In Competition No. 3341 you were invited to submit a poem about a great work of art – a challenge prompted by George Steiner’s observation that ‘the best readings of art are art’.
The writer Geoff Dyer has cited W.H. Auden’s 1938 ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ – about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ and our relationship to suffering – as an example of this: (‘About suffering they were never wrong,/ The old Masters: how well they understood/ Its human position…/ …how everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster…’).
So Nicholas Hodgson’s smart take on Auden’s poem came as no surprise (‘About suffering they were never right,/ The Old Masters;/ They should have known that what the public wants/ Is disasters…’)
In a hotly contested week – high fives all round, but especially to Nicholas Hodgson, David Silverman, Sylvia Fairley, John O’Byrne, Richard Norman and Jane Blanchard – the winners, printed below, take £25.
Shoot me now, says Mariana,
Off me quickly, life’s a drag –
Love is constantly manãna,
All I do is lollygag –
I am emptied, I become null,
Suffer self-destructive feelings –
Sick of everything autumnal:
Leaves are coming through the ceiling.
See the mouse? I couldn’t care
If he is a dirty squeaker –
All that stained glass drives me spare.
No fiancé. I grow weaker.
She’s a misog – do avoid her!
Yes it’s true, my life is cack:
Do I not love to embroider?
Loathe it, babes! And oh my back!Bill Greenwell/Millais’ ‘Mariana’
Here’s a tip: when supervising flocks,
Take time to trace the cut of an inscription.
Keep an eye out for the pirate fox,
But here you’ll find what’s needed: a depiction
Of what will get us all if you translate,
Of what will get us all no matter what.
We only have to hang around and wait.
It gets us going till we have been got.
You see the swooping hills, the tempting dells?
You see the rushing rills, the rural dance?
You see the luscious grass, the floral swells?
The sky so blue? The trees held in a trance?
All this will fade away. And so will you.
And so speaks Death. He’s in Arcadia, too.Philip Wilson/Poussin’s ‘Et in Arcadia ego’
That’s our urinal, hanging on the wall,
Looking as though plumbed in. He’s going to call
It Fountain, Monsieur Duchamp is. It’s Art –
Great Art, he says, and he seems very smart.
He chose this piece of sanitary ware
Carefully from our showroom. It’s a fair
Example of our range, and soundly made,
Quite up to the best standards of the trade –
But Art? He said it wasn’t until signed,
Then in that moment remade, redefined,
And with it the whole Western Art tradition,
With all conventions cast into perdition.
He says great Art’s what causes consternation,
Redraws all maps, boggles imagination.
Still, is this Art? Or Art’s antithesis?
Or does it take (excuse my pun) the piss?George Simmers/Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’
Of course I look fed up, here every day
Outside this clapboard farmhouse, looking glum,
Stood next to her – my daughter, by the way.
If she looks sour, you ought to see her mum!But when they close the gallery, I slip
Out of my frame. Perhaps you have guessed who
I really am? No, not some boondocks hick!
My three-pronged pitchfork should give you a clue.I’m Lucifer, of course, confined in hell.
But in the night, with all the gawpers gone,
I put red tights on, cape and horns as well,
Take up my trident and can have some fun.Wantons in classic art feel my pitchfork
Upon their wicked naked bottoms, then
I stop for drinks with old Hopper’s Nighthawks,
And when dawn breaks, I’m stuck back here again.Brian Murdoch/Grant Wood’s ‘American Gothic’
I am his vision of a starry night,
a moon that burns, a wind in thumbprint whorls,
each star and planet glows with pulsing light,
the sky a rush of motion, mistral swirls,
a grey-blue village, windows lit with gold
by sloping, slumbering hills, a church’s spire,
tall sentinels of cypress, stark and cold,
serene in this dark midnight, pierced with fire.
I am a world in strokes of Prussian blue,
a madman’s nocturne, luminous in oils,
a realm that vibrates, Vincent’s lonely view,
the cosmos captured by his constant toils.
I was, he thought, a failure, nothing great,
a waste of time, a mess, a paint-smeared knife.
I am the vision he strove to create,
ablaze with hope and ever-stirring life.Janine Beacham/ Van Gogh’s ‘The Starry Night’
Go to museums and he’s everywhere –
New York, Vienna, Amsterdam – you’d know
him by that swirling mop of curly hair,
the sulky mouth, the perfect nose. He’s so
alive he might be just about to change
his clothes for soccer, might be at your door
delivering a pizza. Is it strange
to think this face has outlived countless more
heroes and gods because an emperor
loved him? And when death took him from his side,
a thousand statues evened up the score
with immortality, and deified
a face that still knocks criticism flat.
Does anyone love you as much as that?Gail White/the many statues of Antinous
No. 3344: Formal complaint?
You are invited to submit a poem in which a poet expresses their feelings – positive or negative – about a poetic form of your choosing. Please email entries of up to 16 lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 3 April.
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