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Holland Festival’s associate artist ANOHNI presents a mixed media exhibit: SHE WHO SAW BEAUTIFUL THINGS.
The installation includes a series of portraits honoring ANOHNI’s former collaborator Dr. Julia Yasuda, taken by Julia’s late wife Erika Yasuda in Tokyo in the early 1980s, and exhibited here for the first time.
Erika Yasuda’s portrets: Within the collection of the Huis Willet-Holthuysen in the centre of Amsterdam, ANOHNI layers photos, silkscreened fabrics, sculpture, video, sound and paintings from her own artistic practices within a selection of Erika Yasuda’s extraordinary portraits. The works reflect an insular and delicately composed vision of enlightened femininity and luxuriant androgyny, persevering in memory despite historical and ongoing existential threats.
ANOHNI: ‘I like the concept of ‘animism’ – that everything is alive, in an ongoing a process of transformation -and that all materiality is imbued with a certain presence, even a sense of memory that we might not entirely understand. I work with veils as a way to suggest different layers of presense. Sometimes I imagine a cacophony of moments within a timeline in a certain space, as if they were all able to express their vitality simultaneously.’
About ANOHNI: Born in England, ANOHNI lives and works in America as a musician, visual artist and theater director. In 1995 she founded her performance group The Johnsons, with which she performed with symphony orchestras in opera houses around the world, including Sydney Opera House, the Royal Opera House in London, Teatro Real in Madrid and Carnegie Hall in New York.
ANOHNI has presented exhibitions of her visual work at the Nikolaj Kunsthal, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, The Hammer Museum, The Kitchen and Sikkema Jenkins Gallery in New York. She co-facilitated the art project FUTURE FEMINISM presented at The Hole, New York in 2014 and was part of ANOHNI’s artistic residency in Aarhus, European Capital of Culture in 2017.
The Willet-Holthuysen House: The imposing Willet-Holthuysen House is situated in the center of Amsterdam. The house on the Herengracht contains many period rooms. Its beautiful salons are in the style of Louis XIV, and the garden is symmetrically designed as a French formal garden.
Address: Herengracht 605, 1017 CE Amsterdam.
Open daily from 10 a.m. 5 p.m.
• https://www.amsterdammuseum.nl/
june 4 until october 29 – 2023
Willet-Holthuysen House – Amsterdam
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Clive Branson (1907–1944) was born in Ahmednagar, India, the son of a major in the Indian army.
He studied at the Slade School of Art and exhibited at the Royal Academy when he was just 23. Five of his paintings are today in the Tate. His daughter is the painter Rosa Branson.
In 1932 Branson joined the Communist Party. He taught for the National Council of Labour Colleges, spoke at weekly open-air meetings on Clapham Common and with his wife Noreen managed a Party bookshop. He took a leading role in driving Mosley’s British Union of Fascists out of Battersea, was responsible for the formation of a local Aid Spain Committee and fought with the International Brigades in Spain.
Taken prisoner at Calaceite, he spent eight months in Franco’s prison camps. After he was repatriated, Branson toured Britain raising money and support for the Spanish Republic. During the Blitz he painted Battersea street-scenes for the Artists International Association. Conscripted in 1941, he served as a tank commander in the Royal Armoured Corps. He was killed in action in Burma, aged just 36.
The Selected Poems of Clive Branson brings together, for the first time, the best of his surviving poetry. Passionate and committed, it’s a first-hand account of the most violent years of the twentieth-century – Britain in the Slump, Spain during the civil-war, Fascist prisons, the London Blitz, the cultural shock of India and its poverty, the war against Japan – recorded with a painterly eye and a communist faith in the power of the people.
Richard Knott (Editor) is a writer and poet. He has written extensively on aspects of modern history, including the experience of war artists (The Sketchbook War); war correspondents (The Trio); and most recently the surveillance of writers and artists by the Security Services over three decades: (The Secret War Against the Arts). He has also published two collections of poetry.
On Being Questioned After Capture: Alcaniz
I stood before my questioner who asked
‘Why leave home?
Why have you come?
Why?’ He must have guessed
‘Because he is a Communist.’
I thought of all the answers I could give
whether death is correct or whether to save
life for a rainy day
and told a lie to cheat his bullet with a word
to use a bullet afterward
On him the bigger lie – a conscript
‘volunteer’ to rape Spain where she slept
to save his own skin
he had come when he sought ‘The Leader’ on his hands and
knees
To crush a thousand years in half an hour
To make Guernica
a wilderness.
