Mimic Pond

This is a photograph I took on Boxing Day of Mounts Pond on Blackheath. The small mound with trees behind it is now called Whitfield Mount after the eighteenth century open air preacher, but has been a radical landmark since the middle ages. Legend has it that John Ball made his famous speech here during the Peasants’ Revolt, Cornish rebels gathered on it in 1497 and later the Chartists and Suffragettes met at the spot, aware of its tradition as a rallying point for dissent. The pond is seasonal, emerging in winter and disappearing in the summer. Currently, as you can see, it is little more than a large puddle, with crows circling and using it as a bath.

I went to look at this small section of London landscape because I had just read Carol Watts' excellent book of poems about it, Mimic Pond. The cover shows grass poking through the shallow water like lines of verse and in the poem she compares the black crows hovering over winter ice to 'black script' or 'notes on a stave'. Her title comes from Henry David Thoreau's Journal for 16 April 1852 - 'here is a mimic sea - with its gulls' (he was describing the look of a meadow after rain and snow melt). Other writers she draws on, whose work I've mention before on this blog, include Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy, Francis Ponge, Gary Snyder and Allen Fisher. Her poems cover a year of close observation and at about this time she saw the pond as 'a replication of expanses / on different scales, wondering / what the pond sees in the crow / or the crow, as it flies, sees / in the pond / also in motion.'

I went to an excellent online talk by Carol Watts a couple of years ago, 'Pond weathers and inventories: practices of eco-attention in making poetry', but have unfortunately mislaid the notes I made at the time. If I ever come across them I'll amend this blog post... Instead, I'll direct you to an excellent long review of Mimic Pond by Susie Campbell at Long Poem Magazine. She notes, for example, that its 'language fluctuates through shifting levels of meaning and strange reversals, an active playful thinking about pond in writing', and that the rhythms of the poetry sequence 'communicate a quiet spaciousness.'

'Not the restless, trickster shiftings of the pond itself but more like the wheeling, diurnal rhythms of earth and sky, suggesting perhaps that the restless energies of the pond are held within the bigger rhythms of the universe. We feel in them the earth’s curves and parabolas, a recurring motif throughout the collection. Read aloud, these rhythms create a sense of how the great rise and fall of the universe is mirrored in the restless turbulence of the pond.' 

Wind at Walden Pond

The artwork on the cover of this January 2008 edition of Art in America is by Spencer Finch: Sunlight in an Empty Room (Passing Cloud for Emily Dickinson, Amherst, MA, August 28, 2004).  Emily Dickinson once famously wrote of 'a certain Slant of light' - 'when it comes, the Landscape listens...'  On his visit to her home, Finch took precise measurements of the level of sunlight and then tried to recreate the effect using a cloud of blue gels suspended in front of two rows of fluorescent lights.  Finch is fascinated with light and has made various similar cultural pilgrimages to record it: heading, for example, to Ingmar Bergman’s Stockholm residence at the ‘magic hour’ when the director did much of his filming, to Time Square, the inspiration for Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, and to Giverny where he was looking for a shadow similar to the one Monet captured in the painting reproduced below.  Things don't always go to plan: in 1996 he travelled to Rouen only to find that the cathedral Monet had painted in different lights was under scaffolding; undaunted, he did a piece instead based on the colours of his hotel room.  The artworks arising from these trips range from drawings to sculptures and installations.  Eos (Dawn, Troy, 10/27/02), for example, resembles a Dan Flavin light piece, but is designed to match the measurements Finch took at Troy during the hour of Homer's ‘rosy-fingered Dawn’.

Claude Monet, Grainstacks at Sunset (Snow Effect), 1890-91

The Art in America review by Stephanie Cash describes two works Finch had recently completed that were inspired by Thoreau.  The first of these concerns wind rather than light - I have drawn a diagram below to show how the gallery installation worked.  ‘For about two hours the fans periodically create a gentle, intermittent breeze from various directions and at various speeds, determined by Finch’s measurements using a digital anenometer and weathervane while standing on the shore of Walden Pond, where Thoreau spent two years, two months and two days.  Viewers standing at the work’s centre can experience the approximate breeze that Finch, and presumably Thoreau, did.’ Not having experienced this work I can only imagine it from Cash's description, another level of mediation which only goes to emphasise the impossibility of feeling the wind that rippled the surface of the water during the years 1845-7.  

Diagram showing Spencer Finch's

Two hours, Two minutes, Two seconds (Wind at Walden Pond, March 12, 2007)

The other work, Walden Pond (morning effect, March 13, 2007), sounds less appealing because it mixes together Thoreau and Monet, although it is hard to tell from photographs.  The finished work was  

'a wall collage comprising 139 reproductions, arranged in the shape of the pond, of aqueous paintings by Monet.  From 20 spots around the pond’s perimeter, Finch noted the hues of the water and ice, then located their matches in the Monet reproductions.  Each image bears a notation with an arrow pointing to the particular colour, and the time, location on the shore and direction he was facing.  It’s a rather complicated enterprise, and visually and intellectually engaging, but atypically for Finch, it doesn’t present a coherent, unified effect.’

