Poet Zaffar Kunial and painter Raqib Shaw share some common ground. Both have roots in Kashmir (Kunial through his father; Shaw by birth) and England (Kunial by birth; Shaw by virtue of having lived and worked here for over 20 years). But that is where they would at least seem to diverge. Shaw is famous for his opulent, vibrant renderings of paradises (his paintings drips colour), whereas Kunial is celebrated for its compression, intricacy, and focus \u201cupon the small-scale mysteries of language\u201d. As I walked to The Whitworth Gallery to hear Kunial\u2019s poem written in response to Shaw\u2019s work \u2013commissioned by the Whitworth and MLF \u2013 the phrase about unstoppable forces and immovable objects came to mind.<\/p>\n
By seven the last audience members had trickled in from Raqib\u2019s exhibition in an adjacent gallery at The Whitworth, and the space set aside for the night\u2019s reading filled. Kunial opened with Spark Hill, The Word, The Wardrobe<\/em> and Cast<\/em> \u2013 poems from his previous work \u2013 and gave the audience a sense of why, in his introduction, poet Andrew McMillan had called Kunial \u201cone of the best and exciting new voices in poetry\u201d. Cast <\/em>showed Kunial\u2019s to be a poetry that mines both for the beauty of words and for the identities that rest on its shifting layers of meaning. Written after he\u2019d seen a portrait of Shakespeare, Cast <\/em>is a poem of grafted faces \u2013 the reader and the poem\u2019s, and of Kunial and Shakespeare\u2019s, to whom he write that he could:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u2018Light on your lips\u2019 stayed with me as Kunial began to read his commissioned poems, which, from the opening poem The Fourth Wall,<\/em> emerged less as descriptions of paintings and more entrances into Kunial\u2019s own layered worlds. With Shaw\u2019s wallpaper imagining of \u2018A Midsummer\u2019s Night Dream\u2019 as a backdrop, Kunial read The Fourth Wall<\/em>, peeling back the layers of the wallpaper from his own childhood where \u201cthe future came in every once in a while…dark shades of yellow, prismatic as dust on butterfly wings\u201d.<\/p>\n Self Portrait as Bottom<\/em>, the four part sequence Kunial read next (and written after Shaw\u2019s painting of the same name) read like winding down a spiral staircase from the painting\u2019s surface where \u201cthe artist (laughs) at me\u201d, past the speaker\u2019s face, to the basement floors where Shakespeare\u2019s prose-speaking Bottom is a \u201cmouth beyond shadows braying\u201d, to the final poem where, in a genetic test\u2019s results, the speaker hears \u201cthe numbers speak to (him) and feel like a thousand year stare\/but numbers thousands of years ago didn\u2019t end there\u201d. Kunial closed with Bonsai<\/em> \u2013 a blend of Kunial\u2019s time spent at Shaw\u2019s London studio, memories of his British grandfather\u2019s begonias, and the body of the a bonsai tree: \u201cI go back into the room of the needled stately pine\/a trunk of wounded rings collecting\/inches of each owner\u2019s time\u201d. Kunial thanked the audience; they showed their clear appreciation for his reading.<\/p>\n The lasting sense here was of a fusion of process and form between the two artists. Shaw\u2019s process is an active layering \u2013 from drawing, to acetate, to painting, stained-glass linings, and ornamentation; Kunial\u2019s a work of peeling back layers, and unspooling of time from the immediacy of painting. Night\u2019s like these feel worlds apart from the solemnity that can sometimes settle on poetry readings like a fine dust, and part of what makes the Manchester Literature festival special. Next to a gallery of \u2018finished\u2019 works, the reading had a sense of art-as-its-happening, the materials still warm and pliable. Kunial, in the reading and Q&A after, acted as a guide to his process and response to art, and lent the night a sense of intimacy and shared exploration. If you haven\u2019t seen it yet, Raqib\u2019s work is still at The Whitworth. And watch for Kunial\u2019s debut. It promises marvels.<\/p>\n Zaffar Kunial, introduced by Andrew McMillan, The Whitworth, 19 October 2017. Poet Zaffar Kunial and painter Raqib Shaw share some common ground. Both have roots in Kashmir (Kunial through his father; Shaw by birth) and England (Kunial by birth; Shaw by virtue of having lived and worked here for over 20 years). But that is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[16,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nfour centuries apart. I swear by this lapse
\nthe light on your lips seems cast half on mine.\u2019<\/div>\nChad Campbell<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"