The Potato Eaters - revised

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BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

The Potato Eaters - revised

#1 Post by BobBradshaw » 22 Feb 2018, 22:59

v4:
The Potato Eaters


Papa was furious. I had failed
my exams for the ministry. His hopes
for me, like his money,
had been thrown away
again.

It was worse when we
shared dinner after that.
He stared at me with the hard eyes
of a sparrowhawk.

Stories about me luring girls
into a shack for "posing"
had left parishioners
whispering, rather than
listening to his sermons.

Now he shook with rage,
trembling
like the needle
of a compass
surrounded by rust
and junk

as I brooded at the end
of the dinner table, refusing
to acknowledge
his presence.

I set off for Borinage,
desperate to prove myself
a minister
to dirt poor farmers,
and wretched field laborers
who shared meals in their shacks
lighted by a single oil lamp.

I thought of Paul,
of the Savior's message to love
as I bandaged the burns of a miner.

Remembering St. Francis
I gave away my food
and clothes.
Rumors spread to my father
that I had become
as dirty as a spent ember.

He called me "A religious fanatic, unfit
for ministering..."
But before Papa could arrive
to retrieve me,

I fled, once again a failure
in his eyes. My hunger
for acceptance a belly
I would never fill.


v3:
The Potato Eaters


Papa was furious. I had failed
my exams for the ministry. His hopes
for me, like his money,
had been thrown away
again.

I set off for Borinage,
desperate to prove myself
a minister

to dirt poor farmers,
and wretched field laborers
who shared meals in their shacks
lighted by a single oil lamp.

I thought of Paul,
of the Savior's message to love
as I bandaged the burns of a miner.

Remembering St. Francis
I gave away my food
and clothes.
Rumors spread to my father
that I had become
as dirty as a spent ember.

He called me "A religious fanatic, unfit
for ministering..."
But before Papa could arrive
to retrieve me,

I fled, once again a failure
in his eyes. My hunger
for acceptance a belly
I would never fill.




v2:

The Potato Eaters


Papa was furious. I had failed
my exams for the ministry. His hopes
for me, like his money,
had been thrown away
again.

Defiant, I set off,
desperate to prove myself
as a minister to the poor,
for Borinage

where I spent my time
in cramped shacks, darkness
and trays of potatoes
shared under a hanging
oil lamp.

I found pleasure
simply in offering bread
across a small, square table

or in nursing others,
bandaging a miner’s burns,
reading verses to him,
his eyes closed,
but not his heart
or hopes.

I admit I became as dirty
as a spent ember,
giving away my food
and clothes to those worse off.

"A religious fanatic, unfit
for ministering--
your sermons as awkward
as you are”, the authorities vented,
writing to my father
to retrieve me.

But before Papa could arrive
I fled, once again
in my father's eyes
a failure—my hunger
for acceptance a belly
I would never
fill.



v1:
The Potato Eaters


Hadn't Vincent failed
his exams for the ministry?
Papa was furious. His hopes
for his son, like his money,
had been thrown away
again.

Defiant, Vincent set off,
desperate to prove himself,
for Borinage.

It was where Vincent
would find himself most at home--
in cramped shacks, darkness
and trays of potatoes
shared under a hanging
oil lamp.

He found pleasure
nursing a burned miner,
or in offering bread
across a small, square table.

He became as dirty
as a burnt ember,
giving away his food
and clothes to those worse off.

"A religious fanatic, unfit
for ministering,
his sermons as awkward
as he is", the authorities vented,
requesting his father
come get his son.

But before "Papa" could arrive
Vincent fled, once again
in his father's eyes
a failure--Vincent's hunger
for acceptance a canyon
that would never
be filled.

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: The Potato Eaters

#2 Post by Bernie01 » 23 Feb 2018, 02:19

Bob---

an excellent you tube doc, a docent tour that would hold the attention of my young daughter.

but, poem wise....

i want to feel the details, not merely encounter facts---colorfully displayed.

bernie
.

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: The Potato Eaters

#3 Post by BobBradshaw » 23 Feb 2018, 04:47

Thx, Bernie... I will attack from a different angle

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: The Potato Eaters

#4 Post by Bernie01 » 23 Feb 2018, 05:02

Bob---

thanks for digging my POV----doesn't say you agree. that's my approach also, why else present in a Forum like the ones of IBPC.

I don't know what I would do---but i love the challenge.



bernie

FranktheFrank
Posts: 1983
Joined: 02 Mar 2016, 18:07
Location: Between the mountains and the sea

Re: The Potato Eaters

#5 Post by FranktheFrank » 23 Feb 2018, 12:13

I like it, narrative the way I would,
I think Bob is experimenting, and why not. :)
Enjoyed.

