The studio is large and clean. The walls are white. The floor is a splattered parquet. There are neat desks holding art materials, photographs, cuttings, a newspaper. Natural light pours into the room from skylights above, and from a wall of French doors on the far side of the space which open onto a rooftop terrace of plants and sky. There’s a radio playing pop music. Paintings of various sizes lean against the walls. Others are hanging in groups. A couple are set on easels giving them more prominence than the others, as though these are still available for further work, or as signs for further work to follow. As we grow accustomed to the light and the space, it becomes clear that we are looking not just at work in progress, but at an archive of the accumulated produce of years of progressive work, of overlapping phases of commitment, developing interests in subject, media and technique, implementations of theories and guesses. It’s very clean. The scents of teak oil, solvents and coffee. Amid these images the painter stands working at a board. The board is small enough that the painter can reach anywhere she needs to reach without moving her feet, whilst being extensive enough to allow expressive kinetic movements of the eye and arm and brush or knife. Step toward her and the painter without acknowledging us moves silently toward an open doorway leading to another similar room. Light and perspective tilt and realign perception as we follow. It becomes clear that these rooms are only two rooms among an open structure of an uncertain number and geometry of similar rooms, with openings between them, with different dispositions of apertures and images, different radios with different songs, different windows showing different scenes. But always an exit, an image, a radio, a window. Here and there you get glimpses of other people moving between the rooms, looking at the paintings and moving on. But there’s only one artist here, moving among the spaces, making images, bringing and assembling and removing and disassembling objects, then moving on from room to room among the rooms she’s been in many times before.
It’s that simple
in another town.
No, it doesn’t know me
nor this train I’m on.
The ex-poet’s beside herself:
“here in the clouded
red, the grey, the burnt
oak forest, the rails shake”
Safely I’ll love it by letter —
yet skip the “better
that way” to cancel
the doubter’s rhyme, trembling.
This little poem constitutes one section, or perhaps a part of one section, or perhaps a ghost or imposter of a section, of ‘A Shortened Set’; a lyric sequence comprising an uncertain number of untitled sections published in Denise Riley’s new and collected poems Mop Mop Georgette by Wendy Mulford and Ken Edwards’ Reality Street in 1993. Its three stanzas first appeared, along with several other lyrics also later used in ‘A Shortened Set’, in Rod Mengham and John Wilkinson’s little magazine Equofinality (3: 1986); other poems which would also make their way into the sequence first surfaced in New American Writing (8/9: 1988). The story of the poem’s composition is messy and convoluted, in a rather elegant and charismatic way. From Denise Riley’s archived correspondence ‘A Shortened Set’ (1993) emerges as only the last published edit of a series of provisional groupings of poems variously called ‘A Set of Six’, ‘A Set of Seven’ and ‘A Set of Ten’ circulated among her friends over the course of 1989-92. ‘A Set of Ten’ was published in Alice Notley and Douglas Oliver’s little magazine Scarlet in 1991, then the poems appeared as ‘A Shortened Set’ in the pamphlet Stair Spirit, published by Rod Mengham’s small press Equipage in 1992, before finally the whole set of sets was re-cut and spliced together for its retrospective collection in Mop Mop Georgette the next year. In the disparate earlier magazine publications, some of the poems were presented as independent inventions, separated by distinct titles — the poem quoted here was given the name ‘More Trains’. But with their revision and sequencing into the contributory groupuscles of ‘A Shortened Set’, the titles are erased, and the poems lie in a baroque, flowingly suggestive composition. Composed and decomposed, revised and recomposed over a period of years, as the poet began to put her work in poetry back together after a period of distraction and lapse following its promising early emergence in the 70s, the sequence is not only a major accomplishment of Riley’s work in literary lyric but a significant document of that work’s development, and of the ideas about poems and their making which shaped it.
