‘Ken [Kiff] is a poet without a tongue as a true painter should always be’.
Garner Tullis
One – I grew up in the second half of the 20th century, a cultural era often referred to in the visual arts as “late Modernism”, when leading art critics promoted the notion of the separateness and exclusivity of each of the arts in their “advanced” forms. I was fortunate to work with the painter Ken Kiff on a book about his Sequence and came to understand why he rejected the dominant cultural of late Modernism for in favour a more inclusive approach to making images. As perhaps implicit in Garner Tullis’ observation above, Kiff read poetry avidly – by Rilke, Yeats, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost and Vladimir Mayakovsky. He was particularly interested in both the poetry and art writing of Yves Bonnefoy, which helped to shape his whole orientation as a painter. He also developed a close working friendship with the contemporary poet Martha Kapos – an art historian and a colleague teaching with Kiff at Chelsea School of Art – who would come to write perceptively about his work, particularly his use of colour.
Thinking about Ken today, it seems to me more important than ever to celebrate a highly original visual artist who related so deeply to the work of poets.
Ken Kiff comes to mind because he was someone who was true to his own particular vision of the world and made his way without conforming to the expectations of the cultural status quo in the visual arts. His quiet defiance in this respect so unsettled John Hoyland, an abstract painter heavily identified with the ideology of late Modernist painting, that he publicly dismissed Kiff’s work out of hand, claiming that he had turned his back on ‘all the understanding of what’s gone on in modern art’. In fact nothing could have been further from the truth. Kiff simply had a much broader and deeper understanding of modern art than Hoyland; an understanding that critically engaged not simply with the various strands within early modern painting, but also with poetry and music. Hoyland’s conformity to the the “progressive” ideology that sustained a certain view of abstract painting can be seen as part-and-parcel of late Modernism’s professionalised alienation from any connection with, or attempt to inform, our common life. Perry Anderson has indicated the cause of that alienation in Modernist culture: its complicity with a market preoccupied with ‘commodities, including works of art’. For Anderson, the revolutionary possibilities that informed the Cubism and Surrealism on which Kiff pondered long and hard – on the work of Picasso, Chagall and Miro, for example – came to an end with Abstract Expressionism, after which painting in the West was increasingly driven by a commercial gallery system that needed a ‘regular output of new styles’ to feed a market increasingly aligned to the cultural values of ‘haute-couture’. So to Hoyland, wholly identified with the late Modernist notion of “progressive” abstraction, Kiff’s richly varied forms of figurative work could only appear isolated and regressive. They appear very differently, however, if we choose to see them as an articulation of an expanded and inclusive visual poetics, one engaged with what the poet John Burnside refers to as ‘the dailiness of everyday life’.
Two – Sometimes very different moments in our experience align in unexpected ways. I have always puzzled over the literalism that insists that different types of cultural activity are understood as isolated one from another. An example would be the concern expressed by some writers over failure to differentiate between “literature” and “song-writing”; a “failure” that provoked farce reaction in some quarters when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.
My puzzlement surfaced again recently when, after listening to Paul Simon’s song America, I happened to re-read Paula Meehan’s The Moon Rose Over an Open Field. Her title is, of course, the last line from the third verse of Simon’s song. I take Meehan’s poem to be both a celebration of Simon’s skill with language as a song-writer and an expression of gratitude for the positive effect the song had on her when she was a young woman. (You can find the poem on page 251 of her As If By Magic: selected poems, published by Wake Forest University Press in 2021). Having read John Burnside’s I Put a Spell on You (2014), I suspect that he too would not want to draw too firm a distinction between the two forms, although that’s not something I can be certain of.
Unlike those poets who want to insist on an absolute distinction between what a poet and a song-writer make, Paula Meehan has happily acknowledged a blurring of the lines between these two activities. She has said that she began her engagement with the power of language by listening to, and then writing song lyrics under the influence of, artists like Joni Mitchell, Sandy Denny and Van Morrison. So it’s indicative that she sub-titles her poem The Ghost of My Mother Comforts Me, ‘after Van Morrison’ (you can find it on page 80 of As If By Magic). The poem contains echoes that reference the phrase ‘gardens wet with rain’ that appears in both Morrison’s Sweet Thing from his 1968 Astral Weeks and in In the Garden, a song from No Guru, No Method, No Teacher that was released in 1986. It’s this second song that, I would guess, Meehan had in mind when she acknowledged her dept to Morrison.
All this matters to me because it seems important to acknowledge that what touches us culturally, what wakes us to being present to the complexities of our relationship to the world, comes in many forms. Forms, types or modes of articulation that, if bound up too tightly with the expectations invested in fixed categories and the hierarchies of value attached to them so as to distinguish, say, “high” from “popular” culture, can blind us to what is valuable in our own responses. This is not to suggest that some works of art are more significant within a culture than others – it’s not unreasonable to claim that the work of J S Bach is more significant than that of Chip Taylor – but I also need to remember that Taylor’s Wild Thing may have had a real significance in someone’s life, someone for whom the music of Bach is a closed book. I think it also matters because the forms of articulation we call the arts can take on new energy and meaning when they cross-pollinate or when one art form offers an artist working in another strengthens her or his desire to resist the dominant theoretical framings that inhibit what they feel they need to do creatively.
Postscript
As so often happens, no sooner had I posted this than I came across a piece of writing that I should have known about and referenced. In this case, the chapter Like a Striped Pair of Pants in John Burnside’s excellent book The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Profile Books, 2019). In it he offers a very clear and helpful discussion of the distinction between poetry and song, while at the same time addressing the various reasons why we need such a clear understanding of the real basis for that distinction, one that has nothing to do with ‘maintaining a cultural hierarchy commensurate with a class based social order’. His argument is made all the more compelling by his deep knowledge, and clear enjoyment, of the best in both categories together with his awareness of how they feed each other.