A de Chirico moment

click photo to enlarge
Recently, walking through a small paved area that has a row of fairly new shops, I had what I can only describe as a "de Chirico" moment. I briefly felt that I'd stepped out of my everyday existence into the scuola metafisica world of the noted Greek/Italian painter, Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978). This quite unnerving experience was prompted by the sight of a casual assemblage of items propped up against the front of a virtually empty shop that bore a number of "closed" and "closing down" signs. The cracked tailor's mannequin, hoops and wall cupboards/shelves (?) in the clean, deserted space had a look of the unsettling surreal paintings of incongruous objects in architectural scenes with which de Chirico made his name. All that was missing were his deep shadows that the overcast English sky was unable to manufacture.

I took my photographs and as we walked on I reflected further, wondering whether the collection of redundant pieces had been placed there in a deliberate way, but I concluded they probably hadn't. In a blog post of 2008 I pondered on the concept of "found poems" - poetry that is found and extracted from prose that was written for non-poetic purposes. This assemblage seemed to me the artistic equivalent: "found sculpture" perhaps. The use of everyday objects in art has a long history but in terms of "found" articles didn't become mainstream until the "readymades" of the French artist, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) achieved widespread acceptance.

photograph and text © Tony Boughen

Camera: Lumix LX3
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 12.8mm (60mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f2.8
Shutter Speed: 1/500
ISO: 80
Exposure Compensation: -0.33 EV
Image Stabilisation: On

Found poems and beech trees

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The idea of the "found" poem is intriguing. We are used to reading poetry where meaning has been forged over time, worked, re-worked, and built with tears, anguish and quiet desperation. So the idea that one can simply find a piece of writing, composed for a particular purpose, that unwittingly offers the poetic experience seems, at first glance, quite unlikely.

In his poetry workshops published in The Guardian newspaper earlier this year David Morley looks at the found poetry "lying asleep" in field guides and the prose of natural history. He discusses how it can be shaped so it "escapes its origin and finds a fresh tone." The examples he shows often don't depart at all from the words of the original, though in others the finder-poets add their own contributions. The example below is from the article quoted, and is offered to complement today's photograph of the beautiful autumn beech trees at the edge of Pedder's Wood, near Grize Dale, in the Forest of Bowland, Lancashire.

Beech by Peter R White
Wilkinson, John and Mitchell, Alan (1978)
A Handguide to the Trees of Britain and Northern Europe
Treasure Press, London

Beech (Fagus sylvatica)
cannot make roots
in saturated soils but
drive them through
dry layers to
reach
moisture.
Hence although
a thirsty tree it is
not found in wet
hollows nor on clay soils.
Male flowers are little
balls of stamens
on slender stalks.
Female flowers are green
with white filaments and
are on
short stout stalks.

Beech
live for barely 250 years
then die
and
fall
to pieces
suddenly.

photograph & (some) text (c) T. Boughen

Camera: Olympus E510
Mode: Aperture Priority
Focal Length: 18mm (36mm/35mm equiv.)
F No: f8.
Shutter Speed: 1/400
ISO: 100
Exposure Compensation: -0.3 EV
Image Stabilisation: On