‘A Shortened Set’ isn’t a single movement of composition or the fulfilment of a strictly formal idea. It couldn’t be. The life its poet then lived made such poems, poems that are the impress or influx of the ideal through into form, impossible, undesirable, or irrelevant. But that’s not to say the work is without discipline or integrity. Rather than emerging organically from a commitment of the ideal into form, ‘A Shortened Set’ seems to me the product of an extended process of design: of layering, cutting and joining, negation and addition, sustained across a series of versions of the poem in print and manuscript. It is a text lived-with and returned-to over days and weeks and months and years of an unpredictable and sometimes chaotic life, its adaptations and revisions united by the discipline of taste and integrated by the designer’s sense of fitness and utility, as she attends observantly to how changes to parts affect the whole, how the sequencing of these parts relates with the work’s through-movements, its interleaved temporalities, modes and subjects, and so on; a work undertaken with what I imagine to have been a constant anxious reference to the way those changes, relations, and interleavings might affect an ideal reader’s experience of the text. Even small changes between versions of ‘A Shortened Set’ can therefore help us tell useful stories about that development and the ideas it drew forward. It would be fascinating to produce an extended commentary on the poem that explored its compositional decisions down to the fine grain, but I’m not going to attempt that here. I’m just going to write about this little poem-within-the-poem, this narrow, nearly-nothing space, these little lines through which the poem passes on its way to someplace else.
It may initially seem a strange choice. There are much more generous and open sections in ‘A Shortened Set’, with references and allusions which can be illuminatingly resolved, with emotive movements of narrative and image that invite storytelling of the kind I most like to write and to read about poetry. There is barely enough of ‘More Trains’ to warrant extended comment. It’s almost like an un-poem, a moment of vacancy or negativity that because of its self-reflexive and indefinite referentiality distorts the textual elements around it. Such effects are fascinating to meet with in a sequence so committed to forwardness, intensity and lyric self-presence as ‘A Shortened Set’, in which ambiguity is kept under watchful creative control. But beyond fascination, what touches me most deeply about this little poem is not so much its content — the objects of its references, images, or felt details — as its poetics. In this scrap of text, the matter of how and why the poem was made emerges as the emotional and argumentative tone-centre for the lyric dialectic of ‘A Shortened Set’. And what really intrigues me about the poetics of ‘More Trains’ in particular, is that in the version of the poem published in Stair Spirit its three ambiguous little quatrains weren’t included at all.
The quatrain that follows it in Mop Mop Georgette was — ‘Aha we are frozen | stiff as young hyacinths – | outrageous blue | decides to leave green’ — linking between two sections in another temperament, a metrically loose four- or five-stress measure using rarely-captured Shakespearean colours, shimmering beautifully between elevated rhetorical prose and the more inward modulation of blank verse — shades perhaps of Aurora Leigh — somehow without losing its edge of new wave cool. The first of these, ‘It is called feeling’, moves from a line or two wondering about epistemology and cognition to mordant images of flânerie documenting the private miseries of alienation. The second, ‘I’d drive anywhere with anyone’, is a poem of social and emotional deixis (i.e. where we are and how I feel about that) cutting between images of the anxieties of domestic entrapment with what it calls ‘Road movie’ scenes of night traffic. The aboutness of these brief passages is not mystified or even particularly tricky to get at. Lines like ‘I look from face to face like a dog going | in the social democracy of loneliness’; ‘When I’m unloaded and stood in dread | at home encircled by my life, whose | edges do show’ are not difficult in the Cambridge School sense: that is, we don’t need anything more than some commonplace experiences of adult life in modern Britain before the internet, an inner repertoire of images drawing on the common store of literature and cinema, and a sympathetic understanding of the lives of others, to start to imagine and to feel along with the work. The quatrain linking them together in Stair Spirit, ‘Aha we are frozen’, is an epigrammatic symbolist lyric that could have been cut straight from H.D.’s notebook, a study in motion and colour touching with light, accessible irony on the layered themes of the whole sequence.
‘More Trains’ is by contrast immeasurably difficult and mysterious. Whereas in Stair Spirit ‘Aha we are frozen’ works quite neatly as a comment or epigraph to the poems it connects, adding ‘More Trains’ to the chain in Mop Mop Georgette develops a suspended moment, a bracketted moment, a moment of structural disintegration which is anything but neat — and repositioned as a pendant upon ‘More Trains’, ‘Aha we are frozen’ is transformed from a gnomic epigram into a treacherous Ovidian puzzle-box. While thematically of a piece with the poems of place, personhood and vocation that it links, the introduction of ‘More Trains’ brings a swelling tract of indefinite space and time into the sequence, so that now, between the testamentary rhetoric of ‘It is called feeling’ and ‘I’d drive anywhere’, instead of the pellucid emblem of ‘Aha we are frozen’, we find a set of three absorbent Tarkovskian images of reflective interiority, moments in which the mind of the subject is itself elsewhere, as her body is in transition from one town to another, and which call on us to use our inward resources of imagination, sympathy and understanding in much more complex ways.
