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Gervase Phinn: Poetic licence
Some years ago, I was asked by the editor of an anthology of poems about flowers to submit a piece of verse. Since there was £50 in it, I rattled one off and called it pretentiously The Last Bloom of Winter. It was late November and there was a dusting of snow on the garden, but in one of the tubs near the porch grew a geranium still with its petals. This was my inspiration and hence the title.
Reading it now it is a pretty poor piece of doggerel full of clichd similes ("a splash of blood on a white sheet") and overdone imagery ("its stem straight and defiant") but the editor was pleased with it and I got my 50. The following year, to my surprise and delight, the poem was set on an English Literature paper. The candidates were asked to discuss the poem – the theme, descriptions, figurative usage, choice of words, the rhythm and the rhymes. The Chief Examiner thought I might like to read one of the student's answers. The candidate talked about "the nave simplicity" of style, the "brave attempt at evocative description", "the well-conceived images" and the "dextrous juxtaposition of red and white imagery in the penultimate stanza". The poem, she argued, had a hidden meaning. She wrote:
"Gervase Phinn in her (sic) poem, The Last Bloom of Winter has clearly suffered some trauma at the hands of an abusive and violent lover. She is symbolised in the poem by the dying flower and the cold earth in which she struggles to survive represents her lover. Images like the blood on the white sheet, the frozen soil, the coldness and emptiness of the garden all are symbolic of an arid relationship and of the empty life in which she is ill-treated and dominated by the man". With "nave simplicity" I wrote to the Chief Examiner saying that the poem was about a flower. "Indeed it might be about a flower to you," he replied, "but once you have written the poem, you cease to have ownership of it and the reader can make of it what he or she wishes. That is the great power of poetry as it is for modern art."
I was thinking about this recently when I visited Manchester Art Gallery. Displayed in one of the rooms was a huge green canvas with splodges of colour which looked like flying saucers. The painting by John Hayland, one of the country's leading abstract painters, was said "to explore the very nature of colour and its capacity for creating illusions. The painting's complexity needs time to appreciate. By way of the brilliance of the colours and the softness of the outline Hayland achieves the suggestion of movement". As I sat there staring at the canvas and trying to make sense of it, the man next to me explained what it represented. The painting, he said, could be seen on many different levels and that was why it was so challenging. He told me that when Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal in 1917 which he called a fountain, he changed the course of art. The general public thought it was a joke but Duchamp had a serious message that art can be in any media, take any form and be open to any interpretation. He also told me that the painting before us was worth a small fortune. Perhaps I should have charged more than 50 for my poem.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Wednesday 08 February 2012
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