I love when random meetings produce unexpected and rewarding results. I met Alison Gill on one of Paul Carey Kent’s art walks through London, and in the pub afterwards, we struck up a conversation. Alison told me about her work as a sculptor, and I told her about my poems. Fast forward to last month, when Alison contacted me, in the process of looking for speakers / artists from other genres to interact with her upcoming show at Charlie Dutton Gallery. Alison’s practice draws from references to psychoanalysis, folklore, gaming, literature, mathematics, etc, so it is a natural extension of the work to create a ‘salon’ that brings people into the exhibition to talk about associated or related themes. Meanwhile, I was between projects (readers of Invective might remember a post a few months back lamenting this fact), and about to go off on a retreat. So it was, as they say, serendipity.

Before my retreat, Alison and I met a couple of times to talk through her work and the themes behind the show, Legend Trip. I liked the concept of the ‘legend trip’, a term coined by folklorists and anthropologists for a journey to a specific location which has some deeper and often more sinister history (I thought immediately of one of my favourite poems, ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ which is about those places in the world, often quite innocent, that have provided the landscape for atrocities). The centrepiece of the exhibition is a large sculpture called The Magick Door (Kissing Gate), in steel, rubber and porcelain. The work consists of two round metal frames; the inner one, draped with an elaborate mane of inner tubes (some with dangling porcelain fingers), can be pushed forward, so that the whole structure moves on its axis, and the viewer can pass through the sculpture, like its dual-aspect title suggests, as through a door or a kissing gate.

There are also a number of drawings set in landscapes that are hard to navigate; often heavily pattered or entangled, with stairs that lead nowhere, populated by figures who are sometimes masked, or whose faces are obscured. There are traces of recognisable urban / suburban culture; abandoned cars, boys in hooded garments, heaped rubbish (that might contain the inner tubes and bits of metal sourced for The Magick Door).

Right up my alley. Fired by the ideas generated by Alison’s work, I went off on my retreat and wrote four new poems. It is not often that I write so quickly, but the joy of collaborating is that you are given permission to start from an outside stimulus (something other than the usual stuff that circles around in your head). The new poems had their premier last night in the gallery, to a small audience of poets and artists. This is one of the poems, which I read standing in front of the piece that inspired it, The Magick Door (Kissing Gate). The poem is in syllabics, in a pattern of 13 / 11 / 13 – indivisible, uneven numbers (and 13, of course has many other connotations).

As I explained last night, an odd North American reference crept into the poem. Magic Fingers used to be found in every roadside motel room on the Eastern seaboard when I was growing up – for only a quarter, you could make the whole bed vibrate. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but somehow, the dangling porcelain fingers made me recall its unseen, mysterious touch.

Gatekeeper

I am your port of entry, the point of no return,
you yield to my kludgy touch,
the Magic Fingers you can’t switch off. I am a screen

for your sins, discreet, like a Venetian blind you shut
to kill the light. I am night,
starless, sharp with little cries; you navigate through touch.

I am the Goddess Kali of a thousand fingers,
I’ll stroke, stroke until a scream
rises from your gut, the beast unfurled, a masterpiece

of hurt. I am your Painted Lady, your Queen of Spain,
a wing in the rake of thorns;
I cling to you like grave clothes, the suit you’ll never shake.

I am the circus freak, the double act of one. Gone
through a gash, flash in the pan;
it doesn’t last, the searing lash of pain, slash of skin,

peek-a-boo of blood. I’m in the driver’s seat, the scent
of burning flesh, gasoline
quivering my nostrils; I’m full-throttle towards the wall.

I am the swallow in your throat, hollow in your heart,
deep rut of the furrowed field.
I slay without a sound, here inside my velvet box.

Legend Trip is at the Charlie Dutton Gallery until 16th June

http://www.charlieduttongallery.com/Alison%20Gill/Alison%20Gill.pdf

In 1945, WS Graham wrote to Sven Berlin about Alfred Wallis’s paintings: ‘It’s like the work of the angel in the man and both not knowing each other very well.’ In the following year, Graham would write his poem ‘The Voyages of Alfred Wallis’, which begins with the lines:

Worldhauled, he’s grounded on God’s great bank,
Keelheaved to Heaven, waved into boatfilled arms,
Falls his homecoming leaving that old sea testament,
Watching the restless land sail rigged alongside
Townful of shallows, gulls on the sailing roofs.