I could wait and so could lie
for adjournment to another court
meanwhile to live on my bended knee
to make occasion for another start.
I could imitate the victor, cringe
till I and the world beyond
take our revenge.
1939
Clive Branson
(1907–1944)
Selected Poems of Clive Branson
Edited by Richard Knott
Paperback
Release date: 01 May, 2023
Publisher: Smokestack Books
Language: English
122 pages
ISBN-10:1739173007
ISBN-13:978-1739173005
Price: £8.99
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Like a long, funny letter from an old friend, an album of drawings by the legendary singer and activist for social justice, Joan Baez.
Since retiring from active performing, Baez has focused her formidable talents on painting and drawing. This collection of drawings shows another side of Baez: lovingly loose and charming sketches on reoccurring themes such as politics, relationships, women, animals, and family.
Each section, organized thematically, includes an introductory piece by the artist. Baez approaches her line drawings as exercises in freedom: she begins drawing upside down—often using her non-dominant hand—without any preconceived notion of where the lines might lead her.
Beginning with her seminal debut album in 1960, Baez has been a musical force of nature of incalculable influence whose earliest recordings fed a host of traditional ballads into the rock vernacular.
In 1963, she introduced Bob Dylan to the world, beginning a tradition of mutual mentoring that continued across her many recordings.
As a lifetime advocate for non-violent social change, she marched on the front line of the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr., shined a spotlight on the Free Speech Movement, took to the fields with Cesar Chavez, organized resistance to the Vietnam War, and inspired Vaclav Havel in his fight for a Czech Republic.
Joan Baez is a dynamic force of nature. Her commitment to music and social activism has earned global recognition, ranging from induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, to the Ambassador of Conscience Award, Amnesty International’s highest honor. Retired from active performing since 2019, she has devoted much of her time to the “Mischief Makers” series of paintings, portraits that immortalize risk-taking visionaries she has known, who have brought about social change through history, from Dr. Martin Luther King and Bob Dylan to the Dalai Lama and Patti Smith.
Am I Pretty When I Fly?:
An Album of Upside Down Drawings
by Joan Baez
Publisher: David R. Godine
Published: 2023
Language: English
Hardcover
120 pages
ISBN-10: 567927548
ISBN-13: 978-1567927542
$40.50
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Neuf récits composent La frontière des oubliés et retracent le parcours de l’écrivaine, depuis sa fuite, enfant, de la frontière afghane pour se bâtir une vie à Téhéran.
Dans chacune de ces vignettes de vie qui se font écho, elle brosse le portrait de ses compatriotes exilés, des « frontaliers », souvent des femmes, qui portent tous des traces de la guerre, des plaies profondes marquées par des balles invisibles.
À chaque rencontre, elle s’interroge sur la violence, l’exil et l’identité. Et en s’imprégnant de son propre vécu, Aliyeh Ataei embrasse ici plus largement le sort de tous ceux qui ont hérité des « chromosomes-douleurs », se faisant l’écho de leurs voix si peu audibles.
La frontière des oubliés nous fait découvrir une nouvelle plume puissante venue d’Iran. De son style clair et tranchant, Aliyeh Ataei dévoile des vérités qui secouent, et bouleversent.
Aliyeh Ataei
La frontière des oubliés
[Koorsorkhi]
Trad. du persan par Sabrina Nouri. Préface d’Atiq Rahimi
Collection Du monde entier, Gallimard
Parution : 13-04-2023
160 pages
140 x 205 mm
Achevé d’imprimer: 01-03-2023
ISBN: 9782073006745
Gencode: 9782073006745
Code distributeur: G07173
Livre imprimé € 18,00
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Vergeten krijgsgeheimen
Stadspoorten blijven toe. Wachters weifelen
over aandrift van legendes, vergeten ballingen.
Waarom weten zij precies wanneer de kraaien
gaan vertrekken? Eer heeft geen leeftijd, weten
zij. Ongeduld is een glazen harnas. Laat het leger.
Gulzig vreest de rook het doven van het vuur.
Bert Bevers
Vergeten krijgsgeheimen
Uit de bundel in voorbereiding: Bedekte termen
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Aanvang
Waaraan zou mijn moeder gedacht hebben
toen ze mij voor de eerste keer de borst had
gereikt? Waar ze aan begonnen was? Waar
ik aan begonnen was, beginnen ging? ‘Wordt
dit ook voor hem een herinnering?’ Ik wist
wel al dat vergeten nooit volledig lukken zal.
