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| Mary Fedden The Etching Table 1971 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| René Burri Chicago, Illinois, USA, 1971 1971 C-print Tate Gallery |
Druidic Rimes
The mind went forth with naked eye
To take a turn about the sky.
The number of the stars was small,
Not 'numberless' at all.
Back then, the nature of the field
Was chiefly to be unrevealed.
But when the telescope was trained
Where only darkness reigned,
Or seemed to, light broke into being
As if to marry the eye's seeing
In the flowering of a cosmic spring
That grew like anything.
Astronomers then put their hopes
Into profounder telescopes,
And for a while the universe
Answered with stars and stars,
Whole galaxies and nebulae,
As if they'd just begun to be,
Blazed in the dark of outer space
As in the mind's dark place.
II
Now mind went forth without the eye
On waves beyond the visible sky:
Impulses from what scarce was matter
Bounced off a shallow platter
Into the realm of number pure,
The only measure made so sure
That mind was guaranteed to mind it
And always stand behind it.
Number went through the universe,
Numberless numbers in reverse
Came back in echo, pulse and blip;
It was as if the lip
Of silence learned to intimate
In integers that it might mate
Its dark selfhood to any mind
Consenting to go blind
Into the secret labyrinth
Of its own lens, and its first myth
Of sacrificing to the sky
The always naked eye.
– Howard Nemerov (1971)
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| Joseph Beuys Four Blackboards 1972 chalk on blackboards Tate Gallery |
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| David Inshaw The Badminton Game 1972-73 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
The Vegetables
Their lives are legends, yet we always think of them
as disadvantaged. They can't inflate
their bicycle tires, for instance, and bicycle into town.
They can't write poems, or read poems, or think.
Ah, but these were decisions they arrived at long ago.
Why bother? they must have said to themselves. And so
they got on their bicycles and rode out to some empty stretch
of ground, fifty or a hundred of them at once, and dug in.
There each one preserves his solitude without denying
the needs of the community. Through the seasons they grow.
When Death discovers them, they are prepared,
in their long rows, with millions and millions of little jokes.
– Tom Disch (1972)
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| James Rosenquist Off the Continental Divide 1973-74 lithograph Tate Gallery |
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| Philip Pearlstein Nude on Striped Hammock 1974 etching and aquatint Tate Gallery |
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| William Brooker Still Life, New Studio 1974 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
from The Face
Out of the mist small points
grow, glow more brightly, leap
into razor-sharp detail.
The edge of a nebula is lit
by full starlight, band after bank
extending into space. The silhouette
of a horse's head rears above,
the crest of its mane streaming upward.
A luminous shell spatters outward
in clots of gold, an explosion
of broken bottles, piles of them
burning. The red on black of hydrogen
quivers in the center, a blacksmith's
glowing piece of iron in the fire;
pools of aquamarine are dispersed
in space like smoke, delicate
filaments of gas enriched by metals.
Dark spots are dust and gas, or cocoons
with newborn stars deep inside,
cool red giants a million years old.
The nebula is 24,000,000,000,000,000
miles away – it is like measuring
the Atlantic Ocean with a teaspoon.
To the left is the cluster
of stars in Berenice's Hair;
the light we see left 3000 million
years ago, long before man existed,
before the Sun and Earth were formed.
– John R. Carpenter (1974)
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| Prunella Clough By the Canal 1976 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Roy Lichtenstein Entablature IV 1976 screenprint Tate Gallery |
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| Marketa Luskacova Woman and man with bread, Spitalfields, London 1976 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
from The Phaenomena
First study the horns on either side of the moon:
Evening, from time to time, will paint her with different colors,
From time to time the shape of both these horns will change
While the moon waxes – one way on the third day, one on the fourth.
You can learn from this about the month that's just begun:
If the moon looks slim and clear around the third day, then
It will be calm; but slim and reddish-looking means
Winds; while if her thick and blunted corners show
A weak light on the third and fourth nights, then her beams
Are being blunted by southern winds and rains to come.
If, on the third night, neither horn is tilted back
Or bent forward – the ends being vertical on both sides –
The western winds will follow soon thereafter that night.
But if they're still upright like that on the fourth day,
Then take it as a warning of an impending tempest.
If the upper horn seems to bend forward, the Boreal, northern
Wind will come down; if bent backward, the southern one.
But when on the third day a whole ring, very red,
Entirely surrounds her, a tempest is sure to come;
The more red-hot she looks, the stronger will be the storm.
– Aratus, translated by John Hollander (1976)
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| Don McCullin Palestinian Fighter Training in Beirut 1976 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
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| Anthony Eyton Open Window, Spitalfields 1976-81 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| David Hepher Albany Flats 1977-79 oil paint and sand on canvas Tate Gallery |
from Fantasia on "The Nut-Brown Maid"
But the real "world"
Stretches its pretending into the side yard
Where I was waiting, at peace with my feelings, though now,
I see, resentful from the beginning for the change to happen
Like lilacs. We were walking
All along toward a door that seemed to recede
In the distance and now is somehow behind us, shut,
Though apparently it didn't lock automatically. How
Wonderful the fields are. They are
Like love poetry, all the automatic breathing going on
All around, and there are enchanted, many-colored
Things like houses to explore, if there were time,
But the house is built under a waterfall. The slanting
Roof and the walls are made of opaque glass, and
The emerald-green wall-to-wall carpeting is sopping moss.
– John Ashbery (1977)
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| Richard Hamilton Interior with Monochromes 1979 lithograph and screenprint Tate Gallery |
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| Lynne Cohen Furniture Showroom 1979 gelatin silver print Tate Gallery |
from Going to Press
Those close Denver evenings I'd drag myself
down to the green but treeless "park" hemmed
by light traffic, construction sites, a hospital,
whose reedy seepage deepened, widened, did
all it could to assert pondhood. Sprinklers
would be hurling ack-ack. Down I'd flop
into a start of coolness, watch little fish
dimple the surface, lip flies and flip out
flightily, plop-plop-plop like a skipped stone.
They soothed me, some. I'd think about the moors.
– Judith Moffett (1979)
Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)