“Photographer Yvette McGreavy is collaborating with leading writers to create a themed series of portraits. Iain Sinclair is one of the subjects portrayed and has written a short piece to accompany his picture. An exhibition of the collected images is planned to take place at a major venue. Check the news section in the future for updates on this project.”
Being photographed, digitally, in the private act of reading, is already an awkward proposition. Add to that a cemetery setting, a reader of a certain age, late-afternoon sunshine, dense foliage, and the instability is critical. We are so far in, now, to this collaborative and conceptual exercise that we might as well go for bust: and choose to contemplate, at arm’s-length, a slim volume of poetry that floats around engagement with death, extinction, memory and sprightly song.
The phallic awkwardness of a 65-year-old man propped on a peeling log has a comic aspect, certainly. But it is comfortable, serviceable. And he really is reading, that part is no fake. The session opened at the library in which he had been prevented from launching a recent ‘documentary fiction’: for the crime of discussing complexities of Olympic development and destruction. The librarian, an old-school liberal humanist, made him welcome. Images were attempted and achieved. The author found a comfortable chair, among the stacks, and digested a few morsels of Robert Creeley. But the open-air setting of Abney Park, a little to the east, was a more attractive proposition. Those myths, those histories. Stone angels laced into green corsets. Names without stories. Names waiting to be reintegrated into the literary corpus of the city.
Greens are too green. Blues too blue. The book is rose-red. And the air tastes like honey. Digital truth, overwhelming in its self-esteem, fails to convince. To bring the words into focus, the reader has to peek under his spectacles. They are worn so that he can look something like himself. This is quite a pleasant experience; being aware of the circling photographer, going about her business, and at the same time having the luxury of taking it at its own pace, the poetry, a page at a time. The book was chosen, this afternoon, for its lack of bulk. Like a railway volume from the Edwardian era, it slips gracefully into the pocket. Robert Creeley: On Earth. 2006. University of California Press. Printed in Canada. Sponsored, obviously: the quality paper, the careful design. In the expectation of a small, select audience. Friends, as it were. Paying their respects to the dead poet, the no-longer survivor of an heroic period. ‘If that has to go, it was never here.’
I handled the book before a reading I gave in a shop near the British Museum, the best preparation. I chose to have it, take it away, because of the chain of connections laid out in Creeley’s essay on Whitman. Curious heads rising like a causeway of seals from the grey tide. (Grey is the colour inside this event, the posing among the trees. Not the white stones with their erased inscriptions. Parted cranial fog: emulsion stirred by shots of electricity.)
‘In age,’ Creeley writes, ‘one is oneself reflective, both of what it has been to live and of what that act has become as a resonance (I’d almost written a residence) in memory — what it all meant, so to speak, what it had felt like. It is very hard for me to believe that what William Carlos Williams calls “the descent” (to the ending of life, one must presume) can ever be more than the accumulation a literal life must be fact of, the substance of a body, the history of such body in a particular time, the manifest of that locating “thing” in the myriad ways in which it has engaged and been engaged by the world surrounding.’
— Iain Sinclair
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