Only Graham could begin a poem with ‘worldhauled’, an invention, a conflation, heavy and labourious. In it we also see ‘wordhauled’: the idea that language is also heavy, difficult to fathom. Hard to know what Wallis might have made of it (the poem was written four years after his death); he was a man of simple words. He had no formal education. The only book he had read was the Bible (hence ‘God’s great bank, / Keelheaved to Heaven … leaving that old sea testament’). He had no training as an artist. Painting was something he took up ‘for company’ when his wife died. Everyone knows the famous story of how Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood came upon Wallis and his paintings by accident, as they walked past his open door on Back Road West during a drawing holiday in St Ives in 1928; subsequently, how Wallis’s strange naïve pictures of boats askew, his spatially-challenged seascapes altered the course of British modernist painting. Hard to know what Wallis would have thought of his fame, the fact that his paintings have travelled farther than even a seasoned mariner could imagine, or that his rough works – mostly house paint on cardboard or wood – command five figures in auction houses (Wallis died in the poorhouse at Madron).

Graham’s poem predates the kind of fame Wallis was to achieve, although Berlin was already at work on the first serious monograph. Graham explained to Berlin in another letter that Wallis represented ‘a symbol of that energy which manifests itself in all kinds of places, so often when it is shouted for and encouraged by all the gear and disguise of “rolling eye” etc. – not appearing – and at times appearing, as in Wallis, seemingly “in spite of”.’ A typically Graham-like sentence, full of energy, stops and starts, a snaking trail of (il)logic. Kind of like Wallis’s landscapes, which are never accurate maps of a place, but are born out of ‘what used to be … what you will never see any more’ to use Wallis’s description. A life lived on the sea, already in the past when Wallis started painting, reconstructed from memory. That’s why nothing is to scale in Wallis’s paintings; apart from the fact he lacked the formal training of perspective, the huge waves ready to engulf the boat are exactly how they looked to the young mariner; the tiny houses hugging the harbor already in the distance as the schooner pushes out to sea.

Back to Graham. He had been reading the great Anglo-Saxon poem The Seafarer when he wrote his tribute to Wallis. The strong compound constructions of words come partly from this:

Sitting day-long
at an oar’s end clenched against clinging sorrow,
breast-drought I have borne, and bitternesses too.
I have coursed my keel through care-halls without end
over furled foam, I forward in the bows
through the narrowing night, numb, watching
for the cliffs we beat along.

Graham would have been deeply affected by those lines, a poet who spent his entire life next to the sea, and who understood Wallis’s great respect for its power to both lull and destroy. Graham ends his Wallis poem like this:

Falls into home his prayerspray. He’s there to lie
Seagreat and small, contrary and rare as sand.
Oils overcome and keep his inward voyage.
An Ararat shore, loud limpet stuck to its terror,
Drags home the bible keel from a returning sea
And four black shouting steerers stationed on movement
Call out arrival over the landgreat houseboat.
The ship of land with birds on seven trees
Calls out farewell like Melville talking down on
Nightfall’s devoted barque and the parable whale.
What shipcry falls? The holy families of foam
Fall into wilderness and ‘over the jasper sea’.
The gulls wade into silence. What deep seasaint
Whispered this keel out of its element?

‘Over the jasper sea’ is one of the most beautiful images in Graham. Wallis would have known it well. It comes from a hymn:

Hark tis the voice of angels
Born in a song to me
Over the fields of glory
Over the jasper sea.

Alfred Wallis: Ships and Boats is at Kettle’s Yard until 8th July
http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/exhibitions/2012/wallis/index.php

I will be running a writing workshop looking at the influence of Wallis on poets such as Graham, Merwin, Clemo and Christopher Reid on Sunday 10th June
http://www.kettlesyard.co.uk/education/adults.html#658

