#will aitken

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Kyoto, Japan

‘The Arashiyama bamboo grove is so overrun in summer that you can’t see the trees for the travellers. But Kodai-ji temple in Higashiyama offers a splendid and virtually unvisited bamboo grove.’

Photograph: Will Aitken

[vervedoff]

Death In Venice (aqfc) ~ Will Aitken

[orwell]

I just didn’t understand being human. And it’s a problem of extended adolescence: You don’t know how to be yourself as a part of a category, so you just have to be yourself as a completely strange individual and fight off any attempt others make to define you. I think most people go through that by the time they’re seventeen, but for me it extended to about forty.

The Art of Poetry No. 88: Anne Carson interviewed by Will Aitken

[ihsu]

Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry, No. 88 (by Will Aitken), iii

INTERVIEWER: I think it’s interesting that you said object. I remember the first poem you gave me to read, “Total Collection,” about Noah collecting the animals for the ark. I got about four lines into it and I realized it kept getting thicker and deeper and harsher. It didn’t feel like a poem, it felt like falling into a painting, or as if someone had handed me a jewel.

CARSON: Yes, that you travel inside of. I think that’s what poems are supposed to do, and I think it’s what the ancients mean by imitation. When they talk about poetry, they talk about mimesis as the action that the poem has, in reality, on the reader. Some people think that means the poet takes a snapshot of an event and on the page you have a perfect record. But I don’t think that’s right; I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you’re different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference.

INTERVIEWER: So it’s an act.

CARSON: It’s an action. It’s a practice.

INTERVIEWER: It’s an action for both the writer and the reader.

CARSON: Yes, it is, exactly, and they share it artificially. The writer does it a long time ago, but you still feel when you’re in it that you’re moving with somebody else’s mind through an action.

[ihsu]

Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry, No. 88 (by Will Aitken), ii

CARSON: In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing.

INTERVIEWER: In Michael’s book, you also used only the backgrounds of family photos.

CARSON: In most cases that’s true. I found that the front of most of our family photos look completely banal, but the backgrounds were dreadful, terrifying, and full of content. So I cut out the backgrounds, especially the parts where shadows from the people in the front fell into the background in mysterious ways. The backgrounds are full of truth.

INTERVIEWER: Did it help you to understand your brother?

CARSON: No. I don’t think it had any effect whatsoever on my understanding. Another failure of the personal, I guess. I finally decided that understanding isn’t what grief is about. Or laments. They’re just about making something beautiful out of the ugly chaos you’re left with when someone dies. You want to make that good. And for me, making it good means making it into an object that’s exciting and beautiful to look at.

[arkitekcher]

Urban Theatre | Will Aitken Location: London, UK | Unit 21 | 2009

- A proposal to redevelop a strip of high street in north-west London. A tripartite building programme refers to characteristics developed from three of the main protagonists in the novel White Teeth by Zadie Smith which is set in the locality.

[bookofwriting]

"[Y]ou travel inside of [a poem]. I think that's what poems are supposed to do, and I think it's what the ancients mean by imitation. When they talk about poetry, they talk about mimesis as the action that the poem has, in reality, on the reader. Some people think that means the poet takes a snapshot of an event and on the page you have a perfect record. But I don't think that's right; I think a poem, when it works, is an action of the mind captured on a page, and the reader, when he engages it, has to enter into that action. And so his mind repeats that action and travels again through the action, but it is a movement of yourself through a thought, through an activity of thinking, so by the time you get to the end you're different than you were at the beginning and you feel that difference."

— Anne Carson, The Art of Poetry No. 88 (interview by Will Aitken), The Paris Review