Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community

Remembering Stourhead

[End-of-semester dry spell!  I'm re-posting an oft-visited story from my summer's garden tourism.  More new posts soon....]

Stourhead Park is one of the greatest eigheenth-century English gardens,

designed by the wealthy landowner Henry Hoare ("the Magnificent Hoare," a nickname that gave my students lots of giggles) after his return from the Grand Tour of Europe.  Like so many other Grand Touring aristocrats, he had fallen in love with the landscape paintings of Claude,

Poussin,

and Dughet.

Returning after several years loaded down with precious artifacts, including rare books and paintings, Hoare decided to create an Italian landscape in the English countryside.  Unlike other gentlemen of taste, he did not hire a professional landscape designer but did the work himself.  He had the Elizabethan house pulled down and replaced by a Palladian villa,

and also created, over many years, an exquisite landscape garden on more than two thousand acres.  Stourhead landscape garden is considered, in the "sister arts" tradition of the eighteenth century, to be both "painterly" and "poetic."  It is one of the chief examples of the notion that gardens, paintings and poems are "sisters" among the arts, capable of the highest form of aesthetic expression and thus each possessed in some degree of the qualities of the others.  Henry Hoare's garden, then, not only looks like a Claude painting, it also has a poetic meaning, a narrative that unfolds in time as visitors make their way around the property.  The most famous of the circuit gardens at Stourhead presents the visitor with a choice between the Path of Virtue, which leads up a steep and rocky climb to the Temple of Apollo

where one is rewarded with a spectacular view across the lake to the misty, Claudian horizon, and the Path of Vice, which leads, by a short, easy downhill walk, to the pub. 

I've always loved bringing students to Stourhead and I consider it one of my favorite walks in the world.  But on Monday, I decided that since I know the gardens fairly well, I would concentrate on two things:  looking that the spectacular collections in the house, which I had never visited, and finally getting some time for a little sketching of my own.  It was hard not to feel guilty as I sent the students (and Sam) off up the steep climb while I plopped myself down in front of a hydrangea bush.  But my talentless, completely untrained sketches are a major way that I relax, focus, and really see what's in front of me, and I have been missing the practice.  Besides, Stourhead's hydrangeas were beyond gorgeous that day, whether seen from a distance,

in a medium shot,

close up,

or even in an amateur's notebook.

And that's why the last four photos in this post are the only ones I took myself.

 

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.

Fifties Experimental Film: A Glimpse of the Garden

My friend Chad Bennett sent me a link to A Glimpse of the Garden,

a wild little movie by the mid-twentieth-century experimental filmmaker Marie Menken.

Born in 1909 in Brooklyn, Menken was associated with the fifties underground film scene in New York that also included Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, and Kenneth Anger (considered by many to be a forerunner of queer cinema).  She also appeared in several Warhol films herself.  Her famously rocky marriage to poet Willard Maas, said to be jealous of her greater success as an artist, was the inspiration for the toxic relationship between George and Martha in Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  Yikes! 

I must say that in Mike Nichols' famous 1966 film version, Elizabeth Taylor does look a little like the picture above of Marie.  Maas has been identified as the off-camera presence providing fellatio to DeVeren Bookwaiter in Warhol's 1964 film Blow Job, and he also had an affair with botanist Rupert Barneby, whose lover Dwight Ripley is credited in Menken's film with giving her access to their garden. 

In this five-minute film, we see only plants and landscape and hear only birdsong; the sole indication of a human presence is the camera itself, proceeding at a walking pace along paths and across lawns, occasionally pausing to focus on a particular bloom or tree, and finally gazing at sunset over the garden.  Alternating between long, swooping shots, quick cuts between images, and steady-camera shots in which the only movement is the wind through the leaves and flowers, the film is formally ravishing.  Menken's work is noted for its respect for the objects filmed (as is also seen in her film Lights), her desire and ability to sense (or is it produce?) consciousness in inanimate objects.  This aesthetic is of a piece with the interest in materials and in abstraction of the New York School, Fluxus and Abstract Expressionist artists that formed part of Menken's circle.  Her painterly sense can also be seen in the title frame, above, which might, like her film Drips in Strips, be a humorous and loving tribute to Pollock-style drip painting. 