This week I have been on a writing retreat in Oxford. I told several people before I left that I was going on a retreat, and the general reaction was one of bemusement. Why should that be, I wondered? Perhaps there is something about use of the word retreat that surprised them. In one respect, the definition suits my reasons and goals perfectly: a retreat is ‘a place affording peace, quiet, privacy or security.’ When not directly applied to a location, it is ‘a period of seclusion, retirement or solitude’ (I should mention here that I am not alone; part of the joy of a retreat for me is coming away with my regular workshop group, who are long-standing friends as well as fine poets). It is most commonly associated with religious contemplation. But other definitions bring in a more negative connotation: a retreat is an act of withdrawing, especially from danger, the process of going backward, conceding a position (as in the retreat of a military force). That suggests that a retreat, while being a form of escape, also takes into account the situation one has abandoned, which might be a difficult or unwelcome position. I think of my desk at home in London, and its usual array of paper piles: students’ poems to read, lesson plans, unpaid bills, invites, bank statements. In addition to that, the floor in the London study has now become an acceptable alternative for shelving; some stacks of books are specifically for future projects and teaching, but another is a secondary ‘shelf of shame’ (the poet Julia Bird’s term for a section of the library comprising recently-purchased but still-unread books). I look at my temporary desk in Oxford, and although my habit of creating little piles of paper activity has been continued, the piles are manageable, and they do not contain any documents which pertain to the life of work, bureaucracy or finance. This desk is smaller, a manageable space (almost, dare I say, monastic), a place on which I can concentrate on one thing: writing poems. In a way, the epicentre is my laptop, which is the real container of my life. On its hard drive is my collected works, nearly everything I have written since computers entered my existence. Which makes me extremely portable (most poets are, of course. Wordsworth didn’t have a Vaio, but I assume he carried a pen).

But being away from normal concerns forces one to concentrate on the present moment; London has entered the past (at least for a few days). In Oxford, I have already established a pleasant routine; I go for an early-morning run around Christ Church Meadow, then back for breakfast and a shower, and I am at ‘my’ desk by about 9:30. I have never been particularly disciplined in setting a daily routine for myself in London – there are too many distractions, interruptions, multiple tasks to draw my attention. I make copious ‘to-do’ lists, and I get great satisfaction in crossing things off them. But there are some distractions which for me are necessary. I can’t remember what my life was like before the Internet. You might think that Internet access would be against the principles of a retreat (one thing many people seem to want to retreat from is modern life), especially a poetry retreat. But Google is the great gift to poets – I can find a reference or the right word or term without leaving my desk. There is a danger of creating what some have coined the ‘Wikipoem’, a piece that wears its new-found facts in a blatantly obvious manner. Jenny Lewis, our host this week, is about to go on what I consider to be a serious retreat – a month’s fellowship at Hawthornden, the writers’ centre in Scotland (endowed by Drue Heinz, the American heiress who made her fortune in ketchup). There are strict codes of behaviour that writers are expected to observe (including a no-talking rule during the day) – I have nothing against such restrictions. But when Jenny explained that there is no Internet access, I found myself wondering if I could survive for a month without Google. I doubt it.

Ok, you may laugh. But I’ve written three poems since Wednesday, and I’m working on a draft of a fourth, which for me is an extraordinarily good rate of success. So as long as there is a broadband connection on that desert island, I’m fine.

A sunny day in New York last week, exploring the Chelsea galleries. I have a folk memory of Chelsea (from my undergraduate excursions to far-flung diners and cavernous night clubs) as the unchartered periphery of the city, rubbing up against the Hudson River, a hinterland of piers and warehouses. It still has that rough and seedy feel (despite the incursions of high end designers like Comme des Garçons and Balenciaga); the galleries mixing with garages and light manufacturing units, happily ignoring the other in the jostle, but still borrowing from their industrial neighbours a certain aesthetic: all concrete and brick, unadorned, no-nonsense.

So once inside the vast empty space of Ameringer McEnery Yohe, Suzanne Caporael’s small and delicate collages might have been lost. But they had a powerful cumulative effect. As I approach, I realise there is something familiar about the paper they are on, until I’m even closer and realise from the reassuring greyish white that they are pages from The New York Times, identifiable, as some still contain snippets of text or the date. The title of each piece is taken from the particular location in small-town America where it was created, where the out-of-town artist took solace in finding the familiar paper, a daily ritual. The collages are all about ritual, tracking time (there even in the paper’s name, not just ‘time’ but the ‘times’ in which we live) recording place, each the same size. I like the suggestion of important news about to be imparted, instead replaced (or obscured) by these Matisse-like blocks of colour. The New York Times has a particular madeleine-like resonance for me as my parents’ paper of choice, the symbol of accurate information and correct politics to me as a child (my mother, although four years in London, still reads it every morning online). So I understand Caporael’s use of the paper as a base for her collages: newspapers mark not only ritual, but the beginning of the day, waking to what is happening in the world over orange juice and coffee. As a displaced east coast American, I can understand what it is like to find the Times, like an old friend, somewhere far from home (I have the same feeling now when I seek out the Guardian on foreign newsstands).

