Blame Vermeer, by Vincent O’Sullivan

A woman of thirty pours the inch or so of milk
left in a jug, sets the jug high on a shelf
inside a small cupboard because the children
from next door are to stay the night, she’ll
not risk their picking at its precious glaze.
She takes her ring from beside the tap,
slips it back onto her third finger.
She hears steps on the path.
Something
will happen after every painting for a long
time yet. It may have been war,
a sudden wrenching of implacable grief,
diseases arrived from the unburied,
children clattering in only days until
they are shunted east.
And the stranger
announcing, ‘There is something here,’ and her hand
on the lip first then the jug’s smooth curving,
it was lifted, so Jug & Woman
may have been the title again as it was and was
how many hundred times in that small
kitchen, its imagined canvas, the deluging back
of ordinariness so lovely, to what can one
compare it? And the steps always arriving.
It will happen next.

Sources:

Vincent O’Sullivan, Blame Vermeer 
(Victoria University Press, 2007)

Johannes Vermeer & Modern Poetry

For all of us who have been working on Johannes Vermeer and constantly retrieving information on his life, background and artpieces, it is not  new that his influence still pervades on modern arts. While looking around the net in search for precisely that, his influence in modern arts, I stumbled upon this poem written by Ira Sadoff and published in the renowned The Virginia Quarterly Review: A National Journal of Literature and Discussion, and which I already shared with you on Facebook and Delicious, yet I thought it would be adequate to post it on our blog as well since it inspired me when trying to write my story on the painting I chose: A Girl Interrupted at her Music. Here it is, enjoy:

When her mother entered the room, he did not
look up. The young girl’s pale skin turned
white as the shawl she wore. He was pointing
to a figuration of counterpoint, or so
he said. But there was something in the room
of the body giving off light, light was moving
toward the window instead of from its source.
And though his hand still clutched the back
of her chair, the mandolin was covered by sheets
of music, the glass of wine had not been
touched. Though the air in the room seemed
lighter by the old woman’s leaving, nothing
so heavy as speech would be uttered between them,
for there were still lessons to be learned,
what was to be played would soon be played out.

References:

• Ira Sadoff (1976). In ‘The Virginia Quarterly Review’ (pages 112-113). Retrieved 17:38, February 2011, from: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1976/winter/sadoff-vermeer-girl-interrupted/