A Conversation with Kerri Shying

A conversation with Newcastle poet, Kerri Shying

KIT

well today I'm happy to be welcoming my first guest to The Daily Kit - well known Newcastle poet,Kerri Shying. To talk about new work of hers and of mine. Draft work. Works we're each progressing. I should say Kerri and I have worked together quite a lot on various projects in recent years, and riffed off and responded to various of each other's works. We also together invented a new poetic form - the elevensie, which is basically five lines either side of a title.

Let's start off today with a lovely morbid ekphrastic (ekkies, we call them in the trade) Kerri's just been cooking up.

KERRI

Frida Kahlo 1932 self portrait on the border between the United States of America and Mexico

Self portrait on the borderline between wheelchair and walking

the rain so welcome is my gaoler    

slick paths   small drops     vex

both my sailors' gait   and  my state-provided chariot

sensitive as a nerve to moisture rain shuts me

like a shop those days

I am most likely to go online to splurge

money I do not have note the rain

the atmosphere   which by the way

is thwarting you-all too

just I can't run to papa

demanding  a fix this border my body

surrenders to everything

more powerful   knowing why the box exists

containing dividing where I end

is where the pain stops and flowers grow

KIT:

And I want to start off by asking - how is the border between the US and Mexico like the border between the wheelchair and walking? 

Also - it seems that although the poem has an ekphrastic aspect - it still certainly stands alone... And of course this is always the issue with ekkies... how well do they have to be able to work without the picture? And conversely, what relationship do they need to have with the picture they address? Is address the right word?

KERRI

Borders are more arbitrary than we realise - we decide for instance that this country ends here and another starts there, sometimes there is what we perceive as a natural boundary telling us this is so - a river dividing one land and people from another, the end of the body is a foot against the ground.  My experience of sensory neuropathy, by smudging the sensations at the edges of my body and removing my sense of proprioception ( literally the sense of where one is in space) destroyed these distinctions and intensified the sense of merging with the landscape or machinery; a dangerous space in culture and naming. The difference between me walking and me wheeling - to me places me in an exposed state of congress with machinery culture finds challenging to define.  My mixed mobility creates a space between old school 'halt and lame' - practically Biblical - and a sort of steroidal super-tech of the we-can-fix anything age - which is very New World, very American. I won't even start on language and the space where the bilingual live - that's a whole series of poems...

Also - it seems that although the poem has an ekphrastic aspect - it certainly stands alone ... And of course this is always the issue with ekkies... how well do they have to be able to work without the picture? 

 Does it need to be a readable poem without the artwork present? Yes please.

My reasons are idiotically selfish. I think each needs to stand alone despite the interaction between them. Long explanatory screeds beside artwork for me just tell me the piece has not fulfilled the medium. Unless the art and poem are expressly linked and produced to remain together as One work they should naturally both be equal partners in the conversation. 

And conversely, what relationship do they need to have with the picture they address? Is address the right word? I like to be able to see the picture in it - a woman in two worlds and two cultures - for there to be some relation, but I think it is the essence of art - the viewer or reader conversing through time and space with the artist or writer - the idea ( sometimes not, sometimes the art is a coat- hanger for the viewer's own idea too) of that gesture left unfulfilled that attracts us to insert ourselves at all. I've read ekphrastic poems that have made me furious, where I've thought " that isn't what that piece is saying at all", but that is the importance of this style, finding attitudes and subtlety of politics or emotion which are sometimes harder to access in a front-on approach. Does it need to be a description? No

KIT

I like my ekkies to stand alone, if only because who can afford to reproduce the artwork to show to go with the poem? ... and then there are the copyright hassles... BUT I wonder how often I succeed in getting them to stand alone? The problem is that once yv responded, yr committed to some trace of an original work. This goes for the whole response continuum - from 'faithful' translation to parody to serious altercation... and yes many ekkies piss me off -- for being too easy or too smug, too much 'I'm in the know with this' (like food or wine connoisseur-ship). 

And I think response is the thing here. It doesn't matter whether it's to a painting or a picture of some other sort or music or another poem... once yr under the influence, is the influence a thing that can't be got away from? that has to be declared? The whole point is to be under a direct influence and it's interesting that 'we' - by virtue of this genre - allow ourselves to be influenced directly by pictures in a way that we don't quite with music or any literary from... parody's interesting this way because it's kind of 'licence to take the piss', but it implies (usually) a paradoxical degree of awe for an original as well (I don't include parodying a speech of Pauline Hanson's in this category, although they can inspire a kind of awe in their way... there's a kind of linguistic sublime [in the original sense there] ... like yr looking over the chasm into the atavistic space where there are words but not yet what we recognize as meaning... and you get a kind of primeval hatred thing going on there)...

but I digress ... as all these brackets show ...

what I like about yr ekkie ... this Freda Kahlo job is that you play out the tenuous connection ... the borders in everything everywhere and largely imagined, so vanishing and - like pain - able to, as magically, resurface, perhaps where you didn't expect them ... all this somehow mirroring the operation of the ekphrasis as a gesture as well... the idea again elsewhere, in a new and unexpected form and so not the same idea at all ...

borders, along with nation, being a particular interest of mine 

... nation being the deadliest abstraction in the world, for probably the last 150 years or more (since it started taking over from empire as the previous most deadly abstraction)...