Bert Bevers
Aanvang
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The Rights of Women
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, opprest;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
Resume thy native empire o’er the breast!
Go forth arrayed in panoply divine;
That angel pureness which admits no stain;
Go, bid proud Man his boasted rule resign,
And kiss the golden sceptre of thy reign.
Go, gird thyself with grace; collect thy store
Of bright artillery glancing from afar;
Soft melting tones thy thundering cannon’s roar,
Blushes and fears thy magazine of war.
Thy rights are empire: urge no meaner claim,—
Felt, not defined, and if debated, lost;
Like sacred mysteries, which withheld from fame,
Shunning discussion, are revered the most.
Try all that wit and art suggest to bend
Of thy imperial foe the stubborn knee;
Make treacherous Man thy subject, not thy friend;
Thou mayst command, but never canst be free.
Awe the licentious, and restrain the rude;
Soften the sullen, clear the cloudy brow:
Be, more than princes’ gifts, thy favours sued;—
She hazards all, who will the least allow.
But hope not, courted idol of mankind,
On this proud eminence secure to stay;
Subduing and subdued, thou soon shalt find
Thy coldness soften, and thy pride give way.
Then, then, abandon each ambitious thought,
Conquest or rule thy heart shall feebly move,
In Nature’s school, by her soft maxims taught,
That separate rights are lost in mutual love.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld
(1743 – 1825)
The Rights of Women
Anna Laetitia Barbauld wrote this poem in 1793,
in response to Mary Wollstonecraft’s ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman´.
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Gabrielle Bates’s electric debut collection Judas Goat plumbs the depths of intimate relationships.
The book’s eponymous animal is used to lead sheep to slaughter while its own life is spared, its harrowing existence echoes through this spellbinding collection of forty poems, which wrestle with betrayal and forced obedience, violence and young womanhood, and the “forbidden felt language” of sexual and sacred love.
These poems conjure encounters with figures from scriptures, domesticated animals eyeing the wild, and mothering as a shapeshifting, spectral force; they question what it means to love another person and how to exorcise childhood fears. All the while, the Deep South haunts, and no matter how far away the speaker moves, the South always draws her back home.
In confession, in illumination, Bates establishes herself as an unflinching witness to the risks that desire necessitates, as Judas Goat holds readers close and whispers its unforgettable lines.
For a long time, the only part of my poems anyone praised
were the endings.
I didn’t mind.
The way I understood it, if the ending was good,
it cast goodness back over the whole.
I thought we could be saved at the last minute.
Gabrielle Bates is the author of the debut poetry collection Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, APR, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, Black Warrior Review, the Best of the Net anthology, and BAX: Best American Experimental Writing, among other journals and anthologies, and her poetry comics have been featured internationally in a variety of exhibitions, festivals, and conferences. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she serves as the Social Media Manager of Open Books: A Poem Emporium, a contributing editor for Bull City Press, and a University of Washington teaching fellow. With Luther Hughes and Dujie Tahat, she co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, where poets talk over drinks.
Judas Goat: Poems
by Gabrielle Bates (Author)
January 24, 2023
Publisher: Tin House Books (January 24, 2023)
Language: English
Paperback
104 pages
ISBN-10: 1953534643
ISBN-13: 978-1953534644
$16.95
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Blind Old Milton
Place me once more, my daughter, where the sun
May shine upon my old and time-worn head,
For the last time, perchance. My race is run;
And soon amidst the ever-silent dead
I must repose, it may be, half forgot.
Yes! I have broke the hard and bitter bread
For many a year, and with those who trembled not
To buckle on their armor for the fight,
And set themselves against the tyrant’s lot;
And I have never bowed me to his might,
Nor knelt before him — for I bear within
My heart the sternest consciousness of right,
And that perpetual hate of gilded sin
Which made me what I am; and though the stain
Of poverty be on me, yet I win
More honor by it, than the blinded train
Who hug their willing servitude, and bow
Unto the weakest and the most profane.
Therefore, with unencumbered soul I go
Before the footstool of my Maker, where
I hope to stand as undebased as now!
Child! is the sun abroad? I feel my hair
Borne up and wafted by the gentle wind,
I feel the odors that perfume the air,
And hear the rustling of the leaves behind.
