Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I
must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to
aery thinness beat ….
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me
end where I begun.
From
“A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne
The Meridian Gallery in San Francisco (see my previous
post -- 2/17/12 -- about their
wonderful Patrick Graham exhibition) is presenting a show, now extended through
July 14th, called “The Painted Word,” co-curated by Peter Selz and
Sue Kubly. I will focus here
on seven participants: William
Saroyan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Kenneth Rexroth, Jack Hirschman, Robert Duncan,
Henry Miller, and Kenneth Patchen.
Audiences have become used to painters inserting words,
phrases or poems in their work, as in Abstract Expressionist Robert
Motherwell’s “Je t’aime (I love you)” below):
But we are not used to thinking about poets attempting, and
succeeding at, painted poetry. Only the drawn and hand-printed plates of
William Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (completed in
1793) come to
mind:
And then? Most
of us cannot imagine any successors to Blake. This show changed all that for
me. Poets paint. There was a movement, loosely grouped, endlessly defined, that
co-existed with Abstract Expressionism: the Beat generation. I should say, up front, that not every
writer in this show is included in various lists of Beat poets (William Saroyan
paints, but does not “Beat” in any list, for example), and that not all poets who
came of age in the 1940’s and 1950’s painted their works on canvas (Allen
Ginsberg among them). But they
don’t know what they missed -- this show is that compelling.
To better understand these writers and their era, I have
been reading The Typewriter is Holy: The
Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation, by Bill Morgan,
recommended to me by the staff of City Lights Bookstore (which, along with the
Meridian Gallery, deserves a visit).
Morgan makes a claim up front for the differences among these writers: “Friendship held these writers
together, more than style or ideology” (xvii). Allen Ginsberg is central to Morgan’s research, the figure
around whom, the author says, the Beats moved. Ginsberg was not a painter, but
he did set Blake’s poems to his own musical compositions (p.228) And so it
seems that almost all of these writers considered working in another medium, or
even with another medium. Here is proof;
the show includes a poster of a Kenneth Patchen reading, accompanied by André
Previn’s jazz, in Oakland (all images from here on are courtesy of The Meridian Gallery):
Breaking boundaries. This show at Meridian pulls together
writer/artists working from the mid-1940’s to the 2010’s and makes us SEE the
fullness of what the arts are and, specifically, what painting and poetry might
BE if we can only see them, combined.
One of the seminal poets whose paintings are represented in
this show is Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His book, A Coney Island of the Mind, is still in print, and is one of the best known books of poetry from this period, so
Ferlinghetti can help introduce us to this way of thinking and feeling. A
stanza follows:
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making.
It is critical, that stress on “absurdity /and death.”
Coney Island poems were different from Shakespeare and
W.H. Auden; they felt irreverent, immediate, and a little scary. I found an article, last week, that was
first published in
The New York Times
Magazine on November 16, 1952, called “This is the Beat Generation,” by
John Clellan Holmes (
www.litkicks.com/Texts/This
isBeatGen.html). He writes
that there are two main reactions to post-WWII America: people became conformists
(what he calls “the young Republicans”) or Beats (what he calls the1950’s
“hipsters”). Holmes writes:
“More than mere weariness, [Beat] implies the feeling of
having been
used, of being raw. It involves a sort of nakedness of mind,
and,
ultimately, of soul; a feeling of being reduced to a bedrock
of
consciousness. In short, it means being undramatically
pushed up
against the wall of oneself …. [This generation had seen war
and, much
as they are unwilling to go back into that void] they have
never been
able to keep the world out of their dreams …. They had
intimate experience
with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct …. [their
experiences]
led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity,
hucksterism, and
Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later …. Their
excursions into drugs or
promiscuity come out of curiosity, not disillusionment …. How to live
seems to them much more crucial than why …. The valueless
abyss of
modern life is unbearable …. [And yet] beneath the excess [of the Beats]
and the conformity [of the young Republicans] there is
something other
than detachment. There are the stirrings of a quest.”
And isn’t that the point, really, that all of us, and all
writers and artists, face the question of How
to live? That life, and art, involve a kind of realization of the “nakedness of
mind,” a “curiosity,” and “the stirrings of a quest”? The unease we sometimes
feel, the restlessness and eagerness to find ourselves, and even the fear of what
we will find, isn’t that central to our age, even now?
That is why this exhibition is so important, because it
connects us, through works we are unlikely to see together ever again, to a
larger world of art that helps us see that “abyss” and re-work it into
something we can -- perhaps -- confront through paint and
words. And it is their knowing that the “perhaps” is always there
that leads these writers to jump into the paint with such abandon and apparent
joy.