A woman is on a train; she is writing; she is deleting something from her text. Because their subject is in transit to and from we know not where, each image comprises an indefinite, inactive temporality. We do not know who it is that travels, that writes, that deletes. We are brought to feel this unknowing precipitately through the contextless quotations the quatrains comprise: are these fragments of a poem-within-a-poem that the writer is composing as a passenger on the train? If so, is the writer of that transitional poem then the poet of ‘More Trains’ or some other poet, remembered or imagined by Denise Riley – perhaps Laura Riding, whose work Denise Riley was quoting from in letters to Michael Haslam in the early 1990s, or Anna Akhmatova, who also liked to include unmarked or unreferenced quotations in her quatrains, and was seen by others for much of her life, if never quite by herself, as an ‘ex-poet’; or is this a Dr. Zhivago-type train, an epic metaphor for the relentless onward drive of historical processes disinterested in the human suffering they cause, enable, or contain — an interpretation which would relate compellingly with the prevalent tropes of ‘A Shortened Set’. Or are these lines in fact the uncancelled ‘train’ themselves — i.e., is the process of the poem the train the poet rides; or is the train a figure for the driven, urgent process of the poet, with the poem and the ex-poet along with her?
Who loves, who cancels, and who trembles in this poem?
With the addition, or perhaps the un-deletion, of the negative lyricism of ‘More Trains’, the problem of not what but who the sequence is about becomes increasingly convoluted and extensive, its indeterminacies ushering a reader not exactly away from, but rather through the who problem, and towards a further perspective. Through modulations of emphases and images, tone-palettes and tunes, the individual poems of ‘A Shortened Set’ combine to tell a story about about how, across the years of the design of ‘A Shortened Set’, a projective ‘lyric urge’ has been struggling with an equally powerful impulse to ‘Cut | more, cut more’ (p. 20): in a process that has gone on for so long, bitten so deeply, so repetitively, that the wound has started to obviate that body which bears it. I say that body, not the body, because this body is not the body in or of theory, just as that wound is not the wound that lies across the subject, and those cuts are not just holes in language from the standpoint of morphology or semiology. These poems wouldn’t work if any of this were so. The body is a real body; the wound is a real wound; the language bears the perforation and scatter that comes with the traumatic reality of being the language of a real person. If the poem is an extended experimental working-through of the terms of its own compositional process, then it is also at the same time a working-through of the life from which that poetry was spun, the life which felt that urge, that struggle, those wounds. If it was not absolutely and authentically either one of those things, it could not be the other.
Through turning over such oppositions without disposing with their terms, ‘A Shortened Set’ maintains dialectical momentum not outward to the resolution of any purely external problem, but always also inward to what Otto Rank — the dark lady of my readings in ‘A Shortened Set’ — calls the ideologization of personal conflicts. Rank posited birth trauma as the origin of all such conflicts in the personality of the creative artist, and characterised art as a struggle to restore the maternal unities shattered in parturition, up to and including the development of the unconscious and the mechanism of memory itself. ‘A Shortened Set’ in a sense dialecticizes the Rankian challenge by asking questions like: what if mother is the artist? what if partituition came through a caesarean cut? what if mother is the analyst? — and then taking the answers personally; so that in ‘A Shortened Set’ the lyricisation of a Rankian process of self-ideologization through the partial personification of traumatic moments as forms, voices, and movements of language is not the produce of an automatic poet writing under an internal compulsion — a reflex of her victimisation by neuroses, by the history of sex and sexuality, or by the wounds and contradictions which the art which claimed her inherits. It is an accomplishment of design, an act of creative will that has developed its unconscious urgencies into materials, devised to tell a story that sublimates its own dialectical reflexivity through lyric negations (which is to say, negations which are not negations at all), enabling the ideologization of personal conflicts through the struggle with art to be formally opposed by a personalization of ideological conflicts. What remains thrilling and liberating to me about Denise Riley’s poetry in general, and about ‘A Shortened Set’ in particular — in fact as time goes by the precise realism of its standpoint seems to become ever more precious as ever more archival — is that this dispensation constitutes the poem’s starting point, not its terminus or product; that from the tensions promoted within this dialectical ensemble ‘A Shortened Set’ strikes up rare music.
