Our guest poet this month is Patrick Wright. As I was reading his collection Exit Strategy (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) I came upon the poem Archive and discovered that Patrick and I are both very interested in Kiefer’s work.

For me one of the highlights last year was visiting Bilderstreit, a major exhibition of Kiefer’s work at Voorlinden Museum, The Netherlands. A few weeks earlier I had watched the documentary that Wim Wenders made about Anselm Kiefer. I was blown away too by the film: it’s in black-and-white and one can watch it through 3D glasses.

Kiefer was born during the bombing raids in the final months of WWII. For him, everything exists somewhere in the cycle of death and rebirth. Whenever he creates a new work, he knows that one day he will destroy it: attacking it with a flamethrower, axe, bolt cutter, or red-hot liquid lead.

ARCHIVE
After Anselm Kiefer

Before his landscapes scorched by war and history, paintings of straw
and glue, your golden hair, Margarethe, before ‘Death Fugue’, I was back at
school, deep winter. In the yard blew a few stray crisp packets; seagulls
pecked at crumbs. The annex and fence had the look of an abandoned
camp, in Polish hinterlands. Through a cloakroom window I peered,
looking for a ghost of myself, then at a ghost of myself, as the sun
poked out from a cloud and the contours of bulimia gazed back, in
sepia tones. I saw the bullies too, with razored eyebrows, piercings,
fists in my gut, spit on my shoulder, the stench of Lynx, using queer
as an insult. With my SLR, I clicked more in hope than expectation.
I fumbled with fixative, the stop bath, the gelatin swell. My negatives
solarised. I kept re-visiting as a witness. Those days, I bit the inside
of my lip, stubbed cigarettes out on my arm. When the dysmorphic
class photos were framed, still as that winter, your golden hair, said the
Kiefer print, your golden hair, Margarethe.