The first set of works I would like to mention seem to me to
be all about a kind of wild exuberance. Just look at Henry Miller’s “Untitled”
(in a corner he has written “1954”):
It is free, and happy; this painting bears no resemblance to
the art of the Abstract Expressionists, with its European roots. This is a fully local, American art,
with a couple, a church, a house as if seen in a dream, lush colors, a fully-realized
life. Miller is not someone we
think of as a Beat. And yet there
is a connection: in The Holy Typewriter, Bill Morgan notes
that because of the positive outcome of the 1957 censorship trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti (who had published Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems) Grove Press would later be able to
publish Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (p.
129). And Miller would appear at
an international writers’ conference in 1962 in Edinburgh with William
Burroughs and Mary McCarthy and Norman Mailer, a conference where Burroughs was
championed by McCarthy, one of the endorsements that would make him famous
(Morgan, p. 195).
William Burrough’s
Naked
Lunch (see an excellent short
introduction to him here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113610846)
would suffer its own censorship trial, but survive, like
Howl, to sell and inspire well beyond anything he might have imagined.
Morgan’s book details Burrough’s
rough life, from addiction, to murder, to writing influential books with the
intense support of his friends. But
Burrough’s visual art can be gestural, luminous, layered, and filled with
color, as here in the very large “Piece for City People,” from 1993:
I love these pinks, rusts and purples, and the combination
of the sweeping brushstroke and the smaller circles.
The third in this “exuberant” series of works, one of the
striking pieces on the first floor of the show, is “Dipthong,” from 2010, by
Jack Hirschman:
We can see drips, a possible figure or animal,
writing-not-quite-writing, and kind of brash use of color and shape. There’s a
famous story about Hirschman; he sent work to Ernest Hemingway, who replied:
"I can't help you, kid. You write better than I did when I was 19. But the
hell of it is, you write like me. That is no sin. But you won't get anywhere
with it." Hirschman lives in
San Francisco, was its poet laureate, and is an activist, poet and painter. Here
are a few lines of his from “Who Cares” (printed in Left Curve no.21):
…. he said, speaking of
the future some thirty odd
years ago, of this visual
listening to light
just below the surface of things,
this planetary All in you, constructed
of holocausts and ecstasies, the snail's inch
and the worker's steel, demonstrations and
monotonies, golem and robot, opens to receive
most stumblingly, hungrily, desolately, authentically
sounds from deep within the wilding stillness
and there, when five small human bones tug
at your sleeve of skin, the question-mark
falls away and you know who cares.
There is a continuity here between the poetry and painting,
lines in each one that keep moving, verbs that jump, colors that jump, waking
you up.
The fourth set of paintings that seems to me to be completed
in this bouncy, buoyant mode comes from Lawrence Ferlinghetti. His book of poems, Coney
Island, had helped create his reputation, and Ferlinghetti would help others as he
published their work through his City Lights Press. In January 1967, Gary
Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Michael McClure and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
were all on the stage at the San Francisco Human Be-In, an event billed as A
Gathering of Tribes which “marked the start of what became known as “the Summer
of Love” (Holy Typewriter, p. 223).
His poems are known for their easy, hip, cool, accessible language,
language that offers more each time the reader returns to it. Here is a bit of
“4,” from the painterly book Pictures of
a Gone World:
And
in the poet’s plangent dream I saw
no
Lorelei upon the Rhone
nor
angels debarked at Marseilles
but
couples going nude into the sad water
in
the profound lasciviousness of spring
in
an algebra of lyricism
which
I am still deciphering
Ferlinghetti’s paintings, shown at Meridian, are sometimes political
(“Mother Russia”) or historical (“Freud”) or amusing (“Bagno di seni,” a man in
a bathtub filled with breasts) but they are all like a single line of a poem:
one thought, selected carefully, then writ or painted large. Here is a center detail of the wall-sized homage to Picasso, "Pablo" from 1991. The painter
is surrounded by his creations:
The painter seems to be behind a glass wall, in his own
world, unapproachable, but captured, with his women and what seem to be forms
from Guernica floating all around him. “Pablo” is painted in primary colors, an
interesting choice for a painter who preferred grays and browns. “If he were here with us,” Ferlinghetti
seems to be saying ….
I found, on thinking about the show after I saw it, that a
second set of works seemed to present themselves. These are the quieter, more
contemplative pieces that gave this post its title, the “gold to aery thinness
beat.” I felt as though these
paintings, with their acknowledgement of all that has passed, still found the
beauty and the feeling in what remains, just as Donne’s narrator does in his
poem :”Valediction.” It is not “A breach, but an expansion.”
“I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of
painting in an attempt to extend," said Kenneth Patchen (who also read
poems to jazz accompaniment and wrote a play with John Cage). Patchen would be one of the first poets
published by Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Press. He had attended the University of Wisconsin, and knew T.S.
