Newcastle Writers Festival, April 8^th, 2024

LAUNCH of PARIS LIGHT: ‘A Personal Plan de Paris’,
poems by Jean Kent and artwork by Martin Kent (Pitt Street Poetry, 2024).
Conversation between Judith Beveridge (launcher) and Jean Kent and Martin Kent.

This post is long overdue! However, the launch was such a thrilling occasion it deserves to be remembered on this website, even if it did happen almost a year ago.

As the conversation was partly planned and partly ad libbed, this transcript of the conversation has been edited (just slightly) for clarity.

JUDY:

Congratulations Jean and Martin and Pitt Street Poets for a truly lovely book of poems and paintings about Paris. I think this is a marvellous and engrossing publication which so beautifully showcases how the two art forms complement and enhance each other – there haven’t been too many collaborations between differing artists in Australian poetry –

I can think of Jennifer Rankin’s Earth Hold which had some illustrations by John Olsen. The Language of Oysters which has poems by Robert Adamson and photographs by Juno Gemes. Arthur Boyd and Peter Porter did some collaborative work and there have been many examples of individual ekphrastic poems, but these are not ekphrastic poems nor ekphrastic paintings as such, there are two distinct imaginations responding to Paris at work in this book.

Both of you have developed your own creative responses, rather than used each other’s work as starting points, but I wanted to ask you how the process of putting Paris Light together came into being – did you plan this project during your Paris visits or was it something you considered later after both of you had worked for some time individually with your separate genres?

JEAN:

The simple answer is No, the book was not planned in Paris. It evolved, quite surprisingly, many years later, after we’d both been responding quite separately to our times living in Paris.

However, the poems did begin in Paris in 2011, when I had a residency at the Australian Government’s Keesing Studio in the Cité Internationale des Arts. The Cité Internationale des Arts offers residencies to artists and musicians from all around the world. Rolf Hermann, from Switzerland, was the only other poet I met. On April 8th, 2011 – I have a record of this in my poetry notebook — Rolf and I had a meeting to talk about translating one another’s poems, and he told me that he was planning to write 26 poems (in German), based on an alphabet of Paris street names. I couldn’t imagine doing this myself — but I jokingly suggested that I could do a companion set in English. The next day, just for fun, I started making a list of streets and places that had personal connections for me, and I was very surprised how many spontaneously occurred to me.

I began drafts of a few poems which ended up in the book while we were in Paris, but I diverted to work on other books, including The Shadow Box, which I’d also been researching in Paris. Over the next ten years or so, I kept going back to what I called my Alphabetical Rues Ms. — partly to cheer myself up, because The Shadow Box was set during WW1 and was emotionally draining to write.

A book of 26 poems would have been a small book. In the back of my mind, I always had the idea that adding artwork by Martin might give it more depth and make it more interesting. We had already done a book, Paris in my Pocket, which combined my poems and Martin’s paintings and that had worked really well.

MARTIN: (shows books Paris in My Pocket and Paris Light)

The first book Paris in My Pocket contains many of the drawings and paintings that I did during the Paris stay.

The paintings in this new book, Paris Light, are derived from the thousands of photos that I took around Paris. During the mornings Jean would usually stay in the Studio to work on her writing projects, I would go out with my camera. I wandered the streets and Metros of Paris taking photos of the many things happening — exhibitions, demonstrations, fashion shows, film sets, and street life such as dogs, pigeons, tourists, Arabs etc. Then at night I would put on a slide show on my laptop of where I’d been.  There were fascinating dancers in the Dance Studio across the street, people walking their dogs along the street, school children going home. In the evenings we went for walks and we both took sets of photos of buildings, the River Seine, the sky, Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower.

Over six months, various projects developed.

JEAN:

I had initially thought of including photos by Martin. There was a wealth of fabulous photos we could have used. However, by the time I was considering adding something visual to the book, Martin had started doing paintings of Paris which I thought would really complement the poems… We added about 12 paintings to the MS before I sent it to John and Linsay Knight at PSP. They responded very enthusiastically, suggesting a painting for every poem … and that became the goal!

