In The Beginning …

July 5 2011

I used to work in clay.

It had the chalky taste

of earth.

The indelible smell

of place,

where something was born

and cannot help

but return.

And weight.

The heft, in my hand

then lands

on the wheel with a thud,

  —  an artless lump

I compulsively touch,

its cool wet denseness.

I give it shape

and it forgives my mistakes,

by small additions, subtractions

the action

of pressure and speed,

as it rotates

on the heavy treadle wheel

my body encloses   — 

tucked-up close

hunching over.

So a sculptor can take a block

of plaster, or marble

and see the shape it contains,

scraping away

to reveal it.

Or take a lump of clay

and build something up

from nothing.

Starting from the blank page

as I have done.

An act of creation

that also begins in darkness

we can’t help but carry on.

As if there had been no fall, no corruption

by shame

or lust.

And add to the Garden

beauty

abundance

light.

After writing this, I did some Googling, and found out that it wasn’t clay from which God made man, it was “the dust of the earth”. Which kind of wrecks the poem …and kind of doesn’t! (Mix dust with water and air …and voila!)

Anyway, I think the allusion to Genesis, and the Garden of Eden; to the original act of creation, and our own creative acts, still works. The idea of being born emerges in the very first stanza. And clay is perfect for this.  It is not a standard product. It has this quality of terroire:  just as a fine estate wine embodies the climate and soil of its place of origin. So it brings you home; brings you back to the starting place, the original place of birth.

My favourite parts are those that evoke the pure physicality of the stuff.  Not just smell and weight and taste, but the extravagant word play that also contains within it an aesthetic of excess and exuberance:  a line like “cool wet denseness”. I thought “denseness” might be a neologism, a bit of poetic licence; but I pulled out the dictionary, and it is in fact a legitimate word.

This poem began with a picture:  a sculptor chiselling away at a piece of white marble. And I thought how opposite this was to what I do:  how, in a sense, he works in from too much material, and I work out from nothing. Nevertheless, we are both artists (if I may be so presumptuous as to call myself that). In describing his work, I spent a fair bit of time narrowing down the essential verb, and ended up going with “scraping”:  I like the laboriousness and attention to detail it implies (as opposed to “chiselling” or “carving”, for example). And the way this evokes an artist utterly absorbed in his work:  that quality of immersion that is so delightful and productive.