Resources - Discussion Papers

The Painter and the Poet
An Aesthetic Duo In The Classroom

Paul Boam & Hugo McCann, University of Tasmania

A paper presented at the 2001 AATE/ALEA Joint National Conference

A poem is a painting that is not seen;
A painting is a poem that is not heard
Phoebe Hesketh
'A Poem is a Painting'

ABSTRACT

Serious seeing requires more than a glancing look and more than one look requires the viewer to be seeking/searching otherwise the habits of perception will limit. Poems and paintings provide means and opportunities of looking again and reviewing and extending one's interpretations. When combined they form an exciting way of extending our powers of noticing and being aware of our own habits of awareness. Poets and painters have recognised this mutually supportive relationship between these arts in their contributions to human perception and understanding. Poets have responded to painting in verse and painters have responded poems in paint.

The paper/workshop presents a series of examples of poetic and painterly styles. In the context of this paper/workshop, a wide range of opportunities for close reading of print and visual texts as well invitations to write and 'cartoon' visual possibilities is provided.

Why should we care about paintings and poems and put them together as examples of the artful mind at work and proffer this combination as part of a school program? This paper and workshop are an attempt to draw attention to the ways in which the arts of depiction in paint and words support each other and, in careful juxtaposition, reveal something of nature and value of the artful enterprise.

In this workshop we intend to explore in a coordinated way aspects of linguistic and visual literacies - ways that words and figures of language can be combined to catch the variabilities of living and being - the ways that line, colour, shape, form and texture allow us to notice that which is missed or unnoticed in living. This duo of imagery traditions seem to us to offer a great resource for extending human understanding in what is an increasingly visual cultural periodⁱ.

We wish to show how painting and poetry, how looking and talking about them (poems and paintings), how depicting and writing are interrelated in mutually illuminating and supportive ways. We wish to foreground various kinds of writing, talking, looking ⁱⁱ and depicting for reasons which will become even more evident as we proceed. We are seeking ways which allow students to focus on the visual in informed, considered, even leisured, waysⁱⁱⁱ and to respond to it in both speech and writing in ways which are creative and critically aware. We are offering the chance of reading poetry which engages with painting, with the visual in a manner which invites a range of acute observations and verbal responses, increasing students interest in ways of looking, noting, describing and commenting on experience and augmenting their ability to offer a range of critical commentaries about both painting and poetry. We want students to select vistas which allow them to notice^iv and reinterpret the world through the use of the visual arts especially painting.

Our overall approach we take from writers like Auden who wrote about Pieter Brueghel's great painting, 'The Fall of Icarus'. The first part of Auden's poem refers to other paintings to be found in the Royal Museum in Belgium (paintings like Andrea Mantegna's Martyrdom of St James where there is a horse present in the foreground of a scene of an execution). Auden realises what the old masters' in painting had long noted life, ordinary, unexceptional life goes on while some events, perhaps people, are seen to be important only in retrospect rather than in their own time. In their own time they are not the focus of attention. Brueghel has taught Auden that the selection of the focus of our attention is deeply influenced by our ongoing concerns.

Auden's interest in the old master Pieter Brueghel's 'Fall of Icarus' drew the attention of a number of poets who wished to comment on or capture their own response to this painting. Auden makes a point about certain of the 'old masters' in painting and their understanding of human life and the ways in which painting (picturing) can make profound comments about our lives even though the painting has no words with which to articulate its point of view.

The Australian poet, Rosemary Dobson refers to the life of the painter Brueghel and his sojourn in Italy before looking at the objects in the painting where ordinary life as Brueghel knew it is placed side by side with the life of myth, with the life of failed efforts to extended the human condition, to achieve flight once the great image of human freedom.

Painter of Antwerp

Plod homeward, peasant, north-bound from Italy
With head full of slow wonder, pondering
On frescoes at Venice and all the odd adventures-
The bear in the way, the painter at Padua
In a great plumed hat, full of queer notions,
Ships in the harbour at Naples with a new rigging -
Strangeness enough to empty many tankards.

Plod homeward, Brueghel, Painter of Antwerp.

At the top of the Alps he paused perhaps, looked backwards,
Rejecting the fanciful, and took for a painting
Ploughman, fisherman, and moon faced shepherd,
The furrow cut cleanly, the sheep contented;
Put thumb to nose with neither pride nor envy
At soaring wings - a southerner's invention -
Icarus sprawling, two feet out of the sea.
Rosemary Dobson

Dobson is determined to place Brueghel and his work in his time and picks out certain people in the painting - to recognise and insists upon Brueghel's way of combining the mythic and ordinary and, implicitly, the metaphoric.

