What a gorgeous weekend, LeafSalon enjoyed it at the beach as usual. It was a big weekend for culture though, and I for one was desperately gutted (but trying to be a big brave grown-up) that I wasn’t at Splore. I don’t wish to discuss it. Anyway, I indulged in a different spot of culture last weekend when I saw Paula Green and Michele Leggott doing their poetry thing at the Auckland Art Gallery (pictured), responding to the extraordinary work of Frances Hodgkins.

I only had time to whip round the paintings before the readings, but I’ll definitely be back for more this week. My general impressions are of her colours – sea spray green, bleached beige, deep burnt Mediterranean terracotta, ochre, orange and scarlet, and that very 50s chrome yellow. In fact the whole feel to me was 40s/50s textiles and wallpaper, especially in her still lives with their recurring themes of jugs, bowls and fruit. Obviously even though she died in 1947 her themes were widely picked up by the designers who came after her. And the landscapes – I was straight back on that isle of Capri/Mykonos/Cyprus. But we are a lit-blog, so let’s cut to the poetry.

New Zealand is a nation of the most extraordinary poetry/art collaborations (McCahon, Hotere, Pule) and who best to start it off than Paula Green, who is well-known for her passionate poetic responses to art.

Paula chose to look at specific paintings and write of them, to them, from them. However she does it, it works. She's named her poem for the painting, which has come all the way from the Tate gallery in London.

Wings Over Water

Hold the shell to my ear
and I hear distance.
Hold the bird to my ear
and I hear passage.

Hold the drape to my ear
and I hear shadow.
Hold the steps to my ear
and I hear composure.

Hold the vase to my ear
and I hear movement.
Hold the water to my ear
and I hear haziness.

Michele chose to take a different angle in responding to this remarkable woman’s art. Michele has the degenerative eye condition retinosa pigmentosa, which has quite seriously cut down her vision, so she was working largely on Paula’s descriptions of the art, and from visual memory. She hooked on to the leitmotif angle of the exhibition and worked through a few intellectual themes on this.

One of her points was that the beauty of the leitmotif, in art or in poetry (where it can be argued that rhyme or rhythm is the recurring motif) is in the recognition of the same objects in a series of paintings, or the of a rhythm in a poem – it’s ‘the connection of those bright points’ that give satisfaction. Variations on the themes are also important as ‘they remind us of time and distance’.

An extension of this is the fact that several woman artists Michele’s obsessed by at the moment present a spooky leitmotif. They were all around at the same time (late 1860/70s to early 1940s), and they were all nomadic, avant-garde modernists, who pushed their social boundaries, ‘disregarding what was considered proper behaviour for women’. One of these is Frances Hodgkins, another is Ursula Bethel, and the third is the mysterious and magnificent Lola Ridge.

Briefly, Lola Ridge was an Irish-born painter and poet who spent some of her early formative years on the west coast of the South Island married to a goldminer, then left in somewhat murky domestic circumstances and went to Sydney, and finally to San Francisco where she became quite well known. It has started to become apparent however that her years here in Godzone were possibly more productive that has been previously thought, and Michele has become keen to find more of her work from that time.

She read a few of Lola’s poems as a response to the art, since Frances and Lola were leitmotif sisters of a sort. One went straight to my heart as a heart-stoppingly tragic cry from her own. We can print it here thanks to the efforts of Project Gutenberg.

The Edge

I thought to die that night in the solitude where they would never find me...
But there was time...
And I lay quietly on the drawn knees of the mountain,
staring into the abyss...
I do not know how long...
I could not count the hours, they ran so fast
Like little bare-foot urchins – shaking my hands away...
But I remember
Somewhere water trickled like a thin severed vein...
And a wind came out of the grass,
Touching me gently, tentatively, like a paw.

As the night grew
The gray cloud that had covered the sky like sackcloth
Fell in ashen folds about the hills,
Like hooded virgins, pulling their cloaks about them...
There must have been a spent moon,
For the Tall One's veil held a shimmer of silver...

That too I remember...
And the tenderly rocking mountain
Silence
And beating stars...

Dawn
Lay like a waxen hand upon the world,
And folded hills
Broke into a sudden wonder of peaks, stemming clear and cold,
Till the Tall One bloomed like a lily,
Flecked with sun,
Fine as a golden pollen–
It seemed a wind might blow it from the snow.

I smelled the raw sweet essences of things,
And heard spiders in the leaves
And ticking of little feet,
As tiny creatures came out of their doors
To see God pouring light into his star...

... It seemed life held
No future and no past but this...

And I too got up stiffly from the earth,
And held my heart up like a cup...

Whew. We’ve recently been to the Blue Lake at Rotorua, and I was so there on those hills as I listened to Michele read this. She’s very good at it – so much so that I was in a fetal position (on the inside) by the time she’d finished.

I have to say, sitting surrounded by glorious art, listening to glorious poetry was a fairly ideal scenario for me. I spoke to Kim O’Loughlin, the delightful and enthusiastic curator of public programmes at the Art Gallery, and he’s keen to have more of it. Who reckons it’s a good idea? Don’t be shy now.