Poetry and drawing (W. S. Graham)

Roger Hilton

The Ilkley Literature Festival is on at the moment and I went with an old friend of mine to the exhibition at the Manor House over the weekend, 'W.S. Graham, Poet among the Painters'

The exhibition collects together poems and letters by the poet W.S. Graham and puts them alongside images produced by selected St Ives School artists that he was friends with, such as Bryan Wynter, Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon. I first came across W. S. Graham’s writings through Patrick Oliver, an artist who had been an apprentice to Lanyon in the late 1950s and who himself often wove poetry into and through both his conversation and his paintings.  Patrick taught alongside myself and my friend Terry and so in many ways visiting the exhibition brought back memories and in particular a re-visiting of approaches to drawing that sometimes get forgotten or simply lost as concepts change and our ways of making and thinking about drawings alter due to societal shifts. 

W. S. Graham’s poems are set alongside paintings by the artists he was responding to as well as four images by Alfred Wallis, a seaman/artist that was to become a seminal figure not just in relationship to the development of modern art in St. Ives, but in how artist/teachers like Patrick Oliver could articulate the relationship between lived experience and image making. 

W. S. Graham held a long standing correspondence and friendship with the art collector Ronnie Duncan and it is Duncan who has provided the majority of both artwork and copies of W. S. Graham’s correspondence for this exhibition. 

A few weeks ago I posted a response to a drawing conference I had been to in Loughborough. The final event I had been to was Patrick Brandon’s: ‘Delayed graphification: obscurity and emergence in drawing’. The workshop was an introduction to the idea of using poetry as a way into thinking about space and surface in painting and Brandon read out a few lines from W. S Graham as an introduction to his workshop. He had though filtered W. S Graham through a Derridian lens and therefore had a post-structuralist take on how poetry could be fed into a painterly sensibility. However, Derrida when talking of poetry has a wonderful line himself, ‘the ‘catachrestic hedgehog, its arrows held at the ready’, an image that for myself is about the poem as a rolled up hedgehog, it’s potential, animal like, and ready to spike anyone that dares to try and uncurl it, especially if you try and correct 'mistakes'. This image of a curled up compaction of meanings, is one that I will myself take into this interrelationship between poetry and visual image-making. Sometimes this can be as much as anything about just plain awkwardness, and this is where the hedgehog image comes into its own. Roger Hilton was I gather a difficult and curmudgeonly man, who had drunk himself into an early death. In his final years he took to his bed but continued to work, painting gouaches almost to the end. There is a note on the wall of the exhibition next to Hilton’s work, it states; “When Roger Hilton took to his bed in the last years of his life, he lay on his left side. But Hilton was left handed and as a result, his much-admired gouaches were done with the ‘wrong’ (i.e. his right) hand”. How awkward can you get? But in this very difficulty, in his whiskey fog, he was able to pull out a series of images that hold steady in the mind well after seeing them. 

These images were all behind glass so forgive their lack of sharpness and occasional white spot, but hopefully you can still get a sense of their childlike warmth and openness. The birds in these images are awkward buggers, they are flightless soothsayers born of a need to escape the fug of bed, a way out, directed at I suspect Hilton himself. For W. S Graham, Hilton was a ‘terrible’ friend, a friend loved dearly though and in the object memory of a watch, Graham is able to find solace and a sort of companionship, both object and human being left behind after Hilton’s death. This is W. S. Graham's poetic reflection on the fact that he had been left Hilton's watch as a memento of his friend.

Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch

Which I was given because 

I loved him and we had

Terrible times together

O tarnished ticking time 

Piece with your bent hand, 

You must be used to being 

Looked at suddenly 

In the middle of the night

When he switched the light on
Beside his bed. I hope
You told him the best time
When he lifted you up
To meet the Hilton gaze. 

I lift you up from the mantle

Piece here in my house

Wearing your verdigris.

At least I kept you wound

And put my ear to you

To hear Botallack tick.

You realize your master
Has relinquished you
And gone to lie under
The ground at St. Just

Tell me the time. The time

Is Botallack o’clock

This is the dead of night.

He switches the light on

To find a cigarette

And pours himself a Teachers.

He picks me up and holds me

Near his lonely face

To see my hands. He thinks

He is not being watched. 

The images of his dream

Are still about his face

As he spits and tries not

To remember where he was. 

I am only a watch

And pray time hastes away

I think I am running down

Watch it is time I wound

You up again. I am

Very much not your dear

Last master but we had

Terrible times together. 