Her work chimes for me with the drawings of Anne Truitt, on show at Matthew Marks. Truitt was a sculptor, who’s experience as a nurse’s aide in the 1940s made her acutely aware of the human body (she made her first-year art students draw a skeleton and read Vesalius). She said ‘the true space you are living in is inside yourself, not on the outside .’ Interesting, then, that her drawings seem to be about architecture – geometrical constructions that explore three dimensions in two, unlike the flat planes in Caporael’s collages. However, what Truitt and Caporael have in common is in their attempt to understand special relationships through colour. After discovering the paintings of Barnett Newman, Truitt felt that ‘color rose up and towered over me and advanced towards me.’ Truitt talks about ‘metaphorical color’ the sense of ‘color having meaning’, and I know what she’s on about. If you put blue on the page, you are stating all the associations of blue – with melancholy or sadness, or truth or fidelity. So the drawings are about spaces, not actual physical spaces, more like mental states, planes of discovery, moments where things become lucid, make sense through seeing (and seeing brings awareness).

Here is Truitt, writing in 1950, about the experience of driving 270 miles through the night on a Texas road from San Antonio to Midland:

The road was absolutely straight in front of me, and had broken lines, or yellow lines, which helped. There was a big space on either side of the road, which was a Macadam road, and then space on either side, and beyond the space there were fences and behind the fences there was tumbleweed. It was very beautiful really. And every now and then I’d see those little eyes, these little eyes of rabbits in the headlights. And I’d just drive. Sometimes I’d drive for five, ten, fifteen minutes without seeing a living thing, or even any lights. And then I would see way off in the distance, I’d see one light. Which meant somebody was alive out there. The rest was completely flat, like being a pea on a skating rink. Above me was this huge arch of sky. My whole concept of space changed during those hours. Luckily I was alone. There was no radio. I wouldn’t have played it if there was one. Complete silence, and the wind, and this wonderful space. One of the happiest memories I have. Hard to get enough space in life. So that changed my life.

I think of the lines and planes of roads as I come away from those drawings, back into the street, and then up, on to the High Line; a place that didn’t exist (well, at least not in its current form) the last time I was in the city. The High Line was built in the 30s as an elevated track to move freight trains. Joel Sternfeld took beautiful photos of the derelict line in the 80s, an eerie, abandoned place, already a park of sorts, but not an official one. Now it is beautiful again, in a different way, with ornamental grasses and flowers growing in between the tracks. Rus in urbe. From here, you see the city differently than from street level; not so high you can’t see pedestrians below, but high enough to give perspective. A whole block is laid out before you, the city’s grid exposed along four corners. At one point suspended over the road you can sit on a bench and watch the traffic on Tenth Street passing beneath. True, it is calmer than street level, but the city rumbles on, as ever, on below.

Just back from a week at the glorious Château Ventenac http://www.chateauventenac.com/ where spring had arrived before us, and the wisteria was buzzing with fat black bees. We came together to discuss the poetic sequence, especially in relation to space (but also place) and time.

We started by looking at Georges Perec’s funny little book, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a treatise to writers on how to observe, but also on how to immerse oneself in the moment. Perec recorded everything he saw in the place Saint-Sulpice over the course of a weekend (positioning himself, as any self-respecting Oulipo poet might, at various café vantage-points) without editorial comment or censorship, so that even the most mundane or pedantic details are faithfully listed. It reads like an exercise because that’s what it is. When we get down to the business of making experience into poetry, we select, so that certain details might be singled out, highlighted as significant. It is interesting to consider what we cross out in the process.