Within my heart I picture them, and then
I almost can forget that I am blind,
And old, and hated by my fellow-men.
Yet would I fain once more behold the grace
Of nature ere I die, and gaze again
Upon her living and rejoicing face —
Fain would I see thy countenance, my child,
My comforter! I feel thy dear embrace —
I hear thy voice, so musical and mild,
The patient sole interpreter, by whom
So many years of sadness are beguiled;
For it hath made my small and scanty room
Peopled with glowing visions of the past.
But I will calmly bend me to my doom,
And wait the hour which is approaching fast,
When triple light shall stream upon mine eyes,
And heaven itself be opened up at last
To him who dared foretell its mysteries.
I have had visions in this drear eclipse
Of outward consciousness, and clomb the skies,
Striving to utter with my earthly lips
What the diviner soul had half divined,
Even as the Saint in his Apocalypse
Who saw the inmost glory, where enshrined
Sat He who fashioned glory. This hath driven
All outward strife and tumult from my mind,
And humbled me, until I have forgiven
My bitter enemies, and only seek
To find the straight and narrow path to heaven.
Yet I am weak — oh! how entirely weak,
For one who may not love nor suffer more!
Sometimes unbidden tears will wet my cheek,
And my heart bound as keenly as of yore.
Responsive to a voice, now hushed to rest,
Which made the beautiful Italian shore,
In all its pomp of summer vineyards drest,
And Eden and a Paradise to me.
Do the sweet breezes from the balmy west
Still murmur through thy groves, Parthenope,
In search of odors from the orange bowers?
Still, on thy slopes of verdure, does the bee
Cull her rare honey from the virgin flowers?
And Philomel her plaintive chaunt prolong
‘Neath skies more calm and more serene than ours,
Making the summer one perpetual song?
Art thou the same as when in manhood’s pride
I walked in joy thy grassy meads among,
With that fair youthful vision by my side,
In whose bright eyes I looked — and not in vain?
O my adorèd angel! O my bride!
Despite of years, and woe, and want, and pain,
My soul yearns back towards thee, and I seem
To wander with thee, hand in hand, again,
By the bright margins of that flowing stream.
I hear again thy voice, more silver-sweet
Than fancied music floating in a dream,
Possess my being; from afar I greet
The waving of thy garments in the glade,
And the light rustling of thy fairy feet —
What time as one half eager, half afraid,
Love’s burning secret faltered on my tongue,
And tremulous looks and broken words betrayed
The secret of the heart from whence they sprung.
Ah me! the earth that rendered thee to heaven
Gave up an angel beautiful and young,
Spotless and pure as snow when freshly driven;
A bright Aurora for the starry sphere
Where all is love, and even life forgiven.
Bride of immortal beauty — ever dear!
Dost thou await me in thy blest abode!
While I, Tithonus-like, must linger here,
And count each step along the rugged road;
A phantom, tottering to a long-made grave.
And eager to lay down my weary load.
I who was fancy’s lord, am fancy’s slave.
Like the low murmurs of the Indian shell
Ta’en from its coral bed beneath the wave,
Which, unforgetful of the ocean’s swell,
Retains within its mystic urn the hum
Heard in the sea-grots where Nereids dwell —
Old thoughts still haunt me — unawares they come
Between me and my rest, nor can I make
Those aged visitors of sorrow dumb.
Oh, yet awhile, my feeble soul, awake!
Nor wander back with sullen steps again;
For neither pleasant pastime canst thou take
In such a journey, nor endure the pain.
The phantoms of the past are dead for thee;
So let them ever uninvoked remain,
And be thou calm, till death shall set thee free.
Thy flowers of hope expanded long ago,
Long since their blossoms withered on the tree:
No second spring can come to make them blow,
But in the silent winter of the grave
They lie with blighted love and buried woe.
I did not waste the gifts which nature gave,
Nor slothful lay in the Circean bower;
Nor did I yield myself the willing slave
Of lust for pride, for riches, or for power.
No! in my heart a nobler spirit dwelt;
For constant was my faith in manhood’s dower;
Man — made in God’s own image — and I felt
How of our own accord we courted shame,
Until to idols like ourselves we knelt,
And so renounced the great and glorious claim
Of freedom, our immortal heritage.
I saw how bigotry, with spiteful aim,
Smote at the searching eyesight of the sage;
How Error stole behind the steps of Truth,
And cast delusion on the sacred page.
