Today's prompt is a picture by the British artist David Inshaw. Inshaw was a member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group which included Peter Blake, Jann Haworth, Graham and Annie Ovenden, and Graham and Ann Arnold. It was formed in 1975 and placed itself 'in opposition to the scholarly nature of contemporary art which believed that paintings were only really valid if they addressed social questions' (Peter Blake). I first came across the Brotherhood of Ruralists when in the late '70s my parents bought a pencil drawing by Graham Ovenden, but I know a lot more of their work from the front covers of the second edition Arden Shakespeares that I still have on my shelves. But back to the image. There's a lot here that could grow into a poem. The rucksack of the title which is barely in the picture; those gulls all looking in the same direction; the white towels; the hidden face; the strangely claustrophobic landscape. Perhaps you'd like to bounce this image off another poem. Have a look at Matthew Arnold's 'Dover Beach', or Les Murray's 'On Home Beaches' where 'You peer, at this age, but it's still there, ridicule,/ the pistol that kills women, that gets them killed, crippling men/ on the towel-spattered sand.' Think about the contrasts and the potential confluences. Think about your own experiences around beaches and coastlines. You can see more of David Inshaw's work, his intense, often erotic and sometimes almost surreal pastoralism, on his website here; and an article about him in The Guardian, here. Happy viewing, and happy writing.
Image Credit: The Rucksack. By David Inshaw (the artist) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Isn't this an amazing image? A golden mask, life-sized, flattened, with eyes which are at the same time open and closed. Beard, eyebrows, ears, hammered and chased into fine detail - simultaneously naive and strangely sophisticated.
This mask was discovered in 1876 by Heinrich Schliemann, a C19th German businessman who became a famous treasure hunter/archaeologist, and is now in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Schliemann had previously excavated the remains of Troy, where, as told in Homer's Iliad, an epic ten year war was fought between the Greeks and the Trojans. The leader of the united Greek armies was Agamemnon, the king of the Mycenaeans, whose brother's wife, Helen, had been abducted by the Trojan prince, Paris.
When Agamemnon returned from the war, the legend is that he was killed by his own wife's lover, Aegisthus, or perhaps even by his wife Clytemnestra herself. This mask was found in a royal grave at Mycenae, and Schliemann was convinced that it was the death mask of Agamemnon himself, although some have claimed it to be a fake, and some archaeologists now believe it pre-dates the Trojan War by several hundred years. It is made of beaten gold, with the fine details chased out using a sharp tool. It is an amazing artefact. I saw it in Athens nearly thirty years ago when backpacking around Europe and it remains an iconic memory for me.
Today's prompt is to take this mask as a starting point for a poem. There are so many directions in which it could take you! You could just think about masks in any or all of their forms; you could concentrate on Agamemnon and his story; you could think about Schliemann; you could explore ideas of real and fake. You could even link back to what is often considered the first piece of ekphrastic writing: the description of The Shield of Achilles' in Book 18 of The Iliad.
If you are interested in some background, there's an interesting discussion here, and an article about the authenticity question here.
If you fancy reading or rereading The Iliad the translation by Richmond Lattimore is the one to go for.
And here's what Google has to say about the word 'mask':
a covering made of fibre or gauze and fitting over the nose and mouth to protect against air pollutants, or made of sterile gauze and worn to prevent infection of the wearer or (in surgery) of the patient.
mid 16th century: from French masque, from Italian maschera, mascara, probably from medieval Latin masca ‘witch, spectre’, but influenced by Arabic masḵara ‘buffoon’.
One of the most famous poems which responds to a work of art is Auden's 'Musee des Beaux Arts', which famously zooms in on and out from the figure of Icarus falling to his death in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1558 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'. Icarus is a tiny figure, and Bruegel's genius is in the way in which this strange death is situated in the 'everydayness' of a C16th landscape, where, in Auden's words
...the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
This made me think of other pictures by Bruegel - those crowd scenes where all those ordinary people must also have their stories that no one else knows or cares about. And paintings by other artists: the people in background of Ford Madox Brown's 'The Last of England', or the followers in Gozzoli's Procession of the Magi, a picture full of ordinary people who are not the main focus of the image.
Gozzoli's 'Procession of the Magi'
But today's prompt does not use a painting by a famous artist. It uses an image created by you.
Most people take photos - if you are anything like me, you take quite a lot! And when you are on holiday, focussing your camera on a building, or a church, or your child playing on the beach, you quite often take pictures which contain people you don't know. Have a look at your holiday snaps; find one with strangers in it. If it's a digital photo on your computer, zoom in on someone. If it's not digital, you'll just have to make your eyes work a bit harder. Is there someone there who looks out of place? Someone whose expression hides something? That's your springboard, your Icarus. Write about that person, that crowd, that location. Write about your relationship with that person - because you have one now, now that you've noticed them. Or think of it another way - what if you were the stranger in someone else's holiday snaps?
So this prompt is a kind of echoing ekphrasis, springboarding you, as writer, off the Auden/Breugel motif of people unaware or uninterested in what is happening in the background to their lives, to find the people you didn't notice in a day in your own life. Could be interesting!
With thanks to Sally Flint, whose suggestion to write a poem from an image of someone you don't know led me to this idea.
This massive bronze knocker on the North door of Durham Cathedral was intended to enable people who had 'committed a great offence' to ask for sanctuary within the Cathedral. There were originally two small chambers above the doorway where monks would keep watch, ready to let a sanctuary seeker in at any time of day or night. The sanctuary seeker would have to change into black robes with the yellow cross of St Cuthbert printed on the shoulder, and was kept in an enclosure separate from the rest of the church. He (or she - I assume women were allowed to seek sanctuary as well, but I may be wrong) had to confess his crime, and was then fed and sheltered, but after the thirty seven days were over was escorted to a port because he was required to leave the country.
The knocker in the picture is a replica of the C12th original, which is now kept inside the Cathedral, but even this one, which is now about thirty five years old, has been subject to an attempted burglary.
I think this knocker and the possible stories behind it, the concepts of sanctuary and exile, would be a great subject for a poem, either explicitly or tangentially. There is more information at the Durham World Heritage site, and at England's North East; and also an interesting piece about whether the knocker might be a Chinese dragon.
Image 1: 'How doth the little crocodile', Leonora Carrington
Image 2: A bask of real crocodiles
Write a poem about a crocodile. Or not about a crocodile. Or about the crocodile's teeth, or its tail, or its unrealised ambition to be a BBC newsreader.
This immense granite seed stands in its own purpose-built chamber at Cornwall's Eden project. Information about its creation can be found on Peter Randall-Page's website, and there is a short film about it here at Eden.
Image Credit: "SEED" by ME - desktop. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons.
_1994_1995.jpg)