And that’s where the idea of a sequence comes in. One poem is sometimes not enough to contain all the things we need to show. Why not more? After all, poets love numerology, the idea of splitting language into a neat package of lines or stanzas. So why not five poems (like the fingers on a hand) or seven (like the deadly sins, or the days of the week), to show different points of view, angles, timeframes, narratives, etc? We moved from Perec to Stevens, and his Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which gives us such variations, like a Cubist painting or a jazz riff put into words. We thought about the symbolism of the blackbird, the number thirteen, and what Stevens is saying about fate and how language tries to express big things like mortality – and often misses – unless we can focus on the small details. We agreed that his blackbird never feels like an omen, an harbinger of bad luck (after all, Stevens is a champion of the commonplace rather that the fanciful – no nightingale for him) but rather a presence that is alive and moving in a static landscape …

Although it was actually the hoopoe who was sighted, sunning in the lower terrace, and of course, the resident black swans of the Canal du Midi. I include them here because I’m often asked what I have against swans – it’s their romanticising I resist. The black ones have a sort of mythical quality about them, although these two are hardly mysterious – they are used to being fed by tourists on longboat holidays, so they will swim right over to you, and demand attention, trumpeting loudly.

We attempted a group exercise (based on Anne Berkeley’s wonderful versions of Baudelaire’s Pipe) to identify the different ways we perceive language. We all looked at the same poem by Eluard, and came up with our own versions, ranging from fairly faithful translations of the original, to surreal statements based on a complete ignorance of French – increasingly more unstable as comprehension and meaning fly through the window.

And flying is what time did too. It seemed like a lot to pack into a week, and so it was. Naturally, it passed very quickly, in the excited mix of poems and chat, and food and wine. And suddenly I find myself back at my desk in London (where spring seems to have been and gone).

I began my week in the walled medieval citadel of Carcassonne, a place which is sealed in time, and so I end with a photograph, taken by poet Sue Rose, of a motif of decorative carvings – remains of larger structures – arranged on a wall to celebrate pattern and light. Like a good poem, or a series of poems, each one a little bit different than the one next to it.

I came across this quote from WS Graham today – “a word is exciting because of its surroundings” – hunting for some clarification on the poem Johann Joachim Quantz’s Five Lessons (in preparation for my course at Chateau Ventenac next week) while pondering the very strange image near the end when the famous flutist Quantz tells his pupil, Karl:

One last thing, Karl, remember when you enter
The joy of those quick high archipelagos,
To make to keep your finger-stops as light
As feathers but definite. What can I say more?

In 1977, Graham wrote to Fraser Steel, a radio producer at the BBC, who had queried the use of ‘archipelagos’ in the poem, assuming it was a typo. Graham replies:

Of course I mean ‘arpeggios’. That’s why I said ‘archipelagoes’. It is making a quick little entertainment by putting down one word in stead [sic] of the other and both words making an exciting sense. At least I hope so. Again, I think we know he is playing a quick flourish of islands.

A lot of the poem has the strangeness, the not-quite-rightness of something translated awkwardly from German into English (Graham read Quantz’s famous 1752 treatise on playing the flute, Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen in its English translation, leant to him by Rose Hilton). But the use of ‘archipelagos’ is typical of Graham, because he wants us to think of art – in this case music, but of course also poetry – as a means of transport to another place. So there is the sense of two words, the ‘correct’ one, but also one which is close in sound but carries us further in metaphor. And isn’t it funny how playing or listening to arpeggios on a flute sounds a bit like hopping quickly from one little island to the next (and trying not to get your feel wet in the bargain)?

John Cage, whose music I was listening to this afternoon (a chance collision between Cage and Graham – both of them would have liked that) said that music should be ‘purposeless play … not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living.’ Graham certainly felt that way about words, was always acutely aware of their power to both confuse and clarify. Which is what he is constantly doing in his poems, sometimes all at once.

And anyhow, ‘archipelago’ is one of the most beautiful words I can think of, so it’s good to have an excuse to put it into a poem …

We stumbled onto the Reading Room at do you read me?! by accident, the way you do when you are wandering around an unfamiliar city without any real destination or goal. I discovered later that their Potsdamer Strasse branch (or, as it says on their website, a place for lectures, exhibitions, debates and all the still slumbering ideas and projects) is a sister location to their ‘bespoke’ magazine shop (which will compile a personal assortment based on your interests) and lecture space in Mitte. It is an indication that the area around Potsdamer Strasse is going to be Berlin’s next big art destination, as there are already lots of galleries opening in the area.

Berlin is not short of galleries, nor of bookshops, and so it seems logical that the two should come together in some way. It is therefore also logical that you can ‘curate’ a bookshop, in the same way you might ‘curate’ an exhibition (Berlin is a place where even the trees are curated: see below). Thus the simple but brilliant idea of asking inspiring personalities in art, culture and design to select their current favourite books. It’s not a new idea: literary pages of magazines and broadsheets have been asking authors and cultural figures to chose their books of the year or to name their bedside reading for some time, and here in England, Waterstones, one of the most enlightened of the large chains, has always had a policy of asking their booksellers for personal picks (indeed, most bookshops seem to do that these days).

