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by Nina Beckwith FEATURED UCSF ARTIST | NINA'S ARTS NOTES 1st appeared 20 July 1998 David Watts -- Poet on Parnassus "Poetry and art and music and literature help us to deal with the human condition, " David Watts believes. "As intelligent beings we know our fate, and we must live with this anguish. Because of our human condition, because of this knowledge, we are all seeking the mystical experience."
Watts began writing poetry in college and has never stopped. Years after his medical training and then internship at UCSF in 1966, and after establishing a large practice in internal medicine and gastroenterology, he took a degree in creative writing at SF State, published several poetry collections, and became more and more deeply interested in the connections between the arts and the process of facilitating healing. Eight years ago, Watts created a course called Poetry in Medicine, given as a UCSF health sciences elective; he also teaches aspects of the subject at the Fromm Institute. The course is organized around such topics as the first moment of realizing one is ill; pregnancy; death and dying; and caring for someone who is ill, which often causes ambivalent feelings. Poets have written about all of these situations so intensely as to make us feel we have lived them. "Because poetry is brief, metaphoric, concentrated," Watts says, "layers of meaning, understanding, and experience are all condensed into a small space. When you present a poetic rendering of undergoing surgery, for example, to a person who is about to have that experience, that patient will have a memory before the fact, and in all likelihood will derive comfort from it and assurance of healing." Watts is not alone in recognizing the limits of science which, as he says, "is having a difficult time explaining some of the more mysterious aspects of the universe. So I think science itself realizes that it has to develop techniques of moving into things more philosophical, more metaphorical. If you think of Watson and Crick, the solving of the helix occurred in a dream, a metaphorical thought. Science was not equipped to make that solution and it took metaphorical thinking to arrive at a hypothesis that later turned out to be true. " Of necessity, UCSF as a health sciences campus is one-sided. It doesn't have arts programs as part of teaching but, as Watts points out, "all the arts programs going on here speak to our need to have them." Giving the campus a chance to hear readings by major poets, Watts created the "Poets on Parnassus" programs and plans to continue them twice a term. For and from people who work at UCSF, Watts put together an anthology, Poets on Parnassus, published in l994, and he holds poetry workshops every Friday at noon where anyone can bring his or her poems and talk about them. He has also organized poetry and music sessions with jazz and blues musicians (including Steve Leonoudakis whom we wrote about a couple of weeks ago.) "You get a poem going with a little blues in the background," Watts says, "and something happens to the poem: it changes, becomes animated in ways you may have sensed but weren't sure until you tried. Poetry picks up rhythms from the music so there is this rhythmic boost that happens while you listen to each other." Not surprisingly, Watts finds "a lot of very good musicians on this campus including good jazz musicians. After all, music is a savior to our souls." How does he find time for all this and writing poetry, too? "Like William Carlos Williams, (one of America's great poets who was also a physician) if the inspiration comes between patients," he says, "I can jot down a few lines and leave the structure, the scaffolding for later. Sometimes, if I'm lucky, there are such things as found poems: they just hit you and are there immediately. This poem came like that."
Spencer at the Legion The English painter Stanley Spencer was such a passionate and enigmatic man and artist that an award-winning play was written about him, Stanley, which ran in London and also in New York last year. But his paintings have been so little known in the US that the current exhibition at the Legion of Honor is only the second one ever devoted to him by an American museum. More than 60 of Spencer's remarkable works can be seen in the spacious and softly lit underground galleries of the Legion, which were expanded when the museum was completely remodeled a few years ago. Spencer, who lived from l891 to 1959, was both a visionary in the spiritual tradition of William Blake and a marvelously skilled realist whose work at times recalls the Italian painters of the l500s and the images of Breugel or even Diego Rivera. Influences of the art fashions of his time -- modernism, cubism, surrealism -- are nowhere apparent. Like Rivera, Spencer believed strongly that work and workers were subjects of immense worth and dignity: in this show are panoramic paintings of shipyard welders and riveters and of workmen repairing the kilns in his hometown where hops and malt were roasted. Spencer was born and lived most of his life in Cookham and he loved the Thames-side town and its landscape deeply and used its actual streets and houses in many of his Biblical and allegorical scenes. So we see the pale head and hands of Christ carrying the cross through a crowd of villagers while others peer from the dormer windows of Cookham brick houses. A large Crucifixion is painted with horrifying emphasis on the suffering of Christ as a human being: His back is to the viewer who looks into the fiendish faces of His tormentors. Portraits were among Spencer's most powerful paintings. In this show are self-portraits at age 23 and at age 68 and several superb portraits, some nudes, of the women in his life, his wives and intimate friends. One of them was Charlotte Murray, a psychiatrist who had fled from Germany to the UK. Her troubled expression is unsettling, haunting, as are most of Spencer's paintings in this extraordinary show. Stanley Spencer: An English Vision is on view through September 6. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor in Lincoln Park, 34th and Clement, is itself a masterpiece standing at the edge of the continent. Open Tuesday through Sunday 9:30 to 5. Free second Wednesday of the month. Hotline 863-3330; www.thinker.org ...And now for something completely different, as Monty Python would say. Haring Around There's a red one near Moscone Center, a yellow one at Pier 39, a blue one at Union Square, and three of them in riotous primary colors dancing between the Opera House and the Veterans Building. If you've seen these flat, bright, larger-than-life cutout statues around town and wondered, a visit to the Museum of Modern Art and its special Pop Shop will let you in on a recent artworld phenom who has been getting full blockbuster hype since the Keith Haring show opened here in May. Haring was born in l958 and died of AIDS in l990. He started drawing at an early age and then found his real inspiration and developed his unmistakable playful/serious style in New York of the 80s when he saw blank black panels in the subway stations and began to make whimsical pictures on them with white chalk. Of course the cops forcibly removed him again and again but, as he said later, "People left the drawings alone and respected them...it was this chalk-white fragile thing in the middle of all this power and tension and violence that the subway was. People were completely enthralled." They still are by Haring's multimedia displays of figures and forms, some from graffiti, some from the dance moves he saw in nightclubs or from his own inventive graphic imagination. He has been called an heir to Fernand Leger and Andy Warhol and although his career was very brief, his images quickly became recognizable on everything from T-shirts to the Berlin Wall. Asked what he was trying to do in his art, Haring replied, "To incorporate art into every part of life, take it off the pedestal. I'm giving it back to the people, I guess." At SFMOMA until September 8 are more than 100 of Haring's works as well as photos, videos, and memorabilia. Haring sold his work in what he called Pop Shops he opened in New York and Tokyo and the Museum has created a replica Pop Shop for this show, stocked with Haring posters, cards, books, T-shirts, and much more. SFMOMA, 151 Third Street between Mission and Howard. Open every day except Wednesdays, 10-6, Thursdays until 9 p.m. Phone 357-4000; www.sfmoma.org. |
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Perhaps because he
has so many facets and has cultivated intense awareness, UCSF's David Watts seems able to
capture a wider range of emanations from this and other worlds than most of us can
perceive. Watts is physician, poet, musician, writer, broadcaster, and teacher. His first
direction was music and he still plays the French horn in the Bohemian Club's 70-piece
orchestra; he used to play with the UCSF orchestra, too, but cannot manage time for both.