to-last stage, I thought I’d share a short excerpt from the book’s conclusion.  The conclusion is called “The Persistence of Lesbian Genres:  A Circuit Garden,” and it’s a rapid tour through some of the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century writers and artists working in the “sister arts” tradition of women’s landscape genres started by Mary Delany, the Duchess of Portland, Anna Seward and Sarah Pierce, the 18^th-century figures I discuss in the main chapters of the book.  Here’s part of my discussion of Toronto artist Allyson Mitchell, along with some yummy images of her iconic installation piece, The Ladies Sasquatch.  One of the things I love about this part of the book is that I get to quote my friend and colleague Ann Cvetkovich, who first introduced me to Mitchell’s work and is one of its most astute and loving critics.

Oh, and by the way, if you want to pre-order my book (and get the footnotes to the quotations below, which I deleted in this blog format), go to: www.upress.umn.edu

 

“Mitchell’s series “The Ladies Sasquatch,” which the artist has been making since 2005, consists of female sasquatch figures on a heroic scale installed in a wilderness landscape feminized and domesticated through materials: the figures are rendered in fun fur, and the hills, rocks and trees they ramble are created from “found fabrics, needlepoint, rug hookings and carpet samples, to make rocks and hills and logs.”

 

 Invoking the historical complexities of landscape politics in Canada, Mitchell acknowledges the provenance of this imagery in “Aboriginal tales about the Sasquatch, 'Wild Man of the Forest' or Big Foot (as he is referred to in the US)” which “have been appropriated by the white Canadian mainstream - arguably an expression of the racist fears around the "otherness" of native culture - and by default - nature in general.” The setting alludes both to a canonically pastoral “wild forest glen” and to “the bush,” that definitively Canadian location “outside what is formally understood as the city-state.” (Mitchell’s work also potentially puns on “the bush” as an affectionate term for women’s pubic hair.) As critic Ann Cvetkovich describes the work, Mitchell merges “Canadian wildlife myth with the tradition of feminist counterheroines,” taking “the stuffed animal of both natural history diorama and childhood toys” to a colossal scale. Averaging more than nine feet tall, the sculptures are fur-covered and feminine, with prominent vulvas and pubic hair, breasts and nipples, and underarm hair. “Lady Sasquatch is your dream girl,” reads the artist’s statement for a 2005 exhibition, “only bigger and hairier, and she may just eat you if you don’t watch out.” In a 2009 lecture, Mitchell said that she wants to engage viewers’ potential discomfort with women’s hairiness in these images of wild but somehow approachable female sexuality. The contrast in tone between the fun-fur fabric and long eyelashes of the figures, and their often menacing poses and great size, make them both alluring and repulsive, depending on the viewer’s relationship to female sexuality.

For the figure entitled “Oxana,” Mitchell draws especial attention to the figure’s buttocks and vulva--Cvetkovich calls the butt “especially important” in this work--by creating a highly-colored collage of fur reminiscent of a mandrill’s hind end. “You want nature? I'll give you nature!” One visual model Mitchell drew upon for creating Oxana’s butt is Georgia O’Keeffe. Mitchell alludes to O’Keeffe again in a mirrored red and pink rose in the hooked rug covering the base of the sculpture, just below the vulva. Mitchell says she is interested in how the figure’s haunches and vulva can be read as a flower, but also as anatomical--a key convention in the sister arts tradition.

Importantly, however, the figures are not exhibited alone. Rather, they are installed in relation to one another, “in a gathering, as though they’ve come together in some sort of clutch, or meeting, or who knows, maybe even a sacrifice.” In intentional contrast to the canonical Sasquatch myth, in which the creature is always pictured as male and alone, this is a community of powerful female figures gathering for their own mysterious purposes. The female bodies created here are specifically queer or lesbian bodies. For example, Maxie is “an homage” to Mitchell’s friend, the fat activist Max Airborne. The large back, small buttocks and short legs are meant to evoke a specific, recognizable type of woman’s body often seen among lesbians, which Mitchell calls “the refrigerator back.” In her evocation of female bodies rarely seen in canonical art history, Mitchell marries the myth of sasquatch wildness to “the mythology of lesbian culture…something like the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, five thousand lesbians running around naked in the woods and all of the mythology surrounding that kind of a space.” Cvetkovich notices in the work “a queer erotics…one that lends itself to new worlds that enable different kinds of feelings.” Referring explicitly to both previous practitioners in the sister arts tradition and contemporary queer and lesbian communities, Mitchell calls Ladies Sasquatch “a lesbian feminist storybook garden.””

 

Las Pozas: a Surrealist queer garden

Edward James was born in 1907 and was an Oxford contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton.  A patron of the arts, poet, and designer, he is known as an ardent Surrealist.  In collaboration with Salvador Dalí, James created iconic works like the Mae West Lips Sofa and the Lobster Telephone (also known as the Aphrodisiac Telephone).

One of four known copies of the Telephone can be viewed at James’ estate at West Dean, now a National Trust site.  The site is known for its nineteenth-century Gothic house designed by James Wyatt and a twentieth-century Arts and Crafts garden. 
René Magritte painted two portraits of James, both expressing a mysterious or unknowable quality about him.

