either-and-or

[M]y choice of poetry had to do with the fact that it more nearly answered to my own mental tendencies. Whereas scholarship, even in its often impenetrable post-modernist avatars, still ultimately depends upon premise and conclusion, upon the dialectical approach, the realm of lyric poetry—at least for me—is roughly described by Carl Jung when he speaks of true psychology as the domain “always…of either-and-or.” That is, lyric can keep multiple perspectives alive within one frame without seeming merely to be a muddle.

—Sydney Lea, “Why Poetry?,” Seen From All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life (Green Writers Press, 2021)

space beyond the words

If no white space cushioned the poem its language would have to brush up against the language of the world. The world where language buys sausages and fills insurance forms. Where it writes rejections and makes empty promises. Where it speaks in parliaments and fudges truth and sells cosmetic surgery and guns. And if there were no white space to mark it off, how would we know the difference? They are only little words. Even the innocent ones amongst them look like repeat offenders, like the lying sort.

‘Don’t play what’s there,’ Miles Davis said, ‘play what’s not there.’ Play the void. Play the white space. Play outside the frame.

If only there were ways of framing off the worst of our lives. Of containing it. Forbidding it to leak into the rest of our well-lived days.

—Vona Groarke, Four Sides Full (The Gallery Press, 2016)

puzzles me most

Though scarcely a confessional poet I write about my life. Impossible not to, really, since it’s what puzzles me most. The lyric voice permits me to acknowledge that, when I write about frames, I may also be writing about my life and, conversely, though I write about what looks like my life I might as well write about any object that is both discrete and amenable, cordial and solitary. Much as any person is. Much as a frame tends to be.

Of the letters of the alphabet, only one works as a perfect frame. It is the O of the gold frame of Michelangelo’s ‘Doni Tondo’, of the mouth of Beckett’s Not I, the o of omphalos and origin, of globe and moon, of look and book, of for and good. Of open and store. Of close and lose. Of hole and whole. Of do and don’t. Of hold and go. Of no and not. Of alone and know and so and old and, yes, love.

—Vona Groarke, Four Sides Full (The Gallery Press, 2016)

glint of that unlimited vastness

Both in art and in literature, the function of the frame is fundamental. It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls—and somehow stands for—everything that remains out of the picture. I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness.

—Italo Calvino, Letters, 1941-1985 (Princeton U. Press, 2013) selected and with an introduction by Michael Wood, translated by Martin McLaughlin

unbounded

The outer frame of the poem should be the world, and not the edges of the page.

image framed

An image seen through curatorial aperture.

inexhaustible window

In the frame of any one window there are a million poems.

framed for attention

Art begins by framing for attention. The framing can be physical of course, as in the traditional picture frame or mural, or in sculpture the negative space around the object provides a frame, or the art may be framed in the sense of being captured on film/video, or it may be framed by the venue in which it takes place as in installation art or performance art, even landscape/cityscape art is framed for presentation to a random passer-by. Art that is framed asks for and awaits our attention, which is to say it seeks audience, however small or insular, and ultimately art, thus framed, seeks appreciation. And it is appreciation, by even a small group, that closes the circle and makes art of what was proffered by the framing.

floating window

The lyric is a floating window at large in the world, stopping here or there long enough to frame a scene, to allow a certain action to unfold within its constrained vista.

nice title

Inadvertent insult in front of a painting: “Nice frame.” After reading a poem: “Nice title.”