Resounding: A Poem About a Sculpture
Alan Maley, UK
Alan Maley has been involved with ELT for over 50 years. He has lived and worked in 10 countries worldwide, including China and India. He is a prolific author. He is a founder member of the Creativity Group (The C group). In 2012 he was given the ELTons Lifetime Achievement Award. He is a regular contributor to HLT Mag. E-mail: yelamoo@yahoo.co.uk
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Background
Resounding - a poem based on installation art piece
In May 2015 the Creativity group ran a symposium on language education with workshops on the relationships between language, sculpture, art, music and dance. The venue was Oxford Brookes University’s newly opened, award-winning John Henry Brookes building, with an installation by Anne Cottrell dramatically hung from the ceiling of the main ‘forum’area.
The workshop on Language and visual arts, run by Rachel Payne, Senior Lecturer in Art Education, invited participants to write words and images describing the installation from several perspectives: colour and shape, light and shade, movement in its state of suspension, different perspectives as we walked around it, its technical and physical qualities, its relationship to other images in the universe. The sculpture can be seen here:
www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/news/
and led to the following poem from Alan Maley, participant and co-facilitator of the day.
They spin in air
yet mimic water in an ocean -
holding the vortex apart
in this static work of art,
merging stillness and motion.
Through the illusion
of constant gyration
they give shape to chaos -
suspended animation.
Yet for the shape to hold
they, its components,
must be kept separate
by this centrifugal force,
suspended for eternity
in a mirage of movement.
This is the price they have to pay
for keeping their collapse at bay.
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