Women Painting Words and Writing Pictures:
Re-configuring Verbal and Visual Art in Contemporary
British Women’s Poetry
Paula Alexandra V. R. Guimarães
U N IV E R S ID A D E D O M IN H O
The lineage and the l anguage of the so -cal led ‘ekphrastic’ poem,
popularised by male Romantic poets as John Keats in “To a
Grecian Urn” (1819) or P.B. Shelley in “On the Medusa of
Leonardo Da Vinci” (1819), seem to reaff irm the notion of the
woman as aesthetic obj ect and of the man as obser ver or
contemplator. Traditionally, the poems that associate the verbal
and the visual tend to establish a tension between the act of
looking and the act of reading, which in turn accentuates the
obj ectification of the woman ve r bally represented on the page. But
if the theories about the interac tion of verbal and visual artistic
media are as old as poetry itself (Horace’s Ut pictura poesis ), the
notion that the ‘ekphrastic’ process can impl y the control and
possession of the woman represented in that work of art is
relatively recent.
This paper proposes to anal yse the way in which
contemporar y British women’s poetr y, embodied by such di verse
authors as Stevie Smit h, Lynette Roberts , Liz Lochhead and Carol
Ann Duff y, contested and re-used the technique of ekphrasis in
order to adapt it to its own purposes. The respective wor ks of
Lochhead and Duffy not only revise the traditional representation
of woman throu gh art history but also suggest the verbal as a for m
of revision, a reconfiguration of the visual and of the limitations
that it often i mpose s. In turn, Smith’s wor k suggests the
importance and the ambi valence of the act of seeing, it is a mixed
art that uses the fricti on between the visual and the verbal (rushed
sketching and parallel commentar y ) as a deliberate strategy of
contestation. Roberts, as an assumed paint er and poet , insists on
the separation of the several media that she utilises, sensing that
her profusely coloured verbal art should evoke the visual without
recurring to the illustration as such. These women poets and
artists seem, therefore, to re confi gure and problematize the
supremacy of the verbal through the strategic use of the visual in
their own art.
… th e i ma g e s o f a p o et [ …] a re co mp a c t o f a th o u sa n d
su g g e st io n s o f wh ich th e vi su a l i s o n ly th e mo st o b v io u s o r th e
u p p e r mo s t .
( Vir g i nia W o o l f, Th e Ci n ema , 1 9 2 9 )
1
In his groundbreaking works Iconology (1986) and Picture
Theory (1994), W.J.T. Mitchell has treated the relation between
literature
and
the
visual
arts
as
a
‘paragonal’
struggle
for
dominance between the image and the word; his history of literature
is, thus, fundamentally seen and interpreted as a conflicted response
to visual art. Writing specificall y about ‘the poetics of ekphrasis’,
James Heffernan defines it as “the verbal representation of visual
representati on” and sees it as an enduring genre, with us for nearl y
three thousand years (Museum of Words, 1993: 3). 1 Heffernan also
argues that ekphrasis “evokes the power of the silent image even as
it subjects that power to the rival authority of language” ( ibidem 1),
it “stages a contest between rival modes of representation : […] the
driving force of the narrating word and the stubborn resistance of
the fixed image” (6, m y emphasis). But he significantl y adds that
the context it stages is often powerfull y gendered:
[ …] t he e xp r es s io n o f a d u el b et ween ma le a n d fema l e g a ze s , t h e vo ice
o f ma le sp eec h str i vi n g to co n tro l a fe ma le i m ag e t ha t i s b o t h all u ri n g
and t hr e at e ni n g . ( 1 9 9 3 : 1 , m y e mp ha s i s)
Heffernan also reminds us that besides ekphrasis, or the
representati on of a painting or sculpted figure in words, the
influence of the visual arts in literature takes at least two other
forms: ‘Pictorialism’, a method that generates in language effects
that are similar to those created by pictures (namel y, foc using,
framing, scanning, etc.); and ‘Iconicit y’, a process embracing not
onl y visual properties but other sets of relations, including sounds,
resulting in “a visible resemblance between the arrangement of
words or letters on a page and what they signify”, t ypical of the
‘pattern poem’ (ibidem 3). Heffernan sees ekphrasis as an especiall y
1
As a n c i e n t , H e f f e r n a n r e mi n d s u s , a s t h e f a m o u s d e s c r i p t i o n o f ‘ t h e s h i e l d o f
Achilles’ in Homer’s Iliad. Ekphrasis during the Greek period included descriptions
o f s u c h b a t t l e i m p l e m e n t s , a s w e l l a s f i n e c l o t h i n g, h o u s e h o l d i t e m s o f s u p e r i o r
c r a ft s m a n s h i p ( u r n s , c u p s , b a s k e t s ) , a n d e x c e p t i o n a l l y s p l e n d i d b u i l d i n gs . I n t h e
t we n t i e t h c e n t u r y, W. H . Au d e n r e - e n vi s i o n e d H o m e r 's s t o r y i n h i s p o e m " Th e S h i e l d
o f A c h i l l e s , " r e p l a c i n g h i s i m a ge s w i t h a p o c a l yp t i c o n e s : b a r b e d wi r e a n d b a r e fi e l d s ,
r a p e a n d mu r d e r , b u r e a u c r a t s a n d s e n t r i e s .