Gareth Owen, one of our contemporaries, responding to the same painting, just has to include the rhythms of modern mobile phone life, a technology unknown to both Brueghel and Auden but a technology which one feels that both Dedalus and Icarus would have accepted with alacrity. Gareth Owen and Dannie Abse, modern British poets, want to place their imagination inside the consciousness of the failed flier. One wonders why this should be a recurring placement. Only one version of Icarus is our immediate contemporary from this pair of poems but both are concerned with the 'technology' - of course. Why 'of course'? Well Daedalus is one of great inventors and makers in Greek myth and he is not divine. Besides in their own ways these poets are doing what Brueghel does in his painting with the older story.

The English poet, Dannie Abse, insists evidently upon looking at the possible ways in which someone becomes an old master and he, like Gareth Owen, chooses to tell the story from the point of view of the failed and falling flyer. Each of these poets insists upon picking out their own selection (or their version of Icarus') from the painting and commenting upon that. The painting remains a shareable object between them and us, the viewers and readers. We can notice the various linguistic techniques they use to capture and express their views; the ways in which they place the viewer and reader.

They insist in their responses on the ways in which Brueghel has filled his painting with a variety of things and the way in which we choose to find a focus in the flow of such variety. Their poems bring us back to the painting again and again and the painting remains a measure for judging the poet's success and the poet's language. Both poems and painting(s) remind us just how much we select and assume viewpoints and, of course, miss or ignore or suppress others. This painting and the poems produced in response to it can form an extended conversation about aesthetics and about just how much there is to see in a major painting - more than many of us grasp in that first quick, even cursory, glance. We might argue that each poem (and poet) gives us a new way of looking at the painting and we can benefit from this conscious variety.

Here are two further poets commenting on the Breughel painting and the myth. They choose different details to place in the foreground of our attention. William Carlos Williams, of course, uses the short laconic line which expects the reader to grasp immediately the simple language chosen but allow that language to engender a flow of considerations in the reader about that which the poet has chosen to note.

In both these responses to the painting, the writer places the reader outside the action; the reader is an observer not an actor in the scene. Langland insists upon the sounds of the event as pictured. His poem stresses the immediacy of the event . He chooses words that echo, and evoke in the reader's mind, the sounds of each aspect of the movements implied by the painting. He also insist that we consciously note that the people in the foreground of the painting are looking away from this doomed attempt to achieve greater human freedom and to consider what this positioning might mean.

This single painting by Pieter Brueghel has produced a wide range of poetic replies or comments - different ways of positioning the viewer of the painting in relation to the action. They show responses which seek to express an individual's delight in what the painter has done in using an older myth and setting it amidst the daily life of the painter's time. The painting and this set of poets provide us with a rare opportunity to invite others to join in a conversation, begun before we were born, about how the arts of painting, poetry and story telling, of myth telling catch important moments in living and make them available to our considered reflection while leading us beyond a loneliness of being.

One wonders what it is that leads poets to look at paintings as a source of inspiration? Is it that the painter's use of visuals allows for a slower - because it can be repeated again and again - consideration of the sense we make of the world and our living in it? Wordsworth thought that poetry grew out of a revisiting of actual experience and consideration of it in tranquility. Paintings have the wonderful feature that they remain substantially the same in a way that the daily world does not. How much of our viewing of the actual world needs us to review it if we are really to possess it, own it? Perhaps the poets see a wisdom in the selections that the painter has made and wish to benefit from those selections to learn from the painter's sensibility and go with and beyond it? Or might it be in some circumstances that the poet feels freed to play with older stories (myths) now that the painter has shown what might be possible? The painter, in this case, offers an invitation/ a licence to play with the works of the past. Is such play, serious even if joyful play, a way of coming to possess, to make the works ours, to see the significance of experience? But that series of thoughts begs a question of what are the intimate gifts of art? 'By intimate' here we mean the ways in which painting and poetry may be said to open our eyes or give us a lens with which to notice and compare. Incidental to this is the seeking and acquisition of language, of vocabulary and genre through which we can exchange ideas about art and what art is about.

From this example of one painting eliciting many poems we came to focus on the work of R.S.Thomas who wanted to capture in words what Ben Shahn's 'Father and Child' depicts and enriched our understanding of the arts' engagement with our understanding and the ways in which they can mutually augment and enrich our reflections on the world of common experience. Shahn has sought to record in a powerful way the recurring experience of the last hundred years - the fleeing family, clinging to those things which it finds valuable, significant, important. Here the man carries a child and the woman a framed picture. Shahn's choice of things to be saved from whatever horror, indicated in the backdrop of burning bushes, is examined and illuminated in a new way by Thomas's comments.

Ben Shahn and R.S.Thomas are concerned with a terrible experience of the twentieth century of the refugee, the displaced, the driven out, person, living in a landscape of destruction and terror. (It is continuing in this new century as the TV images from the Balkans remind us) The desire to endure, to survive is evident in the painting, the strange need for continuity. The poem, too, recalls roots going back to other families which are central to our culture and suggests both repetition in human experience and perhaps a darker world without hope.

Not all life is lived in such a maelstrom of events as that associated with fleeing from great hatred and danger. Many lives in some senses are strangely problematic. Edward Hopper is a painter of American life in the middle twentieth century, frequently focusing on urban settings and lonely lives. It is sometimes said that he captures in his painting a kind stillness, of alienation from social life, from a sustaining exchange with other people, a chronic loneness.

