An impressionist's manifesto for more naturalistic, less grandiose painting also makes the case for – and expresses – a more immediate poetry
This week, it's time to relax and enjoy a fruit-laden summer cocktail. Marianne Burton's "Pissarro's Orchards" is a kind of postmodern sonnet, with the names of 13 different examples of fruit woven into its 14 lines. It's from Burton's first collection, She Inserts the Key, which is itself a variegated garden of delights.
Something that always endears me to a new poet is seeing the pleasure she or he takes in language for its own sake. Of course, that capacity need not always be on show: it's fundamental to good writing, after all, and no less to poems that conceal the verbal craft which powers them. And there are plenty of such poems in She Inserts the Key. Burton has a gift for short, lyrically incisive stories. The atmospherics of specific times and places are memorably recorded in an extended sequence, "Meditations on the Hours", which forms the connective tissue of the collection.
Like many young poets, Burton savours the bizarre anecdote (there's the obese woman who, post-mortem, has turned into a large bar of soap, for instance). More unusually, she can write in a fresh way about the natural world – even bird-poems which don't induce immediate symptoms of avian déjà vu. Nonetheless, the poems foregrounding verbal technique – concrete poems, a riff on anagrams, and "Pissarro's Orchard" itself – are more than makeweights. They're fun, and interactive (with no accompanying technology for the reader to swear at). They're a reminder of poetry's unique status as an art whose subject is inevitably, partly, language itself, and an assurance that the poet is confident enough to know when to let the words call the tune.
"Pissarro's Orchards" is a loosely-rhymed dramatic monologue, spoken by Camille Pissarro, one of the first and finest exponents of impressionism. Pissarro took painting out of the studio into daylight and fresh air, to respond to real people in real landscapes. I imagine he is a significant figure for Burton, especially in her "Meditations on the Hours", where the response-to-the-moment has something in common with impressionist technique.
Pissarro painted many orchards, sometimes in radiant spring blossom, and sometimes at harvest-time, with fruit-pickers at work. But it was a rather pleasing still-life, Fruit in a Round Basket which particularly helped me appreciate Burton's poem. While the contents of Pissarro's basket are a lot less varied and exotic, I was struck by the analogy of a round basket with the sonnet-form. The weaving-in of the fruit-names suggests a hands-on local craft, and the tactile pleasure of objects retaining a homely thumb-print or seam. The names are looped over the ends and beginnings of lines, sometimes more-or-less audibly ("ban/anacondas"), sometimes more easily seen than heard ("gang/rapes"), but it's not a device the poet wants to hide, or not for long. As if inviting the reader into the workshop, she provides an explanatory footnote on the same page.
True to Pissarro's revisionism, the first eight lines amount to a manifesto, directed against grandiosity in art. The diction is sometimes slightly mannered, as if the painter were making a formal speech to the academicians of the salon and mocking their language as well as their prescriptions and proscriptions. His description of Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting, Cupid Complaining to Venus is deliciously arch: "No feather-hatted naked madam,/ son complaining as he is stung by nectar/-inebriated bees." Classical myth, religious set-pieces and "calendar art" are equally repudiated: "… no impudent kitten, its paw/pawing its mother". The repeated paw-dabbing it neatly pictured here, whilst the fruit-name is both immediately audible and visible, suggesting the way such art, too, plays to our most obvious sentiments.
After the list of "no-nos" the sonnet's turn introduces the artistically radical subjects Pissarro favoured. Although the word-game goes on, the diction is now precise and simple ("perhaps a woman/gossiping as she strings pea-trellises") and swiftly evokes the artist's characteristic subjects. His farmhands and serving-maids are thoroughly naturalistic as they stoop to their work or pause for a chat, yet there's an implicit social idealism in the paintings which the poem picks up when it talks of the "common plan", "taint, rot and worm avoided" and "one hope,/ardent and plain."
Pissarro applied radical ideas to his politics as well as his art. Much of the fruit in the poem is neither European nor orchard-grown. The orchards of the title are perhaps metaphorical, the fruit a symbol of Pissarro's cornucopia of ideas about painting and social justice, and his seminal influence on younger artists. It's a reminder, too, that he was born in the then-Danish West Indies, to a Sephardic Jewish father and Dominican Spanish mother. He inherits plantains and oranges as well as apples and pears.
Pissarro's Orchards
Fruit trees are beauty in themselves. I shall ban
anacondas seducing Eve, slithering over her lap
pleading for her to take a bite. I shall veto gang
rapes of nymphs by satyrs; will have no gods or
angels. No feather-hatted naked madam,
son complaining as he is stung by nectar-
inebriated bees; no impudent kitten, its paw
pawing its mother; no Susanna ogled by an elder.
Berry, leaf, blossom are enough. Perhaps a woman
gossiping as she strings pea trellises, an old man
daring to stoop and hoe, a haymaking group,
each worker committed to a common plan,
– taint, rot and worm avoided – one hope,
ardent and plain. Harvest is sufficient passion.
Note: This sonnet considers Camille Pissarro's philosophy of fit subjects for art. It includes the names of fruits broken between the beginning and end of lines.
via Books: Poetry | guardian.co.uk
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