“In the 1930s the Surrealists
cultivated certain ‘magic’ places.
When I went to stay in Much
Wenlock in the summer of 1972 I
was expecting to find ‘something’
there: I didn’t know what. What I
found was a deep hedge along a
disused railway cutting. This very
ordinary bit of English hedgerow
has occupied my time ever since.”
Adrian Henri July 1973.
Much Wenlock, in short, became
Adrian Henri’s magic place, one to
which he returned, year after year,
to paint and draw in and take
inspiration from for his poetry.
How fitting then that now, some
40 years on, a prize is being
launched here in his name, to
celebrate that interconnectedness
of the poetic and the artistic that
his own life so vividly embodied. It
is a very interesting moment
moreover, to be launching such a
venture, for while the example of
the visual arts may still be of
crucial importance to poets, it is
not so immediately obvious that
the opposite still holds equally
true. Thus the idea of an artwork
as being in possession of poetic
qualities of any kind is not
something you will find all that
many contemporary artists
admitting to, or critics looking out
for and writing about either. Now,
by asking artists openly to name
the poem that has inspired their
work, this new prize takes this
challenge head on, prompting us
all to consider what the nature of
poetry’s relationship to art could
or should be.
While these are questions that can
only fruitfully take place in front of
the works themselves, the
immediate impression from the
pieces illustrated here is that the
answers will prove rich and
various in both subject matter and
artistic form, from the artist/poets
like Henri himself, who provide
their own inspiration, to those for
whom it is the form of a poem,
the feeling of the how rather than
the what of the poem’s meaning,
which provides the crucial point of
artistic engagement. Above all
they will surely reveal, as the
American poet Wallace Stevens
once shrewdly observed, that “To
a large extent, the problems of
poets are the problems of
painters” and that for all their
apparent outward differences, of
stillness rather than movement,
abstraction rather than
signification, art and poetry’s final
ends are not so very dissimilar.
In his great poem on Picasso’s
The
Man with the Blue Guitar
Wallace
Stevens refers to a saying of
Picasso’s that a painting is “une
somme de destructions”,
(translated by the poet to mean “a
horde of destructions”) observing
later, in his still remarkably
relevant 1951 lecture at New
York’s MOMA, “Does not the
saying of Picasso that a picture is a
horde of destructions also say that
a poem is a horde of
destructions?” In short that an
artwork and a poem are always
finally what’s left after everything
else is taken out, the essential,
concentrated thought and feeling.
If that might seem finally to be a
somewhat contrary way of
POETRY & ART
Nicholas Usherwood
is the features editor of Galleries magazine