These forms of urban life are not restricted to the United States, of course, though each setting in Paris, London, Sydney or Tokyo brings its own particularities. Hopper's images remind one of stills from certain movies which explore urban loneliness and one has a sense that film makers are aware of his ways of selecting the settings, the times of day and year, the kinds of lighting and the people who catch our own reflective imaginations. These two paintings by Edward Hopper offer opportunities for noticing and commenting which is what the American poet, Julia O'Callaghan has done with poems that capture some of the painting feelings in words.

Of course the artistic interchange between painters and poets is not one way. Painters turn to the work of poets to focus their attention and to stimulate them to find significant visual selections using the visual style best suited to the dynamic of the words. They find an intriguing challenge to catch the poetry's imagery of movement and put it into visuals that, while being still, evoke movement.

Painters like the American Charles Demuth take poetry as a starting point. Demuth responds in painting to a poem of William Carlos Williams and uses that as a stimulus for painting the layered flow of experience and memory. Williams's style is very abstract; he selects features in the scene and removes all the rest leaving a great deal to the imagination of the reader to complete the scene. His selection emphasises the movement, the energy of the scene that caught his attention and it is a scene that many of us might say we have experienced also even if the place and the kind of fire engine was different from that Williams describes.

The painter, Charles Demuth, was impressed by William Carlos Williams poem which describes, in a spare and apparently simple language, his sense of the visual and auditory trajectory of a large red firetruck moving through an urban setting. It is an event that we have all noticed perhaps so often that we cannot describe the energy and movement of the passage of vehicle. William Carlos Williams' poem is highly selective in what it records of the vision and sound of the passing vehicle. Demuth's painting takes the poem, insisting that it is drawing upon the poet's vision and presents the painter's version of that experience. Demuth attempts to overcome the static nature of a painting placing within the frame a set of layering moments. Both poem and the painting focus on the repeated and serifed numeral five pulsating towards us. They seem to support each other in describing some of the ways in which energetic movement leads to us to select features in experience that seem very significant and memorable for us the viewers. Neither Williams nor Demuth seem to want to comment on the experience in any direct way yet they both leave intriguing implications in the forms they have chosen. Interestingly, Demuth insists upon commenting on the name and initials of the poet. The reviewing is left to the readers and viewers. The experience is caught for the rest of us to notice and it seems that they leave us then to notice again the world we inhabit which is never static. Our daily experience may anaesthetize us to the daily events until our senses are revivified by the work of the artist in either words or visuals. Both Williams and Demuth wish to recover (bring back) the events from the occlusions or the oblivion of the ordinary.

Of course poet and painter can work together to produce a collaboration where poem and painting combine - the painting is not an illustration of the poem though it may illuminate features in the poem which explores matters which remain embedded in the depiction. The American artist, Leonard Baskin, illustrated or, if you like, responded in paint to a poem with a portrait of a hare which was intended to accompany a Ted Hughes' poem. In an important way the painter and poet worked together to produced the joint presentation. Hughes' words give us access to something which seems to be below the surface of the Baskin portrait of a snow-shoe hare in the midst of its struggle with winter. Baskin's work was part of the poetry collection which Hughes, a poet with an abiding and acute interest in wild nature, published There is something special about Hughes's choice of short stanzas to depict this animal living in winter.

Baskin's painting was intended to accompany Hughes' close observation and comment on the natural world, on the hunted beauty and patterns of movement of the winter hare. In fact, both poem and painting need to work with us to capture the annual events of the natural world and the unique commentary on it which the combined arts can give us. Hughes offers us 'a reading' of the animal's awareness, its consciousness.

Some combinations of paintings and poems reveal that poets and painters may be exploring similar matters but not necessarily each other's work. There is a parallel between what the painter and poet depict - what some have called a correspondence. That poet and painter might want to do something which is a parallel artful act. Of course this leads one to ask what is it we think is going on when poets find language to say something in a particular way and what is it that a painter is doing when he shows us something of the world in a particular way. In classical antiquity, the poet Simonides described the poem as a speaking picture and painting as mute poetry. Whether Simonides' views are the last word on the whole business it is certainly an interesting place to begin.

Jacques Prevert and Georges Braque present works which focus on a bird. Braque's painting is called 'L'Oiseau et son nid' and the title of Prevert's poem is 'How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird. They both approach their work having chosen what appear to be very simple and almost childlike styles. Braque's painting is one of his late works which often include bird. It is difficult what these signify but they are surely to each painting. Prevert uses a very simple language to explain how to paint the portrait of a bird. Both works leave us wondering what it is about a bird - and they don't specify the kind of bird - that has attracted them.