Sister artist, species fag-hag.

 

 

 

On Phillis Wheatley's Imagination

Today I had the pleasure of hearing Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley give a talk on the voudon loa Ezili, a force of nature that protects femininity and creativity, as an epistemology for understanding Caribbean genders and transgenders.  I have been working slowly and with great pleasure through Tinsley's book Thiefing Sugar:  Eroticism Between Women in Caribbean Literature.

I was electrified to read the following sentence in Tinsley's Introduction:  "What happens when the beloved/landscape and the poet/lover are both women?"  Although Tinsley is writing about Caribbean literature and I'm writing about eighteenth-century gardens, these questions also describe the project of my own recent book, Sister Arts.  I think that makes our books sisters.

In this afternoon's lecture Tinsley spoke movingly about the hard work of being a black woman (as instanced by the cultural work of misisis and madivines, the Haitian genderqueers who are the focus of her new research).  She also talked about the transformative power of feeling good, and about the crucial role the imagination must play in that transformation.  My friend Omi Jones was in the audience and asked Tinsley about how she was experimenting, post-tenure, with new, poetic forms of writing (for instance in her recent essay "Black Atlantic/Queer Atlantic.")  And that made me think of Phillis Wheatley

whose poem "On Imagination" I read this morning as I continued to make my way through Black Nature, which I've written about here and here.  It's always seemed to me a stunning poem on many levels, not least of which is the sheer ambition of writing a sublime and existential poem that engages with a major Enlightenment aesthetic debate, all from a position of enslavement.  But not of the imagination, and that's the point.  That's the way in which the virtuousity of Wheatley's poetry is always making a rhetorical argument in favor the humanity of the speaker, but in the face of dizzyingly high stakes that would have silenced a lesser talent.  For your inspiration today, here is her poem:

Thy various works, imperial queen, we see,
How bright their forms! how deck'd with pomp by thee!
Thy wond'rous acts in beauteous order stand,
And all attest how potent is thine hand.
From Helicon's refulgent heights attend,
Ye sacred choir, and my attempts befriend:
To tell her glories with a faithful tongue,
Ye blooming graces, triumph in my song.
Now here, now there, the roving Fancy flies,
Till some lov'd objects strikes her wand'ring eyes,
Whose silken fetters all the senses bind,
And soft captivity involves the mind.

Imagination! who can sing thy force?
Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?
Soaring though air to find the bright abode,
Th'empyreal palace of the thund'ring God,
We on thy pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind;
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze th' unbounded soul.

Though Winter frowns to Fancy's raptur'd eyes
The fields may flourish, and gay scenes arise;
The frozen deeps may break their iron bands,
And bid their waters murmur o'er the sands.
Fair Flora may resume her fragrant reign,
And with her flow'ry riches deck the plain;
Sylvanus may diffuse his honours round,
And all the forest may with leaves be crown'd;
Show'rs may descend, and dews their gems disclose,
And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.

Such is thy pow'r, nor are thine orders vain,
O thou the leader of the mental train:
In full perfection all thy works are wrought,
And thine the sceptre o'er the realms of thought.
Before thy throne the subject-passions bow,
Of subject-passions sov'reign ruler Thou,
At thy command joy rushes on the heart,
And through the glowing veins the spirits dart.

Fancy might now her silken pinions try
To rise from earth, and sweep th' expanse on high;
From Tithon's bed now might Aurora rise,
Her cheeks all glowing with celestial dies,
While a pure stream of light o'erflows the skies.
The monarch of the day I might behold,
And all the mountains tipt with radiant gold,
But I reluctant leave the pleasing views,
Which Fancy dresses to delight the Muse;
Winter austere forbids me to aspire,
And northern tempests damp the rising fire;
They chill the tides of Fancy's flowing sea,
Cease then, my song, cease the unequal lay.

