Feathers on Glass

To my great excitement Shearsman are putting out my new book of poetry, With Feathers on Glass, in the next couple of weeks. This is the first new book since 2006 so this is a big event for me. (Some of the poems came out in magazines.)

The title refers to the use of feathers, sometimes, for painting on glass (Hinterglasmalerei). A blurb follows: “The original idea of “Feathers on glass” was to get close to folk art. After a long period attempting to learn Gaelic and Welsh, this new poetry is saturated in folk-lore and myth. The paintings are a distribution of cultured art motifs to rural households, patterns copied onto glass with feathers or brushes made of marten-hair. They are an expression of humility towards the illiterate. The idea of cultural difference being the effect of distribution technology was illustrated by the peddlers who carried the glass panes around the villages of central Europe. The interest in shopping follows a previous and prolonged interest in manufacturing and production, completing the sequence. Reminiscences of childhood and the wreck of the great High Street department stores around 2020 combine in a personal mythology of grand motifs and elaborate ruins.
This is a new start after a long period of silence and begins with an inventory of concrete facts around the poet, in his home in Nottingham, close to where he grew up. One theme is defeaturing, the recreation of court and metropolitan art forms in a simpler manner. Radiant messages broken up by distance. A statue park around The Mall allows for a re-enactment of the history of the State.‘Tautology’ is a poem about neuroscience as something setting out to replace self-awareness as an account of how the mind works. It gives a history of the self as a block on perception, behind which an intact world hides. Where the claim to omnipotence of the ego is ruined by the cosmic impartiality of light.
‘Dr Mabuse meets Dr Marcuse’ tells an adventure in which the famed theorist of de-repression and ‘one dimensional man’ faces the more famous super-villain of Weimar cinema, and they struggle for the future of California and its beaches.”

