Lichtenstein

Today is my fifth wedding anniversary. In typical April showers, we walked (or sploshed), stuffing our faces from Borough market, along to Tate Modern. I am a not-well-read- comic- book enthusiast, more so than a fan of pop-art. Lichtenstein’s famous 1960s comic strip repros/blow-ups may have lost their impact in the pages of art books and magazines but I wasn’t prepared for their impact ‘in real life’ – especially in the first four rooms of the exhibition. The colours, to start, are so uncomplicated and true to the cheap print wash of their inspiration – I didn’t know that Lichtenstein even replicated the inconsistencies of tone and dot alignment that were in the original comics (see ‘Spraycan’).The early pieces, including a double page of a female foot pressing a pedal bin, one closed and the other open, made the most impact on me – for their simplicity and sense of humour – I laughed out loud at Donald Duck’s exclamation to Mickey that he had “caught a big one” out fishing, when actually hooking his own behind. Lichtenstein’s later work, created in the consciousness of his own popularity by that time, seemed to have lost that – by contrast they were complicated, clumsy, dare I say it – boring, by comparison. The fourth room didn’t disappoint in its drama and farce. Here were the big guns, popular, but deservedly so. They appeared to emulate the posters and headlines from Hollywood films and news stories – war and romance – as much as comic strip giants. Again I loved the interplay between image and text, including the fonts; the two I’ve included here put a smile on my face.

Not really a beginning but

It doesn’t seem right to start with a significantly flawed poem but it’s nice to do something with an idea that otherwise would just hang out in Dropbox, so

 

 
Science

Lord knows it’s hard drumming up brains and things soliciting
unintentionally silences in lifts it’s difficult to face that expression
and anyway someone else’s child is always pressing the wrong
button deliberately so there are meetings or pre-meetings I think
and a team which is a lie for all the top down decision making is it
possible to actually look forward to eating a sandwich at a desk
Lord knows there are evening drinks and memes literally flying
around the intranet and good chats what are you watching Africa
The Undateables and having renounced science for very unreligious
reasons but rather its limitations encased in the human brain fortress
and believing it to include everything but in fact excluding no thing
it is not simply the poetry that nova implodes when Brian Cox says
it is not a universe of lights we see we see a universe of worlds but
and his smile his eye light says that which he cannot explain as science