Poetry Exercise
Title: Ode to Ironing.
Poetry is white:
it comes from water swathed in drops,
it wrinkles and gathers,
this planet’s skin has to spread out,
the sea’s whiteness has to be ironed out,
and the hands keep moving,
the sacred surfaces get smoothed,
and things are done this way:
the hands make the world every day,
fire conjoins with steel,
linen, canvas, and cotton arrive
from the scuffles in the laundries,
and from light a dove is born:
chastity returns out of the foam.
Pablo Neruda
Approach: I was really excited about doing this exercise. It gave me a wonderful afternoon revisiting some old favourite poems and thinking about how I might work with them visually. To begin with it was hard not think purely illustratively about them, taking the words literally and creating an image that fits.
I also had a challenge with selecting the poem I wanted to work with. I went through Stevie Smith, Seamus Heaney, Julia Darling, Anne Sexton and Pablo Neruda. In the end I narrowed it down to Julia Darling’s “Manifesto for Tyneside” and Pablo Neruda’s “Don’t go far off” and “Ode to Ironing.” I printed the three of them and carried them around for a week or so, reading and re-reading as I sat on trains or had a moment free.
While I dearly love “Manifesto for Tyneside” it felt a bit overwhelming in terms of the photography I might create and it was hard to move away from being too literal. In the end I decided on “Ode to Ironing.” For some reason I can’t easily explain it resonated and was something I wanted to work with. Having made my choice more re-reading followed; images in my mind’s eye of water droplets and wrinkled fabric, of litter, recycling banks, heathlands, the sea, forests, cars and children in a park.
In the end I simplified the idea and decided to use the pebbles with a variety of backgrounds, the notion of natural and manmade being at the core of my ideas. The poem speaks to me of the earth we inhabit, its beauties and perils, our systemic relationships and the point in its evolution we have come to. It put mein mind of Gregory Bateson, ecologies, systems, Gaia, Mother Earth.
It also gave me a strong sense of the need for textures as a way of being in dialogue with the poem – smooth, soft, wrinkled, hard.
