Artists on Mitchell: Poetry by Isabelle Garron, E. Tracy Grinnell, and Eléna Rivera

Isabelle Garron is a poet based in Paris, France. She shared the following reflection on Joan Mitchell and her collaborative writing workshop with other poets responding to Mitchell's work. Excerpts from three poems after Mitchell's painting The Bridge (1956) follow.

I discovered Joan Mitchell’s work in the mid-nineties, following a conversation with Jacques Dupin in the context of my academic research on his writing about artists. I feel connected to Joan Mitchell through her gesture, her relationship to color, the audacity of her opening of forms to a change of perspective outside of any affiliation.

The experience of her works is the unstoppable stream¹ that irrigates the poem I’m looking for, just like the example she sets for inhabiting a world² as an artist, by risking all the energy our body gives us to manifest its form and song.

Joan Mitchell’s painting has left its mark on the poetics of many women poets I know. She is one of the essential references in our conversations. I’m thinking of Catherine Weinzaepflen, whose writing is imbued with the landscape, painting, and color, and the American poets E. Tracy Grinnell and Eléna Rivera.

Two years ago, Eléna, Tracy, and I started a project we refer to between ourselves as the “Mitchell project.” It’s a kind of three-person workshop writing, always inspired by one of Joan’s works. The painting that sparked this process is The Bridge (1956). Using The Bridge to inaugurate this project emphasizes our wish to invent unprecedented bridges between the fine arts and poetry. We’re also thinking of using the title The Bridge for an online review we want to launch with the ambition of sharing the link between contemporary poetry and the work of female artists.

Translated by Nicholas Elliott. Read the French original here.

Isabelle Garron

Poem I

In a place with the bridge in counterpoint

interior from which I return
and by walking along the sea
the promenade inscribes
the absence of a bridge
the shore traces
constructed openness
curves what separates
fluctuates in the wind
the promenade familiar with the surf

interior from which only the island
on the other side and a man
down below on the pebbles
and the outline
of his body the stick
he throws to his dog
in the air on the pebbles
toward the open sea
in the absence of a bridge

interior from which the worlds set out
eyes raised to the soaring of a plane
marking the blue above
bathed in the undreamed
color of the inside
I reformulate Joan’s diptych
and her gesture
right where it cleaves
with burst and mark

interior facing two canvases
placed side by side
from where separation blows
and allows a glimpse

facing the architect desire
of not adding
other spaces to space
I note how to say
the tenuous whole it lacerates

facing the separation in unity
this unity in the bonded distinction
of two painted surfaces
and a dull crack

face on everything concurs
and nothing concurs
the presentation of the separated
the named bridge of a place
without a figure and enhanced by red

Translated from the French by Nicholas Elliott. Read the original poem here.

Eléna Rivera

The Divide

     after Joan Mitchell’s The Bridge

1.

The way rapture is tinged
with a strip of paint, streaked—

     I’d like to turn, tip
     toward the second panel
     cross the bridge, strip—

         ***

Chose to cover two canvases, not
one only it rips certain ideas of “art”
& still has to feed the body—

     les couleurs / colors
          le pont / bridge
               l’écoute / listening

     Help me to continue with my wild abstract
     style; it’s a question of learning to listen.
     Flat or round brush? French or English?
     How wide the gap? The artist chose hers.
     I was born into it—into the divide.

2.

The other panel has no beginning
begs to be drawn forward—
grief & joy poured out
of long blue & green tubes.

Then a bit of red & black
pours out of me without having
the right words.  A breeze  opened
the door.  I wrote something  I continued
right up to the edge and stood under eaves.
She squeezed me & it left a gap between
my right & left side,
scrape away now
red
reminder.

3.

Even if all parts rave & never match up
the painting ventures forth highlights both parts.
Let us touch and try, in the breeze the heart,
even if the parts part us in the worst of
ways, even if ...

& the emotion dragged over canvas
reminds me that I am alive—brushstrokes
come out of hiding hurrying to make
a choice that will clear the confusion
not trying to smooth it all out—
much more complicated all these cavities
(when they depend on bristles & handles)

4.

So I wrestled to bring the two sides together,
two languages, maybe even more insisted upon it.

Walking past the landscape that had been ripped
away from her, knew if she didn’t try she’d get sick.

Now hoped to obliterate the heartache striped
of color revealing no connection between them.

The poem notes the vandalism that comes when
the perforation leaves her in palliative care.

Touche moi  touch me  touch moi  touch me
très près  very close  & maybe we’ll quiet down

then, oh the brutality of it all, never understood
& still struggling to listen, find color, a bridge.

E. Tracy Grinnell

An ocean of arms

after J.M.’s The Bridge

first, the interior

     relation
     from which point
     you see—                the bridge, a seam
                            or, the seam
                         that elides the sea—

              —what i can see, from here—

         in your city,
     a woman walks her dog
     the leash around her waist—

                     an arrow
                     may draw
                         flesh
                     across
                         an ocean   of arms—

or words cohere
among
displacements
suspended—
                            (i held one of the stones
                               alone in your atelier—
                               so you know)

               an abstraction
               of notes   won’t conform
                   to narrative

            we pass   from silence
            to words
            and back—

where the square
stood i am
thinking   of orchids

                         the red of intention, harbor—
                             green of loss,
                                undergrowth—

i am
looking forward to sleep
to the memory of
(the fear of) extinction

                 awakening to wheat
                    from mid-winter
                    oblivion

                             yet, we walk
                             the same streets
                             still—

                 or light
                 sweeps
                 our cities, or clouds
                 form an array of
                 notes, or a catalogue
                 of birds a grip
                 of fog

in your city, and now in mine
i am writing this
while a man, next to me
    writes a play—      of nuclear disaster?
we are, only two—
                    in any city—

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