In today's Pickle Jar we're joined by Vidyan Ravinthiran. He's a poet who grew up in a mixed area of Leeds (in the North of England), studied at Oxford and Cambridge, and is now an Associate Professor of English Literature at Harvard. He's the author of two books of verse. Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014) was shortlisted for several first collection awards, with individual poems appearing in The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Financial Times. The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here (2019) won a Northern Writers Award, was a PBS Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the Forward and the T.S. Eliot Prizes. Harvard,
Today we talk about this piece by Lakdasa Wikkramasinha
Don’t Talk To Me About Matisse
Don’t talk to me about Matisse, don’t talk to me
about Gauguin, or even
the earless painter van Gogh,
& the woman reclining on a blood-spread . . .
the aboriginal shot by the great white hunter Matisse
with a gun with two nostrils, the aboriginal
crucified by Gauguin—the syphilis-spreader, the yellowed obesity.
Don’t talk to me about Matisse . . .
the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio
where the nude woman reclines forever
on a sheet of blood.
Talk to me instead of the culture generally—
how the murderers were sustained
by the beauty robbed of savages: to our remote
villages the painters came, and our white-washed
mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.