James married Tilly Losch, an Austrian dancer, in the early 1930s, and produced Les Ballets 1933, which included Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, and George Balanchine, as a vehicle for her.  In 1934, in a divorce countersuit, Tilly accused him of homosexuality.  In 1940, James stayed for a period at the Taos, New Mexico ranch of bisexual Mabel Dodge Luhan, which housed a revolving guest lists of avant-garde artists.  Travels in Mexico convinced him that in order to design the “true Garden of Eden” he had in mind, “Mexico was far more romantic” a location than either Britain or the United States.  In 1945, guided by a young telegraph operator named Plutarco Gastelum whom he had hired in Cuernavaca, James found the location of the garden he was to name Las Pozas (“the pools”) at Xilitla.  This is the James garden I nominate “queer,” if only for its Surrealist vibe of sexual freakiness and its origins in a collaboration between men.

 Gustelem, his wife and children lived with James at Laz Pozas for the next forty years.  Gustelem and James collaborated on nearly forty concrete follies (garden buildings including temples, pagodas and summerhouses) with names like The House on Three Floors Which Will In Fact Have Five or Four or Six.  Plantings included an orchid collection that at one time numbered 29,000 specimens, and “casas” or animal houses housed wild birds and animals from all over the world.

 
James was also a poet.  Here are some verses about his garden: 

 

I have seen such beauty as one man has seldom seen;

therefore will I be grateful to die in this little room,

surrounded by the forests, the great green gloom

of trees my only gloom - and the sound, the sound of green.

Here amid the warmth of the rain, what might have been

is resolved into the tenderness of a tall doom

who says: 'You did your best, rest' - and after you the bloom

of what you loved and planted still will whisper what you mean.

And the ghosts of the birds I loved, will attend me each a friend;

like them shall I have flown beyond the realm of words.

You, through the trees, shall hear them, long after the end

calling me beyond the river. For the cries of birds

continue, as - defended by the cortege of their wings -

my soul among strange silences yet sings.

 

Here's James at Las Pozas in the 1980s:

 

Thanks to Roberto Tejada for introducing me to Las Pozas.  Now run by a foundation, the garden is open to visitors.  I’m adding it to my list of lifetime garden tourism/research destinations.  I’ll be able to visit West Dean this summer when I’m in England and will be sure to report any features that set off my garden-writer gaydar.

 

 

The Book of the Garden

Poets love gardens.  Inside the wider tradition of nature poems, garden poems record intimate and domestic encounters with plants, soil, insects and animals.  Gardens, like poems, are human attempts to give shape to our experience of the world. 

Various landscapes make their way into my poems.  Growing up I spent much of the year on a ranch in southern Alberta and its geography remains vivid for me.  Often after a visit to my parents, the pastures, river and outbuildings of the ranch suffuse my poems for a while--not usually as they are today, but as I remember them. 

A year ago my partner Madge and I bought a house with Madge's mother in a new neighborhood in Austin called Mueller.   Now we're a two-dyke, two-boy, one-Nana, one-dog, two-cat household.  Mueller is built on the site of Austin's old airport and provided city planners with the rare opportunity to build a new neighborhood from scratch in the central city.  It's a New Urbanist Disneyland, dense and green.  The homes either have no yard (the row houses), a shared common area (the garden homes) or, like ours, a small yard about 17 by 7 feet in the front and 16 by 20 feet in the back.  Smaller than the yard behind a Brooklyn brownstone, people.  In upcoming posts I'll be describing the process we're just beginning of landscaping our tiny plot of earth.

What makes up for the minimal private yard, though, is the beautifully-designed common green space.  Across the street from our house is a park with an open grassy area, playscape, pool and basketball court.  And two blocks away is a greenbelt where I walk our dog Blue every day. 

I love how well-designed it is.  The circuit path around it takes Blue and I about 20 minutes to walk.  (Well, I walk.  If no one's around and I can let him off the leash for a while, Blue prefers to tear around at top speed or prance like a white-tailed deer.)  It leads us around a pond that filters the neighborhood's wastewater and is also home to coots, fish, and frogs.  When you follow the path down to one of the small waterfalls, you are out of sight and hearing of city traffic for a blessed few minutes.  And the trail is littered with witty "keep-Austin-weird" sculpture depicting the insect and plant life of the blackland prairie landscape, including the notorious pollen spores that cause Austin's allergy pandemic.  

(sculpture by Chris Levack)

(sculpture by Dixie Gay Friend)

This landscape is starting to displace the ranch in my poems.  Here's one I wrote for Hoa Nguyen's magical workshop. 

THE BOOK OF THE GARDEN

 “If you have not received the oral transmissions, you must not make gardens.”

                                                                       -Japanese garden master Zoen

 The garden exists in two places, inside

and outside.  In a drawer, the secret

teachings of the landscape designer lie

teaching secrets to termites and a flea, great

with child.  In the yard, a ball-shaped hole

dug by the dog, filled by the rain, marks

the place I tried to bury compost, smirks

from nieghbor next door as the dog bold-

ly digs it back up.  Upstairs, the gift lies

buried like compost waiting to be dug

up and placed in a rain-filled hole, a shrub’s

roots cradled, beauty-berries lifting high.

 

From the teak seat, you see carp in the water

sunset’s purple, pink and orange ribbons

streaming across their waste-fed, luscious fodder.

Water falls in steps, steps fall away like hip-bones

from the root of the spine.  Shrubs are named

fragrant, Indian, common; verbena, mallow,

yarrow.  New-planted acacia, mossycup fallow

in late fall, leaves compound, attached, arranged

in fans, feathers, needles, awls, brush the rim

of sky’s inverted bowl.  Steel spider, magnified

a thousand times, and walkers-by are dignified

by the gift of blue glass eggs, slung beneath a limb.