There is nothing like citing a painting to limit readership, especially an Abstract Expressionist.                
     Though, there again, Rothko is so generally liked it might also be seen as trying to curry favour to choose such a popular painter as the subject matter for a poem.  It used to be the poster of the lady tennis player scratching her bum that found its way onto student walls, now, with the deracinated generation of value-for-money students it is more likely to be one of the easy pastel Rothkos that are the art addition of choice in the non-political, gender-non-specific world that university students are living in.  What do I know!  When was the last time that I even spoke to a real life, digs-living student!
     Anyway, the Rothkos that I am writing about are not the pretty-pretty-poster-friendly ones, they are the monstrous (in virtually all senses of the word) paintings that Rothko was commissioned to paint for an up-market business dining room.  And when someone expressed some scepticism about his approach, Rothko explained that he hoped that the paintings would give the diners indigestion.  Good for him!
     The donation of these paintings by Rothko's widow allowed the Rothko Room in the Tate to exist - and I have had a difficult relationship with it ever since.
     Rothko's work can be seductively easy to like; some of his work can be so colourfully satisfying that you are drawn into the painting before you have had time to work out an approach!  The work in the Rothko Room is not so inviting.  And yet.  And yet, each time I go to the Tate I head for the Rothko Room and sit and look.
     I still, after all these years, do not know if I actually 'like' them; somehow that doesn't seem to be the right word to use.  I am obviously drawn to them and they seem to demand my attention.  And I must get something out of the experience or I would not repeat it so often!
     If you want to check out the Rothko Room you can go to http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/rothko/rothko-room-guide and see for yourself.
     I realise that this poem is more about the room than about the paintings, and I do not want you to assume that my description of "splodge and squiggle,/dark on dark" is a dismissive and derisive rejection of what you can see.  The seeming easy of the pictorial expression is something which I find deeply paradoxical when I consider my conflicted approach to the art.
     Anyway the Barcelona Poetry Workshop Group was the stimulus for this draft and I now realise that I have been away from that powerful source of inspiration for far too long!

The Rothko Room, Tate Modern

I look at gaps

and think about the spaces stretched

between the art and that blank wall

that reaches out at angles,

high and low, containing me.

And some communion in this

gloom-curated space,

cathedral-quiet and

supressing sound, seems

not unapt.

It forces me to look,

though not always to see,

that this relationship with

splodge and squiggle,

dark on dark,

is neither more nor less

than what I choose to bring with me.

These are the Elgin Marbles of the Tate:

work wrenched away from purpose

(and the upset stomachs of the very rich)

for the perusal of the people where

I place myself. 

            I gravitate towards

this room each time I come

and sit and wonder

why or what I’m looking at

each time I shift my gaze

from plane to plane

in such a wide and

claustrophobic space.

As I always (and will continue) to say,  I welcome any response and will respond to any comments.