... but maybe that's a topic to bookmark?

by 'we' (up above) b t w I mean us and our mates, the poetry makers of these parts (and other parts) 

anyway I think you should ask me a question before this gets too one sided 

... I mean it's meant to be a conversation rather than an interview 

but while you think about that --  here's another topic ... I wanted to ask you about tatts ... and ... poetry... is there a relationship there? I mean particularly to do with the coherence of a body of work/ of a work embodied/ of the body as work/ as a worked surface / palimpsest... 

tatts and pain are a thing too... I was in Forster today and on the main street, there's a tattoo parlour called 'Dr Goodpains', and (being a wimp) I thought 'ouch'...

I'm sure we've discussed that Stephen Spender (1955) essay about the making of a poem... where he talks about the Beethoven and Mozart methods of creative composition - i.e. working from the details as opposed to working from the big picture - the poetic equivalent of the contrast in logic between inductive and deductive reasoning... tattoos seem to me like a Beethoven thing to do with the body... start with the parts of the picture or the picture in parts ... but I guess that's only true of certain styles... I mean it doesn't really apply to Yakuza tatts... if yr just one big dragon, that's got to be Mozart...

KERRI

I've been thinking about your abstract paintings; I want to ask you about the positioning of Eccies against abstraction. How do you choose the paintings you pair with the poems on your blog? Do you think people see this as a pairing, an Ekphrastic poem? Should we see this is an eccie? Is the abstract available to be eccie-ed up at all is is the process exclusive to the figurative artist? 

KIT

pondering ta... 

greetings from Hobart 

KERRI

i am glad i keep my journey and my memories safe on my skin because planned ones needing time

and spaces to cooperate fall through and now with the novel coronavirus others

know this not just the sick disabled poor imprisoned question will this cause a post-viral boom

in commemorative tattoo

KIT

and sorry for the delay on which I blame a little island to our south 

but to the question of abstraction and poetry, which I pondered while at MONA and in Hobart more generally 

ekphrastic abstraction?

abstract ekphrastics?

I think a point I was trying to make in pictures of nothing at all 

... well maybe not a point ... more of a contradiction with which I was hoping to play 

call it a contradiction in play  

was simply that all attempts at not representing (at non-depiction) ultimately fail

and this is merely more obvious in the case of poetry (of any word work) than it is in the case of painting or music 

...

look at something like the chevron (one of the oldest ‘meaning-free’ design features yll fine on ancient pots around the Mediterranean) ... look at the meaning and function it's take on ... apart from the oil, there's keeping apart on the highway and showing the right way to go… of course the oil is no doubt appropriate as probably that was one of the things that came in the pot with the chevrons on it  

can there be something like abstract poetry?

of course various people have had a crack 

(notably Edith Sitwell about a century ago)

... but it all shades into really being nonsense poetry or concrete poetry or surrealist poetry ...

…I do think one can make poetry about this ... a kind of conceptual poetry, I suppose 

and I thought to do the subject justice I would simply have to descend into poetry

and so 

a mask is much

little essay on ekphrastic abstraction

notes at MONA

in Lutruwita

for Kerri

takes a trick to wander lost

in all this skin till told

and in the mountain

there isn’t time at home

everything symbol sets

not that but the journey with

it’s mirror making

pants down

no drugs needed

voices and weather

try to be free

can’t help it

still the picture making lines

lines picture

first two abstractions

idea not thing

wrung out

darkened passage

do they meet

or have they parted?

fall to a pattern

all in a depict

made instance at

the eye aimed

and where is till?

track scratch

bubble in to be

even here forbidden

hate it when they say ‘there’s a face’

or

‘camels’, ‘ice cream’

It’s always though like this

being born again again

there’s nothing but

Beholder’s Eye

for cheap affliction

ampersand clef

thrown to the clocks

without a name

make mysteries distract me

consider Ampelmän as well

(must be enough of him)

dot travelling

puzzle up

guilt by association

what else?

test pattern’s really much of a map

and hazarded ubiquity

kind of a thing grip to it

faster than the day

in the dream I must bring

my own chair table

there’s hardly a language we speak

so briefly

it’s from having admired

orders taken then

sink a well

all out of script

tending to

archetype

city all ruins

fragile slight and tricked with

bold roman italic

asterisk it then

no hope

top unimage the line

so that it may come

to arbitrary ends means

in parrot bright

and frogfall

same wolves on the wall

skin we crawl to trouble

so vanishing conduct

.