MARTIN:

My painting process has always been dominated by Modernism, and recently I wanted to try a more photorealistic style. I used the photos that I took in Paris as a starting point. The paintings sometimes contained references to art and history, sometimes poetical feelings and sometimes were simply factual. Paris is a rich, hybrid environment.

As time went on, my process developed and my knowledge of Jean’s poems increased, so I was able to focus better on what was required for the book. So, the poems and paintings had the same genesis, life in Paris in 2011, but developed quite separately.

Each poem and each painting has a life of its own.
Each reader constructs an understanding of the material of their own.

Jean was able to match my paintings with her poems, which was an amazing achievement.

JUDY:

Did you both share the same feeling about Paris or did you differ in your responses to aspects of the city? I guess this question brings up issues around subjectivity, gender and relationship with your own particular artforms.

MARTIN:

Mostly we shared the same feelings.

Jean has had a much longer association with French things than I do. I was surprised and anxious about Paris the first time that we went but was much more comfortable during the second visit.

Jean’s poetic narratives are wider and deeper than mine, but my paintings show a unique view of their own. We’re both interested in flowers, birds, fashion, architecture, art — etc, so our subject matter is similar.

JEAN:

I agree with all of that. Any differences we had were more to do with our previous knowledge of Paris. Martin studied French history at school, whereas I didn’t. My area of study was French language and literature. I loved the sound of French from the moment I heard my first French words, whereas Martin speaks no French at all.

Those differences affected the way we coped with daily life, but we have common passions for French art and music and film and French style and culture generally, and I think this book developed because we did respond so similarly to so much of what we experienced.

JUDY:

What the book captures so wonderfully, through both the pictorial and verbal images, is the light and dark of Paris: the beauty of the art, the architecture, its energy and cosmopolitan vibrancy, its produce, its flowers, yet you also detail the darker sides: the homelessness, the beggars, the tragic history, the terrorist violence, the cold, the noise, the crowds. Indeed, Jean in your poem ‘Allée Yves Saint Laurent’ you juxtapose these aspects of Paris when you say:

Above the footpath fug of dogs and exhaust fumes,
Paris air is scarved with scent. Odours of orchards
and Otherness, distilled into invisible trails

we nose after—rubber and custard, roses and jasmine . . .
all the high notes and the low notes .

and in ‘Passage d’Enfer’ (Hell’s Passage) you say ‘every city, every life has its hells’ and your detail of that Martin on page 13 is quite disturbing, I gather the street held some sort of mortuary. That weave of so much dark history coupled with the splendours of the city must have been quite confronting. Would you like to comment on this?

MARTIN: (shows painting, p12)

This painting and poem are an interesting example of how they fit together.

When I painted the Eiffel Tower at night with swirling white filaments, I “saw” the Eiffel Tower as a lady in a swirling lacework dress and with searchlights on her head.  It’s a complete surprise to me that someone might find the image disturbing. However, I’m perfectly happy with alternative interpretations of my paintings.

The painting does stand by itself.

During our first visit to Paris, we separately visited the area around Passage d’Enfer. We found the area disturbing. I visited the nearby Paris Catacomb which contains millions of skeletons.

JEAN:

I did not go to the Catacombs! That is one experience we didn’t share!

I think Paris for me has always been a strange mix of bliss and horror. Because of the location of the Keesing Studio, just across the Seine from Notre Dame, and next door to the Jewish Shoah Museum, you are living right in the centre of a huge city, with so much history and current change right on your doorstep.  I found just going out into our street was often a sensory overload.  It was exhilarating, but also exhausting. When we went back for a second time, I knew better what to expect. And I tried to live more like a Parisian, treating the neighbourhood like a second home. Paris has a way of transcending its difficulties, though. No matter what horror you’ve felt, there is inevitably a moment of extraordinary beauty – even if it’s just the softness of the light or the streak of a sky trail over those iconic chimney tops – which makes being there very special.

