Three Poets Painting with Agnes Martin’s Brush
BY HEIDI SEABORN
1.
As the daughter of an art history major, I’ve spent a lot of time in art museums. But during the pandemic years, I sought out art with new ardor. I craved color: Mark Rothko’s brilliant cloud forms, the wash of Helen Frankenthaler and the vibrancy of Joan Mitchell. I swam in David Hockney’s glittery swimming pools and Frank Bowling’s rosy waterfalls of color. I gravitated to Calder, to Mondrian, Matisse and of course, Monet’s “Water Lilies”. Gazing at a painting or a sculpture, I’d often feel the beginnings of a poem bristling within, so I’d take a photo to return to for inspiration.
All that artwork seeped like watercolor into my poetry. The ekphrastic impulse leading in some cases to a deeper relationship with a particular artist. I needed to understand why Rothko’s work turned so dark in the years before he died. To know what prompted Georgia O’Keeffe’s cloud paintings. Soon their voices were collaged into my poems, the conversation between art and artist and poet rippling in circles over the surface of my work.
2.
It’s late January and a crust of snow and ice edges the streets of Taos, New Mexico which I navigate carefully as I walk toward the Harwood Museum of Art. On this monochromatic day, I’ve come to see the work of Agnes Martin (1912-2004), the painter known for her geometric abstract work, featuring muted or white backgrounds lined with pencil to form grids and bands. A curator leads me to the Agnes Martin Gallery, an octagon with an oculus installed overhead and four Donald Judd stools. The gallery holds seven Martin works, all acrylic paint on linen canvas, all painted in the early 1990s and gifted by the artist to the museum. The gallery was constructed according to Martin’s wishes. The paintings seem to crowd the spectator. Or perhaps it is the presence of poets I feel around me. Within the past year, three new Agnes Martin-inspired poetry collections by the acclaimed poets Lauren Camp, Victoria Chang and Brian Teare have arrived in the world, prompting one to wonder:
Is this a Baader-Meinholf phenomenon or coincidence? Is Agnes Martin in the poetic zeitgeist or is it something deeper?
3.
An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, June 2023) by Lauren Camp
Lauren Camp, who is currently the Poet Laureate of New Mexico, writes in her collection’s notes that she has sat many times in the Agnes Martin Gallery. The biography Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art, by Nancy Princenthal, Camp takes with her to a Willapa Bay AiR residency. From the prefatory poem “Must Learn Neither”:
I’m not sure why I packed it, what it celebrates, but I know the artist
and her simple lines against excess. Know she made
sacred an emptiness.
Camp couldn’t have thrown a better book into her bag. Set in the spare, often gray Willapa Bay, Washington, An Eye in Each Square weaves Martin’s biography, words, and art into poems that sweep through Camp’s external and internal landscapes. Throughout these poems, the reader sees the lines of a gray horizon, the sea, the sandflats, as if the poet were immersed in a Martin painting.
Reckless compounding waves scuff at the shore and flatten.
The day does not retain meaning.
The view: a grey above and beneath.
Sand grains and mounds between moon jellies on the beach.
Camp writes in “This Arrangement of Habitat” before turning inward:
I’ve spent two years protecting my father from fleet wings
of his mind and the effort of holding
steady through such loving comes along in whorls.
Half-a-dozen poems carry titles from Martin’s paintings. In “Tremolo” the poet is describing the painting through the biography of the painter. In “Drops” the speaker is centered, yet the painter hovers within the lines. It is this intimacy between artist and poet, art and landscape, that shapes An Eye in Each Square. An intimacy that the reader enters as if we are along for the residency, the speaker’s long walks and her exploration into Martin’s life and work, and ultimately her own life—her grief and longings.
4.
With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, April 2024) by Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang’s With My Back to the World collection takes its title as well as its poem titles from Martin paintings. We sense the artist’s presence throughout, in quotes, in conversation, as reference, and with reverence. In powerful poems that illuminate a mind pressing against its own grief, depression, and a repressive world.
Adherence to constrictive form is a hallmark of Chang’s work, and here, the poems evoke the unique abstract geometric structure of Martin’s work. Yet where Martin’s grids, squares and bands penciled over empty or blandly hued canvases beg the viewer to fill in the space, Chang’s poems clamor against their containers: questioning, lamenting, desiring, seeking wisdom and relief. For example:
Untitled #9, 1995
Agnes only had nine years to live. The angels must have begun to hover around her canvas like monkeys. This canvas has nine white thin strips between the red and blue ones. I’ve spent my life thinking about the blue ones, thinking they were the future. But the future was red all along. I sense something is ending but I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s the future. This morning, I looked at a large spiderweb above my car. When I returned 10 minutes later, the weaver was gone, the web dismantled, but my hands were still open. Maybe a life doesn’t matter so much as the feeling it leaves behind, whether anyone receives the feeling or not. Maybe our goal is to spend all the light. Since none of us asked to be born.
The poems’ shapes become a formal cage holding the bird of Chang’s language. Or as Chang ends the poem “Homage to Life, 2003”:
Every poem is trying to be the last free words on earth.
It is this sense of constriction and freedom that permeates throughout With My Back to the World as the poet wrestles with Martin’s assertions that the making of art leads to freedom. From “Fiesta, 1985:
Agnes said that painting is not about ideas or personal emotion, that the object is freedom…What is art but trying to make something resemble what it was before it was made, when it was still unknown and free?
Or in “Grass, 1967”:
Agnes said that solitude and freedom are the same. My solitude is like grass…what if my solitude is depressed? What if even my solitude doesn’t want to be alone?