Michael (MV)
Posts: 2154
Joined: 18 Apr 2005, 04:57

Re: The Potato Eaters

#6 Post by Michael (MV) » 23 Feb 2018, 19:45

 
Hi Bob,

interesting - prodigal son-like; yet, ultimately - creatively - Van Gogh wasn't a prodigal.


"requesting his father" as demanding his father


in keeping w/ the titular image & metaphor, workshop consider:

. . Vincent's hunger
for acceptance, a belly
that would never
be filled.


^^ perhaps that fuelled Vincent's lust for living life


8)

Michael (MV)

 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: The Potato Eaters

#7 Post by BobBradshaw » 23 Feb 2018, 21:36

Frank - glad you enjoyed it
Michael- I like your belly image

I think Bernie is right. Told a different way, it could carry more feeling...

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: The Potato Eaters

#8 Post by BobBradshaw » 23 Feb 2018, 23:10

revised

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: The Potato Eaters

#9 Post by Bernie01 » 23 Feb 2018, 23:44

first person works to push the action forward, to keep the narrative intense and focused.

do we known what he thought? well, that's another issue for another time.


Papa was furious. I had failed
my exams for the ministry.

His hopes for me,
like his money, thrown away
again.

I set off, desperate to prove
myself a minister to the poor,
to the potato eaters of Borinage.

The dirt poor farmers,
the wretched field laborers
who shared meals in their shacks
lighted by a single oil lamp.

IN THE DARK AND COLD,
I found pleasure offering WHAT I HAD,
A STILL LIFE WITH BREAD.

the poem could end here....


I thought of Paul,
of the Savior's message to love
and I bandaged the burns of a miner
as Mary Magdelene
cleansed the feet of Jesus.

I gave away my food,
and rumors spread to my father.

He called me "A religious fanatic, unfit
for ministering--"


But before Papa could arrive
I fled, once again a failure
in my father's eyes.


My hunger
for acceptance a belly
I would never fill.

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: The Potato Eaters

#10 Post by Bernie01 » 23 Feb 2018, 23:54

Poems about well known figures....r events.


i ask myself, what new and artistic narrative can i develop. think of the current film Dunkirk.

we all know the story, but the film maker developed a new, or fresher pov.

i wonder what the artist had in common with Gauguin? how did the one time divinity student come to enjoy a local brothel?

stuff about his dad....a touch boring to me.

but Gauguin. that cramped yellow house they shared. two of the great masters of the modern era.


a detail i would use, some how:

When he was in a condition to go out, with his head enveloped in a Basque beret which he had pulled over his head...


my own thin theory, VVG identified with the death of Jesus---the wound in Christ's side, the cross and the persecution. his antagonism and love for Gauguin, not unlike Christ's universal love of his enemies, but also his driving the money changers from the temple.

VVG drank absinthe. Pernod. a very strong drink, green i think....hemingway cautions a young girl about this The Sun Also Rises.



The Sun Also Rises: Chapter 3

It was a warm spring night and I sat at a table on the terrace of the Napolitain after Robert had gone, watching it get dark and the electric signs come on, and the red and green stop-and-go traffic-signal, and the crowd going by, and the horse-cabs clippety-clopping along at the edge of the solid taxi traffic, and the poules going by, singly and in pairs, looking for the evening meal. I watched a good-looking girl walk past the table and watched her go up the street and lost sight of her, and watched another, and then saw the first one coming back again. She went by once more and I caught her eye, and she came over and sat down at the table. The waiter came up.
“Well, what will you drink?” I asked.
“Pernod.”
“That’s not good for little girls.”
5
“Little girl yourself. Dites garçon, un pernod.”
“A pernod for me, too.”
“What’s the matter?” she asked. “Going on a party?”
“Sure. Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. You never know in this town.”
10
“Don’t you like Paris?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you go somewhere else?”
“Isn’t anywhere else.”
“You’re happy, all right.”
15
“Happy, hell!”
Pernod is greenish imitation absinthe. When you add water it turns milky. It tastes like licorice and it has a good uplift, but it drops you just as far. We sat and drank it, and the girl looked sullen.

We had another bottle of wine and Georgette made a joke. She smiled and showed all her bad teeth, and we touched glasses.
“You’re not a bad type,” she said. “It’s a shame you’re sick. We get on well. What’s the matter with you, anyway?”
“I got hurt in the war,” I said.
“Oh, that dirty war.”

couldn't stop quoting this wonderful novel.


