Then
On Friday, practically delirious with joy because my bureaucratic scavenger hunt was over, I decided to celebrate with a couple of cultural adventures. First up, the Poetry Library in the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank of the Thames. I found out about this place a couple of months before my arrival, and had imagined it vividly as a Greco-Roman temple full of beautiful people reciting poetry and sighing, so as I approached that concrete bunker of an arts venue -- god, the mid-twentieth century was a dreary time for architecture -- I had to keep my hand under my jaw so it wouldn't keep dropping. "Brutalist" architecture indeed!
The RFH itself is quite a trip once you get inside. The best way I can describe it is in comparison to the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining: lots of big windows and trippy, hideous carpeting. No crazy ghost ladies in the bathtub, though, and no bathtub, for that matter. The Poetry Library is tucked away in a comparatively cozy little corner of the fifth floor, and while it's not the grand palace of verse I'd envisioned, it avoids a sterile, institutional, Jack-Nicholson's-around-the-corner feeling, and has the charm of all things well-worn. Ads for readings and writing contests, as well as a "Lost Quotations" bulletin board -- for absent-minded readers who have a snippet of some unknown poem stuck in their heads -- are posted all over a big chunk of wall on the right of the entrance. The collection itself is impressive; I was ecstatic to find a large number of older books by one of my favorite poets, Alice Notley. Still daunted by lack of adequate "proof of address" (I've only been in my place for a week, after all), I couldn't check anything out, and instead spent an hour sitting in the back reading Robert Creeley's Hello: A Journal, a collection of "postcard poems" he wrote while traveling through New Zealand, Australia, and southeast Asia. It felt fitting, as I am still in the traveler mentality here, and will be for some time, I expect. These lines, which Creeley wrote in Sydney, struck me:
Such simple language, but the use of couplets, and commas, and all of that space he creates around the words -- he really gives them a lonely, haunting feeling, doesn't he? Lovely.
After waving goodbye to the Ugly Poetry Bunker -- the RHF does other things, too, like hold concerts, but that's by-the-by -- I made my way towards Pimlico and the Tate Britain, thankfully housed in a much nicer building. The Tates are really great museums, because they rotate their vast collections and are a much more manageable size than, say, the National Gallery (where I'll return for a second try Tuesday evening). In May I visited the Tate Modern, which specializes in modern and contemporary art,and was pleased by the organization of its collections, which are displayed by themes: History/Memory/Society or Nude/Action/Body. The Tate Britain is a bit more traditional, with rooms displayed by period or by artist, although that makes it easy to eyeball which rooms are not to be missed. First up I checked out the Turner collection (that's Joseph Mallord William Turner, the great 19th-century landscape artist, if you weren't sure). A great introduction, with rooms organized by the developments in art and society over the course of Turner's career. Context receives its rightful place here. Even for those not so interested in landscape art, Turner's work has a wonderful sense of movement, of light, of a scene just about to change; it has a real presence.
I also visited the rooms displaying work by Vanessa Bell, painter, and sister of my favorite Londoner, Virginia Woolf; Francis Bacon, an Irish emigre a la Joyce and countless others, who has a museum in his name in Dublin, containing his studio exactly as it was when he died, and a database to read about everything in it; and Tracey Emin, one of the Young British Artists, many of whose works are also on display at the Saatchi Gallery in the South Bank Centre. Bacon and Emin's works are very intense, and very moving, so after that I was ready to head home.
Once I did, I found myself feeling a bit homesick. Luckily a cure was ready-at-hand: a pizza, a couple of beers, and the Must-See TV lineup, which shows here on Fridays rather than Thursdays and is two seasons behind. But, no matter -- when it comes right down to it, nothing says "home" to me like Will & Grace.
The RFH itself is quite a trip once you get inside. The best way I can describe it is in comparison to the Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining: lots of big windows and trippy, hideous carpeting. No crazy ghost ladies in the bathtub, though, and no bathtub, for that matter. The Poetry Library is tucked away in a comparatively cozy little corner of the fifth floor, and while it's not the grand palace of verse I'd envisioned, it avoids a sterile, institutional, Jack-Nicholson's-around-the-corner feeling, and has the charm of all things well-worn. Ads for readings and writing contests, as well as a "Lost Quotations" bulletin board -- for absent-minded readers who have a snippet of some unknown poem stuck in their heads -- are posted all over a big chunk of wall on the right of the entrance. The collection itself is impressive; I was ecstatic to find a large number of older books by one of my favorite poets, Alice Notley. Still daunted by lack of adequate "proof of address" (I've only been in my place for a week, after all), I couldn't check anything out, and instead spent an hour sitting in the back reading Robert Creeley's Hello: A Journal, a collection of "postcard poems" he wrote while traveling through New Zealand, Australia, and southeast Asia. It felt fitting, as I am still in the traveler mentality here, and will be for some time, I expect. These lines, which Creeley wrote in Sydney, struck me:
Your voice
so quiet now,
so vacant, for me,
no sound, on the phone,
no clothes, on the floor,
no face, no hands,
-- if I didn't want
to be here, I wouldn't
be here, and would
be elsewhere? Then.
Such simple language, but the use of couplets, and commas, and all of that space he creates around the words -- he really gives them a lonely, haunting feeling, doesn't he? Lovely.
After waving goodbye to the Ugly Poetry Bunker -- the RHF does other things, too, like hold concerts, but that's by-the-by -- I made my way towards Pimlico and the Tate Britain, thankfully housed in a much nicer building. The Tates are really great museums, because they rotate their vast collections and are a much more manageable size than, say, the National Gallery (where I'll return for a second try Tuesday evening). In May I visited the Tate Modern, which specializes in modern and contemporary art,and was pleased by the organization of its collections, which are displayed by themes: History/Memory/Society or Nude/Action/Body. The Tate Britain is a bit more traditional, with rooms displayed by period or by artist, although that makes it easy to eyeball which rooms are not to be missed. First up I checked out the Turner collection (that's Joseph Mallord William Turner, the great 19th-century landscape artist, if you weren't sure). A great introduction, with rooms organized by the developments in art and society over the course of Turner's career. Context receives its rightful place here. Even for those not so interested in landscape art, Turner's work has a wonderful sense of movement, of light, of a scene just about to change; it has a real presence.
I also visited the rooms displaying work by Vanessa Bell, painter, and sister of my favorite Londoner, Virginia Woolf; Francis Bacon, an Irish emigre a la Joyce and countless others, who has a museum in his name in Dublin, containing his studio exactly as it was when he died, and a database to read about everything in it; and Tracey Emin, one of the Young British Artists, many of whose works are also on display at the Saatchi Gallery in the South Bank Centre. Bacon and Emin's works are very intense, and very moving, so after that I was ready to head home.
Once I did, I found myself feeling a bit homesick. Luckily a cure was ready-at-hand: a pizza, a couple of beers, and the Must-See TV lineup, which shows here on Fridays rather than Thursdays and is two seasons behind. But, no matter -- when it comes right down to it, nothing says "home" to me like Will & Grace.
posted by HB @ 12:15 PM
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