"Voice of Fire"
"Vanitas"
Tom Cull
Tom Cull served as the Poet Laureate for the City of London, Ontario from 2016 to 2018. He teaches creative writing at Western University and runs Antler River Rally, a grassroots environmental group that organizes monthly cleanups of Deshkan Ziibi / Thames River. Tom’s first full-length collection of poems, Bad Animals, was published by Insomniac Press in 2018.
“‘Voice of Fire’ responds to Barnett Newman’s abstract expressionist piece of the same name, which he painted for the American Exhibition at Expo ’67 in Montreal. Newman had an affinity for Canada, and after he died, his wife offered Voice of Fire to the National Gallery of Canada for a very reasonable price ($1.8 million), believing that Newman would have wanted the painting to end up north of the border. Its purchase in 1990 caused a Canadian-sized stir: the Gallery Director, Shirley Thomson, was called before the House of Commons to justify the purchase; for weeks, the public engaged in debates about what constitutes art and how (or if) the National Gallery should spend public money. Though it inspired many roadside knock-offs and my-kid-could-do-that arguments, the painting is now worth considerably more than its original price (with estimates as high as $40 million), and the general consensus is that it was a brilliant purchase.
Where Newman’s title alludes to God’s fiery chat with Moses on the mount, my poem imagines the painting as ransacker, redeemer, destroyer—imagines a kind of return of that voice in the current age of fire and flood.
‘Vanitas’ is about the Gallery Director, Shirley Thomson, who was my aunt. She was, herself, a bit of a masterpiece.”
1. Man and his World
Islands rise
out of the St. Lawrence.
Dump truck after dump truck,
builds the world homunculus.
The future is dymaxion,
is tetrahedral, hard-edge,
pop, op, geometric—
Voice of Fire, Mouth,
Green Shirt, Up Cadmium,
Firepole, suspended by steel
cables in Fuller’s geodesic dome—
Apollo space capsules,
parachutes, blow-ups of moon
and movie stars.
Thousands escalate
through the bubble,
through its transparent skin
spy Russians across the park
rolling out heavy equipment,
Sputniks and pamphlets.
Over Da Nang, Phu Cat
and Bien Hoa, the skies
open orange.
2. Abstract Sublime
The flames
boiled waterbombers
like flying kettles,
evacuated whole towns
choking on soot,
until the rains came
and didn’t stop.
They came shuffling
along the gallery floor
through half-ransacked rooms,
busted terrines, smashed glass,
looting so quickly pointless.
They ate the meat dress.
Some still dreamed,
others hoarsely
chanted dithyrambs—
all gathering in the
cathedral chamber
to stand before
the painting.
That flag burning itself.
Enriched cadmium-red zip
throbbing against
columns of cold-blue—
the singing stopped
and it spoke.
3. Exodus
Red zip time machine—
figure forever falling
through itself.
Tell them,
I AM sent you:
the fire that burns
without consuming.
The line up
recedes out of frame
each waits their turn
to pass through
the burn radius
emerging where a new
gallery rises.
“One never hesitates before a masterpiece.”
—Shirley Thomson, Director, National Gallery of Canada
The night the gallery opened
we stole as many champagne
glasses as we could hide
under our stiff rural duds,
dipped fist-sized strawberries
into pools of chocolate.
Aunt Shirl, herself a masterpiece:
robes by Teruko Nakamura,
figure-eight chignon, chunk earrings,
schlepping VIPs through the gallery
trailing assistants and Georgio of Beverly Hills.
The walls were empty, silent;
the firestorm coming later,
when the purchase was announced:
three stripes, one point eight million.
The my-five-year-old-could-do-its.
The aw-shucks Manitoba MP
who could rip one off in five
minutes with a couple cans
of paint and a roller.
The pop-up road-side
replicas: Voice of Taxpayer.
When Shirl died, we came together
to tear her apart, we pillaged
her down to the last Burtinski
—the art of manufacturing a life
to be carved up and hauled away.
We spread her ashes
in Huron County, at the farm
near the grave of Bruno
the headless dog.
Everything now is worth more.