2
interesting technique because it
entails
prosopopeia , or “the
rhetorical technique of envoicing a silent object” (6); he argues that
“Ekphrasis speaks not onl y about works of art but also to and for
them” (ibidem 7), thus staging a revolution of the image against the
word: “In talking back to and looking back at the male viewer, the
images envoiced by ekphrasis challenge at once the controlling
authorit y of the male gaze and the power of the male word”
(Heffernan, 1993: 7).
Paradoxicall y, Heffernan onl y traces his poetics of ekphrasis
in a strictl y male tradition that goes from Homer to Ashbery, and
includes names such as those of Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats,
Browning and Auden. 2 No female tradition of ekphrastic poetry is
mentioned, including the figure of Sappho, the names of Felicia
Hemans, Letitia Landon and Christina Rossetti in the nineteenth
century, and the more recent ones of Stevie Smith, Carol Ann Duffy
and Liz Lochhead, just to refer a few. 3 Notwithstanding this neglect,
Romantic ekphrasis such as it was practised by the poets of the first
and second generations, and some Victorian poets as well, would be
sustainedl y commented upon and criticised by contemporary British
women poets.
John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), a poem that
explicitl y feminises the work of art, figuring it as “a still
unravished bride”, paradigmaticall y reflects the inherent tendenc y
of ekphrasis to conceive aesthetic relations between poet and a rt
object in terms of gender and sex role. P. B. Shelley’s poem “On the
Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci” (1819), in its turn, muses upon a
painting of Medusa’s silent and decapitated head, which is also
2
O n e r e l a t i ve l y r e c e n t e x a m p l e o f e k p h r as i s i s W . H . A u d e n ’s p o e m “ M u s é e d e s B e au x
A r t s ” ( 1 9 4 0 ) . Th e p o e m ’ s d e s c r i p t i o n o f t h e p l o u gh m a n i n B r u e g h e l ’ s L an ds c ap e w i t h t h e
F a l l o f I c a r u s p r o vi d e s a n i n t e r p r e t a t i o n o f t h e p o e m a n d p l a c e s t h e i m a g e i n t h e
c o n t e xt o f Au d e n ’ s vi s i t t o t h e B r u s s e l s M u s e u m a n d t h e o t h e r wo r k s o f t h e “ o l d
masters” kept there.
3
A f e m a l e t r a d i t i o n i s n o t o n l y i mp l i c i t i n t h e p o e t i c r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s o f i m a g e s a n d
s c u l p t u r e s o f t h e G r e e k p o e t e s s a n d o t h e r m yt h o l o g i c a l o r h i s t o r i c a l w o m e n , p r e s e n t
i n t h e wo r ks o f H e m a n s a n d L a n d o n , b u t a l s o i n t h e P r e - R a p h a e l i t e p o e m s o f C h r i s t i n a
R o s s e t t i ( “ I n a n A r t i s t ’ s S t u d i o ” ) a n d E l i z a b e t h S yd a l l .
3
gazing at the petrified male observer. As Mark Sandy argu es
(Poetics of Self and Form , 2005), “both these l yrics alternate
between the art work as poetic subject and its observer as the
subject of the poem”, both “confront the price that must be paid for
attaining an ideal and immutable beaut y” (78).
Both Shell ey’s imaginati vel y retrospective account of his
experience in the Florentine Galler y and Keats’s invented
recollection of a museum visit dissol ve a distinction between the
consciousness of the obser ving subj ect and the artistic obj ect
under obser vation. Wh ether imagined or real, these artworks
become for Keats and Shelley symbols which enable a dialogue of
the self with the self ( Sandy, 2005: 79) .
Typicall y, these male poetic accounts of aesthetic experience do not
contemplate or include the ‘dialogue of t he self with the Other’, the
feminine, as this one is not given a voice of its own in the poem
(being either dead or petrified ).
The
emergence
of
the
feminine
Other,
and
its
problematization as an art object, would occur in later poets,
namel y in Robert Br owning, who deliberatel y reverses the Ovidian
myth of artistic creation, Pygmalion and Gallatea, in several of his
poems, namel y “My Last Duchess” and “Women and Roses”. 4 In the
latter, and as an emerging artist, Browning contemplates and
questions his fem inine objects in the following terms:
II
Round and round, li ke a dance of snow
In a dazzling drift, as its guardians, go
Floating the women faded for ages,
Sculptured in stone, on the poet's pages .
[…]
IV
Stay then, stoop, since I cannot cli mb,
You, great shapes of the antique time !
How shall I fix you, fire you, freeze you ,
Break my heart at your feet to please you?
Oh, to possess and be possessed!
(lines 4 -7, 16 -20, my emphasis)
4
“ M y L a s t D u c h e s s ” ( 1 8 4 5 ) i s a d r a m a t i c m o n o l o gu e b a s e d o n a D u k e ’ s c o n t e m p l a t i o n
a n d c o m m e n t a r y o f h i s d e c e a s e d w i f e ’ s p o r t r a i t , a R e n a i s s a n c e fr e s c o , a n d b e h a vi o u r .
