Firstly, I accept the poems of Ken Bolton as they are, in the world, by the head and hand of the person who is the poet.

Secondly, they are a record of a life being lived, and of that life living amongst and with and in relation to, and in conflict with, and in puzzlement about, others living their lives, and making things, like poems (too) and paintings, or not making things, but sitting nearby, smoking, talking, coming, going, dressed this way, that way, serving food and coffee, sullenly, sadly, joyfully, and in the context of a city, its streets, its markets, its traffic, and so forth.

But, and thirdly, these poems give me trouble.

I mean “trouble” as annoyance and as enjoyment, or perhaps, expansion, but that “expansion” comes from intensity, attitude (like dislike, surprise, revision), wonder (as in wondering), contradiction (or is that contrariness). It’s all there, creating chains and knots and bursts of light (momentary, or glittery like stars, or a starburst); and it’s all unwindable, unfoldable, but trouble anyway, meaning time and energy and reward: oh, yes, I remember … now … hours later … (something).

Here’s an example – RB Kitaj … yes, I know the name, but suddenly I’m interested, as in “Night thoughts” (the poem) the poet’s mentioned the Kitaj painting with Walter Benjamin in it – “… “The Autumn of Central Paris” / is the painting’s / title. Benjamin sits / surrounded by others, / at La Coupole or Les Deux Magots …” – and I don’t know it, I don’t know any paintings by Kitaj by name. And so, I want to see “The Autumn of Central Paris”, and then I find an essay by John Ashbery (The Paris Review, March 2011). Ashbery the poet and art critic, of course. And it’s a nice little essay and there’s the Benjamin painting, and others I like. And then I read more about Kitaj’s life, including his wedding, and the painting of the wedding with Freud in it and Hockney, although I can’t quite “believe” in Freud, but Hockney is clear.

Does Ken (the poet) like Ashbery, I seem to have “no” in mind. Does it matter – to Ken, I mean – that Ashbery wrote about Kitaj. (Oh, and there’s a little etching by Kitaj of John Ashbery, 1997.)

This is (also) what Ken wrote about Kitaj’s painting in the poem:

… I’d remembered the red in it. / It is an exhilaratingly / intelligent painting / a feeling of / “work done,” in the compression of imagery & information – that says / spies, fear, forces of Left & Right – the foreigners / – like Benjamin, who’d seen it / before – calculating, / taking the air, thinking “Paris” – / must get out soon. …

Other names of writers and artists wash easily over me, with pleasure, as I know (of) them, know their names, see in memory their colours and subjects. Yes, I have learned something over the years, years I’ve felt as “lost-years”. It’s a sort of melancholy of gratitude. Ancestors, antecedents – what! But … I’m disturbed continually though … the trouble that is, is disturbing, just because the trouble, as disturbance, absorbs time like a sponge … the day outside changes, it’s raining, it’s windy, when did this happen, why wasn’t I watching clouds and light and trees.

I should know more about John Ashbery. What about “How to begin to understand John Ashbery” by Douglas Crase. He begins: “We are used to hearing of poets so private they speak for all of us.” Really! Trouble compounded! I make my own trouble; I complain there are not enough hours in the day. And it’s there, this “not enough time,” in these poems of Ken’s, that are overall titled in his letter, kindly, for me: “Three for LMW”. (Three gifts: I think of Anton who died two years ago and who always called me “lmw”.) I’m “fulminating” just like he says:

But fulminating is easy / And not to the point. Tho is having one / my usual way? Don’t I / usually begin, & continue, / pointless, blithe / “It / Serves Me Right To Suffer”?” … (in “Night thoughts”)

Does he mean, having a fulmination, an explosion – of anger say, about whatever, the weather, an insult … No, it’s not easy, this “trouble,” it’s troublesome. (I take my anti-depression tablet, Escitalopram, with coffee. No, I can’t pronounce it, I can’t lay my tongue on the right syllable in the right way (es-cit-al-o-pram) – a medicine against fulmination.)

