Journey's End

If you come here often, you probably know that I have a good many friends who are painters--not sure how that happened, but I enjoy it and get as much or more out of talking about the visual arts as I do from talking about writing. In fact, I'm going to meet up with a couple of painter friends for lunch today... I tend to be more interested in talking about arts other than my own in some ways, as I think about writing quite enough. And if you know those things about me, you may also know that I have collaborated a good bit with painters and other artists, especially with Clive Hicks-Jenkins.

Here's a poem I wrote about one of his early paintings, "Journey's End." It was written as a little gift for Clive, and it appears in The Foliate Head, the collection of my poems dedicated to him. In many of his inside/outside pictures, the foreground is a still life containing treasured, meaningful items, while in the background (often seen through open curtains, as in the stage, so important to Clive's history) a mysterious Welsh landscape appears. Items tend to repeat, much as we see actors in different plays. In this early picture, a sense of human presence on the stage of the world and a combining of still life with landscape already are important. The cup portrayed here belonged to his late father. The tower (Tretower) was the place to which Clive retreated for some years after breaking from his life in the theatre. The poem begins by musing over what seems missing--the strong narrative and bright, intense color of many of his later works. It glances at the painting, moves to consider story and imagines the painting as a kind of fount of possible stories related to his father and the father's death, and at last rests in the mystery of the picture.

Happy birthday, Clive! Slightly belated...

THE BLUE MARCHES

                  “. . . this early painterly approach to objects

                  can be seen in Journey’s End, the little still-life/landscape

                  painting of my dad’s tea mug standing in front

                  of Tretower Castle.”  –Clive Hicks-Jenkins

There’s nothing here bejeweled with twig and flower,

No wolfish fur that burns as if a kiln

Had been flung wide to let in sprays of salt,

And most of all, no story, wings, or saint.

Instead there is the seepage of a blue

Not twilight:  low, continual dim glow

Dispersed from borderlands beyond this world.

So here is landscape as the stillest life,

So here is still life hunkered in the grass,

Estranged from lamplit houses, grown outscale.

There’s nothing here but cup and keep and tree,

And tree resembles keep, and keep is tree

Truncated—cup is stump of leaning tree.

No teller yet, unless the tale be one

Older than the famed white book of Rhydderch,

Older than the red of Hergest, older

By far than these… Fetch me a magic fruit

So I can taste its glistening cells and gulp

The stubborn words that linger out of reach.

In blueing light, a father’s mug might be

The grail, might be Welsh cauldron, wombed with life,

Might over-brim with death-drink, colorless.

There’s nothing but a shadow in the cup!

Its clipper ship in sail is doldrum-glazed,

Forgets the fragrance of darjeeling seas.

The motte, a mound of good Welsh earth, was his,

As was the tower vacant to the sky,

The kingdom known as Powys long ago,

And all the rainy borderland of blue—

All things that flee and hide in borderlands

Between the earth and sky belonged to him.

But now he has passed through that realm of dreams

And left you wondering by hills of earth,

And long you’ll muse, and long you’ll meditate

And never understand the world you brushed

Across that sheet of paper:  world where tree

Is keep, and keep is tree, and cup can loom

As high as high Tretower or a tree.

                       —Journey’s End, 1999


Prior mentions of Journey's End--

Marly Youmans / The Palace at 2:00 a.m.: "Like a tower"

Mar 07, 2013

Journey's end. "Journey's End" with Tretower castle by Clive Hicks-Jenkins. You can find something I wrote about this piece here. Poem as tower. Unterecker, A Reader's Guide to William Butler Yeats (p. 107): By staring at any ...

http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/

Marly Youmans / The Palace at 2:00 a.m.: Clive at The ...

Sep 01, 2011

7. Both those little paintings show Tretower,. where Clive hid himself in a cold chrysalis. between his life in the theatre and his life as a painter. The larger one is "Journey's End,". showing Clive's father's mug in the foreground.

http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/