Poem Brut # 31 / Duos #6 – Tim Atkins & Yuki Atkins
Collaborative pieces with felt tip, pencil, and typewriter.
Animals,
ghosts,
and stars.
In the 31st edition of The Poem Brut series and the 6th edition of Duos series new poetry by Tim & Yuki Atkins.
‘The Stuckness That Isn’t Exhaustion’: Beckett and Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘The Tetschener Altar’
‘We are what we are. The setting has to come out of the text, without adding to it. … In ‘Godot’ it is a sky that is sky only in name, a tree that makes them wonder whether it is one, tiny and shrivelled. I should like to see it set up any old how, sordidly abstract as nature is, for the Estragons and Vladimirs, a place of suffering, sweaty and fishy, where sometimes a turnip grows, or a ditch opens up.’ And in case we don’t get it: ‘Nothing, it expresses nothing, it is an opaque no one bothers to question anymore. Any formal specificity becomes impossible.’ There is something speaking to this in Friedrich’s painting, as if what it seems is that we have a sky, a mountain, a cross, a metal Christ — apparently. A set of diagrammaticals, sans labels, inveighing against both meaning and the world, a spectacle without place, something that inaugurates picturing after the fact.
Richard Marshall on Caspar David Friedrich and Samuel Beckett.