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| Giorgio Morandi Still Life 1960 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Francis Bacon Seated Figure 1961 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
from The Tutelar of the Place
Queen of the differentiated sites, administratrix of the
demarcations, let our cry come unto you.
In all times of imperium save us
when the mercatores come save us
from the guile of the negotiatores save us
from the missi, from the agents
who think no shame
by inquest to audit what is shameful to tell
deliver us.
When they check their capitularies in their curias
confuse their reckonings.
When they narrowly assess the trefydd
by hide and rod
by pentan and pent
by imposts and fee on beast-head
and roof-tree
and number the souls of men
notch their tallies false
disorder what they have collated.
When they proscribe the diverse uses and impose the
rootless uniformities, pray for us.
When they sit in Consilium
to liquidate the holy diversities
mother of particular perfections
queen of otherness
mistress of asymmetry
patroness of things counter, parti, pied, several
protectress of things known and handled
help of things familiar and small
wardress of the secret crevices
of things wrapped and hidden
mediatrix of all the deposits
margravine of the troia
empress of the labyrinth
receive our prayers.
– David Jones (1961)
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| Graham Sutherland The Scales 1961-62 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Joan Eardley Salmon Net Posts ca. 1961-62 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
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| William Roberts The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel, Spring 1915 1961-62 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Robert Rauschenberg Almanac 1962 oil paint and acrylic paint with screenprint on canvas Tate Gallery |
from Roots
We sat in the kitchen on her good antiques.
'Have you ever really thought about the roots,'
She asked, filling a pair of luster cups,
'What a world they are, swaying in the thick air
Under us, upside down?'
I'd thought about them
All the week before, when the elms were budding,
The twigs so delicate we might have had
A Chinese landscapist for first selectman
Who put out all the town roads to wild plum.
In a week they would be plain leafy elms –
Not a gross thing to be, god knows, but coarser –
And I'd thought how their roots all year around
Would keep that primavera delicacy.
So I said, 'I have, a little. What about them?'
'When I was a girl, my father put those cedars
In the hedge along the road. He told us then
(I don't suppose it's true, but it ought to be)
That a tree repeats its structure, up and down,
The roots mirroring the branches; and he showed
Us how the tap-root of a cedar tree
Is the same length as the trunk, and the green brush
In the air is shaped like the brown brush in the earth.
Did you ever notice the trees in Fragonard?'
'They don't look real,' I said, 'They look like coral.'
'They look like roots, is what they look like. Wait.'
She went and got a book of reproductions
And showed me the lady swinging on the swing
In a mass of greenery and silk and cloud.
Then suddenly she turned it upside down
And the cloudy leaves and the clouds turned into rocks
And the boles of the trees were gripping them like roots.
'Think of the branches tossing in the loam,
Reaching for rays of water, the way leaves
Arrange themselves for sunlight, except lacier'.
'Does Pluto keep potatoes in a vase
Like Zinnias, do you suppose?' I asked.
Her face took on the aspect of quotation.
' "The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child,"
– That's Shelley, the Spirit of Earth in Shelley –
"Met his own image walking in the garden.
That apparition, sole of men, he saw.
For know there are two worlds of life and death:
One that which thou beholdest; but the other
Is underneath the grave, where do inhabit
The shadows of all forms that think and live
Till death unite them and they part no more."
– Prometheus Unbound, a long dull poem.
Please use the ash-tray, not my luster saucer.'
– William Meredith (1962)
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| Peter Lanyon Wreck 1963 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Olwyn Bowey Portrait sketch of the painter L.S. Lowry 1963-64 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
Sylvia's Death
For Sylvia Plath
O Sylvia, Sylvia,
with a dead box of stones and spoons,
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in the tiny playroom,
with your mouth into the sheet,
into the roofbeams, into the dumb prayer,
(O Sylvia, Sylvia,
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about raising potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?
Thief! –
how did you crawl into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long,
the death we said we both outgrew
the one we wore on our skinny breasts,
the one we talked of so often each time
we downed three extra-dry martinis in Boston,
the death that talked of analysts and cures,
the death that talked like brides with plots,
the death we drank to,
the motives and then the quiet deed?
(In Boston
the dying
ride in cabs,
yes death again,
that ride home
with our boy.)
O Sylvia, I remember the sleepy drummer
who beat on our eyes with an old story,
how we wanted to let him come
like a sadist or a New York fairy
to do his job,
a necessity, a window in a wall or a crib,
and since that time he waited
under our heart, our cupboard,
and I see now that we store him up
year after year, old suicides
and I know, at the news of your death,
a terrible taste for it, like salt.
(And me,
me too.
And now, Sylvia,
you again
with death again,
the ride home
with our boy.)
And I say only
with my arms stretched out into that stone place,
what is your death
but an old belonging,
a mole that fell out
of one of your poems?
(O friend,
while the moon's bad,
and the king's gone,
and the queen's at her wit's end,
the bar fly ought to sing!)
O tiny mother,
you too!
O funny duchess!
O blonde thing!
– Anne Sexton (1964)
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| Paula Rego The Firemen of Alijo 1966 acrylic paint, oil pastel, charcoal, ink, resin, paper collage and aluminum foil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Patrick Caulfield Battlements 1967 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Mary Fedden Mauve Still Life 1968 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
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| Joseph Beuys For FOND II 1968 oil on paper Tate Gallery |
An Introduction to Literature
Look: no one ever promised for sure
that we would sing. We have decided
to moan. In a strange dance that
we don't understand till we do it, we
have to carry on.
Just as in sleep you have to dream
the exact dream to round out your life,
so we have to live that dream into stories
and hold them close to you, close to the
edge we share, to be right.
We find it an awful thing to meet people,
serious or not, who have turned into vacant
effective people, so far lost that they
won't believe their own feelings
enough to follow them out.
The authentic is a line from one thing
along to the next; it interests us.
Strangely, it relates to what works,
but is not quite the same. It never
swerves for revenge,
Or profit or fame: it holds
together something more than the world,
this line. And we are your wavery
efforts at following it. Are you coming?
Good: now it is time.
– William Stafford (1968)
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| Joseph Beuys Untitled 1962 oil on paper Tate Gallery |
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| Richard Hamilton Fashion-plate 1969-70 cosmetics and pochoir with lithograph and screenprint Tate Gallery |
Poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)