There is a childlike quality about Braque's presentation. One is not sure how one is to relate the objects in the frame nor if one should do this. Perhaps we are expected to leave the objects unrelated yet the things within the frame seem as if they should connect in some way. The bird and fish have a certain life in our questioning imagination - they are important symbols - as we view the Braque but one is not sure if the bird will sing.

These have been smallish scale paintings so far - small scale in the number of figures included; in the combinations of still life, landscape and a kind of portraiture included. This changes when we look at Pieter Brueghel's 'The Return of the Hunters' which has long been a favorite painting with teachers of English going back to Ted Hughes schools' program work for the BBC forty years ago. The painter's design of his painting leads us into the scene by the perspective angle of the hunters and the hounds interacting with the four verticals of the trees and the spaces between them. These two visual elments lead us directly into the centre of the painting. They also push us to the curving road in the middle distance and the tree veiled town and icy hills in the background. In more recent times three esteemed poets, William Carlos Williams 'The Hunters in the Snow', Anne Stevenson 'Brueghel's Snow' and John Berryman 'Winter Landscape' have written about their experience of the painting, about what they have focused on and decided to comment about.

Pieter Brueghel The Return of the Hunters 1565   (refer to illustration 8)

The Hunters in the Snow - William Carlos Williams The overall picture is winter icy mountains in the background the return from the hunt is toward evening from the left sturdy hunters lead in their pack the inn-sign hanging from a broken hinge is a stage a crucifix between the antlers the cold inn yard is deserted but for a huge bonfire that flares wind-driven tended by women who cluster about it to the right beyond the hill is a pattern of skaters Brueghel the painter concerned with it all has chosen a winter-struck brush for his foreground to complete the picture

As we will see, each of the poems focuses on differing aspects of the Brueghel painting like publishers looking for details to illustrate something. Williams scans the painting and makes a selection which comes closer and closer to the foreground of the painting leaving out interesting and perhaps very significant details.

Both Stevenson and Berryman focus on the three hunters but the details that they select are so very different. The three poems are evidently about Brueghel's painting but from it each makes a different selection - the poets have, as it were, cropped the painting to focus on a particular feature. Stevenson, in particular, wants to know what happens next in the painting and who is painting such moments now.

Brueghel's Snow Anne Stevenson Here is the snow: three hunters with dogs and pikes trekking over a hill, into and out of those famous footsteps - famous and still. What did they catch? They have little to show on their bowed backs. Unlike the delicate skaters below, these are grim; they look ill. In the village, it's zero. Bent shapes in black clouts, raw faces aglow in the firelight, burning the wind for warmth, or their hunger's kill. What happens next? In the unpainted picture? The hunters arrive, pull off their caked boots, curse the weather slump down over stoups... Who's painting them now? What has survived to unbandage my eyes as I trudge through this snow, with my dog and stick, four hundred winters ago?

Winter Landscape by John Berryman Three men coming down the winter hill In brown, with tall poles and a pack of hounds At heel, through the arrangement of the trees, Past the five figures at the burning straw, Returning cold and silent to their town, Returning to the drifted snow, the rink Lively with children, to the older men, The long companions they can never reach, The blue light, men with ladders, by the church The sledge and shadow in the twilit street, Are not aware that in the sandy time To come, the evil waste of history Outstretched, they will be seen upon the brow Of that same hill: when all their company Will have been irrecoverably lost, These men, this particular three in brown Witnessed by the birds will keep the scene and say By their configuration with the trees, The small bridge, the red houses and the fire, What place, what time, what morning occasion Sent them into the wood, a pack of hounds At heel and tall poles upon their shoulders, Thence to return as now we see them and Ankle-deep in snow down the winter hill Descend, while three birds watch and the fourth flies.

Each of the poets gives a different title to their poetic response to the same painting. Apart from indicating something of what they have particularly chosen to focus upon, one wonders what the titles reveal about each poet's approach to the painting. One wonders if Williams and Berryman's poems could be really understood without a viewing of the painting. Brueghel's painting is so rich in detail that it allows one to focus on several frames within itself yet one wonders what, despite or indeed because of Brueghel's richness of detail, he has left out from the scene.

Pieter Brueghel's painting is rich in detail and provides a number of sub-frames, if you will, to focus on and so it may surprise no one that it has attracted the attention of a number of esteemed poets. However, some poetry is introspective and poets have also been drawn to painters of introspective figures; painters such as Gwen John who clearly were interested in interior aspects of an individuals life. She once commented: 'I may never have anything to express except this desire for a more interior life.' There are, of course, a range of meanings one might assign to 'interior' here? Is painting an expression of an interior life apart from being a painting of interiors? The life of the emotions and the mind is also a kind of interior life. Interiors frequently combine still life studies as well as portraits of people (or animals).