So, as a champion, even in early youth
I waged by battle with a purpose keen:
Nor feared the hand of terror, nor the tooth
Of serpent jealousy. And I have been
With starry Galileo in his cell —
That wise magician with the brow serene,
Who fathomed space; and I have seen him tell
The wonders of the planetary sphere,
And trace the ramparts of heaven’s citadel
On the cold flag-stones of his dungeon drear.
And I have walked with Hampden and with Vane —
Names once so gracious to an English ear —
In days that never may return again.
My voice, though not the loudest, hath been heard
Whenever freedom raised her cry of pain,
And the faint effort of the humble bard
Hath roused up thousands from their lethargy,
To speak in words of thunder. What reward
Was mine, or theirs? It matters not; for I
am but a leaf cast on the whirling tide,
Without a hope or wish, except to die.
But truth, asserted once, must still abide,
Unquenchable, as are those fiery springs
Which day and night gush from the mountain-side,
Perpetual meteors girt with lambent wings,
Which the wild tempest tosses to and fro,
But cannot conquer with the force it brings.
Yet I, who ever felt another’s woe
More keenly than my own untold distress;
I, who have battled with the common foe,
And broke for years the bread of bitterness;
Who never yet abandoned or betrayed
The trust vouchsafed me, nor have ceased to bless,
Am left alone to wither in the shade,
A weak old man, deserted by his kind —
Whom none will comfort in his age, nor aid!
Oh, let me not repine! A quiet mind
Conscious and upright, needs no other stay;
Nor can I grieve for what I leave behind,
In the rich promise of eternal day.
Henceforth to me the world is dead and gone,
Its thorns unfelt, its roses cast away:
And the old pilgrim, weary and alone,
Bowed down with travel, at his Master’s gate
Now sits, his task of life-long labor done,
Thankful for rest, although it comes so late,
After sore journey through the world of sin,
In hope, and prayer, and wistfulness to wait,
Until the door shall ope, and let him in.
William Edmondstoune Aytoun
(1813 — 1865)
Blind Old Milton
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From the UK Poet Laureate and bestselling translator, a spirited book that demystifies and celebrates the art of poetry today
In A Vertical Art, acclaimed poet Simon Armitage takes a refreshingly common-sense approach to an art form that can easily lend itself to grand statements and hollow gestures. Questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, he offers sparkling new insights about poetry and an array of favorite poets.
Based on Armitage’s public lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry, A Vertical Art illuminates poets as varied as Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, A. R. Ammons, and Claudia Rankine.
The chapters are often delightfully sassy in their treatment, as in “Like, Elizabeth Bishop,” in which Armitage dissects―and tallies―the poet’s predilection for similes.
He discusses Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize, poetic lists, poetry and the underworld, and the dilemmas of translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Armitage also pulls back the curtain on the unromantic realities of making a living as a contemporary poet, and ends the book with his own list of “Ninety-Five Theses” on the principles and practice of poetry.
An appealingly personal book that explores the volatile and disputed definitions of poetry from the viewpoint of a practicing writer and dedicated reader, A Vertical Art makes an insightful and entertaining case for the power and potential of poetry today.
A Vertical Art: On Poetry
by Simon Armitage (Author)
Publisher Princeton University Press
Section Poetry Criticism
Paperback
ISBN 9780691233109
May 24, 2022
Paperback
$22.95
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Nimmer schor is de maan
Zwier de korrels uit de aren, dorsers! Het bier en brood
van morgen moet jullie akkers uit. Op stille tenen verklaart
gelukkig de middag zich geduldig nader. Dat kreupelhout
onwillig is en de spar ontschorst. Dat regen op komst lijkt:
hoge wolken zijn gestreept als de borstveren van een havik.
De wijze weet dat de maan nimmer schor is en heeft een
naam die eigenlijk zachte dieren zouden moeten dragen.
Onderaan de dijk bloeit in pruilende klei de grote bevernel.
Bert Bevers
Nimmer schor is de maan
Verschenen in de catalogus Enghuizer dialogen, Hummelo, 2019
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Alles moet
Verblij me met het lijmen van tijden. Hoe
leven wonderschoon zich aan de mens gewoon
perfect voltrekt als alles goed gaat. Door denken
aan. Want alles moet. Niets gebeurt zomaar.
Zet aan het leven! Niets mis is er mee. Het is of
Fellini met een handycam achter ons loopt. Zo
Bert Bevers
Alles moet
Gedicht ongepubliceerd
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