written by Mel Gooding, April 2011
Introduced to a young woman,
tall, slim, pale, dark hair cropped like a boy’s,
I wonder why I think I know her face.
Her father, ebullient, burly and bald, painter poet,
enthusiast with a big heart and a beautiful mind,
smiles proudly, pleased we have met.
He is showing paintings here that honour
the poets of city lights – pictures of a gone world
of poets who honoured reality with sandwiches at lunchtime,
who howled against dullness and American madness,
who made a Jewish prayer for the dead poets and pranksters
and the living ones also, who filled up with gasoline
and went on the road, who set up a fairground of the mind
and called it a bookshop, who loved words, and poems and pictures
and those who spoke them, wrote them and made them,
and each other, and who (except for the bookshop proprietor,
Ferlinghetti by name, now rich in years and honours,
who was there, who was the man)
are mostly now dead.
Carvalho honours others dead: it’s part of his job
as he sees it; he just can’t forget.
Artists, poets, writers, musicians, people gone through darkness
into the world of light, many before their time:
poet-gun-runner Rimbaud, mythopoeic Anais Nin, flying angel Klein,
down-to-earth Manzoni, who did the artist’s shit.
Dark dreamers, bright hopers, reality dealers,
like those friends the painter-poet elegist left behind,
those who feared, those who disappeared,
those whose names he un-disappeared:
the best minds of his generation, destroyed.
I know this young woman’s face! Of course!
I saw it in a photograph, fading into darkness,
taken in Paris in 1970,
when, carrying dark memories and pale sorrows,
her father came from Brazil.
Professor Mel Gooding is an art critic, writer and exhibition organiser.
Antonio Claudio Carvalho exhibited at the Saison Poetry Library in April 2011 as part of ART ON POETRY, a season of artists' books.