Gwen John Young Woman Holding a Black Cat 1914-15   (refer to illustration 9) The poet, Sylvia Kantaris, knows that painter, Gwen John, called her cat, Edgar Quinet which is also the name of a boulevard in Montparnasse, an artists' quarter in Paris. The cat turns up in several of her paintings lying on the lap of the women whom John painted. Kantaris wants to contrast the atmosphere of the painting with the actual life of the painter. The poet, paying attention to the detail of the painting, notices the direction of the cat's gaze and assumes that it is directed towards the exit. (Of course, the poet might just be wrong about that.) From this inference, the poet assumes that the cat wants to break free.             Elizabeth Bartlett draws a parallel with prisoners and the young woman in John's painting. She also gives an immediacy to John's depicted reality so that it seems to continue into the poem's and poet's present.

Sylvia Kantaris 'Gwen John's Cat' Edgar Quinet (named after the boulevard in Montparnasse) must have got fed up of posing in so many glum girls' laps. Dressed in slate-blues, greys or mauves, they all fade into walls as they had no choice. Such a gloom of sitters came and sat and went (woman in a necklace; woman with a jug, a book; young woman holding black cat; herself). I like to think that Edgar Quintet bristled, scratched, brushed past and exited - maybe came back with a nature morte (a bird, a mouse, a dead leaf at least) to liven up the canvases a bit. If so, his gifts were fruitless. Drawn into interiors as if to represent the artist's lot (and she forever waltzing out into the whirl of Montparnasse by night) he looks as if he never could have settled either this side of the door or that , his eyes forever focused on an exit back. Millbank - Elizabeth Bartlett - Gwen John's Young Woman holding a black cat I think of the prisoners banged up here, looking out over the Thames from the dark side of the street. As we climb the white steps together and try to insert ourselves inside one glass segment of the swing doors instead of two. I tread on dead faces with my unsuitable clacking heels, murdering the air with words. We should have come with our eyes held in our hands to meet the girl holding the cat in her lap, who has, after all, eluded us, leaving behind an empty chair, a saucer of milk on the floor, a note on the door. There are cat hairs like brush strokes all over my black jacket and bars painted over all the windows We have been let out on parole for a few hours. I have touched her lover's statue and had my hand cut off. You have come eye to eye with Ezra Pound at last, and we have picked all the erotic fruit greedily from the cake with first concealing a file in the middle. Outside, the wind is as cold as an iron bracelet. [The Tate Gallery, where John's painting is displayed, stands on the site of the Millbank penitentiary (1812-1892).]

Sylvia Kantaris picks out the colours of the dress and the walls as being particularly significant in John's painting and if she is right we have to understand what John's language of colour and, I suggest, texture/surface of the painting might mean.

Kantaris's view of nature morte that it might enliven John's painting seems to be a contradiction? 'Nature morte' is a French phrase which applies to 'still life' and means literally 'dead nature'. How can Kantaris claim this?

Please refer to Appendix 10: Interior lives

Yet another painting of Gwen John's 'A lady reading' continues the sequence of interiors which Sylvia Kantaris led us to expect of Gwen John though once again, if Kantaris is right, the cat is missing. This is an example of the interior life and plays with all the ambiguities of the word 'interior'. In this painting we see a woman reading in a room and reading print text is an example of the interior life in action.

Jenny Joseph looks at what language can do after viewing Gwen John's painting of a woman reading in a room. She pursues the nature of the differences with care throughout this poem, highlighting as she does something of the particular abilities of each art form - painting and writing.

Jenny Joseph draws an attention to the differences between words and paint which are so obvious that one may never have found the words to describe that difference and the difference may reveal important features of each of the arts.

Rooms, if artists are to be believed, seem to reveal different kinds of community and life. If one looks at the rooms which Gwen John depicts and compares them with that of a painter like Pieter de Hoogh one has a sense of different ways of being in the world. The light penetrating John's rooms seems crucially different from that depicted by de Hoogh. The interiority of each painter's work seems different in important ways. De Hoogh's woman and child seem to live in a clearer world than John's cat or the woman reading or the chair, table and curtains. How far can this be read as a comment on the clarity of views present in each interior life may be open to some debate and yet there seems to be some parallel with the certainties of the seventeenth century compared with those available to artists of the early twentieth.

Pieter de Hoogh (1629-1678?) Woman Peeling Apples with child Wallace Collection, London (please refer to illustration 11)

Paring the Apple - Charles Tomlinson There are portraits and still-lifes. And there is the paring the apple And then? Paring it slowly From under cool-yellow Cold-white emerging. And…? The spring of the concentric peel Unwinding off white, The blade hidden, dividing. There are portraits and still-lifes And the first, because 'human' Does not excel the second, and Neither is less weighted With a human gesture, than paring the apple With a human stillness. The cool blade Severs between the coolness, apple-rind Compelling a recognition.

The English poet, Charles Tomlinson, focuses on the relations and differences between portraits and still-lifes in painting. He focuses on the activity in this interior and in focusing on the apple peeling he seems to be concerned with the act of peeling and revealing but he ignores the mirror beside the bright window or the dark pot over the glowing fire. He has nothing to say about the design and decorative features in the room and in the dress styles. He does not comment on the expressions on the faces of the people in the picture. Tomlinson's selection is driven by some particular interest which seems to focus on the relations to be discerned between portraying a person (portrait) and depicting a still life, catching the thingness of an object(s).