There was a Spencer Finch show at Turner Contemporary in 2014, which regrettably I didn't get to see.  In the video clip above he talks about the influence of Turner and installs a sculpture which resembles the Emily Dickinson one, called Passing Cloud (After Constable).  [Incidentally, I did get to go to the previous exhibition at Turner Contemporary in 2014 - which was also inspired by clouds, including Constable's - and wrote about it here.]  Finch has done cloud studies himself, as well as drawings of ice, wind, sunlight and water.  The colours of the surface of the Hudson River were his raw material for The River That Flows Both Ways, an installation on New York's High Line that could be seen last year.  His website has some other examples of recent work but I will end here with a piece he made some time ago, described in the Art in America article.  It sounds preposterous but also rather magical.

‘Resembling an amateur science project, an early installation that also looks to the cosmos, Blue (One second brainwave transmitted to the star Rigel), 1993, comprises a tattered orange armchair, a TV set, an old Apple computer, electrodes, an antenna and a tripod-mounted transmitter.  Using these jury-rigged components, Finch recorded his brain wave for one second as he watched the huge blue wave in the opening sequence of the 1970s TV show Hawaii Five-O, a still of which appears on the TV screen.  His brainwave was then translated by the software and projected into space by the transmitter.  It should reach its destination, the bluest star in our sky, in the year 2956.  With the ‘real’ work supposedly somewhere in the cosmos, modern-day viewers are left with a scrappy installation that belies the beauty of the concept.’

Walden Pond

Radio 4's In Our Time did a programme recently on 'Thoreau and the American Idyll'. At one point (about 13 minutes from the end) they briefly discuss the way Thoreau was influenced by the Romantics, but focused much more on the details of nature and less on the overall landscape than writers like Wordsworth. This is certainly true, although you get a wonderful composite picture of Walden by reading the whole book. There is a moment in Chapter 9 when Thoreau seems on the verge of a wide-angle landscape description, but ends up focusing on the shifting colours of the water:

"The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it much concern one who has not long frequented it or lived by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth and purity as to merit a particular description. It is a clear and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though on the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter and a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All our Concord waters have two colors at least; one when viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at hand. The first depends more on the light, and follows the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of a dark slate-color... Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the pond."

Scenery and a Music Box

'I am prepared to meet my death / In this excessively lucid landscape' wrote Kenji Miyazawa in his poem 'Scenery and a Music Box.' In the notes to his translation of this poem, Roger Pulvers suggests that it beautifully illustrates Kenji's vision. Dated 16 September 1923, the poem describes a walk along the Toyosawa River to cut down trees in the early evening. Kenji ends up imploring the hill to be still, expecting nature to take from him something in return for the trees he has felled.

The poem has landscape motifs that Kenji used repeatedly: the river, the wind, clouds, stars. There is the figure of a farmer fused with the landscape set alongside signs of modernity like the electric wires which whistle in the wind and become a 'music box'. As this wind dies down into a gentle breeze, Kenji sees it as a symbol of eternity (he uses the Buddhist term kalpa). The focus of the poem sometimes zooms in on luminous detail, like the raindrops on the bridge, and includes striking images drawn from science and geology, like the clouds that are 'crystal-rimmed' and then 'chalcedonic'.

Kenji's 'active engagement with nature, and his seeing himself as its faithful chronicler and recorder, was sufficient to set him apart from virtually all other Japanese poets, who tended to use nature as a springboard for their own musings and lamentations.' Roger Pulvers talks about the way Japan's industrialisation overwrote its traditional love of nature. In a passage that reminds me of remarks by Alex Kerr I discussed in an earlier posting here, he says 'most of Kenji's contemporaries would have believed - as Japanese still tend to believe today - that the Japanese love nature virtually more than do the people of any other nation. This belief is held despite the fact that preservation of nature is a very low priority for those people in Japan who hold the future of the country in their hands. Nature itself has become nothing more than a figment of nostalgia to most Japanese people.' In 'Scenery and a Music Box' the poet observes that the bridge over the river provides a view 'seething with nostalgia'. Kenji wanted nature cherished, but he also wanted to promote the science of modern agriculture and reduce rural poverty. Kenji's ideal life is described in his last and best known poem, 'Strong in the Rain': a strong man, free from desire, living in 'a little thatched-roof hut / In a field in the shadows of a pine tree grove.'

It may just be coincidence, because I've been reading both writers recently, but Miyazawa seems to me to share much in common with Henry David Thoreau. They both rejected convention (and their own fathers' lives) in favour of a life lived according to their own beliefs. They shared a poetic vision of nature alongside a practical interest in the process of farming. Miyazawa's desire to live 'Strong in the Rain' reminds me of the kind of life aspired to by Thoreau at Walden Pond. Neither of them married and their asceticism was seen by others as extreme. Neither was as physically robust as they would like to have been: Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the age of 44, Miyazawa of pneumonia at the age of 37 - his last request was for a thousand copies of the Lotus Sutra to be printed and distributed among his friends and acquaintances.

