Some very quick thoughts on this. There's a fair sprinkling of art
writing/reviewing done by poets in the UK; there's a definite rash of
poets in art galleries & museums, usually running writing workshops
based on the collections; the Tate put out a couple of books of (not all
that exciting) poems
about its pictures long before Paul Durcan came to be the person you got
in to write poems by the yard about your painting collection, and more
recently it has
had writers in residence including Denise Riley, who ran a brilliant
lecture series there about 4 years ago, and Drew Milne who also ran a
very interesting brief course focusing on some poets' references to
painting (Prynne, Mulford, D. Riley, others). Prynne's lecture on de
Kooning. Andrew Crozier, whose books with artists are currently
exhibiting in Cambridge, as Nate mentioned before. A truly naff
acrostic poem on TATE MODERN, by James Fenton, published a few days ago
in one of the newspapers. Allen Fisher ... [add names to this series]
... Dell Olsen (and in response
to the oft-repeated appeal to get textual, we could with profit discuss
her lovely new Book of the Fur, referring [sorry] as it does in part to
Meret Oppenheim..) The 'Platform' series of readings organised by Miles
Champion happen in art spaces in London, whether this is a programme or
by convenience, but for sure they have an 'insoucient buzz' ... Heavens,
even the Sumner/Hyde + Cayley performance at the Nunnery Gallery, Bow
Arts Trust, 181 Bow Road this very Wednesday 7.30 p.m, which comes about
because some of *my best friends are artists ... While artists do tend
to be graduates of art schools, few writers here (yet) are graduates of
writing programmes? maybe that has something to do with something ...
New York -- in New York they have whole CDs of painters who sing country
and western music.

e

them ... Artists
-----Original Message-----
From: J Kimball <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 22 May 2000 03:57
Subject: Trucking with artists


>A note of thanks, frontchannel, to those who wrote me backchannel with
>their comments on the new Tate. A consensus emerges that both the
>building and the curating are brilliant.
>
>It strikes me that both in the US and UK lines of friendly
>communication between graphic arts and poetry are tenuous. Friendships
>between poets and artists seem less prominent a feature than was the
>case years ago. A generation or two earlier the opening of something
>like Tate Bankside (that is, if something like Bankside could have
>happened earlier in the UK) might have occasioned bursts of
>commentary from poets, even some verse. Today's poets seem
>almost inarticulate about nonliterary arts of their own time, less
>engaged by contemporary painting, sculpture, the graphic arts.
>
>I'm fairly certain counterevidence can be cited, though, as many of us
>have friends who experiment with video, play in bands, even paint and
>sculpt. Some poets in New York take on these arts themselves,
>perfoming in rock and experimental music, dabbling in multimedia, etc.
>So in this instance crossfertilization between nonliterary arts and
>poetry is more dynamic, perhaps. Yet what appear to be missing are the
>intensities of a nonexclusive social nexus evolving out of shared
>interests in the 'other,' the insouciant buzz and friendships between
>the craftspeople of the eye and the word. Are graduates of literature
>and writing programs, on one hand, and from art schools, on the other,
>so professionalized as to be mutually independent?
>
>




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