JUDY:

Jean perhaps you could read this poem.

JEAN:

Yes! Although this poem is titled ‘Passage d’Enfer’ — Hell’s Passage — it’s not actually about that street.  Like a lot of the poems, the title is a starting point for my own thoughts and memories and feelings, rather than a description of the place.

Passage d’Enfer

Every city, every life, has its hells.
Holes in the day you fall down.

One afternoon in the pedestrian pell-mell
a man in a mini-dress passes.  A giraffe
among women, his-her face a mask
where the weeping won’t stop.
Then the Metro rehearses you
for that last torture before the mortuary.
Under the broken wing of your arm,
the little girl you’re sheltering
will surely go there first.  Liverwurst
in sagging skins, already in the belly of a wolf
that howls and lurches underground.
No frail petals now, on any dark bough.

An ordinary Sunday in Sully Morland—
across the street from a florist’s impossible
choices (une botte de tulipes? jacinthes?
mimosa? …) you push through a glass door
and here it is: Passage d’Enfer.
Just an image on a wall, black and white.
But you’ve been there before, not far
from Cimetière de Montparnasse. You know
that alleyway of buildings like cupboards,
flat-faced, bare as storage units for bodies.
Where it fits in this architectural history
of the City of Light, of Lovers, of Eiffel’s lace
and fields Elysian, doesn’t matter —

you’ve fallen into the mood, the pall, the doom
of the place. Hell’s passage is inside you, a negative
waiting to re-emerge in fear’s chemical bath.
                        Is it possible to resurrect here,
to move through this evolution from the swamp?

In the Pavilion de l’Arsenal,
the nurserymen of culture believe so …

Old films of how Paris became what it is now
drench the walls and reflect and ripple
over a polished, parquet floor:
chateaux, barricades … eternity beckoning.
You wade through them, shuffling to mute

your lone echo.  One fallen petal,
you drift on, through staining light.

JUDY:

Both of you worked a lot from memory to create this book – although you did have photos, notes, journals and sketches to refer to – there must have been a lot you left out — especially as you have structured the book around the alphabet which restricts the poems to 26, and Martin has 26 images. Did you decide as a team which poems and which images to include and how much more did you actually write and paint but did not include?

MARTIN:

I have a collection of thousands of photos from Paris, of which only about 50 have been used. While the photos are not actually about Jean’s poems, we did have some choice of which ones to use.

I would find a likely photo and start to paint it. Jean would see the painting and would form an idea of where it might fit in.

Jean was the main architect of how the poems and pictures were assembled, with help from publishers John and Linsay Knight and book designer Kylie Mulquin. Linsay suggested the brilliant idea of using small vignettes after each poem.

John, Linsay and Kylie Mulquin developed the look of the book, including the cover.

I think that there is also an accidental similarity between poems and paintings.

JEAN:

We both had other work which was not included. For me, there weren’t very many extra poems. I wanted the book to have an overall lightness and to feel like a celebration of Paris, so that affected what poems and paintings I chose. The paintings mostly weren’t done to match any particular poems, so I played around with the placement of Martin’s paintings to try and create a natural flow which connects with the words. That was one of the biggest challenges and it did mean that some paintings were given preference over others.

Some paintings –eg the first one, which Martin is about to talk about—were just so beautiful I was determined to include them. Apart from the fact that I loved this one, that image was a glimpse from one of our studio windows of the street towards the Seine, so it was a perfect fit.

MARTIN: (shows painting, p 0)

The first painting in the book started as a copy of a photograph showing a young person walking down the footpath. However I quickly became aware of a poetic association – the post in the centre is fluted like a cathedral column. The leaves of the trees suggested a canopy like a cathedral arch. The young man/woman seemed to have an angelic face. So the photo of a street changed into a stage showing a special person stepping out of the light and setting out on a walk.