Perhaps the devotion to making art in pursuit of Martin’s ‘freedom’ resembles death as Chang writes in the opening lines of the title poem “With My Back to the World, 1997”:
This year I turned my back to the world. I let language face
the front. The parting felt like death.
While Martin may serve as guide for Chang’s emotional inquiry, the poet presses into Martin’s psyche (“Starlight, 1962”):
Agnes knew that love exists because of the distance of starlight. That desire is the only thing with nerve endings. That it drips. That it dries faster in the desert. She knew to paint it vertically but to hang it horizontally.
to bring us into the painter’s heart and mind, while acknowledging limitation: “I am trying to draw a woman’s heartbeat, not the heart.” (“Aspiration, 1960”). Yet, as the poem’s next line demonstrates, “The sensation of being strangled, not the hands around my neck,” it is the speaker that we feel most vividly in these poems. A speaker who is “carrying death on my back” (“Friendship, 1963”) and whose “depression has reorganized into grids.” (“Play, 1966”).
If in An Eye in Each Square, Camp has walked into an Agnes Martin painting, Chang’s speaker is nearly subsumed. The final poem, “Friendship, 1963” in the collection ends with:
When I
took a photo of Agnes’s piece, I saw my dark reflection on the gold. I started counting the grids but the bald man came up next to me. Suddenly there were two dark shadows on the gold. I asked him to step away but when he said, No, it was Agnes’s voice.
Finally, the speaker presses away from the shadow of Martin, a parting that must “feel like death.”
5.
Poem Bitten by a Man (Nightboat Books, September 2023) by Brian Teare
The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven (reissued by Nightboat Books, 2022) by Brian Teare
Brian Teare too appears to pursue, then resist Martin’s presence in his work. Perhaps no poet has a deeper connection with Martin than Teare. Poem Bitten by a Man, while ostensibly concerned with the work of artist Jasper Johns, builds on Teare’s Martin-inspired ekphrastic collection The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven which (initially published in 2015 and then reissued in 2022). Teare describes coming to Martin not through her art but through her Writings, when in 2009, he discovered that her essay “The Untroubled Mind” was a comfort through a debilitating chronic illness. Thus begins a journey between poet and painter that spans over a decade and two collections.
In The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven, Martin’s geometric influence is evident in the form and shape of the poems, and most poems carry titles from Martin’s Writings, or with description of the artwork’s media and dimensions. With Martin as muse, companion, and container, Teare weathers and wrestles his illness. From “People that look out with their backs to the world represent something that isn’t possible in this world.”
In these poems, the speaker’s relationship with Martin deepens from discovery to companionship through his illness, until he finally withdraws. Yet, it seems that Teare was not finished with Agnes Martin. Or perhaps she was not yet done with him.
Poem Bitten by a Man was written in response to a commission from the Philadelphia Museum of Art to write about Jasper Johns. The collection’s title is based on John’s work “Painting Bitten by a Man” and includes a handful of poems that take their titles and shape from John’s iconic “Flag” series of collaged paintings. These poems are interspersed throughout one long poem. The long poem itself is a collage of journals, and the biography and writings of both Johns and Martin and others. The result, is an intimate journey into a man’s illness and suffering, loves and life with the two artists as partners, and sometimes rivals to the speaker’s actual partner “R”:
“Your problem is you feel closer to art than people.” Not closer to—safer/with…
…Agnes the god of empty forms, of transcendence, a personable classical impersonality. Johns the god of the given world, of assemblage, an austere romantic modernism. R. the trickier intimacy, the failure of representation. Other gods come and & go, trailing ions the elicit thought, neural cascades.
I do what I’ve found
the possibility
The privilege of being here, suffering
the mortal together.
Yet it is Martin’s presence that continues to buoy and interrogate the speaker through his illness:
after the emergency
I find comfort in the wisdom figure Agnes makes of herself, a role Johns assiduously avoids. I’m consoled by grids that for her represent innocence, her writing’s dogmatic certainties
Certainties such as Martin’s “Stand with your back to the turmoil.” A command that the speaker ultimately rejects to face the turmoil of his life, to argue the diagnosis, to pay the bills, to advocate for himself, to take the “bourgeois job” with health benefits and economic stability. But this is not the rejection of Martin at the end ofThe Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. Closer to a disagreement between old friends.
Near the end of this brave, powerful, long poem, Teare asks:
How to hold on to who we
are? Rubber stamps & ink. Graphite marks. A ruler.
The answer lies in the making of art.
6.
In the gray space, the spirit starts to find shape, to find internal structure.”
~ Agnes Martin
I read that Martin would come to sit on a Donald Judd stool in Harwood’s Agnes Martin Gallery surrounded by her paintings. Three bear the same title: “Untitled, 1990” and her trademark geometric structure and muted palette, but otherwise are unalike. Just as the collections of Teare, Chang and Camp echo one another in form, shape, convention and source but are wholly distinct. Another thing Martin wrote: “The response depends on the condition of the observer.”
The deep inspirational vein of Agnes Martin has led to an unrivaled ekphrastic leap from the original to a multitude of originals, in each case a collection that is utterly new and surprising. After reading these four collections, I understand the compulsion, and even I, a lover of color, am drawn to her gray space.
The making of art often begins in the gray space, the empty rectangle of canvas or of page. Each of these poets, Camp, Chang, Teare—has taken residence in Martin’s work and biography and made art from her spirit, and inspiration from her structure. She has served as muse, mirror, protagonist, and ultimately, empty canvas on which to pencil their own lines.