The French painter of the late 1800s, Georges Seurat, has attracted a wide range of attention from workers in arts other than painting especially for his 'Sunday afternoon on the Ile de la Grande Jatte'. For example, the American composer Stephen Sondheim based a much acclaimed complete musical/opera on the painting 'Sunday in the Park with Georges". Seurat was interested in how colour is composed and he painted using tiny dots of colour. But he was also deeply intrigued by the external and interior lives of the people he noticed and painted. They bring with them a lot of 'elsewhere' which the American poet Delmore Schwartz has written about in response to the painting which depicts a scene close to the centre of Paris during the nineteenth century.

Georges Seurat Sunday Afternoon on the Ile de la Grande Jatte (please refer to illustration 12)

Seurat's Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine' Delmore Schwartz What are they looking at? Is it the river? The sunlight on the river, the summer, leisure, Or the luxury and the nothingness of consciousness? A little girl skips, a ring tailed monkey hops Like a kangaroo, held by the lady's lead (Does the husband tax the Congo for the monkey's keep?) The hopping monkey cannot follow the poodle(?) dashing lead. Everyone holds his heart within his hands: A prayer, a pledge of grass or gratitude A devout offering to the god of summer, Sunday and plenitude. The Sunday people are looking at hope itself. They are looking at hope itself, under the sun, free from the teething anxiety, the gnawing nervousness Which wastes so many days and years of consciousness. The one who beholds them, beholding the gold and green Of summer's Sunday is himself unseen. This is because he is Dedicated radiance, supreme concentration, fanatically threading The beads, needles and eyes - at once!- of vividness and permanence. He is a saint of Sunday in the open air, a fanatic disciplined By passion, courage, passion, skill, compassion, love: love of life and the love of light as one, under the sun, with the love of life. Everywhere radiance glows like a garden in stillness blossoming. Many are looking, many are holding something or someone Little or big: some hold several kinds of parasols: Each one who holds an umbrella holds it differently One hunches under his red umbrella as if he hid And looked forth at the river secretly, or sought to be Free of all of the others' judgement and proximity. Next to him sits a lady who has turned to stone, or become a boulder, Although her bell-and -sash hat is red. A little girl holds to her mother's arm As if it were a permanent genuine certainty: Her broad brimmed hat is blue and white, blue like the river, like the sailboats white, and her face and her look have all the bland innocence, Open and far from fear as cherubims playing harpsichords. An adolescent girl holds a bouquet of flowers As if she gazed and sought her unknown, hoped-for, dreaded destiny. No hold is as strong as the strength with which the trees, Grip the ground, curve up to the light, abide in the warm kind air: Rooted and rising with a perfected tenacity Beyond the distracted erratic case of mankind there. Every umbrella curves and becomes a tree, And the trees curving, arise to become and be Like the umbrella, the bells of Sunday, summer, and Sunday's luxury. Assured as the trees is the strolling dignity Of the bourgeois wife who holds her husband's arm With the easy confidence and pride of one who She is sure- a sovereign Victorian empress and queen. Her husband's dignity is as solid as his embonpoint: He holds his cigar, and a dainty cane, quite carelessly. He is held by his wife, they are each other's property, Dressed quietly and impeccably, they are suave and grave As they were unaware or free of time, and the grave, Master and mistress of Sunday's promenade - of everything! - As they are absolute monarchs of the ring-tailed monkey. If you look long enough at anything It will become extremely interesting; If you look very long at anything It will become rich, manifold, fascinating: If you can look at anything for long enough, You will rejoice in the miracle of love, You will possess and be blessed by the marvellous blinding radiance of love, you will be radiance. Selfhood will possess and be possessed, as in the consecration of marriage, the mastery of vocation, the mystery of gift's mastery, the deathless relation of parenthood and progeny. All things are fixed in one direction: We move with Sunday people from right to left.

Seurat's painting, like Brueghel's, is filled with a host of details and with the possibility of reframing portions of it to feature, or focus on, something which particularly attracts our attention. The 'Sunday life' that George catches is somewhat different from ours yet we can find in the painting much to enjoy and with which to sympathise. Seurat comments on life by his selections and positioning of his characters. Schwarz helps us note some of the details and comments on them in an illuminating way. He shows how Seurat's painting is more than an experiment with colour and light, it is also a kind of social document, a critically aware record of a time and place and a community with values which look back at us from the painting.

Please refer to Appendex 13 - Depicting Society?

So far we hope that we have indicated that the relation between painting and poetry is lively and insightful. It presents us with a view of how to respond to either the poem or the painting by conducting a kind of conversation with it; by singling out details and asking questions and finding answers.