That makes a good introduction to the book of poetry.

JUDY:

I really love the way you both bring out the colour, the mood, the character of the individual streets, or specific scenes, each street and scene has its own uniqueness even the ‘Avenue de Wagram’ which you missed seeing but describe so beautifully in the opening stanza Jean, grabs our attention through the details:

On a dog-leg trot between the Arc de Triomphe
and Parc Monceau why didn’t I find you,
Avenue de Wagram?

With your wildflower Square and clean-walled houses,
you’re a spoke in a wheel I didn’t set turning,
trundling instead the wrong way
down the Champs Elysées,
its cafes still crowded at 3 p.m., its footpaths wan
with a ragged man and his sign J’ai faim,
then a woman on her mat, veiled and bent, praying.

It must have been a joy to both write the poems and make the paintings in as much as it would have brought Paris back into focus for you, kept it alive in your memory and imaginations. Would you like to comment on the significance of the Paris trips to your lives and to your creative pursuits?

JEAN:

The first residency in 1994 was definitely life changing. We came home and I felt my life had been divided into Before Paris and After Paris! I also saw our normal neighbourhood with very fresh eyes. So, as well as having kilos of notes for future writing about Paris, I was able to respond to everyday life here as if this was also an exotic and special place. Paris Light is my fourth collection which contains poems about Paris …So the residencies have certainly been very rich creative experiences for me.

MARTIN:

Yes, Paris has been a major project.
Paris is an enormous source of ideas and is so large that its ultimately unknowable.

Jean is currently writing a memoir.

Recently I’ve become interested in the statues around central Paris. There are hundreds of them. Also, after some spectacular failures, I am painting scenes of poets reading poetry.

JUDY:

Perhaps Jean can read another poem and Martin comment on another painting.

JEAN:

Reads ‘Rue des Deux Ponts’

Rue des Deux Ponts

From one end of rue des Deux Ponts, this is the view:
the Eiffel Tower, on the hour, doing its silver lamé shimmy.
In the distance, for five minutes, this shrug against the winter dark.
Then we’re back to molten honeycomb: shadows by the river;
trysts and tourist parties; picnics on cold stone.

One day in rue des Deux Ponts, Ile St-Louis, there’s a patisserie.
Heaven in the mouth: mille feuilles; opéra; everything chocolat.
Next day, desire on the tongue—nothing left. A black gap,
violent as a tooth extracted. Is it arson? An explosion
in the oven? A bomb?

The workmen won’t talk. Between the knife shop
and hole-in-the-wall for ice cream, they start again from emptiness.
 It’s common as history here. Cafes, restaurants, little shops . . .
winter guts them, then remakes them with a new-old face.
 In a certain light even the Eiffel Tower is just rusty lace.

From this distance, from this street of two bridges,
the mending’s simple: electricity in the night, an insouciant sparkle
against Time. Before green buds begin on spiked trees,
the sky shrugs down stars. Every hour, on the hour,
a rusty old tower dances in the dark.

MARTIN: (shows picture page 10)

This painting started as a twilight photo of a shimmering Eiffel Tower.
The photo was blurred and the search lights on the top were revolving around.

Seurat painted the Eiffel Tower showing a time before the tower was finished. The tower and surrounding air was painted with pointillistic dots.

Robert and Sonia Delaunay painted the Eiffel with large colourful circles in the sky.

The Eiffel Tower has had many lighting schemes over its lifetime, and the current one was designed by French lighting engineer Pierre Bideau.

My painting also references Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and contains a nod to Van Gogh’s moon in the top right corner.

JUDY:

Martin, can you tell us about the materials you used for the paintings and what your process is? Do you always sketch first? Did you spend a lot of your Paris time in Art Galleries and do you think that was an influence on your work. Do you work quickly or slowly?

MARTIN:

I usually investigate a subject with the camera. I draw freehand in pencil and pastel pencil and follow up with acrylic paint. Many designs are investigated in various media, including pen and computer. The media used and the size of the artwork are important starting factors.