I t r a i s e s i mp o r t a n t g e n d e r a n d a r t i s t i c i s s u e s i n t e r m s o f o b j e c t i v e a n d s u b j e c t i v e
representation.
4
Feminist critics have long been concerned with male appropriations
of the female body, but onl y recentl y have women art historians and
critics given sustained attention to the way that this colonisation is
reflected in male theorising about the nude – the visual art form
which, for Danette DiMarco, is probably the most concrete example
of this gender imperialism. 5
Within the verbal arts , a similar challenging of the ‘ nude’
tradition could be said to inform the Feminism of contemporary
British poet Carol Ann Duffy, labelled the poet of "post -post war
England: Thatcher's England". 6 It is the title poem from her 1985
collection, Standing Female Nude , that is most central to a
deconstruction
of
the
traditional
attitudes
toward
this
issue.
Conversel y, an instructive example of a poem which epitomises the
male tradition can be found pr ecisel y in Robert Browning's "With
Francis Furini," published in his 1887 collection, Parleyings with
Certain People of Importance in Their Day .
Aside
from
their
oppositional
stance,
what
makes
this
Duffy/Browning pairing so provocative, for DiMarco, is “t he wa y
that both employ a dialogic format and incorporate the voices of
absent others: Browning's poem is structured as a conversation with
the Renaissance painter Furini in which the tradition of nude
painting is defended; Duffy's poem is structured as the response of
a female model to the male artist who is painting her ” (1998: 1, m y
emphasis). She encodes and deconstructs the ideology informing
traditional arguments, whereby her poem functions as a defense of
5
S e e h e r j o u r n a l a r t i c l e e n t i t l e d “ E xp o s i n g N u d e A r t : C a r o l A n n D u f f y’ s R e s p o n s e t o
R o b e r t B r o wn i n g ” ( Mo s a i c , 1 9 9 8 ) . P a r t i c u l a r l y i m p o r t a n t h e r e i s L yn d a N e a d ' s T h e
F e m a l e N u d e : A r t , O b s c e n i t y a n d S e x u a l i t y ( 1 9 9 2 ) w h i c h d e l i b e r a t e l y t a k e s i s s u e wi t h
K e n n e t h C l a r k 's h i t h e r t o a u t h o r i t a t i ve s t u d y, T h e N u d e : A S t u d y I n I d e a l A r t ( 1 9 5 6 ) .
N e a d fo r e g r o u n d s t h e w a y t h a t C l a r k 's s t u d y i gn o r e s a n d / o r e v a d e s g e n d e r i s s u e s , a n d
i n t h e p r o c e s s s h e i d e n t i fi e s a n d c h a l l e n ge s a p h i l o s o p h i c t r a d i t i o n wh i c h p r e s e n t s t h e
m a l e a r t i s t a s t r a n s l a t o r o f m a t t e r i n t o fo r m a n d wh i c h p o s i t i o n s t h e f e m a l e m o d e l a s
t h e o b j e c t t o b e t r a n s m o gr i f i e d .
6
Th e o r i gi n a l l a b e l i s b y A l l e n - R a n d o l p h ( 1 9 9 5 ) . A p h i l o s o p h e r b y t r a i n i n g, D u f f y
h a s p u b l i s h e d a n u mb e r o f c o l l e c t i o n s o f h e r p o e t r y - S e l l i n g Ma n h a t t a n ( 1 9 8 7 ) , T h e
O t h e r C o u n t r y ( 1 9 9 0 ) , Me a n t i m e ( 1 9 9 3 ) , T h e Wo r l d ’ s Wi f e ( 1 9 9 9 ) a n d R a p t u r e
( 2 0 0 5 ) . I n 2 0 0 9 , s h e b e c a m e t h e U K 's t w e n t i e t h P o e t L a u r e a t e a n d i s n o w o n e o f
B r i t a i n 's b e s t kn o wn a n d m o s t a d m i r e d p o e t s .
5
the model. The techniques employed by the two poets serve, for
DiMarco, to foreground issues of authority, and particularl y Duffy's
subtle manipulation of the dramatic monologue format serves to
enlist the kind of reader/viewer participation that is central to post
structural and post modern art criticism (ibidem 2).
Although for Browning the problem of critical standards and
appreciation of nude studies was the narrow -mindedness of the
Victorian public, his conception of art’s human character becomes
problematic as he argues here for an archet ypal be auty and
simplicit y implicit in the female form; Furini’s models were real
enough but his ambition was to paint
That marvel ! which we dream the fir mament
Copies in star -device when fancies stray
Outlining, orb by orb, Andromeda -God’s best of beauteous and magnificent
Revealed to earth -- the naked female form .
(lines 139 -43, my emphasis)
Browning argues for the form of woman as a sign, constructed by
God and man, to signify a m ysterious Other that is both related to
and distinct from men’s experience. To preserve the innocence of
the gaze, then, Browning’s idealisation of the female figure strips
both
women
and
men
of
their
sexualit y
and
historical
circumstances.