The English poet, U.A. Fanthorpe, enacts this liveliness by presenting us with the views of person who appears in a painting of the French painter, Edgar Degas who painted, towards the end of nineteenth century a woman, an expert in ironing, at her daily work. U.A.Fanthorpe presents us with thoughts and views of that person who has been made permanent in the painting. She offers us a conversation between painter and the person being painted.

One suspects that U.A.Fanthorpe is playing with implied notions about interpersonal politics - the relations between an artist and the model, between the model's expectations and the drive of the painter; between the painter's view and the poet's particular interpretation of time, person and place, perhaps.

The implied notion repeated throughout this paper and workshop is that learners have to be invited to join in the conversations of poetry and painting if they are to acquire the full riches of aesthetic awareness and, of course, the sensuous and flexible potentialities of human language and human sharing.

APPENDICES - follow up and sharing suggestions (Click on the titles to return to your place in the text)

Appendix 1 Helping viewers see more - a general comment (click on title to return to text)

Working with learners to increase powers of nuanced looking:
Invitation, initiation, conversation, response and extension - the lives in poetry and painting

A lot of human insight, making connections, achievement and learning comes from and through the concerted sharing of ideas. This may occur in talking or working with one other person on a shareable task or it may come from conversations in slightly larger groups or in teamwork on commonly accepted projects of some kind. Sometimes it comes from having to present one's ideas to others in manageable groups, using styles, genres and media appropriate to the task(s).

The choice of foci of attention, nature of the sharing group, the choice of style, genre and media is heavily qualified by the contexts of the maturity of the students, the social health of the overall group or sub-group. The major goal is to have individuals have a rewarding and growing experience of insights and understanding gained while sharing and during joint explorations.

Conversation can be developed using a range of genres and media singly and in combination. Conversation can centre on description, comparisons, comment, criticism or a combination of all of these.

Appendix 2 The Fall of Icarus (click on title to return to text)

Helping others see, look, note and talk or write:
Possible conversation starters:

Who are all the people you can see in Brueghel's painting? What trades or professions or jobs can you see? Where are the people located in the vista? What are the people, whom you can see, doing? What is in the foreground of the painting? What do you see in the background of the painting? How free was the painter in placing the figures in this vista? What can you see in the background? What does the background contribute to the meanings of the painting? Where are the foci of light in the painting? (It will prove helpful to make short notes, either individually or in pairs, to assist with extended examinations of a work.)

At what period of history is the painting set? Is it the same period as that of the myth? What point might Brueghel be making by setting his painting in this period?

Appendix 3 A general approach to the paintings and poems (click on title to return to text)

Invitations to the conversation about painting and poems, about viewing and reviewing the world(s) we share.

[It is always of value to explore these questions about any painting and poetry correspondence with one or two other people. They are likely to give new perspectives on the paintings, poems and these questions. Here are some questions with which one might start to consider any of the paintings and the poems.]

What things can you see in this painting? People, objects of various kinds. What significance do you attach to them? What are the most significant and why?

What in the picture have you seen before? What in the picture makes you review (look again, think about it again) what you have seen before? Does the picture bring you to rethink in any way(s) what you have seen before? If it does how do you think the picture does this? (What is it in the picture that leads you to this?)

What does the poet pick out for attention in this painting? Is it the same as you have or would have picked out? Does the poet see the same significance? If not, what is it that the poet notes? Why? Is the poet right, do you think? Why?

How many characters are there in this painting? Who are the most significant? How do you know? From the title? From the position in the painting? What is the most significant position, do you think? Why?

What were the previous moments before this particular instance was set in paint? What might happen in the next subsequent moments after this painterly moment? Can you explain why you would make these suggestions?

What is the predominant colour in this painting? Does this colour carry any emotional significance for you? Why? Is it a commonly shared significance? Can you show why you think this is so? (You might mention (cite) other paintings, films, posters, visuals, fashions and so on.)

Comment on the use of light and dark, light and shadow, in this painting. What for instance is the light source in this painting? What might the shadows tell you? Is the pattern of the play of light very important to the impact and meaning of this painting? What particularly is significant?

Comment on the posture, dress, and expression of the human characters in this painting? What do each of these mean to you and why? What is the relationship between the characters in this painting? Emotional? Social, political and so on?

Look closely at the foreground, middle distance and long distance in this painting. What significance can you see in the placement of objects and people in relation to the foreground? Are the most important matters/things in the foreground? What meanings can you see in the placement of the objects/people?

What can you say about the poem(s)? Is there something remarkable about its use of comparisons? When you look at other poems can you detect anything important about their line length? Does the poem use rhythm in a noteworthy way? Does the poet use rhyme? Is there a rhyming pattern?

Guide some people through the interesting features of this painting. Write a program note for someone viewing this painting - help them see more.

Appendix 4 Painting and Photography (click on title to return to text)

Painting and Photography ?
Possible conversation starters

Does Thomas, or indeed Shahn, pick out what you might notice or wish to focus upon when you think about the theme? How do you read the red of the images just behind the child, the man and the woman? What is being depicted and how does this modify the meaning of the depiction?