But what is new (and exciting) here is the presentation. Long thin sheets entitled what do you read?! hang from the walls on pegs (for browsers to take away). One side lists the inspiring personalities who have been asked for their picks, and on the reverse, is an individual selection. For example, the artist Jonathan Monk has been reading The Complete Writings of Donald Judd, American English by Richard Prince, The Jeff Koons Handbook, and lots of magazines, including i-D, Wallpaper, and Hello (yes, Hello). Each title has a short personal description by the selector. So Monk says that Judd’s Complete Writings are ‘A comprehensive guide to very little’ and that Wallpaper magazine is ‘To be read on the toilet. ‘ The inspiring personalities’ comments are generally humorous and meaningful, and give us equal insight into books and readers. A list of what someone is reading is a window into his / her mind and soul.

Each of the inspiring personalities’ books are available for sale, with bright pink cards tucked inside their pages (like library cards) saying which personality has chosen the book and why, so that the selections are cross-referenced.

There are chairs to sit in while perusing. There is coffee.

In another room are general selections of books: art, architecture, design, fashion, typography, cultural essays. Again, baggage restrictions prevented me from going completely crazy, but I came away with a few selections:

I like your work: art and etiquette is Paper Monuments answer to Miss Manners meets Andy Warhol. Various artists were interviewed for their opinions on courtesy in the art world. Jessica Slaven is asked ‘What is the role of etiquette in the art world?’ to which she replies, ‘ The art world should have a separate code of behaviour from civilized society to indicate its self-impressed and savage nature.’ Roger White, in a section entitled ‘How artists must dress’ states that ‘The relationship between an artist’s work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes.’ And Wendy Olsoff, when asked ‘When does breach of etiquette play a role in embarrassing or awkward encounters?’ simply answers ‘One kiss, two kisses, or three? One is never sure.’

http://www.papermonument.com/i-like-your-work/

I also bought when you travel in Iceland you see a lot of water by Roman Signer and Tumi Magnússon, described as a ‘travel book’, but which is an illustrated road trip and conversation between the two artists. It is a beautiful book, with an old map of Iceland as the endpapers, and photographs charting the journey.

http://www.hauserwirth.com/publications/69/when-you-travel-in-iceland-you-see-a-lot-of-water/view/

But my best purchase was the Sternberg Press edition of Sung Hwan Kim’s Ki-da Rilke, which is the artist’s illustrated interpretation of Rilke, presented like someone’s secret notebook (interleaved with pink sheets that are not bound, so that they are like interventions or asides), or dog-eared copy with doodles in the margins. Rilke becomes a kind of tour guide or ghostly presence, his poems written out in the artist’s long hand (the way I used to write out poems I liked in a notebook, before the days of computers.

http://www.sternberg-press.com/index.php?pageId=1321&l=en&bookId=216&sort=year DESC,month DESC&PHPSESSID=1d1c226bc171edd2817c997bd7addd90

Eventually, I had to leave the shop. I restricted myself to those three books, as I knew they would be hard to find in London. But I’ll be back.

http://www.doyoureadme.de/

Most cities worth visiting need to be experienced more than once, over time, in different seasons, staying in different quarters. It is essential to have a decent map, to walk as much as possible, to see how different neighbourhoods join up so that you get a feel of the city’s arteries. It’s important to have an itinerary, to know what you want to see, famous landmarks and museums; but it is equally important to wander, to adopt the flâneur’s stance, to rely on local knowledge.

Nowhere more so than in Berlin, a city which seems in constant flux; in places, like an enormous construction site, still only 20 years new since unification. We had visited once before, in the dead of winter, in the midst of a snowstorm, and although our second trip was also in winter, the sun was out, and so were Berliners, sitting in cafés and on park benches. They’re a bit tougher than Londoners, their coats and boots are sturdier (and their dogs have more attitude).

Even with a map, we got lost. Frequently. But getting lost is a good thing in Berlin, because much of what is interesting is hidden; you have to be intrepid and seek things out. This is the city of pop-ups – pop-up galleries, pop-up restaurants – sometimes in temporary structures, or buildings ready for the bulldozer, so you have to be quick. The most vibrant art spaces are tucked away – down alleys, in courtyards, up several flights in office blocks, sharing stair space with lawyers and architects. Many of our finds were accidental, and more treasured for it.

