Scrivener Session

 Dr Lisa Dart on poetry and painting

This week in creative writing we have been sniffing, grasping, listening, sipping and glancing. We have been seeing and smelling and hearing and feeling and tasting. In short we have been thinking about the senses and how our senses are not single primary colours which stand alone in paint pots, but are on the palate of our consciousness and are mixed into different shades and tones.  After all, we hear ‘sweet’ voices, we comment on ‘rough’ manners and annoying sounds ‘grate’ on us. These simple and common examples show us that we are aware of the synaesthetic: the understanding of one sensory stimulus in terms of another sense. You might call it a sensory mixing of genres. 

In line with this idea of understanding one thing in terms of another, we have also been looking closely at the relationship between painting and poetry and how writers have had the urge to capture visual art in words. This is known as ‘ekphrasis’. It was then by some near-miraculous stroke of luck (or planning) that we invited Dr Lisa Dart to our second Scrivener Session to read from her collection, ‘The Linguistics of Light’ (Salt 2010). Like Auden and Keats, Lisa follows a long and fascinating tradition of poets who respond to visual art works and try in some sense to summate them, to grasp them, to sense them, in words. 

Her recent collection contains a sequence of poems responding to the work of the American painter Edward Hopper and along with slides of the paintings, Lisa read from works and engaged the audience in an exploration of her motives, her techniques and her troubles in writing ekphrastic poetry. Her poems individuated themselves by their focus on light: not just the light of Hopper’s paintings, but of the symbolic energy and the grammar of light. I remember clearly two descriptions of light that ‘struck’ me. The first was ‘gape of light’ and in another poem, the ‘brunt of light’. Both of these are highly original, but they work on our synaesthetic ability with brilliant force and we understand them almost without effort.

This Scrivener Session was intelligent, engaging and there were some great- and very difficult!- questions put to Dr Dart. Though perhaps what grabbed my attention most was Lisa’s discussion of the ambitions of poetry and how she desires work that is sensitive to philosophy; to the ebb and flow of ideas, of presuppositions and problems. Here, Lisa spoke of poems being beautiful and satisfying, but also of poems going beyond this, to touch the intellect with, well, its light I suppose.

There’s food for thought. And if it is food for thought, I wonder if there is any such thing as intellectual obesity…

- Dr Craig Jordan-Baker (c.jordan-baker@ucreative.ac.uk)

 If you would like to find out more about Lisa’s work then please follow the link to the Salt website, where her collection can be purchased: 

http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=9781844710546