Would you turn towards paintings for images like that of Shahn? Or might you turn to photographs say some of those by Cartier-Bresson or Diane Arbus or Bill Brandt or ....

In what ways do photos and paintings differ in their power to compel our thoughtful attention? Do they differ at all except in the way vistas are captured/caught/ exposed to our attention?

Appendix 4 Still image and moving image (click on title to return to text)

Still image as the basis of choosing moving image?
Consider the following questions individually, in a pair discussion, or a slightly larger group.

What are the shared features in each of the Hopper paintings? Consider the way the scenes are lit and the use of shadows, of the areas outside the illuminated space; the time of day and the year; the way the people are dressed; in what period in the twentieth century are both paintings set (how do you know that)?

Has O'Callaghan caught all of this detail? What might she have missed? Has she 'read' the painting the way you might have done? What might she have missed in your opinion? Can you describe the scene?

What do you notice about O'Callaghan's choice of comparisons to capture her response/enactment of the painting?

What images would you place immediately before and after these to make a clip from a possible movie? Sketch out your images and accompany them by explanatory (directorial ) notes.

Try a haiku or a tanka form and find a way of presenting your work to others that allows them and you to enjoy the examination of your work.

What sort of music would use to create the mood of each painting? Can you suggest incidental music for each painting? What combinations of instruments would you seek to complement the power of the painting?

Try out the combination of painting, poem and music as short presentation introducing the paintings to a small audience.

Appendix 5 From poem to painting (click on title to return to text)

Possible Conversation starters

Following Demuth and Williams can you suggest other scenes which we might commonly experience that might be treated in words and pictures in ways similar to that chosen by Williams and Demuth? [One might take a startling and exciting moment in sport, or someone skateboarding or dancing in a crowded setting, or sailing a yacht in dangerous seas or …]

Why might Williams, in his characteristic fashion, have chosen to use such short lines? What effects might such lines have on the meanings of the poem?

Share your ideas with someone else in the class - use print and visual media to do so. (Tanka, haiku, collage of photos, a combination of collage and tanka or haiku and so on]

Find an image using a number, or a common symbol, or logo which through a process of abstraction, repetition and structure takes on a meaning in a manner similar to Demuth's painting (write a poem about your image)

Appendix 6: Combined operations (click on title to return to text)

Possible conversation starters

What features are shared in the poem and painting? What are different? Why do you think there are these differences? Is it merely a matter of personal choices on the part of the painter and poet? Might they be playing to the strengths of each medium? What might these strengths be?

Can each item be successful on its own? What is lost if one encounters one without the other?

What do you notice when you look at Hughes' range of comparisons? What is the particular effect of this choice?

Appendix 7: Parallel artistic perspectives - Poems and Paintings (click on title to return to text)

Parallel explorations
Possible conversation starters

What does the bird signify? Do all birds signify this? If not which ones do? Has Braque chosen the right bird for you? What sort of song do you think is the appropriate one for the Prevert's bird?

Does Braque's painting conform to Prevert's suggestions? What variations can one see in his painting?

What objects are included in Braque's painting? What might be the pointing of including each one and why might they be placed in this relationship to each other? What is Braque doing with the choice and arrangement and selection of colour?

Prevert writes of the bird coming quickly or slowly , of the bird singing or not, of trying to capture the freshness of the wind and the sounds of summer rural heat. He end by directing that one signs the portrait using a pen fashioned from one of the birds feathers? Why do that? What is Prevert asking us to consider when he gives this direction? Why not the leave the successful painter who has caught the bird in art to use a brush?

Try (individually or in a team) to design a draft for the portrait of a bird in which you think the bird will sing. What sort of bird will you choose? What dimensions of cage do you have mind?

Appendix 8: It's all about details? (click on title to return to text)

So it's all in the details- The meaning, God, or the Devil is in the detail?
Conversation starters

What are the really interesting details in Brueghel's painting? Are all the important ones in the foreground? What makes the details you noticed important?

What are important colour features in this painting? Can you find words to describe the light that Brueghel has given to or recorded for this day?

Would it be right to say that Brueghel has managed to paint the colour of cold? If it is, how does he manage it? [He is unlikely to achieve this through one means one means only.]

The painting presents a combination of scenes. Please list all the occupations you can see the large canvas. List all the animal life you see. Can you list the separable scenes and show how each contributes to the overall design of the painting?

Find ways of sharing your views with others outside your immediate group.

Appendix 9: Designing the details-Brueghel (click on title to return to text)

Possible conversation starters

Can you locate all the details which the poets mention? For instance, can you see, for instance, the 'men with ladders' mentioned by Berryman. Can you find the church and the blue light? [How do you know that it is a church?] Berryman is very alert to the colour in the painting? Has he included all the moments of significant colour? Would you add any other moments of colour? What might Berryman have meant by 'the sandy time'?

William Carlos Williams notices Brueghel's foreground details. Why might Brueghel have included these? Brueghel had to made a selection or several selections in completing this work.