Eliot and William Carlos Williams, yet had to work as a migrant and was
confined to bed for his final 13 years, years when he wrote and painted some of
his best work. Patchen played with
the poetic tradition:
Sunday,
April 8th (168
With this rose, I thee world. Fashioned in Love, its
color the
color
of heart’sblood! See, though its leaves do wilt and fall, yet
is
it rose; and never any mean or sullied thing. Wonder it!
Meridian has, for sale, a portfolio of delicate silkscreened
poems on handmade paper by Patchen; they must be handled with gloves, but they
are very beautiful, sometimes funny, always playing with whether colors or
words are foremost. Here is a
painting from the show, a kind of “valediction,” called “#160 Untitled,” from
the 1960’s:
“Shape-shifting was the essence of his art,” wrote the
critic Jonathan Clark (in Kenneth Patchen:
A Centennial Selection, Kelly’s Cove Press, p. 9. This book is also at
Meridian, and gives you a good idea of how linked drawing and poetry were for Patchen). The painting here shape-shifts on its
own. Roses? Snakes? Planted fields with gold shot through
the air? Patchen also writes
prose; here is a bit of “A
Pasturized Scene” (all crazed spellings are his):
“A
little roly poly Giant Sloth chanced to be picking an bouquet of dryish blue
skullcaps, when, without any warning whatever, an impetuous Cow dashed from a
doorway hung with swinging bags and began at once to make wild threats against
his continued safety. Much enamoured as he was by their vague, barny smell and
puffy sponge-veined lips, he made in turn ….”
In addition to Shakespearean and Hefnerian sexual innuendoes
(which I haven’t quoted here) the Beats had a more than a streak of Edward Lear….
Kenneth Rexroth was also one of the first writers published
by City Lights and helped fight for Ferlinghetti’s Howl to be published (Holy
Typewriter, pp. 127-8). Here
is the conclusion to the poem “Gic to Har” (from www.poets.org):
I
remember a sycamore in front of a ruined farmhouse,
And
instantly and clearly the revelation
Of a
song of incredible purity and joy,
My
first rose-breasted grosbeak,
Facing
the low sun, his body Suffused with light.
I was
motionless and cold in the hot evening
Until
he flew away, and I went on knowing
In my
twelfth year one of the great things
Of my
life had happened.
Thirty
factories empty their refuse in the creek.
On
the parched lawns are starlings, alien and aggressive.
And I
am on the other side of the continent
Ten
years in an unfriendly city.
You can see here a lyricism, disrupted, and mourned for.
Rexroth’s painting “San Marco” from 1956 has the same mournful, profound
beauty:
I stood before this for quite awhile. The layers are really
moving.
Along with Patchen and Rexroth, Robert Duncan’s paintings
lend themselves to a long, hard, meditative look. Here is “Flower Design,” from 1950:
It is a Vuillard, a Matisse, but goes all over, right to the
edges, as if to say the dance continues… Duncan’s poems have an edge that he
does not pull into his paintings. See
these few lines from the prose poem “Structure of Rime XX,” from his Selected Poems:
….You
keep the unknown bird hidden in your hands as if to carry sight into
the
house. But the sightless ones have opend the windows and listen to the songs
outside. Absence, the Mother of
Blindness tells them, rimes among the
feathers of birds that exist only in sight. The songs you hear fall from their
flight light like the shadows stars cast among you.
You
must learn to lose your heart. Let the beat of your heart go. Missing the beat.
And from the care of your folded hands unfold a feeling in the room of an empty
space….
And then there is this fabulous work, “Untitled,” which you
must imagine as large (and then go and see it):
It is as if Duncan wanted a light, free, and easy touch in
the allover paintings that he could not place in his poetry. For him, but not
for the other poets, there was a difference between the painted and the written
work.
The last of the writer-painters in this “quieter” group is
William Saroyan, best known as a playwright, novelist and short-story writer. One of his works is suspended from the
gallery ceiling. He once told a
younger writer "Try to learn to breathe deeply; really to taste food when
you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be
wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell." In
this, he is a Beat, although he isn’t mentioned in The Typewriter is Holy.
Saroyan, like Duncan, paints all-over lines (that would later be
“discovered’ anew by Brice Marden in his “Cold Mountain” series). Here is
Saroyan’s wonderfully-titled “Paris Grass and Other Stuff (June 9, 1961)”:
Grass looks just like that, doesn’t it? Especially in
Paris. And here is my favorite
painting by him, called “Orange on Top of Typed Sheet” from 1973:
This seems a fitting piece with which to end this
review. It’s a typescript that has
been painted over, and yet we can still read bits of the type, and where we
can’t, the artist has transcribed (illegibly!) some of the blotted-out words.
Paint, ink, type, paper … it doesn’t get more basic than that. The show is up
until July 14. Go and see it for yourself. And let me know what you think!