Van Gogh drunk, terribly depressed?

bernie

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: The Potato Eaters

#11 Post by Bernie01 » 24 Feb 2018, 00:16

Gauguin’s Stirring First-Hand Account of What Actually Happened the Night Van Gogh Cut off His Own Ear
“Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling too, inwardly, a sort of struggle was preparing.”
BY MARIA POPOVA

Gauguin’s Stirring First-Hand Account of What Actually Happened the Night Van Gogh Cut off His Own Ear

Certain relationships are charged with an intensity of feeling that incinerates the walls we habitually erect between platonic friendship, romantic attraction, and intellectual-creative infatuation. One of the most dramatic of those superfriendships unfolded between the artists Paul Gauguin (June 7, 1848–May 8, 1903) and Vincent van Gogh (March 30, 1853–July 29, 1890), whose relationship was animated by an acuity of emotion so lacerating that it led to the famous and infamously mythologized incident in which Van Gogh cut off his own ear — an incident that marks the extreme end of what Sir Thomas Browne contemplated, two centuries earlier, as the divine heartbreak of romantic friendship.


Vincent van Gogh, “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear,” 1889
In February of 1888, a decade after Van Gogh found his purpose, he moved to the town of Arles in the South of France. There, he exploded into a period of immense creative fertility, completing more than two hundred paintings, one hundred watercolors and sketches, and his famous Sunflowers series. But he also lived in extreme poverty and endured incessant inner turmoil, much of which related to his preoccupation with enticing Gauguin — whom he admired with unparalleled ardor (“I find my artistic ideas extremely commonplace in comparison with yours,” Van Gogh wrote) and who at the time was living and working in Brittany — to come live and paint with him. This coveted cohabitation, Van Gogh hoped, would be the beginning of a larger art colony that would serve as “a shelter and a refuge” for Post-Impressionist painters as they pioneered an entirely novel, and therefore subject to spirited criticism, aesthetic of art. Van Gogh wrote to Gauguin in early October of 1888:

I’d like to see you taking a very large share in this belief that we’ll be relatively successful in founding something lasting.

Despite his destitution, Van Gogh spent whatever money he had on two beds, which he set up in the same small bedroom. Seeking to make his modest sleeping quarters “as nice as possible, like a woman’s boudoir, really artistic,” he resolved to paint a set of giant yellow sunflowers onto its white walls. He wrote beseeching letters to Gauguin, and when the French artist sent him a self-portrait as part of their exchange of canvases, Van Gogh excitedly showed it around town as the likeness of a beloved friend who was about to come visit.

Gauguin finally agreed and arrived in Arles in mid-October, where he was to spend about two months, culminating with the dramatic ear incident.

In Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals (public library), the French painter provides the only first-hand account of the strange, almost surreal circumstances that led to Van Gogh’s legendary self-mutilation — circumstances chronically mis-reported by most biographers and the many lay myth-weavers of popular culture, all removed from the facts of the incident by space, time, and many degrees of intimacy.


“Paul Gauguin (Man in a Red Beret)” by Vincent van Gogh, 1888 (Van Gogh Museum)
Gauguin recalls that he resisted Van Gogh’s insistent invitations for quite some time. “A vague instinct forewarned me of something abnormal,” he writes. But he was “finally overborne by Vincent’s sincere, friendly enthusiasm.” He arrived late into the night and, not wanting to wake Van Gogh, awaited dawn in a town café. The owner instantly recognized him as the friend whose likeness Van Gogh had been proudly introducing as the anticipated friend.

After Gauguin settled in, Van Gogh set out to show him the beauty and beauties of Arles, though Gauguin found that he “could not get up much enthusiasm” for the local women. By the following day, they had begun work. Gauguin marveled at Van Gogh’s clarity of purpose. “I don’t admire the painting but I admire the man,” he wrote. “He so confident, so calm. I so uncertain, so uneasy.” Gauguin foreshadows the tumult to come:

Between two such beings as he and I, the one a perfect volcano, the other boiling too, inwardly, a sort of struggle was preparing. In the first place, everywhere and in everything I found a disorder that shocked me. His colour-box could hardly contain all those tubes, crowded together and never closed. In spite of all this disorder, this mess, something shone out of his canvases and out of his talk, too…. He possessed the greatest tenderness, or rather the altruism of the Gospel.