Painting was the first art Denise Riley aspired to learn, though I know of only a handful of visual artworks by her — I’m sure there must be many more. She provided a series of quite wonderful illustrations for a printing of her friend the celebrated Australian poet Martin Harrison’s first pamphlet, Leisure in 1978 (fig. 1); the first item in her archived papers at the Cambridge University Library, dated 1966, is a typewriter collage of smashed lines from poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, threaded like a work of punk embroidery into a view of Windermere (fig. 2). Some of the lines Denise Riley uses there, from poems like ‘Hart-Leap Well’, ‘Kubla Khan’, and ‘Poem: A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal’, continue to echo in her work in poetry and poetics down to the present day. She shared an affectionate friendship with the painter Julia Ball, nearly 20 years her senior, in Cambridge in the 70s and early 80s; and Julia Ball’s work provided a basis for the iconic cover image of Denise Riley’s first solo-authored book of poems, Marxism for Infants, in 1978 (fig. 3). Friends would send her little paintings when they really wanted to reach her. She leaves a mark in lipstick on Tom and Val Raworth’s letter box in a working class suburb of Cambridge — still there a year later, gone green, Tom told her on one of his handmade postcards. In an autograph manuscript note beside the epigraph attributed to Paul Klee above the Preface on a photocopy of Stephen Rodefer’s Four Lectures — ‘ “Writing and painting are deeply identical” ’ — Riley has commented: ‘We should be so lucky!’ (fig. 4). From the beginning her poems are as full of painters and paintings as they are of singers and songs, always communicating a longing for the kind of life and world that painters and painting can promise: a world of visible, material labour, a world which reserves a special space for sustained and quiet gazing, a world with a deep institutional order encompassing local art colleges and the Courthauld and the Royal Academy and an outer galaxy of galleries, shows and collectors, with a strong interest in the recognition and promotion of uncultivated talents. The appeal of that world to young people of Denise Riley’s background and aspiration was immensely powerful in twentieth-century Britain.
Several sections of ‘A Shortened Set’ dwell on or with painted images by Ian McKeever, one of the period’s most recognised and accomplished British painters, as the sparse notes to Mop Mop Georgette direct us. McKeever’s work is powerful, beautiful and interesting. It even defines a certain kind of power, beauty and interestingness which for his and Denise Riley’s generation in Britain possessed a special fascination: they loved being interested in things. They were encouraged by culture and education, and by each other’s sometimes coercive regard, to find and to develop unique interests, and then tested for their capability to bring and share those interests to work groups, sympathetic institutional inspectors, and a public that convened circles of interest around the interests of its most interesting people. But Ian McKeever’s paintings don’t feel interesting in the same way that Denise Riley’s poems are interesting, even if Denise Riley might in some sense have liked them to, except in what seem like moments in particular areas and especially the layers and layerings of individual paintings and poems, particularly in the ways in which those layers break or bleed through or into each other. Even when Ian McKeever’s paintings are doing things that might bear descriptive comparison with the kind of moves Denise Riley’s poems make with images, with space and light, perspective and perception, the differences that emerge from the comparison are more compelling than the likenesses — including in those passages of the sequence in which Denise Riley’s poems are explicitly describing things in Ian McKeever’s paintings.
Why would a poet want to be a painter? Poets are often caught wishing they were something else, anything else, including being nothing at all when the alternative is to continue being a poet. The art is not easy. The stories that English poets tell about their vocation, especially when it is conceived in such terms as a compulsion or a calling, have long represented the art as comprising within itself a hazard or trap. Deep within poetry, say the poets, with atypical unanimity, lies a nexus of dangerous contradictions: at one moment inviting or demanding agitation into written song, at the next arousing repudiation and dismay. From the poet’s perspective the page has resistances that other scenes of creative action do not share. Denise Riley has spoken about her sense of the limitations of poetry to represent and to capture movement, for example, in the way that painting can, though this apprehension has not prevented her from trying to make her poetry move as though poetic language had the plasticity, viscosity and elasticity of paint. Like the dubious subject in transit and her cancelled poem in ‘More Trains’, Denise Riley’s images and poems are almost always in motion in some way. But movement in poetry is not quite like movement in painting. The movements of the eyes and ears and hands of the reading and the gazing subject are not the same; the way light falls upon or glows behind and travels across text and image shapes the optical physicality of reading and of gazing very differently; the ways we construe images and feelings from poems and paintings don’t relate with memory and cognition in the same way, and so on. Considered as painting Denise Riley’s poetry is inert and uninteresting; as poetry it is animated and lively even at its most tranquil and ruminative. Over the course of ‘A Shortened Set’ snatches of songs and stories, images from everyday life or literature and visual art, envelopes of feeling replayed at different speeds and intensities, move into, through, across, and out of the frame, sometimes to return, under an oscillating, now weaker, now stronger, but always present pressure of cancellation that pushes dynamically back against the poem’s iterative outward movements. Each part-poem rhythmically displays and accretes, obscures and sublates its objects with a careful interest in the quality with which their objects are developed and regressed, recalled and disintegrated.