In contrast, Duffy’s deliberate engagement with her era’s
typical individualist economic issues is revealed in “Standing
Female Nude”, published in the 1980s or midway into Thatcher’s
rule. Her dramatic monologue “features a single speaker, an artist’s
model, speaking within the specific situation of readying to leave
the studio after six hour s of posing, being paid, and being show n
the painting” (Kinnahan, 2004: 142-3). 7 Nevertheless, we are given
details of the lives of both the painter and the model: both are in
7
Li n d a K i n n a h a n ’ s c h a p t e r o n “ Th e P o e t i c s o f P u b l i c D i s c o u r s e i n C a r o l An n D u f f y”
i s i n c l u d e d i n h e r l a r ge r wo r k , L y r i c I n t e r v e n t i o n s o f 2 0 0 4 , i n wh i c h s h e e xp l o r e s
l i n gu i s t i c a l l y i n n o v a t i v e p o e t r y b y c o n t e m p o r a r y w o m e n i n N o r t h A m e r i c a a n d
B r i t a i n , s i t u a t i n g a h a l f c e n t u r y o f w o m e n ’ s e xp e r i m e n t a t i o n a n d b r i n g i n g a t t e n t i o n
t o t h e c u l t u r a l c o n t e xt s o f n a t i o n , g e n d e r , a n d r a c e .
6
France and poor, but he is being heralded as a “genius”. Through
the arrangement of her words, her tone and her silences, Duff y
reveals the essence of the woman model; the speaking l yrical self
undergoes a dismantling that reveals the ideological foundations of
class
and
gender.
“The
poem
involves
several
levels
of
representation: the poem’s representation of the model; the model’s
representation of her experience; the artist’s representation of the
model; the museum’s representation of the painting” (Kinnahan,
144).
Six hours li ke this for a few francs.
Belly nipple arse in the windo w li ght,
he drains the colour from me . Further to the right,
Madam. And do tr y to be still.
I shall be represented analyticall y and hung
in great museums. The bour geoisie will coo
at such an i mage of a river -whore. They call it Art.
Maybe. He is concerne d with volume, space.
I with the next meal. [ …]
[…]
He possesses me on canvas as he dips the br ush
repeatedly into the pai nt. Little man,
you’ ve not the money for the arts I sell.
[…]
[…] When it’s finished
he shows me proudl y, […] I say
Twelve francs a nd get my shawl. It does not look like me .
(lines 1 -9, 18 -20, 26 -8, my emphasis)
The ‘self’ is dispersed here within various discourses:
economics and class, the body, Art. She is defined by the
bourgeoisie as a “river -whore”, and by the male artist as b oth a site
of commodification and desire: unable to afford her, he possesses
her “on canvas” and this possession becomes that of the museum
and the middle class. “Artistic representation objectifies the woman
just as patriarchal economic structures objecti fy her as a commodit y
to be bought, sold, possessed” ( Kinnahan, 144). It is not just that
the speaker’s representation is bought, sold, p ossessed, gazed upon;
7
but also the speaker herself is a literal commodit y, selling her body
for the money to survive (145). Thus, Duffy’s poem seems to
suggest that the self and its language are always grounded in
material circumstances. But its final statement is the nude model’s
laconic comment that “It does not look like me”, a brief assertion of
self that subversively escapes the t yranny of representation, and
that corroborates the arbitrary nature of authorised artistic language
– “They call it Art”.
Although the female writer’s re -examination of painting’s
assumptions and expectations is by no means limited to the
twentieth
century,
“the
interdisciplinary
push
of
Modernist
experiment and the new possibilities offered by cinema and
photography meant that poets as diverse as Stevie Smith, Lynette
Roberts and Liz Lochhead seemed particularl y conscious of the
visual” as a privileged aesthetic category (May, 2011: 45).
Due to her art training and her subsequent period as an art
teacher in Glasgow and Bristol, in which she variousl y questioned
the Western tradition, Liz Lochhead (1947-) is the one who “most
deliberatel y
en gages
with
and
attempts
to
rewrite
the
male
ekphrastic tradition” (May, 45). 8 In her earl y poem entitled
“Object” (1972), in which she significantl y poses for an artist, she
offers resistance to that tradition by showing “the process of female
portrait-making” as “continuall y refracted” (45).
In the first part, the poet imagines the problems the artist is
confronted with in the process of representing her, but still
8
S c o t t i s h p o e t a n d p l a y w r i gh t Li z Lo c h h e a d wa s b o r n i n La n a r ks h i r e . H e r f i r s t
c o l l e c t i o n o f p o e m s , M e m o f o r S p r i n g , w a s p u b l i s h e d i n 1 9 7 2 a n d wo n a S c o t t i s h Ar t s
C o u n c i l B o o k A w a r d . A p e r fo r m e r a s w e l l a s a p o e t , s h e b e c a m e a fu l l - t i m e w r i t e r ,
p e r fo r m a n c e p o e t a n d b r o a d c a s t e r . H e r p l a ys i n c l u d e B l o o d a n d I c e ( 1 9 8 2 ) , Ma r y
Queen of Scots Got Her Head Chopped Off (1989), Dracula (1989), Cuba (1997), and
P e r f e c t D a y s ( 1 9 9 8 ) . S h e t r a n s l a t e d a n d a d a p t e d M o l i è r e 's T a r t u f f e ( 1 9 8 5 ) i n t o S c o t s ,
a n d t h e s c r i p t o f h e r a d a p t a t i o n o f E u r i p i d e s ' M e d e a ( 2 0 0 0 ) . H e r l a t e s t wo r k i s a n e w
c o l l e c t i o n o f p o e t r y, T h e C o l o u r o f B l a c k a n d Wh i t e : P o e m s 1 9 8 4 - 2 0 0 3 ( 2 0 0 3 ) a n d a
n e w r o m a n t i c c o m e d y fo r t h e s t a g e , G o o d T h i n g s ( 2 0 0 6 ) . H e r wo r k i s c o n c e r n e d wi t h
t h e p a t r i a r c h a l i n fl e xi o n s o f c u l t u r a l m e m o r y a n d l e g e n d ( m yt h s ) a n d i t d e v e l o p s
s u b v e r s i ve n a r r a t i v e s t r a t e gi e s .