So how does poetry sit alongside plastic image making? If you look at the work of Alfred Wallis he fuses vision with experience, with a poetics of association. And it is this fusion that I well remember Patrick Oliver trying to make students understand when we were undertaking ‘morning drawing’. (See blog posts related to the pedagogy of art and design) 

                                  

                                                             Alfred Wallis

If you look at the image by Wallis above, you may well think that the small house squeezed between two others is the result of observation, it being set behind and away from the other two. However I well remember Patrick Oliver telling us a story he had picked up from his time in St Ives about Wallis’s own observations on the size of the house. Apparently the man that lived there had a small soul. He was mean spirited and had shown himself to be no friend of the sailing community. Size in this case being a recognition of spiritual worth. This coupled with a way of making images that relies on memory and a finding of shape/space by feeling for the way that forms fit or lock together as they are made, creates a way of image making that transcends a need for fixed perspective because it moves seamlessly between vision, memory, and an image hierarchy based on relative importance, whether this be spiritual, emotional or simply clarity or vividness of the remembered experience. These things are nested, or rolled together, like the hedgehog, and if you attempt to unravel them they lose their prickly warmth and end up as cold facts. 

Hilton had assimilated Wallis’s lesson and just as Wallis was no longer a sailor when he was making his images of ships and St. Ives, Hilton was no longer going any where except his bedroom. Hilton was even though bed ridden, able to tap into the raw world of image discovery, perhaps all the more raw because he was using his ‘wrong’ hand, perhaps all the more spiky and edgy because he was dying and he knew it and was yet still able to sense something of his life through that whiskey daze. 

Another death that W. S Graham had to respond to was that of Lanyon himself, killed in a gliding accident, at a moment in his career when he was beginning to fuse together his earlier lyrical abstractions with a tougher, gliding inspired vision of landscape and its perception as an unfolding dizzy conjunction of earth and air. The poetry of ‘space’ that Lanyon occupied is revisited by Graham as he folds the Cornish landscape into the language of Wallis and the making of boats and pounding of waves and history and flying. Another curled hedgehog that steadies us as we metaphorically hold hands with those past artists that help us to see again and even in their passing remind us of how in our own present, we owe it to them to continue the search for the curled hedgehog of image making. 

Peter Lanyon: Gliding painting

This is W. S. Graham's poetic tribute to Lanyon who died in a gliding accident in 1964

The Thermal Stair

I called today, Peter, and you were away.

I look out over Botallack and over Ding

Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea.

Find me a thermal to speak and soar to you from

Over Lanyon Quoit and the circling stones standing

High on the moor over Gurnard’s Head where some

Time three foxglove summers ago, you came.

The days are shortening over Little Park Owles.

The poet or painter steers his life to maim

Himself somehow for the job. His job is Love

Imagined into words or paint to make

An object that will stand and will not move.

Peter, I called and you were away, speaking

Only through what you made and at your best.

Look , there above Botallack, the buzzard riding

The salt updraught slides off the broken air

And out of sight to quarter a new place.

The Celtic sea, the Methodist sea is there.

You said once in the Engine

House below Morvah

That words make their world

In the same way as the painter’s

Mark surprises him

Into seeing new.

Sit here on the sparstone

In this ruin where

Once the early beam

Engine pounded and broke

The air with industry.

Now the chuck of daws

And the listening sea.

‘Shall we go down’ you said

‘Before the light goes

And stand under the old

Tinworkings around

Morvah and St Just?

You said ‘Here is the sea

Made by Alfred Wallis

Or any poet or painter’s

Eye it encountered.

Or is it better made

By all those vesselled men

Sometime it maintained?

We all make it again.’

Give me your hand, Peter,

To steady me on the word.

Seventy-two by sixty,

Italy hangs on the wall.

A woman stands with a drink

In some polite place

And looks at SARACINESCO

And turns to mention space.

That one if she could

Would ride Artistically

The thermals you once rode.

Peter, the phallic boys

Begin to wink their lights.

Godrevy and the Wolf

Are calling Opening Time.

We’ll take the quickest way

The tin singers made.

Climb here where the hand

Will not grasp on air.

And that dark-suited man

Has set the dominoes out

On the Queen’s table.

Peter , we’ll sit and drink

And go in the sea’s roar

To Labrador with Wallis

Or rise on Lanyon’s stair.

Uneasy, lovable man, give me your painting

Hand to steady me taking the word-road home.

Lanyon, why is it you’re earlier away?

Remember me wherever you listen from.

Lanyon, ding dong ding dong from carn to carn.

It seems tonight all Closing bells are tolling

Across the Duchy shire wherever I turn.

The letters that W. S Graham wrote to Ronnie Duncan have a quality of their own that sits between the visual and verbal. So I will leave you with a few images of pages of Graham's letters. 

A film about Ronnie Duncan and his art collection