The subject, style and narratives in my paintings are influenced by many artists.

The photos provide a suggestion of the overall composition. When I look at the photos, I’m transported into a memory of the scene, which is the main source of the subject matter. The modernist style helps to channel the poetic meaning of the painting.

George Seurat did many local drawings and paintings in Paris, including the Eiffel Tower.

Van Gogh inspired the use of colour to express emotion. Contemporary abstract painter Sarah Morris had an exhibition in Paris which investigated the psychology of cities.

Amish Kapoor exhibited Leviathan at the Grand Palais while we were in Paris. Leviathan is a large dark red bladder which occupied a large part of the internal space of the Grand Palais. Viewers could walk inside the bladder.

Agnes Martin the American Minimalist painter had an exhibition at the Cite.

Visiting Art Galleries in Paris was a real thrill. The artistic community in the Cite was very encouraging for my own work.

JUDY:

And Jean, do you work quickly or slowly on your poems?

JEAN:

Slowly. There are usually many drafts before I feel a poem is finished. And as you can see with this book, the time from first thoughts about it to final completion of the manuscript was a good 10 years. For some of that time, the possibilities for poems were just mulling around in my head rather than going onto the page. Even once the drafts begin, though, it can take me a long time to get every word right.

JUDY:

Both of you in this book have so wonderfully been able to address the image, make it speak interpretively while meditating upon the moment of viewing it, what do you see as the basic similarities or differences between poetry and painting?

MARTIN:

It seems to me that the poems and some of my paintings have a similar structure. Poems seem to have a narrative thread adorned with poetical images.

Some of the paintings start with a realistic photo image, but different dimensions are teased out. Sometimes a “colour field” dimension (Monet’s Garden in Yellow), sometimes “conceptual” (Car Reflections), many are “Decorative” (Flower paintings), some are “Narrative” (Family on Bikes).

There is quite a lot of poetical finesse developed while painting. This only becomes apparent slowly.

JUDY:

Do you think and you both share the same aesthetics and do you think collaborators need to do so in order to produce engaging work?

JEAN:

I think we do share the same aesthetics and sensibilities. Any collaboration has to involve respect for and generosity towards one another, so it would be much harder to be creatively successful if you don’t have that.

MARTIN:

This book was created naturally, and was developed through the profound talents of poet, painter, publishers and designer.

JUDY:

Asks Jean to read another poem to finish the Conversation: (Musée du Louvre)

Musée du Louvre
(for Frances Rouse)

Long ago, learning French, we joked that the phrase
we’d need most in Paris would be: Où est le Louvre?

Our lives were lithe then, unlimited in expectations
and the long leap needed to leave Australia, alone

in the above-the-clouds limbo of a flying kangaroo
did not daunt you.  When I followed, much later,

the Louvre was long queues and Antiquities,
a litter of heads between mine and Mona Lisa’s.

Now I know the local way in, via Lions’ Gate.
I’ve had my leisure time with Leonardo,

earned a laissez-passer to other Musées I could
love more: Musée d’Orsay where the river light

drifts delicate lace over arabesques of Art Nouveau;
where we can lunch under a Rubenesque ceiling

then long to follow Vincent, in a room near by,
to a lazy sleep in a haystack; where art is so layered

our legs ache going from level to level, and still
there will be more … Just as, a little wander away,

the lilies, again and again, lure me back. 

Où est l’Orangerie? I would ask now,
if I were new here.  Look left or right—

look all around the curved room—all the world
is lulled: Monet’s Nymphéas in water-mirrors,

the willows and the clouds and the floating
faces, alone and silent (mostly) lingering—

the small lakes of Smartphones raised as if
once this luminosity is lying there, it could be

the only looking glass our futures need.  

Paris Light and Paris in my Pocket are available for purchase from good book stores and from the publishers Pitt Street Poetry. https://pittstreetpoetry.com/shop/