8
criticises his ‘single-angled’ view as implicitl y limited by the rigid
dictates of canvas an d perspective:
I, love,
am capable of being looked at
from many different angles. This
is your problem.
In this cold north li ght it may
seem clear enough.
You pick your point of view
And stick to it, not veering much –
this
being the onl y way to make any sense of me
as a formal object . Sti ll
I do not relish it, being
stated so – my edges defined
elsewhere than I’d i magined them
with a crispness I do not possess .
The economy of your l ine does not spare me
by its hairsbreadth.
(lines 1 -17, my emphasis)
In the second part, the sitter’s verbal description competes with the
visual one of the artist, setting up a dialogue between sketch and
text, detectable in the expression “being stated so”. As in Duffy’s
poem,
the
model
does
not
recognise
herself
in
the
art ist’s
representation, and believes it to be his problem, not hers, that he
can onl y draw her ‘economicall y’, as “a formal object” and “with
crispness” she does not possess. Hers is, therefore, “an aggressive
challenge to the formal certainties of the pictu re” (May, 46) and to
the act of objectification, which is also the subject of the poem.
‘The reductions and elev ations’ suffered by women in art are indeed
present in much of Lochhead’s poetic output.
There is a great concern with depicting women through out art
history, as is the case of the tript ych poem series “The Furies”, in
which the poet refuses to perform ekphrastic double -objectification
and chooses instead to individualise the female figure. Thus, after
situating Pieter Brueghel’s painting ( Dulle Griet, 1562) 9 in its
9
Th e c e n t r a l f i gu r e i n t h e p a i n t i n g i s a wo m a n d e p i c t e d r u n n i n g i n a s c e n e o f
n i gh t m a r i s h i n t e n s i t y; m a d n e s s a n d fo l l y s e e m t o b e t h e d u a l a n d r e l a t e d t h e m e s o f
the Dulle Griet.
9
historical context, the poet suggests the tensions she feels between
the object’s domestic realm in her “mantelpiece” and her own
academic appreciation of it, finall y deciding for a subjective
empathy for or identification with the c haracter of Mad Meg, a
figure of Flemish folklore:
Oh that kitchen knife, that hel met, that silent shout,
I knew Meg from the i nside out .
All she owns in one ar m, that lost look in her eyes.
These days I more than sympathise.
(lines 18 -21, my emphasis)
Lochhead also deals with the problem of how a contemporary
female visual artist might respond to that tradition, namel y in her
1970 poem entitled “Notes on the Inadequacy of a Sketch at
Millport Cathedral”, in which she closel y and criticall y anal yses her
own drawing. The poet assesses both her visual representation and
her verbal depiction of this process in her poem, in which the
problems of reductionism and formalism that affected “Object”
seem to resurface:
I selected what seemed to be essentials.
[…]
[…] But its plain
setting down in black and white
wasn’t enough. Nor underlining
certain subtleties. This sketch became
a simile at best. It’s no metaphor .
(lines 35 -42, my emphasis)
Assuming that the metaphoric becomes the mode to which all art
aspires, this visual seems to offer “a failed figurative language, a
tentative facsimile rather than a transformative work of mimesis”
(May, 47). Thus, Lochhead proposes the verbal as a medium of
revision, of reconfiguration of the visual, both often needing to
work in complementary symbiosis.
If Lochhead’s poetry attempts to release female art objects
and to rewrite th em as individuals, Stevie Smith (1902-1971) had
10
tried precisel y to prevent her work and public persona from
becoming objectified, “working hard to make her oeuvre a process
rather than a product” (May, 49). 10 The importance and the
ambivalence of the visual, and of the act of seeing, in Smith’s life
are present already in her earl y essay of 1937 entitled “Art”, in
which she not onl y offers a curious description of the National
Gallery in London but also asks the question ‘how do people see
pictures?’(May,
49).
Smith’s
three
autobiographical
novels,
published between 1937 and 1949, further suggest a writer’s mind
composed of still images and haunted by galleries, paintings and art
critics. 11
If in her poem “Salon d’Automne”, Smith at ypicall y dismisses
an
exhibition
of
nude
female
painting
as
“pedantic
and
unsympathetic”, in another entitled “Deepl y Morbid” she describes
the experience of a secretary who is taken into a magical land
through a Turner painting in the National Gallery; the suggestive
Blakean tone and the mixed -media subject of the poem become
enhanced by the “contest between Joan’s monotonous world of t ype
and the ineffable possibilities of a painted sky” (May, 50):
[…]
Before the pictures she seemed turned to stone.
