the sourcerer: poetry

Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

About changes, big and small.

I saw this some weeks ago. It entered my dreams. I thought of it whilst driving. Eating. Brushing my teeth. I think this change needs to be big, bigger than a new hairstyle. The obvious thing to me is travel. That means next year. A New Year's Resolution. But as my dear friend pointed out from far-off Tennessee - why not get a headstart and make it December 1? Small changes are good too and they always lead me somewhere interesting.

My first day off in many. All my friends are working. The grass at the bottom of the garden needs cutting, but after watering, the bamboo copse is filled with chattering Cape White-eyes, so it doesn't get done.

Through neglect, the mustard greens are going to seed. The flowers add zing to my lunchtime sandwich. It would have been so easy to stay in my pajamas and not go out today. But my Calvinist upbringing dictates otherwise and I go to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens for a few hours.

A fragment of poetry by Ian McCullum, part of the Untamed Exhibition. Your animal heart. I like the sound of that. Sculpture and maquettes by Dylan Lewis.

And then - what I actually came to see: The Living Wall. It's a cage-like metal structure, filled with plants in plastic bottles. The colours change as you walk the curve. I love it.

Walking with bare arms in this garden is sheer bliss. The bushes buzz and whirr with bees and ladybugs. Frogs croak in the ponds. Guinea fowl and Egyptian geese compete.

Home again, my fingers still smell like peppermint geranium. A glass of white wine, feet in the water. Back to work tomorrow.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Taking the word for a walk.

My friend Ming hosted a creative writing workshop yesterday at the Castle of Good Hope. Built between 1666 and 1679, surprisingly still there. I look at photos of old Cape Town and become so despondent at what we've lost. Don't get me started on the pine tree plantings at the Parade.

I love this castle. I've seen the ins and outs of it whilst shooting there, it's hosted some fantastic exhibitions and events, drinks up on the battlements...

The workshop was held in one of the resident artists' studios on the far side. What a satisfying way to spend a saturday morning.

Renier sang for us on our tea break. We ate chocolate cake. I walked over to visit my favourite spot - the Dolphin Pool.

We wrote a poem using a different formula.

sometimes the hopes are way too big for the pin
an image the face is cut in two
that reflection in the mirror it moves me
solidity veiled by transparency
the most quiet place I know is under the water
this is what I'm trying to say
a deep droning
I hear
like swimming in temperate seas
bursting with life
best when they're on their way out
inside I dream of green arrows and summer
sometimes the hopes are too big for the pin
I hear them saying
outside it waits. it waits

And cut out the tenth word to make something new.

For information regarding future workshops, contact Elsibe via her website.

You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.