I had to compile a new Selected poems in 2017, which I found difficult, as you might expect. Thirty years of writing. But as a result of the difficulty I got interested again and began having ideas, so the first sketches for Feathers were in about September 2017. I then wrote a lot of poems and I was nervous about the effect and about dividing the poems into two books. I wanted that division to be perfect before going into print. So this delayed things. I don’t really want to get into why I stopped, back in 2005. It had to do with “The Imaginary In Geometry” being very difficult to write and then not getting reviewed when it came out. I felt it was a climax. When it was time to start again, I felt that it was just too difficult and anyway I couldn't do better than “Geometry”. But a whole set of things changed in 2005. My job in London vanished (it wasn’t on the new corporate organogram) but I got a new one in Nottingham. I moved to Nottingham which is about 13 miles from where I grew up, in Loughborough. I think part of the pattern was that in London I was under strain the whole time, the environment was insecure and competitive, and I didn’t belong there. This was very stimulating, in its way. When I moved to Nottingham it was going home and I wasn't under strain any more. What changed, later, was that I acquired a house with a garden, I acquired a cat who liked the garden, and then I retired and didn’t even have to go into the office any more. So I felt united in a new way. I was happy. And this was the basis for new poems. I wanted to write about this and a series of poems set in my garden seemed to be the way forward. What I discovered, hidden under an aggressive elder hedge, was a sink with cockle shell (and snail) decoration: obviously an ornament in imitation of a Grotto. This was naive art in my own back yard. I was very happy with this. It connected to the paintings on glass. The centre had sent something out to the periphery and visibly this was me, I had reached the periphery and had only vague ideas of what was happening in the world’s cultural metropoleis. I had a long relationship with naive art which came to a head with reading Harald Szeemann’s book Visionäre Schweiz. Szeemann just filled me with enthusiasm, like a jug. The shells of the decoration referred to the distant sea, and by an obvious shift they could be referred to the tides, stirring in obedience to the Moon. There was the glimmering of a poem here. The idea was to record the feelings I actually had and to use the processes of naive art to bring them into words. He quotes “a way of thinking that shows magical-animist traits, without sharp separation of fantasy and reality” and in which “the way of thinking and acting is pre-logical, concrete, with symbols, compressions, dislocations; objects are perceived as animate”. Another source was a document called the Papyrus Jumilhac (known to me from a description rather than directly) which relates to a single nome (province) of Egypt, the 18th, but sets all the great myths locally, in terms of the hills and waterways of that province. So everything happened here. The gods shrink to local scale. They are small enough to be seen in a garden. This reinforced the idea but it was already there, really. So this is “personal mythology”, written as folklore rather than myth. I really liked, also, a painting by Gerhard Altenbourg called "Ich-Gestein", or "I-ore"; the geology of an attachment to your home.
Szeemann was an exhibition organiser and essayist. He did all kinds of things but one of them was to bring naive artists, of whom Switzerland seems to have produced quite a few, right up against modern artists (of the 60s and 70s, usually) and erase the boundaries between them. So his exhibition catalogues were sacred texts for me. I also have catalogues (bulletins) from the annual exhibitions of naive art at Bratislava, edited by Štefan Tkač, a Slovak art historian. He had to rename the events “Insite” (= in situ), because the Party did not accept that any citizen of a communist country could be called Naive. No, they were all enlightened. So he could have the exhibitions as long as they were called something else. There was also a 1964 book about peasant artists in Yugoslavia by Oto Bihalji-Merin, which the library here gave away for about 50p. A wonderful book. This is actually where I got interested in painting in glass, I suspected that the paintings he illustrates were influenced by an older Catholic tradition in the Hapsburg realms, although after investigation I don’t think that's true. (Bihalji-Merin is categorical about this.) Someone called Hegeduśič went to teach art to villagers, in Croatia, in around 1929, and glass was one of the media he used. It is significant to me that these historians were all European; Swiss, Slovak, Serbian, this appeals to my abiding ideals.
For the first five years I had no money – the pension was about 20% of my previous salary. So I wasn't going anywhere. I was already there. This was really the end of alienation but also of events: every day was empty and I had to fill it. Everything was very simple and the poems could only record what was there. My gestures were magnified: unconscious fantasy was audible because there was no other sound to make it unclear. The poems started with images, or clusters, which I found significant, and used “pre-logical” means to develop this primary material into more elaborate structures. I am not sure how this fits in with the ethos of Alternative Poetry. I suppose the direction was prescribed by the lack of the autobiographical themes which I had written about in previous books – so falling in love, being rejected, conflicts with an employer and with the business system in general. I had reached a stage in life where that music had stopped playing. The new direction allowed me to connect with what was happening inside me and so to write a new autobiography, even if the themes seemed esoteric.
The poem most about glass painting is called “Paintings on glass”. This mentions the Peace of Westphalia. The story is that the paintings, aimed at modest households, were originally of saints. Protestant households were not interested in buying these. The producers reasoned that the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, had been the basis for free and unpersecuted religious activity for Protestants in Germany. The envoys to the peace discussions had faces and you could make paintings of them. They were undoubted representatives of Protestantism as a secular and political interest, a community. (The design is a few decades younger than the Peace, around 1700.) So you could produce stylised paintings of them and sell them to Protestant households, to decorate their front rooms. This does mean something to me, because a large print (from a painting from a photograph!) of the Disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843 was a feature of my grandparents’ home. It was later a feature of my parents’ home, although it was not in the front room. This is continuous with the glass paintings tradition, although I am not aware of any significant art being produced in this line. That 1843 photograph (a composite of many photographs, I believe) is significant in the history of photography.
Having reached the point of retirement I was doubtful about the value of learning anything more. It was hard to explain how it would equip me to lead the rest of my life. I went on studying Welsh and Scottish Gaelic and impulsively added Irish Gaelic. I found this difficult because there was so much of it I didn’t know. But it was wildly stimulating. I was drawn to these languages, old and dwelling on the periphery of Western Europe, because I was also on a periphery and because I felt close to my ancestors – the effect of age and simplifying life. It was like withdrawing into my garden. I was getting closer to what was fundamental, intact although buried by everything less stable and more superficial.
It’s hard to change your style after sixty. It is no good thinking that when you open your mouth something different is going to come out. More probably what you hear is just what was there before, but more developed, bonier, more essential and less distracted by graces and trills.