Soon, the two men merged their finances, which succumbed to the same sort of disorder. They began sharing household duties — Van Gogh secured their provisions and Gauguin cooked — and lived together for what Gauguin would later recall as an eternity. (In reality, it was nine weeks.) From the distance of years, he reflects on the experience in his journal:

In spite of the swiftness with which the catastrophe approached, in spite of the fever of work that had seized me, the time seemed to me a century.

Though the public had no suspicion of it, two men were performing there a colossal work that was useful to them both. Perhaps to others? There are some things that bear fruit.


“The Painter of Sunflowers (Portrait of Vincent van Gogh)” by Paul Gauguin, 1888 (Van Gogh Museum)
Despite the frenzied enthusiasm and work ethic with which Van Gogh approached his paintings, Gauguin saw them as “nothing but the mildest of incomplete and monotonous harmonies.” So he set out to do what Van Gogh had invited him there to do — serve as mentor and master. (Gauguin was the only person whom Van Gogh ever addressed as “Master.”) He found the younger artist hearteningly receptive to criticism:

Like all original natures that are marked with the stamp of personality, Vincent had no fear of the other man and was not stubborn.

From that day on, Gauguin recounts, Van Gogh — “my Van Gogh” — began making “astonishing progress,” found his voice as an artist and came into his own style, cultivating the singular sense of color and light for which he is now remembered. But then something shifted — having found his angels, Van Gogh had also uncovered his demons. Gauguin recounts the tempestuous emotional climates that seemed to sweep over Van Gogh unpredictably — the beginning of his descent into the mental illness that would be termed bipolar disorder a century later:

During the latter days of my stay, Vincent would become excessively rough and noisy, and then silent. On several nights I surprised him in the act of getting up and coming over to my bed. To what can I attribute my awakening just at that moment?

At all events, it was enough for me to say to him, quite sternly, “What’s the matter with you, Vincent?” for him to go back to bed without a word and fall into a heavy sleep.

Van Gogh soon completed a self-portrait he considered to be a painting of himself “gone mad.” That evening, the two men headed to the local café. Gauguin recounts the astounding scene that followed, equal parts theatrical and full of sincere human tragedy:

[Vincent] took a light absinthe. Suddenly he flung the glass and its contents at my head. I avoided the blow and, taking him boldly in my arms, went out of the café, across the Place Victor Hugo. Not many minutes later, Vincent found himself in his bed where, in a few seconds, he was asleep, not to awaken again till morning.

When he awoke, he said to me very calmly, “My dear Gauguin, I have a vague memory that I offended you last evening.”

Answer: “I forgive you gladly and with all my heart, but yesterday’s scene might occur again and if I were struck I might lose control of myself and give you a choking. So permit me to write to your brother and tell him that I am coming back.

But the previous day’s drama was only a tremor of the earthquake to come that fateful evening, two days before Christmas 1888. “My God, what a day!” Gauguin exclaims as he chronicles what happened when he decided to take a solitary walk after dinner to clear his head:

I had almost crossed the Place Victor Hugo when I heard behind me a well-known step, short, quick, irregular. I turned about on the instant as Vincent rushed toward me, an open razor in his hand. My look at the moment must have had great power in it, for he stopped and, lowering his head, set off running towards home.

Gauguin laments that in the years since, he has been frequently bedeviled by the regret that he didn’t chase Van Gogh down and disarm him. Instead, he checked into a local hotel and went to bed, but he found himself so agitated that he couldn’t fall asleep until the small hours of the morning. Upon rising at half past seven, he headed into town, where he was met with an improbable scene:

Reaching the square, I saw a great crowd collected. Near our house there were some gendarmes and a little gentleman in a melon-shaped hat who was the superintendent of police.

This is what had happened.

Van Gogh had gone back to the house and had immediately cut off his ear close to the head. He must have taken some time to stop the flow of blood, for the day after there were a lot of wet towels lying about on the flag-stones in the two lower rooms. The blood had stained the two rooms and the little stairway that led up to our bedroom.

When he was in a condition to go out, with his head enveloped in a Basque beret which he had pulled far down, he went straight to a certain house where for want of a fellow-countrywoman one can pick up an acquaintance, and gave the manager his ear, carefully washed and placed in an envelope. “Here is a souvenir of me,” he said.

That “certain house” was, of course, the brothel Van Gogh frequented, where he had found some of his models. After handing the madam his ear, he ran back home and went straight to sleep, shutting the blinds and setting a lamp on the table by the window. A crowd of townspeople gathered below within minutes, discomfited and abuzz with speculation about what had happened. Gauguin writes:

I had no faintest suspicion of all this when I presented myself at the door of our house and the gentleman in the melon-shaped hat said to me abruptly and in a tone that was more than severe, “What have you done to your comrade, Monsieur?”