Close upon the Turner pictures
Closer than a thought may go
Hangs her eye and all the colours
Leap into a special gl ow
All for her , all alone
All for her, all for Joan.
[…]
Where the awful li ght of purest
Sunshine falls across t he spray
There the burning coasts of fancy
10
An e a r l i e r E n gl i s h w o m a n p o e t , F l o r e n c e M a r g a r e t S mi t h w o r ke d a s a c o m m e r c i a l
s e c r e t a r y a n d l i v e d i n t h e s u b u r b s o f Lo n d o n , t a k i n g c a r e o f h e r a u n t a n d wr i t i n g
p o e t r y , n o v e l s a n d t h e o l o gi c a l w o r ks . Al t h o u gh c h r o n o l o gi c a l l y b e l o n gi n g t o t h e s o c a l l e d ‘ Au d e n ge n e r a t i o n ’ , S mi t h wo u l d r e m a i n l a r ge l y u n c l a s s i f i a b l e . I n t h e 1 9 6 0 s
s h e wo u l d g i v e s e ve r a l r e a d i n g s a n d p e r f o r m a n c e s o f h e r p o e m s . A p a r t fr o m d e a t h ,
c o m m o n s u b j e c t s i n c l u d e l o n e l i n e s s ; m yt h a n d l e g e n d ; a b s u r d vi gn e t t e s , u s u a l l y
d r a wn f r o m m i d d l e - c l a s s B r i t i s h l i f e , w a r , h u m a n c r u e l t y a n d r e l i gi o n .
11
Th e n o ve l s , c o n c e r n e d w i t h t h e p e r s o n a l a n d p o l i t i c a l m a l a i s e i n t h e i m m e d i a t e
p o s t - w a r p e r i o d , a r e t h e f o l l o wi n g : N o v e l o n Y e l l o w P a p e r , O v e r t h e F r o n t i e r a n d T h e
Holiday.
11
Open to her pleasure l ay .
[…]
The spray reached out and sucked her in
It was hardl y a noticed thing
That Joan was there and is not now
(…)
Gone away, gone away
All alone.
She stood up strai ght
The sun fell down
There was no more of London Town
She went upon the pai nted shore
And there she walks for ever more
Happy quite
Beaming bri ght
In a happy happy li ght
All alone.
(lines 19, 20 -5, 38 -44, 51 -6, 57-65, my emph asis)
Morbid Joan’s colourless, dreary life is suddenl y given a meaning
or a purpose through the contemplation of art, and her literal
absorption into what she sees is so complete that she becomes part
of the painting. This rather unexpected trick on the part of the poet
is just one of Smith’s many deceptive visual techniques, and it may
serve as a thin disguise of her own situation as a spinster secretary.
But this is also part of her abilit y to create repeated versions of
herself, “competing editions of the authentic original” (May, 54).
That Smith was tenaciousl y committed to her own art is
suggested throughout her career by her insistence on publishing her
poems with doodled illustrations.
Between
1951 -2, she
even
managed to produce three BBC programs, significantl y entitled
“Poems
and
Drawings”.
Arbitraril y
matched
to
their
verbal
counterparts, the illustrations suggest both the hurried sketch and
the darkl y caricatural influence of Goya and George Grosz. 12
An intermedial art that utilises the friction between the visual
and the verbal as a deliberate form of contestation is precisel y
suggested by Stevie Smith’s balancing between the forms. This
12
G r o s z wa s a G e r m a n a r t i s t kn o wn e s p e c i a l l y fo r h i s s a v a g e l y c a r i c a t u r a l d r a wi n gs
o f B e r l i n l i f e i n t h e 1 9 2 0 s . H e w a s a p r o mi n e n t m e m b e r o f t h e B e r l i n D a d a a n d N e w
O b j e c t i vi t y g r o u p d u r i n g t h e W e i m a r R e p u b l i c b e fo r e h e e m i g r a t e d t o t h e U n i t e d
States in 1933.
12
occurs, namel y, in her famous poem “Not Waving but Drowning”, in
which a “perplexing mismatch between the poem ’s male speaker and
the female figure depicted in the illustration” (May, 51) becomes
obvious. The addition of another possible referent in the form of
this enigmatic figure aims to disorientate a reader that has already
faced the overwhelming ambiguit y of the poem’s final stanza, which
we can interpret as being uttered by the drowning man himself or by
the poem’s narrator:
Nobody heard hi m, the dead man,
But still he lay moani ng:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but dr owning.
[…]
Oh, no no no, it was t oo cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
(lines 1 -4, 9 -12, my emphasis)
Thus, by juxtaposing opposite representations, Smith “questions the
efficacy of visual rep resentation” in this case, and “uses art to
deflect the gaze of the reading audience ” (May, 54). Also the poem
seems to warn its readers against the often deceptive nature and
scope of the human eye, which tragically mistakes the drowning
man/woman’s appeal for a mere salutation. The artificial boundaries
of gender, which the visual makes more evident, are also disrupted
because the “moaning dead man” of Smith’s poem may represent
any suffering human being, including woman or the poet herself.
