Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
Writer of Poetry, Screen Plays, Stage Plays & Fiction
There are the Biennale’s Big Beasts, of course –
this year David Hockney’s ’82 Portraits
and 1 Still Life’ at the Ca’ Pesaro (each
painted in three days) and, at Palazzo
Grassi and Punta Della Dogana,
Damien Hirst’s ‘Treasures from the Wreck
of the Unbelievable’, which took ten years –
the pavilions in the Giardini
and the Arsenale; the freebies
in rented palaces and tenements.
And there are the abiding grand masters,
the Titians, Tinterettos,
On the island of Burano, where women,
sitting at their front doors for the light, make lace
and men fish in the lagoon, and houses
are painted the profound colours of sun and sea,
there is a family owned restaurant
Da Romano (opposite the headquarters
of the Communist Party) whose first owner
encouraged those painters rejected
for the first Biennale to hang their work
on his walls – since when artists of all kinds
have come: Miro, for example, Matisse,
‘A camera on a tripod stood at the edge of the water, apparently abandoned; its black cloth snapped in the freshening wind.’
DEATH IN VENICE Thomas Mann
…Cholera is no longer a rumour.
Besotted, face rouged, hair dyed, he dies
staring unseeing at the shallow sea.
Artifice, made and re-made, fades in the rain,
like the islands with their ‘gorgeous palaces’…
Near the Palazzo del Cinema –
where, annually, insubstantial
figures, louder than life,
At Punta Della Dogana, a cellist
seated under the arcade, is playing
melodies from operatic arias.
It is early evening. A fog horn sounds.
A cruise ship is sailing for Dubrovnik.
With a tug at the bows to pull, one to steer
at the stern, The Queen Elizabeth –
its superstructure higher than St Mark’s
Campanile, moves slowly toward us
through the Giudecca canal. Passengers,
silhouettes on the top deck, look down
on the packed, diverse crowds jostling along
the Riva Degli Schiavoni,
On the third floor of Ca’ Rezzonico –
where gondoliers slept when the palazzo
was let to the song writer Cole Porter –
is Egidio Martini’s collection
of five centuries of Venetian art.
Three of the floors’ small windows survive,
each an intentional belvedere.
Two view the Grand Canal, the third south west.
The eye follows the perspective below:
a canal and its quay with inevitable
eclectic craft, stone bridges and turisti;
then tenements and the terracotta tiles –
‘ The hand holds so much power – the power to love, to hate, to create, to destroy.’ SUPPORT, Lorenzo Quinn
The resin and fibreglass installation
of one of the sculptor’s small children’s
hands and wrists emerges from the Grand Canal
many times life size and startlingly white
to brace the rose Ca’ Sagredo Hotel –
once a palace where Galileo stayed –
as if to prevent its imminent collapse.
When we arrive on the opposite bank
so you can take photographs the market
has closed,
THE ROPE SWING
THE ROPE SWING
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