An undulating country of clouds

A book I never tire of dipping into (and always end up re-reading more than I intended) is John Suiter's Poets on the Peaks. It describes the experiences of Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac and Philip Whalen in the North Cascades where they all worked as lookouts, watching for fires from the summits of Crater Mountain, Sourdough Mountain and Desolation Peak. It is a most beautiful book to read, thanks to Suiter's black and white photographs of the key sites and landscapes. Some of these can be seen at the Poets on the Peaks website, along with extracts from the text. The section there that quotes from the book's Epilog gives a sense of how brief and special this episode in American literary culture was: the isolated lookout cabins that gave these poets the chance to experience wild nature, hard work and solitude, along with space to cultivate their poetry and Buddhism, are mostly no longer used. 'Fittingly, the last two operational fire-watch cabins on the Upper Skagit today are Kerouac’s on Desolation and Snyder’s and Whalen’s on Sourdough.'


Here are three Poets on the Peaks links:

• An interview with John Suiter and Gary Snyder
• John Suiter interviewed by Michael Rothenberg
• A review from the Skagit River Journal

Incidentally, there is a John Suiter photograph here in a similar style to those used to illustrate Poets on the Peaks, this one showing a nineteenth century version of the lookout stations, Thoreau's cabin at Walden. Suiter starts Poets on the Peaks with a quotation from Thoreau which could be describing the landscapes experienced by Snyder, Kerouac and Whalen:

'As the light increased I discovered around me an ocean of mist, which by chance reached up exactly to the base of the tower, and shut out every vestige of the earth, while I was left floating on this fragment of the wreck of a world, on my carved plank, in cloudland... All around beneath me was spread for a hundred miles on every side, as far as the eye could reach, an undulating country of clouds, answering in the varied swell of its surface to the terrestrial world it veiled. It was such a country as we might see in dreams, with all the delights of paradise.'

- from "Tuesday" in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

The drifting white downy clouds

There are a growing number of blogs based on the journals of old, out of copyright authors. From a landscape perspective, the Henry David Thoreau blog is of obvious interest and in fact I would go further and highly recommend it. As you would expect, the entries are poetic and insightful, and they range from specific observations of plants and animals to general reflections, like this extract from the entry for 24 June 1852:

The drifting white downy clouds are to the landsman what sails on the sea are to him that dwells by the shore,—objects of a large, diffusive interest. When the laborer lies on the grass or in the shade for rest, they do not much tax or weary his attention. They are unobtrusive. I have not heard that white clouds, like white houses, made any one’s eyes ache. They are the flitting sails in that ocean whose bound no man has visited. They are like all great themes, always at hand to be considered, or they float over us unregarded. Far away they float in the serene sky, the most inoffensive of objects, or, near and low, they smite us with their lightnings and deafen us with their thunder. We know no Ternate nor Tidore grand enough whither we can imagine them bound. There are many mare’s-tails to-day, if that is the name. What would a man learn by watching the clouds? The objects which go over our heads unobserved are vast and indefinite. Even those clouds which have the most distinct and interesting outlines are commonly below the zenith, somewhat low in the heavens, and seen on one side. They are among the most glorious objects in nature. A sky without clouds is a meadow without flowers, a sea without sails

On reading this passage today, we are perhaps less likely to think about the clouds, which drift on as they ever did, than of the disappearance of white sails from the coastal landscape.

Landscape Lieder

The Lied and Art Song Texts Page is a fascinating archive of poetry that has been set to music. For example, look up John Clare and you can read the text for Ivor Gurney’s ‘Ploughman Singing’ (1920) or Benjamin Britten’s setting of ‘The Evening Primrose’ (one of Britten’s Five Flower songs from 1950, the others being Robert Herrick’s ‘To Daffodils’ and ‘The Succession of the Four Sweet Months’, George Crabbe’s ‘Marsh Flowers’ and the anonymous ‘Ballad of Green Broom’).

Here are a selection of ten more landscape lieder by famous composers:

• Sir Arthur Bliss’s ‘The Ballads of the Four Seasons’ based on the poems of Li Po
• John Cage’s ‘Solo for Voice 49 (relevant) - The Year Begins To Be Ripe’, which makes use of text by Henry David Thoreau.
• Goethe’s ‘Gefunden’ (‘I walked in the woods’), set by Richard Strauss
• Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’ set by Claude Debussy
• Ralph Vaughan Williams’ version of Housman’s ‘On Wenlock Edge the wood's in trouble’, from A Shropshire Lad.
• The spring poem ‘When daisies pied and violets blue’ from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost set by, among others, Igor Stravinsky
• Milton Babbitt’s version of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, ‘That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection’
• Josef von Eichendorff’s poem ‘Forest Maiden’, used by both Hugo Wolf and Robert Schumann.
• Elliott Carter’s setting of Walt Whitman's verse in ‘Warble for Lilac Time’
• ‘Nature, the gentlest mother’, one of Aaron Copland’s Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.