Frances-Ann Norton: Poetry

Dream Poem 103: The Knives A Bronze Age village near the sea Round low houses with high pitched thatch. Inside peaty smoke, prismatic blacks Long shadows. Red light from the fire pit rising up blue light from the sky, slanting down in a shaft through the smoke hole. A curdling of smouldering curls make paisley patterns of the air. I am the chief’s daughter eleven years old. This is my house All my relatives and family live here together. Vikings from over the sea live in the next village. They come and steal from us. I have two knives, One is a special dagger, the other one is an everyday blade. I must hide them so they are not taken from us. I am small and insignificant wrapping the knives in a skin I push it into my clothes and hide. The Vikings come shove around my brothers scare my mother. Make nuisances of themselves fall down drunk in a tent next to where I’m hiding. I wriggle out and manage to find...

Dream poem 115; Knife dream She perpetrator and victim of her own actions. Horror and anguish, pain and fear spring from her deeds. She is the sharp instrument of her own sorrow. She Tool of utility Mechanism of symbolism, Contrivance of ritual, Medium of ceremony, Agent of threat. She Expression of her own exasperation Her inner strength deflects the double edged blade Her resolve keeps her from flinching.

Fried Kudzu All the trees are dressed Pelaw and Fellgate pass in a flurry of blossoms and verdant fields, lush hedgerows  and a sudden green overwhelming of street lights with foliage. In the Carolinas the kudzu at this time of year would wantonly climb pylons snaking out onto electric wires like tightrope walkers in their desperation to reach and strive upwards and onwards. Self-destructing strangle-vines. The very thing they are best at asphyxiating has ended up being the petard by which they are hung. Unstoppable in their headlong shoot to doom. Path to annihilation. Perhaps they hope to take out the whole of Marvin or Waxhaw with their last strangling gasp before they are fried and frazzled by Duke Electric. Images wiki commons:  Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Divisio n 1980 tepegraph poles 1922 Newberry south carolina ca. 1922 - ca. 1953) Title Newb...

Niagara in the 90’s; After James Richards, Raking Light 2014, Digital Video with stereo sound. Safely seated in a small darkened space In the 1990’s rooms of the Tate Here to see Inventory’s DaDa reflection on social housing. London trains and busses have exhausted me. Onscreen a series of obscure and abstract images Until Niagara appears. And now two films are running, the one on screen and the one in my memory. Niagara Falls in December, the nineties have just begun like a new love affair. Niagara Falls in deep love Of crashing foam. A woman in a yellow trench coat that her mother bought from a shop that doesn’t exist anymore, Headscarf and red lipstick. She waits at the top for her photo to be taken. Pose like Marilyn. But there are no colours Everything is blank faced, locked up Frozen solid, danger zone. The petrified falls and thickly Iced, icey, walk-ways are A hazard Impassable. Like this fake marriage...

Dream poem 113:  Bauhaus in the Halls of Versailles She fumbles putting on an earring it is a complicated piece of jewellery in separate elements the Bauhaus symbols of, square, triangle, circle. They lock together to create a single sculptural piece in the style of the Russian Constructivist, El Lissitzky. It is the final test She is feeling uncomfortable. Working in groups, it has been a three day test. In their team is a bully and a misogynist. It is just like the halls of Versailles. image 1: The Hall of Mirrors, Gallerie des Glaces, Versailles Image 2: El Lissitzky, Proun A-2

Double Poignard Red Rage The falling feeling Of dizzy connectedness And the snip, snip, snipping Of the tiny cuticle scissors. Small enough to hide in my hand Instrument Of impotent rage Inexpressible anger Frustration Shame. Sent to my room for some Post-Victorian infringement Completely incomprehensible. What do these bloody parents want? Really? My 3 year old self has no idea. Once again Tucked under her arm Fighting Thrown onto my bed Door slammed I rip books Scribble in them, throw them. But now I have the scissors Its tiny blades Don’t make hacking rents That I want to see They make sparrow pecks On the duvet. Peck, peck, peck Goes the tiny beak It is not enough Peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck. A small cumulus of feathers floats to the carpet under my bed Appear in drifts of snow But it is not enough To contain my universe of pure Red rage. Not enough to express my galaxy ...

Dream poem 111 How Not to Teach At art college A student is expecting me to say something constructive about his painting. It looks something like this Half figure, a guitar, a chain link fence and sky. I say to him The fence needs to be more in front of the figure So it can cast a shadow on the form The sky needs to start darker at the very top And get lighter where it is near the sun And get darker again where it hits the horizon. He thinks about it for a moment And agrees.

Dream poem 108:   M agic Cup of Tea A North Korean communist girl   very smiley and happy can magically produce cups of tea from thin air when she drinks. When I try it the cup appears but with only a teaspoon of tea in the bottom she drinks it anyway.

Mirror Land: Response to Gaffney's 'The Good, The bad and The Ugly' sculpture. Lone girl at an Irish Zoo, how she has set herself apart. She is on a table which rests on a mirror. Claude Glass, a Black Mirror, used for painting landscapes in the 18 th  C. Are the landscapes memory landscapes? Or Ingold Taskscapes? 1965 treetop canopy, a park with a cenotaph. A lot of sky, populated by trees. This hand mirror is Cleopatra’s Obsidian highly polished mirror. Not a true reflector black stone of magnetic depth A wonder. The magnetic depth of prismatic black flecked with quartz. The contemplative depth is much more about soul space. A  Psychological fingerprint. Because it is not a true reflection It gives space for infinity Mirror To look in it is to gaze on the infinite, the sublime. Not Newman’s sublime although I think I understand the Abstract Expressionism’s love of black. Ad Reinhardt, Malevich, Rauschen...