Letter from Brussels

Over the winter I was in Brussels at Passa Porta, the House of International Literature, as a writer in residence. My time there ignited a long poem I put into a leporello with accompanying watercolour and gouache abstractions. The working aesthetic of this artist’s book, unfinished as I write this, is catastrophe, chaos and Coleridgean fragments.

On some pages I painted a chimeric pleasure dome, a Xanadu; on others, later in the accordion sequence, smoke, mirrors, mirages and ship figments floating above the sea. Etel Adnan, fond of the leporello format, liked to think of it as the summoning of movement: of voyages by train, the movement of music spilling out from the pages of musical notation in front of a symphony conductor. The passage of time.

It might be decadent to embark on an artist’s book right now, when the imperialist axis of Western states has ignited or aided and abetted something like nine theatres of war in West Asia and further east, against Persia, a people who invented chess, and whose term ‘shah mat’ – the king is dead – now resonates far beyond its bowdlerized version, ‘checkmate’, to interpolate an oft-chanted anti-Trumpian aspiration in the US: ‘No Kings’.

Anti-imperialism is all around us, unimpeachable. I visited the Atomium in February, an iconic Brussels landmark. It was built for the 17 April 1958 Universal and International Exhibition, ...