The following are some threads on landscape and poetry which have recently intersected for me.
First, an image from upcoming show German Expressionist Prints at the Rex Irwin Gallery.
Erich Heckel (1883 – 1970)
Two men by the sea
Woodcut, 46.2 cm x 32.7 cm (image Rex Irwin Art Dealer)
And here is Daniel Siegel (The Mindful Brain, Norton 2007, p54) on poetry:
But then think of poetry … which inhibits the strictly hierarchical, top-down left-brain processes organizing our raw experience into a preconceived grid. Poetry, like silence, creates a new balance of memory and moment. We see with fresh eyes through the poet’s artistry, which illuminates with words a new landscape that before was hidden beneath the veil of everyday language. (italics mine)
In Heckel’s work I have a fantasy of words arising from a landscape, and these words also enabling that landscape to be experienced in a different way – it goes both ways. And this is implied too in the quote from Siegel.
The Boston Change Study Group have been doing work on the interplay of what they term the Implicit and the Reflective-Verbal Domains, and here is a beautiful quotation they cite from Merleau-Ponty (in their paper Forms of Relational meaning: Issues in the Relations Between the Implicit and Reflective-Verbal Domains), supporting the idea of an embodied mind (i.e one that doesn’t ascribe to the Cartesion split):
The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of “psychic reality” spread over the sound; it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear. And conversely, the whole landscape is overrun with words. (The Visible and the Invisible, p155)
And a final thread of my own – here is a poem (from a dream) that I wrote last year:
glyphs
last black night
they shuffled silently again in the field
intent upon their ruminationsuntil one took flame
bright tendrils licking at the seriphs
and then another –till they all blazed yellow
each now clear in its form
proclaiming some kind of slogan
indeterminate
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