1767-1773?

Wheatley is, as Tinsley would say, one of Ezili's children.

To the Survival of Roaches: More Black Nature

One of the many things I appreciate about Camille T. Dungy's anthology Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry is its attention to pests.  

Of course, there is plenty of beautiful pastoral writing in the book, like this excerpt from Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices:

"The land we till is beautiful, with red and black and brown clay, with fresh and hungry smells, with pine trees and palm trees, with rolling hills and swampy delta...Our southern springs are filled with quiet noises and scenes of growth.  Apple buds laugh into blossom.  Honeysuckles creep up the sides of houses.  Sunflowers nod in the hot fields.  From mossy tree to mossy tree--oak, elm, willow, aspen, sycamore, dogwood, cedar, walnut, ash, and hickory--bright green leaves jut from a million branches to form an awning that tries to shield and shade the earth.  Blue and pink kites of small boys sail into the windy air."

Wright uses verbs ("apple buds laugh into blossom") and lists (those marvellously specific tree varieties) like a poet.  This piece is an example of an African American pastoral trope that contrasts the black writer's spiritual and physical connection to the natural world with the racial threat posed by its human inhabitants, as in Margaret Walker's "Sorrow Home:"

My roots are deep in southern life; deeper than John Brown    

            or Nat Turner or Robert Lee.  I was sired  and weaned

            in a tropic world.  The palm tree and banana leaf,

            mango and coconut, breadfruit and rubber trees know me.

[...]

O Southland, sorrow home, melody beating in my bone and

          blood!  How long will the Klan of hate, the hounds and

         the chain gangs keep me from my own?

In African American folk traditions, however, this alienation was often expressed via identification with other unvalued creatures:  with foxes and coyotes, with rats and roaches.  This metaphor was congenial to the more confrontational stance of Black Arts Movement poets like Audre Lorde.  Lorde's "The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches" is probably the locus classicus of this distinctive kind of African American nature poem.

Call me

your deepest urge

toward survival

call me

and my brothers and sisters

in the sharp smell of your refusal

call me

roach and presumptuous

nightmare on your white pillow

your itch to destroy

the indestructible

part of yourself.

 

Call me your own determination

in the most detestable shape

you can become

friend of your image

within me

I am you

in your most deeply cherished nightmare

scuttling through the painted cracks

you create to admit me

into your kitchens

into your fearful midnights

into your values at noon

in your most secret places

with hate

you learn to honor me

by imitation

as I alter--

although your greedy preoccupations

through your kitchen wars

and your poisonous refusal--

to survive.

 

To survive.

Survive.

In a critical essay included in the book entitled "Boll Weevils, Coyotes, and the Color of Nuisance," C.S. Giscombe recalls a Top Forty version of "The Boll Weevil Song," first performed by Charlie Patton in 1929 but with deep roots in African American folk culture.

 

Giscombe calls hearing this song "among my early encounters with the stuff of poetry."  The nuisance creature poem is an important aspect of nature poetry that Dungy's anthology brings, literally and metaphorically, out of the woodwork.

Black Nature

I've been longing to read and write about (and write poems with) Camille T. Dungy's anthology, Black Nature:  Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry ever since Dungy came to Austin as the guest of the Pro Arts Collective this spring. I've finally run through my backlog of English garden photos from my summer travels, so today I was able to sit down with this luscious, thoughtful book.

the earth is a living thing

 

is a black shambling bear

ruffling its wild back and tossing

mountains into the sea

 

is a black hawk circling

the burying ground circling the bones

picked clean and discarded

 

is a fish black blind in the belly of water

is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal

 

is a black and living thing

is a favorite child

of the universe

feel her rolling her hand

in its kinky hair

feel her brushing it clean

                                -Lucille Clifton

In her introduction, Dungy points out that in ecopoetics, a new-millenium movement denoting writing with a strong ecological emphasis or message, African Americans "have been generally absent from tables of contents."  Indeed, at the recent Poets and Scholars symposium at The University of Texas, Lesley Wheeler said at a roundtable that for her, ecopoetics seems to be a way to create another white canon in the wake of the opening-up of American poetry more generally to non-white voices. 

