They Forced Me to Look at Modern Art THEN Write Poetry on It.

A Response to the Painting February 1954 by Roger Hilton

In her red dress she dances

Her feet up in the air

Her head thrown back

No need for music

She’s dancing

I’m her audience

My eyes clap for her

And then I walk away

But she’s still dancing

With much convincing from Michael and Suzaana, I wrote this poem in our impromptu poetry workshop in response to this painting which we viewed Monday at the Tate Britain. Writing this poem was a huge stretch for me. Quite different from those two, I have not picked up a pen to write anything creative (unless you count this blog and witty Facebook statuses) in years. However with encouragement from my always supportive trip mates- and I must acknowledge a teeny tiny bit of alcohol- I scribbled this blurb.

Admittedly, it was only with persuasion that I even viewed the painting described, a simple composition of only the colors black and red splashed, apparently with meaning, upon a white canvas. Like creative writing, modern art is not something I usually enjoy. Often I do not find the works aesthetically pleasing, and rather than inspire me, modern art instills in me envy. I stand before the canvas and think, “I can ‘ingeniously’ produce a work in the fashion of a kindergarten art project all the same, why am I not getting paid millions of dollars for this?” I found these sentiments to quickly arise as I stared at this painting, but through our discussion learned to suspend these judgments. As Michael, Suzaana, and Will looked upon the painting, they saw much more than the seemingly only big blotch of misshapen rectangular red paint with four smaller misshapen black rectangles extending from it and a dash of more black paint to its left. They noticed that the colors possibly make up numerous things, a piano for instance, or a lady doing a handstand. Then, unlocking my closed mind, I finally saw a lady dancing. The big splash of red became her sensuous dress, the four extending splotches of black transformed into her moving arms and legs up in the air, a lacking fifth piece of black her head thrown back in exuberance. I realized that this work was, not amateur, but astonishingly provocative in its simplicity, an inspiring masterpiece that required skill to create.

Through just these casual discussions of modern art and a slightly tipsy poetry workshop, Monday forced me to extract deeper meaning from what I would normally disregard and then create a new discourse to describe it. Moments such as these have made up this Queer London course. Over the past three weeks I have learned to, in the words of Michael, “put pressure on” what I would normally ignore and to analyze and describe it in a new enlightened manner. Thank you tremendously to this course- composed of Gaga dancing, strip tease encompassing glam poetry slam, a confessing dancewhore, laugh-til-we cry Greyhound bus stories (love you Suzaana!), free time Disney movies, and many, many things more- for that.