To the man with his wife in a car in Sheung Wan on a Sunday with poet Frank Doogan.
The Last Supper is a weekly podcast about art in Asia. Artist and entrepreneur Oscar Venhuis talks with fellow artists, collectors and gallerists about the current state of affairs and explores the multiple dimensions of art.
Poet Frank Doogan
Episode 14 | In this episode I have the pleasure of talking with Frank Doogan, a Hong Kong-based poet. Frank reads a selection of his poetry and we discuss how he develops his narratives. We also talk about getting lost, the relationship between culture and intelligence, argue what art is and the role of craft in contemporary art.
Unshelled
Take the pearl
and put it back
where the sun doesn’t shine
Take the glinty coldness
of teeth chipping iridescence
and love it
with
your
eyes
I want the oyster
I want the fleshy
oily
feely
smelly
slipperiness
of
a
being
like you
The eyes
can have the pearl
To the man with his wife in a car in Sheung Wan on a Sunday
I took the car for a
walk
carefully
promenading
my hands
my hands
with redundant
power
so masterfully light on the wheel
I am at home in this womb I bought
steeled in a substantial grey
with this, myself and my wife
on the way
to almost nowhere
and back
to key
the jacket of my muscular self
into the cupboard parking lot
where I kiss the bonnet
once
to the side of each headlight
and pet my car warm and fat
goodnight
The Mirror
I went to my war
drobe
took out my rhino jacket, my cortex helmet, my GI boots and
put them on
fire.
and looking into the black marble galaxy of your eyes
I saw sushi fish swimming through Pelegrino, no ice
and felt the smooth of your life
bring my member
ship to a
world that only
we
were mirrors in.
I went to my war
drobe
and found you
naked
moulded in a mound of figures
all form and feeling and love
and saw
nothing
to fight
for
or
against.
Becoming an antique
(to the very old man with the stall on Upper Lascar)
The eyes and the hands
moved
the eyes
moved
more
The eyes looking
a keen dying observer leaning out a window
living by a table of ordinary aging accretions
moving slowly towards antiquity
And thinking he would rot first
he built a coffin
draped with green plastic
covering a collection of
the definably ordinary rubbish
of the recently old
and hoped for an aging under the coffin’s cloak
that would
morph them
and his life
into
antiquities
Southern Fall (Beijing 2001)
Now that I’ve gone north
and my face
with age
goes
south
to join
other parts
in their southern fall
the summer of my life
my wife
too
falls
south
our faces age
sometimes without
the careful crafting
that a perfect life
leaves
we age
with the studied
strokes of a sculptor’s
shaky desire
and blessed be our
human bits
made with
marks
of
work
and
love
and
laughs
and
foolishness
-----
'The Last Supper' is produced and hosted by Oscar Venhuis | Instagram @thelastsupper.asia
The Dock by Frank Doogan, video by Chris Norman.
Frank Doogan
Poetry has been part of my life since childhood. My mother gave us all poems to memorize and recite, and taught us to formally debate and value clear expression – words were what we did as children. My father and uncles wrote poetry, and there was a genuine respect for anything that was defined as artistic, and anyone who was defined an artist. The naming was not done lightly.
The list of poets we learned from included Allingham, Yeats, Tennyson, Keats, Wordsworth, Auden, Shakespeare, Blake, Donne, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Frost, Pope, and Shelley.
Part of why I memorize and write poetry is the conversation is quiet and resonant, bringing glimpses of meaning and beauty that are beyond us as people. Or, in the words of Yeats ‘… love is less kind than the gray twilight, And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.’
——
'The Last Supper' is produced and hosted by Oscar Venhuis | Instagram @thelastsupper.asia
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