A contemporary of Smith, the Argentine -Welsh painter and
poet Lynette Roberts (1909 -95), the only Latino -Welsh modernist,
embarked in the earl y 1940s on an intense creative period of
painting
and
writing,
often
in
ill -health,
povert y
and
bleak
13
isolation. 13 She had studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts
during the 1930s and her exceptional and original work brings into
focus the ‘visual literate’ , as well as the groundbreaking use of
cinematography in her poetry. But, from the beginning, Roberts
insisted on se parating her various media: while her paintings
suggest Primitivist colour schemes and subjects , 14 her poems
indicate that she reworked Imagist aesthetics ; they seem to rely “on
visual perception and an optic poetics that goes beyond traditional
ekphrasis” (May, 55). 15
For example, her shorter poem “Rainshiver” suggests the
visual through the actual imprint of the words on a page; not
through the usual recreation of a painting or the register of sense
impressions, but through “an organic union of those compe ting
modes” (May, 56):
Rain
Chills the air and stills the billing birds
To shrill not trill as they should in
This daffodil spring.
(lines 1 -4)
In other poems, her ‘poetic and textual canvas’ is informed by a
profusion of colour and form, from the descr iption of a rural winter
as a “cupboard of darkness” to the Welsh soils which glisten with a
“green impaled with age” (May, 56).
The dense linguistic surface of Roberts’ work is immediately
striking in Gods with Stainless Ears, written between 1941 and
13
L yn e t t e R o b e r t s w a s b o r n i n B u e n o s A i r e s t o a n Au s t r a l i a n f a m i l y o f W e l s h
d e s c e n t . Th e f a mi l y m o v e d t o Lo n d o n d u r i n g t h e F i r s t Wo r l d W a r . R o b e r t s a n d a
f r i e n d s a i l e d t o M a d e i r a a n d s h e h i r e d a s m a l l h o u s e h i gh u p t h e h i l l . I t w a s d u r i n g
t h o s e l o n g d a ys o f f r e e d o m t h a t L yn e t t e fo u n d h e r vo c a t i o n a s a p o e t . S h e t h e n m e t
a n d m a r r i e d t h e We l s h p o e t a n d e d i t o r W i l l i a m R o n a l d R e e s J o n e s ; t wo c h i l d r e n w e r e
b o r n b u t h e r m a r r i a g e w o u l d e ve n t u a l l y f a i l . Th r o u gh t h e S e c o n d Wo r l d W a r ye a r s
R o b e r t s w r o t e a n d s t u d i e d i n q u i e t p e n u r y i n a r e n t e d c o t t a ge a t L l a n yb r i , l a t e r
moving into a caravan . She was a friend of Robert Graves and also met and
c o r r e s p o n d e d w i t h T. S . E l i o t a t F a b e r .
14
P r i mi t i vi s m i s a We s t e r n a r t mo v e m e n t t h a t b o r r o w s vi s u a l fo r m s f r o m n o n - W e s t e r n
o r p r e h i s t o r i c p e o p l e s , s u c h a s P a u l Ga u gu i n 's i n c l u s i o n o f Ta h i t i a n mo t i fs i n
p a i n t i n g s a n d c e r a m i c s . B o r r o wi n g s fr o m p r i m i t i v e a r t h a v e b e e n i m p o r t a n t t o t h e
development of modern art.
15
R o b e r t s h a d t wo c o l l e c t i o n s p u b l i s h e d b y F a b e r i n h e r l i f e t i m e , P o e m s o f 1 9 4 4 ( a
s e c o n d i mp r e s s i o n c a m e o u t i n 1 9 4 5 ) , fo l l o w e d b y G o d s w i t h S t a i n l e s s E a r s . A H e r o i c
Poem, of 1951.
14
1943, and subtitled ‘A Heroic Poem’, written from the port of
Swansea, which was heavil y bombarded during the war. The
excellence of the writing lies in the relationship created between
localit y and the distances and presences of war. The rural landscape
in the piece is shot through with moder n m ythical dimensions; the
vertiginous juxtaposition of perspectives is partl y achieved through
the clash of registers, including scientific, technological and
archaic ones:
In fear of fate, fl ying i nto land Orcadian bir ds pair
And peal away li ke pr aying hands; bare
Aluminium beak to clinic air; frame
Soldier lonel y whistling in full corridor train,
Ishmaelites wailing through the windowpane,
[…]
(lines 31 -5, my emphasis)
The construction of the poem suggest s a four dimensional cube,
bringing together opposite sides or facets : the immediate
eternal; subjective physicalit y
referential
rhythms
of
speech
and the
and objective consciousness; the
or
language
and
the
abstract
contemplation of meaning i n words; words as commun ication
and
words as pattern; the order of nature and the order of angels.