We were in town as guests of Kit Schulte (http://www.kitschulte.com/) whose gallery is located in Schöneberg, in the south west of the city. Galleries have started to spring up here as rents in Mitte become too dear; there is enough of a critical mass to instigate a Schöneberg art walk on the last Saturday of every month. The Schöneberg gallery scene is still not as big as the one around Checkpoint Charlie (now rather loftily referred to as the Berlin Gallery District, complete with its own impossible-to-follow map) or the explosion around Mitte. But Schöneberg is the sort of place where galleries might thrive – a very typical Berlin mix of residential (young families with buggies), Turkish restaurants and gay hotels (the large and uncensored windows of the S & M shops are like Cathy de Monchaux installations). Kit’s gallery is located in her flat – so that the space is inviting, welcoming, part of everyday life (her dog Louie is often to be found in the gallery with his squeaky toy). The rooms are large and light, high-ceilinged, with their original Victorian cornice work.

The space is particularly well-suited to the minimal drawings of Linda Karshan and Koho Mori-Newton. Linda’s work occupied the larger room. One wall was given over to works from the recent sequence of woodcuts, the basis for our collaborative edition, Desire Paths. It was the first time I’d seen them displayed on the wall, like grids for an imagined streetscape, and it gave particular resonance to the reading of the poem at the private view.

Koho’s drawings were in a smaller room, giving them a concentrated intensity, like tornadoes. He had hung the side wall of windows with huge columns of grey silk, which looked like tarnished pewter from a distance. The two artists occupied their separate and distinct spaces, but carried on a meaningful dialogue across the parquet floors.

On the Saturday, we ventured into the Berlin Gallery District to visit the Niels Borch Jensen Gallery (http://www.berlin-kopenhagen.de/galerie.html) and Linda’s exhibition with Berlin-based artists Sara Sizer and Dolores Zinny & Juan Maidagan (a husband and wife team of sculptors). Here the show was collaborative and integrated, with the artists responding to each other through the way the exhibition was designed. The afternoon showing was described not as a private view but as an ‘afternoon gathering’ with live music (improvised jazz that filled the space and echoed into the other galleries in the building). Unlike private views in London, this was truly a family event (the kids were having fun in the stairwell, testing out the acoustics in the spectacular Art Deco building, creating their own musical accompaniment).

More space to other places we visited in future posts …

Staphorst is a place you can’t quite place. I was expecting it to be rural, and it is, in a way. We travelled on three trains to get there; from London to Brussels, Brussels to Schiphol. And from Schiphol, heading north, through Rotterdam, towards Meppel; the landscape eventually yielding to wide, flat fields separated by irrigation canals and lined by rigid rows of poplars, with the odd farmhouse or windmill suggesting habitation. But once we had alighted from the train, I was surprised by the amount of traffic. While some of the older women still cycle on ancient pushbikes in traditional dress, there are a lot of cars for such a small town, all heading in convoy to low-built strip malls along the main street. In that respect it reminded me of suburban New Jersey. But the long farmhouses with their painted shutters and thatched roofs brought me quickly back to Holland. None of the houses along the main road are particularly old; although they resemble seventeenth-century dwellings, most were built in the early part of the twentieth century, giving the town a feel of a restored village (again, I thought of America, somewhere like Williamsburg, although Staphorst is not a tourist recreation – this is how people live). The farmsteads grew up in a straight line along the bog; a farmer’s son would build his house behind his parent’s house, and his children behind him, so all the houses are regimented along the main road, facing the same way. There are cows and sheep in the yards, milk pails hanging along the wall, thatched sheds in the back. It is considered to be one of the most religious places in Holland. The town falls silent on Sundays.

It is an odd place then to find an exhibition of contemporary art. But just on the outskirts of town, Hein Elferink has built a gallery next to his house. On the Saturday we were there, light was streaming through the large horizontal glass roof, and we could see the brown forms of winter trees crowding the sky. We were gathered for the private view of works by Linda Karshan and Marian Breedveld; Linda’s drawings, as always, stark in the best possible way, like charts to nowhere, next to Marian’s bright swipes of colour. They worked surprising well together, matched in their sense of pattern and motion (Linda and Marian discovered they had a common background in dance which informed both their works).

