Creative springboard: art inspires Poetry School students
They toured art galleries in London in search of inspiration. Some even travelled to Venice for the Biennale. And on Tuesday night at a reading at the Redfern Gallery in Cork Street, London, eight Poetry School students – Juli Jana, Olivia Sprinkel, Daphne Gloag, Fran Hyde, Peter O’Hare, Jacqui Frye, Mike Sims (pictured), and Mary Mulholland - presented the fruits of their investigations. Poet and tutor Tamar Yoseloff, who introduced the Poetry and Contemporary Art students before their reading, said afterwards: “Most of the poems I had heard in workshop, but it is always a different experience to hear them read aloud. Hearing all the poems at once made me realise what good work we did this term.”
This reading gave an idea of the places a Poetry School course might take you to, whether external or internal. Two contrasting poems referred to paintings of Scilly by Cornwall-based contemporary artist Kurt Jackson, whose The Thames Revisited exhibition is currently on show at the Redfern. Other poems looked at different colours: blue was very popular, black was mentioned, and there was a striking poem about yellow - an ambulance’s flashing light in a dash to the county hospital, a last walk in unaided, at a time when “in the shops, only forced daffodils”. Another poem, inspired by geometry, talked of the lawyers moving in “with proportional dividers and compasses”.
Before and after the reading there was a chance to look at Jackson’s paintings. The titles of some of his works, painted in the open air, revealed a kind of poetry, too - ‘The hanging gardens of Richmond at night’, and ‘Four mallard tumbling into the source of the Thames at dusk’ - although others were more amusingly perfunctory, such as ‘A30, M25, Thames 2013.’
As Tamar Yoseloff said in introducing the students, art provides a springboard to poetry. The Poetry School’s spring term of courses begins next month around the country, and you can find out more about them here. As for me, I will be turning up again at the Poetry School in Lambeth in January, ever eager to learn more.
Greg Freeman
