Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess. Whitechapel Gallery salutes writer and artist who abhorred iniquity
By James Brewer
A life in poetry took off for Anna Mendelssohn after she served a stiff prison sentence for an alleged offence which she insisted to the end she did not commit. Hundreds of surrealistic, piercing but sometimes playful verses flowed in torrents from her pen, many written in a garden shed in which she was reduced to living, in Cambridge just a short walk from the university.
Now in a modest but intensely moving exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery is presenting the first institutional display of works by the poet, writer, and artist Anna Mendelssohn (1948-2009), who was also known as Grace Lake. Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess should inspire visitors to search out her intense reflections on her own difficult circumstances and on societal ills.
Amid fevered media publicity, Anna was one of eight people put on trial in 1972 for allegedly conspiring to cause explosions blamed on the activist Angry Brigade. In what was at the time the longest criminal trial in British history, the accused became known in radical circles as the Stoke Newington Eight. Four of the defendants were acquitted but she was sentenced to 10 years at the since-closed, Category A Holloway Prison in London. She was released on parole after five years, for teaching literacy and drama to her fellow inmates.
In vitrines at the London gallery display are 35 works from the Anna Mendelssohn Archive which was donated by her three children in 2010 to the University of Sussex Special Collections. The archive ranges from juvenilia to the poems written in her last days – she died of a brain tumour at the age of 61.
The array of poetry, notebook entries, and artistic works on paper, shows her experimenting with language often in a surreal manner and in the tradition of Charles Baudelaire, Gertrude Stein, Anna Akhmatova, Nazim Hikmet, Federico Garcia Lorca, and Tom Raworth, in the view of exhibition curatorial consultant Sara Crangle.
Anna Mendelssohn’s ardent and unfaltering brio confronts the restraints to which she was ever alert: public and private iniquities, class discrimination, misogyny, and anti-Semitism. She tears into what the organisers call “the socio-historical mechanisms which influence the creation and destruction of language in public and private spheres.”
Anna was born near Manchester into a left-wing political family and inspired by the Paris student uprisings of May 1968, gravitating on her return to the UK to radical circles in London. On display is an untitled sketch in graphite on paper and which is thought to be a self-portrait made during her imprisonment. She has an enigmatic gaze and in a gesture of defiance perhaps, she has a cigarette hanging from her mouth. After her release from Holloway, she moved to Cambridge to study English literature at St Edmund’s College. From the city, she published 15 poetry collections, and contributed to anthologies and journals.
Her poetic and artistic output was immense: filling nearly 800 notebooks, thousands of loose-leaf pages, and ephemera on which put down everyday musings, research, poetry, and visual art. Much of the oeuvre can be summed up in her phrase: “Poetry cannot tear its gaze from the pavement” and she declared: ““I do not fake, I do not lie, I worship at the shrine of poetry.”
She suffered personal trauma even after prison: a victim of the housing crisis and living in a garden shed albeit near enough to the university library to visit; as a single mother with her three children fostered out, and her studies interrupted during custody battles. London poet and scholar David Grundy writes in an essay on the Poetry Foundation website “Mendelssohn fights back with the only weapon she has left — the poem itself.”
The Whitechapel exhibition takes its title from Mendelssohn’s 1996 poem fragment; redundance; wordsworth: “speak, poetess, speak in the end –/ what has been Taken –/ will always be being spoken to you.”
Central to the exhibition is Untitled (Relentless) (c 1997), seven sheets illustrating a poem of that title with acrylic, chalk, and pastel. As a visual artwork, Mendelssohn presents the poem as one to be engaged with closely, a sense of urgency in its opening lines: “poetry races through/ these streets, hitting/ itself against stone walls/ splitting glass, fragmenting solitudes.” Elsewhere, the artist’s Untitled (Ideogram) (c 1980–1983) works underscore her fascination with symbolism or the pictorial in written languages such as Arabic and Chinese, while Untitled (Key) (c 1970s-mid-1980s) sees her codifying natural phenomena, objects, metaphysics, and forms of speech in discrete signs.
She was a woman among an often male-dominated poetry environment — “men act as if they own the poetic mind,” she wrote.
The display is curated by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, the 2023 Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery, with Sara Crangle, Professor of Modernism & the Avant-Garde at the University of Sussex as curatorial consultant. Sara Crangle edited the invaluable, 784-page I’m Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn (Shearsman, 2020).
Anna Mendelssohn: Speak, Poetess is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, until January 21, 2024.