It was also the launch of Desire Paths, the edition of Linda’s new woodcuts and my corresponding poem. It is a beautiful production; the sheets emerging from an earth-coloured box, Linda’s woodcuts on delicate tissue-thin Japanese paper, but dark, grained, serious. My poem like an inscription carved in stone or on a tomb. Amazing to think that although Linda was in Connecticut, I was in London and Hein was in Staphorst, the finished result of our project is completely, stunningly integrated. Our paths finally came together, making the title of the work more relevant.

But this is what Hein does. He shows us his presses, his cases of metal type: Fournier (which is the font chosen for our edition), Baskerville, Gill Sans, Bembo. Classic faces. The paper he uses is thick and smooth, a creamy off-white. His boxes are covered in linen, the bindings hand-stitched. This is slow, meticulous work. The book as artifact, as artwork.

So maybe not so odd then, to be in Staphorst. The town is famous for its ‘stipwork’, a traditional kind of button embroidery that decorates caps and skirts. It is a place where people make things with their hands, the way they’ve been making things for years. There is devotion and patience in this kind of making, just as there is devotion and patience in making books, and pictures, and poems …

When your writing is going well, does it feel as if words are ‘pouring’ from you? When you’re listening to someone speaking and not really grasping the meaning, do you have the sensation of words ‘washing’ over you? Why a ‘torrent of abuse’ or a ‘sea of troubles’? These watery metaphors represent a pace at which words are measured, the ebb and flow of language; water can describe our way of speaking, of thinking.

There is a Jorie Graham poem called The Surface which is about the experience of trying to describe the fast-flowing movement of a river, but it is also about ‘the river of my attention’, the way the mind moves, ‘bending, / reassembling—over the quick leaving-offs and windy / obstacles’. The poem is broken, fragmented, like the motion of water. It is not possible to grasp it, to hold it, to chart it.

So how do we articulate our understanding of water? As Robert MacFarlane suggested in his opening talk at the recent Place: Taking the Waters weekend at Snape Maltings, perhaps we need to begin by choosing our prepositions carefully. A river is not simply a location nor a feature of a landscape, but a moving, living organism. Speaking of the late Roger Deakin, MacFarlane suggested that rather than being ‘on’ the water or ‘by’ the water, Deakin’s desire was to be ‘in’ it. His book, Waterlog, acted as a set text for the weekend’s conversations – a manifesto for the right to swim. Deakin argues that swimming should be as natural as walking, but we have lost the knack of being fully immersed.

Before he starts the epic swim around Britain that is chronicled in the book, Deakin says, ‘I started to dream ever more exclusively of water. Swimming and dreaming were becoming indistinguish-able. I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new… In water, all possibilities seemed infinitely extended.’

As I read these words, a poem kept nagging at the back of my mind. It was only after finishing the book, attending the Place weekend that the lines of the poem became clear, like landmarks on the horizon. The lines describe that experience of immersion, not into a lake or a river, but into the depth of the ocean:

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

The poem is Diving into the Wreck by Adrianne Rich, a poem which is about the experience of total immersion, into the deep sea, into words, into mythology, an ancient place (which is both the strange subterranean world of mermaids and also the world of words, stories set down centuries before the poet discovered them). It is a poem about immersing yourself in the poem, in words.

Back to Deakin, who could be describing Rich’s poem when he says:

So swimming is a right of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim.

Many talks impressed me over the Place weekend, but the artist Simon Read and his maps of the River Deben came closest to bringing water and words together, in Deakin’s spirit of full immersion. Read lives ‘on’ the river Deben, in a Dutch barge he sailed over himself from Holland. But ‘on’ doesn’t feel like the right preposition to describe how his river life has saturated his work. Since the 80s, he has been trying to capture ‘how fluid systems work’ (both rivers and drawing, which he says has its own fluid dynamic), making maps of the river which are beautiful swirling watercolours but also practical, navigable charts, and chronicling in words along the river’s course the alterations to the landscape through coastal erosion, flooding, human intervention. So his maps become palimpsests for the history of the river with many different interventions (the way Alice Oswald’s poem Dart introduced a multitude of voices and experiences of that river).

No surprise to find that his last exhibition was entitled Immersion: Drawing with Purpose.

http://www.simonread.info/

The photo is from Roni Horn’s series of the Thames.