I see perhaps I haven't really answered yr question about the pairing though

except for guilt by association 

because 

the arbitrary and the random 

never quite get to be 

you cannot help but connect 

and words will always mean

... nor does that answer the question about why I connect what I do

... 

I suppose the obvious answer is that there is a temporal/spatial connection 

if things are happening at more or less the same time 

...

this leads to (perhaps) larger questions about text-image relations more generally 

... how to make the text-image relationship equal 

and neither illustrate nor caption 

if you see what I mean

that is always a struggle across modes/media 

in collaboration 

and even with yourself

... I suppose one practical question is 

whether an abstract picture makes a connected poem somehow more 

abstract or archetypal or gives it some other kind of depth 

or if poem imbues with meaning a picture of nothing at all

?

KERRI

i am telling my story     I'm the oldest

language      singing with skin     

through me      you go among the lost people

per mi se va tra la perduta         

between 

our tributes to the lost declarations

of allegiance    smile children  

cry the pains     these pictures  

all face out           I am made to be read

there is an enso circle shiny black 

 sat in at the base of my skull     

that I can't see even

with a mirror    no numbing cream 

we agree

permanence is earned with pain

            in

art as in life      what marks us  costs us

plenty

KIT

tatts to get you through the gates of hell? I wonder if Dante had any tatts? Somehow I doubt it. I googled it and got 15 million results in .48 of a second, so let's not go there.

yv got a number of great and wonderfully contentious lines there  -- 

permanence is earned with pain

and 

     what marks us  costs us/plenty

I get how tatts hurt to have and cost lots to come by 

but don't they point in the direction of impermanence?

and isn't the skin something given? 

maybe that's just me but I can't think of a medium to work more subject to decay ...

that seems like a very Buddhist place to be though 

and maybe that's the point ?

but where's the poetry in / alongside / under / over by means of it?

back to your poem though 

... pictures painted by others on yourself that you can't even see

feels like a kind of an offering up 

... a body for truth and reconciliation?

truth has had this form

phrase up to it

best pun

it's all with little cogs in mind

we run

by heart

it's all of this to be in a skin

and breathe

and venture forth by limb

and having heard and hummed

so sing

and at the strings

for all you're worth

not living here

but last of all

in a place where time stops

we begin the tomb

all mind's eye now

the scratch as at paper

whom we picture

becomes of the past

the cruel time comes to each of us

when we may turn away from that face

where love was known at first 

but what does it mean to say that I am the oldest language?

and how can you sing with your skin?

that last seems, at least potentially, a dangerously chauvinistic idea... 

when the Aryans do it and 'tomorrow belongs to me' 

aren't our skins the mongrel edge

of who we actually are 

of how we touch

of where we've been,

will be

?

KERRI
each of us

an ambular death bag 

got a skinful of pictures

a show and tell 

of days of thinks

little gougings represent

that pain  is all that pain

is in the here

the here is pain 

and nobody gets a tattoo

of a horror that isn't in the

rear view

I'm riding in my skin death bag

I'm high on being nothing

going nowhere

I'm the bag my life 

came in

gives me freedom

in the morning I get up

life there it is

writ large

small taste

this that here then

nothing can be kept

so play

KIT

nothing can be kept so play ?

yes!

sleep to dream and wake to play

that’s my wearying chase of tail

in mountains and in mists

and

and nobody gets a tattoo

of a horror that isn't in the

rear view

?

so tatts are about time?

which the skin is too

but

tatts are drawing our attention to that fact

drawing us in to the skin as a story

like dreams risen to the surface

but unlike dreams

vanishing only as slowly as we ourselves do

…

I recently started putting together a m/s of jetlag poems thinking about maybe a chapbook, but it all morphed from the hypnagogic into dream material more generally … of which I find myself embarrassingly well equipped … probably all a result of a childhood with a father who was a part time dream analyst (offering sixpence for a dream the way most parents then would for a tooth)… check today’s, along these lines, #69 - ‘nooks and crannies’…

love to be lost in the old pyjamas

eternity's that moment 

none long enough to inhabit 

slip into oneself in dreams

must be from where we depart

when there’s nowhere to go

…

nothing can be kept so play?

this is the Gospel of Epicurus

this is one for the Garden

!

KERRI

So many entitled folks, forgotten the forests and the air already. Cash is king

do you know how to turn the waterfall on

            it's the switch behind the         nevermind

i'll do it

            behind every success there's 

hard work         

good health

visualising yourself in the driver's seat

teaching the world       how

to treat you

activated almonds

                        big hearts         are a sign

            of         congestive        heart failure

            only     the poor           live all crushed in

together

leadership        is best left to the ones who demonstrate

success

do you know where the stuff goes         from the

            vacuum cleaner duct holes                   i'm

scared

                        what if it just builds up 

                        until the house

                        burns down