The poem’s fragile assemblages of image and word, argument and story, are combined by a delicate paratactic artifice to which that oscillation gives a narrative dynamic, as its intensity and force increase and diminish over the course of the sequence, ending with a gentle ebbing away into and through a balladic or hymnal final section. The story that the negative poetics of ‘A Shortened Set’ tells is the song of itself, a Romance of lyric vocation, the tale of how the poem came to be. So told, it is a story which is at the same time also a story about how other things came to be: things like babies and class consciousness, poets and memories. We might read ‘A Shortened Set’ as driven by a curiosity about the extent to which the way poems are motivated into being is distinct from that of other things with their own laws of development, such as history and sexual reproduction; starting from the assumption that, as seems axiomatic from any post-modern standpoint, poems come to be through a process which is not just similar to, but which at some level simply is a component of those categorically higher processes; moving toward the question of how and why to go on making poetry, and not only things like revolutions and children, in light of this understanding. More ardently and provokingly than Riley’s later prose account of poetic vocation in The Words of Selves (2000), ‘A Shortened Set’ develops an account of what it is to commit (and not to commit) to a life of making (and not making) serious poetry, tracking the work from the origins of what it calls the ‘lyric urge’ to its afterlife in the retrospection of the ‘ex-poet’, with the whole contour of the vocational conflict overseen by the poem’s third figure, the shaping, accepting and rejecting maternal presence that compiles and composes its scattered materials.
There are several ways to read this dynamic as it plays out in ‘More Trains’, turning on how its pronouns hook onto and slip from their various possible attachments. I’d like to briefly explore just one of them here by reflecting on the first line of the second quatrain: ‘The ex-poet’s beside herself’. This strange line has haunted me since I first read it twenty-five years ago, to the extent that I almost feel that I wrote it — that its thought originated in me, but that I can’t remember quite what I meant by it, and I think this doubfulness over where these lines have come from, to whom they belong, and to whom they refer, is also their affective purpose in the lyric. ‘More Trains’ manifests the affective dilemma and vacancy of the autosuggestive mood of compositional self-attention. Though it is too much an internalised, tightly-wound, seeping thing to be properly termed an inspired poem itself, my idea is that these lines enfold an image of the moment of inspiration, recreating — within the containment of an irony that sharply twists from security into peril — the moment of the arrival of a poem that seems, as poems sometimes do, to have come upon the poet from outside.
Isn’t it odd that the ex-poet, rather than the poet, is beside herself here? To be beside oneself is to be ecstatic. In the context of the Ovidian footling of ‘A Shortened Set’ ecstasy must surely bear its archaic meaning as divine possession. But logically an ex-poet has no business with this particular ecstasy. Poets, as Plato has Socrates teach the Homeric rhapsodist Ion, are the ones supposed to be ecstatic — thrown out of themselves by the influence of higher spirits in the creative act. So why would the ex-poet be beside herself? Surely if she is beside herself, then she is at this moment not an ex-poet any more, but is suddenly again a poet: in which case it would be reasonable to surmise that the lines which follow, ‘ “here in the clouded | red, the grey, the burnt | oak forest, the rails shake” ’ are the ex-poet’s poem, product of an ex-poet’s ecstasy. What has returned the ex-poet to poetry? Why has our poet, who wishes she were a painter, come back to the dangerous art she longs to leave behind? If the poem has come from outside, with the resistless force of a divine compulsion, then the answer might be that she doesn’t really have a choice; the idea that she might ever have been able to become an ex-poet was just a fantasy of the poet, looking for a way out from the agonies of lyric vocation into the consolations of another art. Which begs the question: what then has triggered the snap-back of compulsion?
