Tuesday 5 February 2008

Daily Spark Word: Splash

Today's spark word is 'splash'. I look forward to seeing what people come up with!

swimming

as a child
i knew how to swim
but i didn't dive in.

i sat on the fence
and watched my brother's friends
running wild.

2 comments:

Jim Murdoch said...

The Biggest of All Splashes

(after Hockney)

I am affected by the effect.
It has caused me to be moved
despite the fact I am far removed from it.
How can a moment frozen in time move me so?
It ripples through time and negative space … like an idea.


I have always been fascinated by causality. In the physical world it's easy to explain how something like a Newton's Cradle works but philosophically the relationship between cause and effect is greyer. In Hockney's famous painting A Bigger Splash all we see is the effect of someone plunging into a pool in California in the summer of 1967. That was forty years ago.

So many pictures are of something, a bowl of fruit, a family group, but this painting's subject is not of the subject per se, rather his effect on the pool; we never get to see who – or perhaps what – has caused that splash and yet the consequences of that splash have continued down till this day. I was always told that energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed and I see this as the perfect metaphor of that.

The shape of the poem is meant to be suggestive of a ripple by the way. Ideally the poem would be centre-justified but the comments box won't allow complex formatting.

Miss Ticket Stubs said...

Hi Jim,

Nice work! The way the poem ripples outwards is very clear and neatly done. I quite like Hockney's work, and I particularly like poetry inspired by art.

Thanks, as always, for joining in!

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