And yet, as Ravi Howard points out in one of the ten brief critical essays included here, "Waves of paradise carried slave ships.  In southern woodlands grew both emancipation oaks and hanging trees.  (Could some have been both?  Can we ever know?)  Along with the rice, tobacco, and cotton, the enslaved grew okra and yams, pieces of home for many transpanted Africans.  The connections to nature, those that haunt and those that nurture, have been with us all along."

More soon as I continue to work through this amazing book.

 

Gertrude Jekyll Garden at Lindisfarne Castle

We had spent most of the morning waiting in an Edinburgh queue for our rental car.  Then Milo had to go to the bathroom so we stopped in Dunbar on the Scottish coast, where we enjoyed the self-proclaimed "Best Loo of 2010" facilities. In addition to the loo (which really was pretty fantastic), Dunbar boasts the ruins of a "slighted" castle, one deliberately destroyed in 1568 to prevent it falling into enemy hands.  The castle is set on a promontory in Victoria Harbor, the day was fresh and beautiful, and we lingered.  The children rolled down the steep grassy embankment to the harbor again and again. 

So by the time we got to Lindisfarne Castle, our destination for the day, it was early afternoon.  I had plucked this site from the British Heritage Pass list in haste, thinking it had literary associations.  A Scott novel?  (It turned out to be where the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of England's finest surviving illuminated manuscripts, was created in the eighth century.  Oh well.)  The castle is on Holy Island off the coast of Northumberland, and can only be reached by a causeway.  The causeway, in turn, is accessible only at low tide.  And the tide comes back in at 3:45 p.m. in August. 

We raced across the causeway and skidded into the parking lot just in time to catch the last shuttle bus up to the castle.  Our first acquaintance with the truly impenetrable Northumberland accent was when the driver told us, not once but several times, that we would not get to the castle in time for the last entry at 2:30.  We just kept saying we wanted to try.

We hustled the children up the steep stone path to the castle entrance.  As we were showing our pass to get in, I noticed a pamphlet about the Gertrude Jekyll garden at Lindisfarne.  Which I had not known.  Anything.  About.

I pretty much lost my mind, abandoned Madge and the kids, and raced across the meadow to the small walled garden Jekyll created with her collaborator, the architect Edwin Lutyens, who renovated the castle in the Arts and Crafts style starting in 1901.  The two worked together on some famous commissions, but this one, for publishing magnate Edward Hudson, is one of the few that remains.  Hudson featured the work of Lutyens and Jekyll, as well as their writings on home and garden design, in his iconic magazine Country Life, confirming their status as households names of the English domestic arts. 

I like to think of Jekyll as the Gertrude Stein of English garden history.  (She never married, and wore men's boots.)

Although the garden had fallen into disrepair by mid-century, it was restored according to Jekyll's original plan when the property was acquired by the National Trust in 1944.  It's one of only four Jekyll gardens left in the world.  I had stumbled upon a jewel.

Jekyll's designs are known for their untouched sweeps of lawn and naturalistic planting.  Hudson had originally envisaged a vast landscaped area stretching from the original 16th-century walled garden all the way up to the castle walls, creating a unified work of art from house and garden as was typical of Lutyens-Jekyll collaborations.  But he ran out of money by the time Jekyll began work in 1911, so she was constrained to this rather boxy design.  Needless to say, she rocked it.

Jekyll's signature massed beds of one color,

and unique cultivars--she herself developed almost 60 new varieties and introduced hundreds more to English gardens from around the world--including woolly lambs-ear, a staple of Austin gardens--

bear all the marks of her signature style.  She used form as well as color to shape her garden artifacts.

I had only about fifteen minutes in this treasure-box before the tide rolled in.  I snapped pictures so quickly I actually broke my camera and had to use my iPhone for the rest of our trip.  Madge and the kids almost had to drive off the island without me.

All the more precious for that.