The lines that the ex-poet has written suggest she has before her in reality or memory an image. We might reasonably suppose the image is one of the Ian McKeever paintings on which other poems of the sequence gaze, perhaps one of the Traditional Landscapes approximately contemporary with the composition of ‘More Trains’ (i.e. 1986 or before), exhibited early enough that Denise Riley could have gotten along to the Greenwood Gallery to have seen them prior to writing the poem. We could even justifiably imagine that the ex-poet is thinking of Traditional Landscapes 5, the overpainted photograph reproduced above, in which all the elements of the ex-poet’s poem are present: the clouded red, the grey, the burnt oak forest — but isn’t Burnt Oak somewhere in London, a small voice protests — a painting in which the qualities of movement that Denise Riley especially covets — that movement of and between the layers of flowing, blending, cracking paint and the objects of a painter’s gazes and glances — dynamise the image.
So let us imagine the ex-poet, really travelling from somewhere to somewhere else by train, let’s say from London back to Cambridge, with this interesting image before her. Almost automatically, distractedly, on a scrap of paper or on the back of a letter, she writes these lines, the first she has written for some years. They weren’t intended for a poem. But the interest of the image demanded reciprocation in verbal depiction. Something else came along for the ride: ‘the rails shake’. There are no rails in the painting. This is not an observation of the image, but of where she is right here and now; in a sense this is the catalysing element that makes what she has written a poem, because her text now layers affect with abstract reflection and imagination. Her textual image of the painting is overpainted, combined with self-experience to become an element of expansive form, in and through which she is thrown out of herself, out of the train she is on — ahead of that train, to where the rails shake in anticipation of the train’s coming. Seductive appeals and suggestions glimmer in the verses, glints of anxieties not only of separation but of return and consummation. And now she, not only her figure for vocational fear in the would-be ex-poet, but her real living self, trembles; caught and bound to the tracks between revulsion and desire. This is the ex-poet’s poem, the poem against poetry, made in full light of the knowledge of what its calling can do to those called; but such a poem can last no longer than a transitional moment: helplessly the ex-poet is now become again the poet, who immediately — or perhaps later, in tranquility, in another temporality — re-recomposes the ex-poet’s lines, making them a moment within a layer within a lyric composed of several such petalled, labial layers, animated by fearful and ecstatic tremors and sublations. The Rankian primal quest has been turned upside down, its poet tipped out, enacting the fantasy rebirth of a maternal poet from the overpainted end of her own poetry, into a poem of the deracination of self and desire in the crisis of vocation and abolishment; of the moment at which the wish, the memory, the lure of unpoetry, and the thrilling ecstasy of the poem pulling the other way, tear at the poet’s safety, opening her work by design to a world that floods through the trembling gaps opened by her creative negations. You better believe the rails shake.
There are children here, running between the rooms upstairs. We can hear their feet on the wooden floor above. Their rhythm tells us they are loved and safe. Their voices ring through the building. Bees and falling water from the little courtyard garden beyond the open kitchen window above the sink through the bead curtain. The studio floor is tiled terracotta. Hairy rush mats. There are long windows on two sides of the studio. An Edwardian villa on the corner of a suburban street. A single unfinished painting in the corner of the room opposite the door is no more insistent to the eye than the photographs and postcards on the walls. Dated sketch books lie neatly stored under work surfaces. Dozens of brushes in ceramic vases like cut flowers. There are people here, quietly sitting on bentwood chairs. One gently rises. We take her seat. Around the studio hours pass like the cars and birdsong outside. Music from a radio on the scaffold over the road. We stay. It is not clear which of these people may be the artist that works here. The work changes untouched as the afternoon draws on. People come and go. Layers of striated blue and green give way to rising red and brown underlights that seem to disperse into drifts of particles as they approach the upper surface of the image. The tilting light of early evening brings forward geometrical forms in sharp angled gradations of indigo and orange. Pollen motes. Movements of air in the lime trees. Everyone has gone. The music and the children are quiet. A woman enters from the street. She sits down and watches us a while. It is getting dark outside. Falling water from the yard. Upstairs a television. The animals are still. The woman lights a propane gas fire. Metallic forms twist gleaming through the painting. In the deepening twilight the artist rises and prepares her materials. She moves around the room carefully choosing photographs and brushes. She mixes the paint in the cupped palm of her hand. A livid scarlet turning green-black in the deepening dark.
Thanks to Samuel Solomon for help with the pictures and Drew Milne for his correspondence in the revision of this old essay, which took some helpful cues from his unpublished 2017 paper on the poetry of John James.