He calls Roger La Fresnaye “loopy” in “An Unsuitable Attachment”. My trouble feels loopy. Rabbit holes, etc, but rabbits bring memories of my father, and they (memories) are too painful at this moment. La Fresnaye’s paintings/drawings don’t look “loopy” to me, they are colourful, weirdly colourful, like Sophie Tauber-Arp’s drawings – for instance “Abstract Motif” (1925) or “Six Spaces with Four Small Crosses” (1932). (I really like “The Conquest of the Air” on this freezing Saturday morning — I love the red, white, blue cloth/flag hanging in the sky and the strange tabletop I can’t quite fathom, and all the other shapes and angles; the conquest of the air, this is terrible! We know it, the air sucked from our body, the room, the world.)

I didn’t mean to write this this morning, I had other plans. At least Marie Laurencin painted groups of women in beautiful fabric (dresses) – and I like this that I read on “The Art Story” website:

She [Marie] charged higher prices for work which she found dull than for that which she enjoyed; she charged men double what she asked of women and charged brunettes more than blondes.

She loved scarves too. Hurrah for Marie, my middle name. She liked decoration too, hurrah again. I love her painting “The Young Girls”. Black lines and drapey material, happiness for a moment, their faces like masks. (There’s too much to say about Laurencin – the little dog (Coco) in the portrait of herself with Cecilia de Madrazo.) Once more, trouble, from one mention in Ken’s poem. Riches.

Apollinaire asks (in the poem, the one titled “An Unsuitable Attachment” with two epigraphs, one of which is “‘you were all I ever dreamed of” — girl on bus”):

… Is / Derain modern anymore, or Matisse? What words / gather them, / summon their character? / But it’s 1914 / Later than you think – & some months afterwards / you are sitting near your tent, the night air cool, & still. / Huge shells tear thru it …

I do think Matisse is modern (I bought a pack of Matisse postcards online to send to friends, perhaps that is unmodern.) I get whacked about the head, just like in the poem: “The Future, in / Apollinaire’s case, / whacks you about the head.” It’s the Past that whacks me about the head. I’m pleased by the trouble the poems bring because they ease the whacks, hold them at bay even. And … I’m still only halfway through the third poem. Maurice Denis … I don’t know, yet he seems such an important artist/writer. I know nothing, for sure. I look him up and love the green faces of “The Two Sisters”. Japonism the style is called. Green of course reminds me of Duchamp (The Green Box) — who is only mentioned once; I am shocked (Dear Poet, give me more Duchamp!):

It felt different. What was he [Apollinaire] leader of. Some had not returned. / Some – Tzara, Duchamp – / seemed not to take things / seriously, or were newly serious. Different. / Is this serious History? It can’t be. It can’t be a roll-call, / though it must at least be that. I can just about recall / what 1986 felt like …

These poems doom me to my chair and table and computer. I knew it was all downhill from here, at this age, but it’s been confirmed. My mind remains town-size, hemmed in by pine plantations and kanite walls and flat swampy land and hills called “mountains”. I did want to be unhemmed-in but that took its toll, so I’m (still) overwhelmed by all the art, ever and coming, and not yet imagined. These poems are, for me only, perhaps, enormous art museums with small and hopeful labels beside the works, just tempting enough to turn me into a rabbit sitting beside a trap at the mouth of the burrow/hole. Victorine Meurent, I don’t know. A painter and model for Manet (an artist in her own right, is said of her – oh dear!). She was Manet’s “Olympia”. You can see her eyes in several paintings, there’s no mistake, it’s her!

I like these words in “An Unsuitable Attachment’: “… the nuts of the seventies & later – / Oehlen, for me, for now, the / ne plus ultra – / Sigmar Polke, Kippenberger. Art history, as it writhes & convulses. / If that’s what it does. …”. It’s true, the (American) art scene sounds awful, a war zone, rulers, punishments – maybe torture. Ask the women.

Then I finish reading the third poem. I sit still to get it done and marvel at how it rallied all its threads as (worlds of) affective energies, that transfer to me as affection, the effects of which spell(ed) trouble (with a small “t”).

Note

The three poems by Ken Bolton are: ‘An Australian Afternoon – Faces at the Metropole”; “Night thoughts”; “An Unsuitable Attachment”. “Night thoughts” has been published in Overland on 21 June 2024.

Image: Marie Laurencin, The poet Guillaume Apollinaire and his friends (1909, detail)