“I don’t know…”

“Oh, yes… you know very well… he is dead.”

I could never wish anyone such a moment, and it took me a long time to get my wits together and control the beating of my heart.

Anger, indignation, grief, as well as shame at all these glances that were tearing my person to pieces, suffocated me, and I answered, stammeringly: “All right, Monsieur, let me go upstairs. We can explain ourselves there.”

Then in a low voice I said to the police superintendent: “Be kind enough, Monsieur, to awaken this man with great care, and if he asks for me tell him I have left for Paris; the sight of me might prove fatal to him.”

I must own that from this moment the police superintendent was as reasonable as possible and intelligently sent for a doctor and a cab.

Once awake, Vincent asked for his comrade, his pipe and his tobacco; he even thought of asking for the box that was downstairs and contained our money, — a suspicion, I dare say! But I had already been through too much suffering to be troubled by that.

Vincent was taken to a hospital where, as soon as he had arrived, his brain began to rave again.

All the rest everyone knows who has any interest in knowing it, and it would be useless to talk about it were it not for that great suffering of a man who, confined in a madhouse, at monthly intervals recovered his reason enough to understand his condition and furiously paint the admirable pictures we know.


Newspaper report from December 30, 1888: ‘Last Sunday night at half past eleven a painter named Vincent Van Gogh, appeared at the maison de tolérance No 1, asked for a girl called Rachel, and handed her … his ear with these words: ‘Keep this object like a treasure.’ Then he disappeared. The police, informed of these events, which could only be the work of an unfortunate madman, looked the next morning for this individual, whom they found in bed with scarcely a sign of life. The poor man was taken to hospital without delay.’
With pressure from alarmed neighbors and local police, Van Gogh was soon committed into an insane asylum. From there, he wrote to Gauguin about the sundering tension between his desire to return to painting and his sense that his mental illness was incurable, but then added: “Aren’t we all mad?”

Seventeen months later, he took his own life — a tragedy Gauguin recounts with the tenderness of one who has loved the lost:

He sent a revolved shot into his stomach, and it was only a few hours later that he died, lying in his bed and smoking his pipe, having complete possession of his mind, full of the love of his art and without hatred for others.


Complement this particular portion of the forgotten treasure Paul Gauguin’s Intimate Journals with astrophysicist Janna Levin on madness and genius, poet Robert Lowell on what it’s like to be bipolar, and neuropsychiatrist Nancy Andreasen on the relationship between creativity and mental illness, then revisit Gauguin’s advice on overcoming rejection and Van Gogh on love and art, how relationships refine us, and his never-before-revealed sketchbooks.




internet: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/08/2 ... -gogh-ear/

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: The Potato Eaters

#12 Post by BobBradshaw » 24 Feb 2018, 00:25

Thanks, Bernie...I will fold your ideas into the poem, which will immensely help make it simpler. You keep adding kindling to our fires....so thank you! I haven't had a chance to absorb your comments on Gauguin and Van Gogh, but I will....I appreciate your information...priceless as they say. Bob

FranktheFrank
Posts: 1983
Joined: 02 Mar 2016, 18:07
Location: Between the mountains and the sea

Re: The Potato Eaters

#13 Post by FranktheFrank » 24 Feb 2018, 02:30

1st person works well in V3.

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: The Potato Eaters

#14 Post by BobBradshaw » 27 Feb 2018, 03:02

Thanks, Frank, for your generous appraisal... a poem sometimes takes a village...


BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: The Potato Eaters - revised

#16 Post by BobBradshaw » 15 Mar 2018, 22:13

Thanks, everyone...I am reworking this....best

Bernie01
Posts: 777
Joined: 30 Jul 2015, 11:14

Re: The Potato Eaters - revised

#17 Post by Bernie01 » 16 Mar 2018, 22:02

Bob---

a fast and satisfying read...only this seemed out of place---a phrase that didn't seem the era of VVG.


His pretense of being
a better man because he preached
while I sketched nudes
pissed me off.
What did the SOB know
about art?


how do you feel about your poem now?


bernie

BobBradshaw
Posts: 2683
Joined: 03 Jun 2016, 21:03

Re: The Potato Eaters - revised

#18 Post by BobBradshaw » 17 Mar 2018, 00:02

Thanks, Bernie. I have deleted that stanza...let me know.

Yes, I like this extended version. Hopefully, the poem is more emotional because we understand the relationship between Vincent and his father better. The tension of them at the same dinner table appeals to me.

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