Roberts further disrupts and coerces the tradition of the male
epic through the language of film and documentary ( deliberatel y
using words like “frame” and “cut”) . The generic fluidit y of cinema
is for her a promise of liberation from the reductive gaze implicit in
that male tradition. She herself explains in her Preface that “when I
wrote this poem, the scenes and visions ran before me like a
newsreel […] the poem was written for filming, especiall y Part IV,
where the soldier and his girl walk in fourth dimension among the
clouds and visit the outer strata of our planet ” (May 58, m y
emphasis):
We by centrifugal force … rose softl y …
Faded from bloodsi ght . We, he and I ran
On to a steel escalator , the white
Electric sun drilling down on the cubed ice;
Our cyanite flesh chill ed on alumi nium
Rail.
15
(lines 540 -46)
Precise observation is caught up in dynamic metaphor; the imagery
seems unnatural and artificial, moving restlessl y betwee n acute
visual and verbal sensibilities. Thus, and as May stresses, “Roberts
not onl y draws on a visual aesthetic to inspire and structure her
work, but equall y asks for a peculiarl y visual response to interpret
it” (2011: 58).
All these poets and many ot hers, including U.A. Fanthorpe
(1929-2009), Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) and Eavan Boland
(1944-), rework and recreate both ancient and contemporary male
forms of verbal and visual art. While Fanthorpe’s poems denounce a
voyeuristic male public, which prefers to look instead of reading
and art instead of literature , 16 Jennings is interested in religious art
and believes that the visual offers unit y, form and accurate hand to
her
own
poetry. 17
Like
Lochhead,
Boland
questions
male
representations of women at several points and warns of the
reductive process of representation. 18 Although women’s ekphrastic
tradition may still be a ‘hidden’ or developing poetic genre,
working both as part of and against a Western aesthetic tradition,
these poets repeatedl y take this legacy into their own life and
experience, and manage to transform it back into Art.
References
B R O W N I N G , Robert (1994), The Works of Robert Browning , The
Wordsworth Poetr y Li brary, Ware, Wordsworth Editions.
16
U . A. F a n t h o r p e ’ s p o e m s t h a t b a l a n c e ve r b a l a n d v i s u a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n a r e “ Wo m e n
I r o n i n g ” , “ P o r t r a i t s o f Tu d o r S t a t e s m e n ” , “ Th r e e P o e m s fo r A m y C o o k” a n d “ P a i n t e r
and Poet”.
17
J e n n i n g s h a s c o l l e c t i o n s s i gn i f i c a n t l y e n t i t l e d A Wa y o f L o o k i n g ( 1 9 5 5 ) a n d T h e
S o n n e t s o f Mi c h e l a n g e l o ( 1 9 6 1 ) , a n d a s e r i e s o f p o e t i c t r i b u t e s t o C a r a v a g gi o , C h a ga l l
a n d Go ya .
18
B o l a n d h a s s e ve r a l p o e m s t h a t c r i t i c a l l y e vo k e t h e a r t o f p a i n t e r s l i ke C h a r d i n ,
R e n o i r a n d D e ga s .
16
C L AR K , Kenneth (1956), The Nude: A Study In Ideal Art . Penguin
Art and Architecture Series, Penguin Books.
D I M A R C O , Danette (1998), “Exposing Nude Art: Carol Ann Duff y’ s
Response to Robert Browning” , Mosaic (W in n ip e g, Ca n ad a) , September
1998, pp. 25-39.
DUFFY,
Carol Ann (1994), Selected Poems , London, Penguin Books
and Anvil Press Poetr y.
H E F F E R N A N , James A. W. (1993), Museum of Word s. The Poetics
of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery , Chicago and London, Uni versity of
Chicago Press.
K E A TS , John (1988), The Complete Poems, Penguin Classics,
Penguin Books.
K I N N A H A N , Linda A. (2004), “The Rhetoric of Self, Nation, and
Economics . A Poetics of Public Discourse in Carol Ann Duff y”, Lyric
Interventions. Feminism, Experimental Poetry and Contemporary
Discourse, Iowa City, Uni versity of Iowa Press , pp. 132 -179.
L O C K H E A D , Li z (2011), A Choosing: The Selected Po ems of Liz
Lochhead, Pol ygon, Birlinn Li mited.
M AY , William (2011), “Verbal and Visual Art in Twentieth Centur y British Women’s Poetr y”, The Cambridge Companion to
Twentieth-Century Bri tish and Irish Women’s Poetry , ed. Jane Dowson,
Cambridge, Cambridge Uni versit y Press, pp. 42-59.
MITCHELL,
W. J. T. (1986) , Iconology: I mage, Text, Ideology,
Chicago, Uni versit y of Chicago Press.
M I T C H E L L , W. J. T. (1994) , Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and
Visual Representation, Chicago, Uni versit y of Chicago Press.
NEAD,
Lynda (1992) , The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and
Sexuality, London and New Yor k, Routledge.
R O B E R TS ,
Lynette (2005), Collected
McGuinness, M anchester, Carcanet Press.
Poems,
ed.
Patrick
S AN D Y ,
Mar k (2005), Poetics of Self and Form , Nietzschean
Subjectivity and Genre , Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
S H E L LE Y , P. B. (1956), Selected Poetry, The Penguin Poetry
Library, Penguin Books.
S M I TH ,
Stevie (2002) , Selected Poems, Penguin Books (P enguin
Classics Reprint).
17