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Tracey Emin's online exhibition is on the White Cube website until 02 August 2020.

Images:

Main image aboveÌý Tracey Emin, Self-portrait, taken while in isolationÌý2020

Image credit: Copyright Tracy Emin

Image to the left: The Kiss by Tracey Emin, made in her home

Image credit: Copyright Tracey Emin

In Museums Unlocked, Front Row features a poem by , Front Row's artist in residence this week, on eachÌýof the five episodes.Ìý The first poem, Purple Haze is about the in London.

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ÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌýÌý Ìý Purple Haze

When Jimi glanced into his small attic mirror
while parting his lips, unteasing his hair,
in a candle-like glint he saw George Frideric Handel
alarmingly wigless, alarmingly there.

‘What have you been taking?’ said Handel to Hendrix.
‘Only the usual,’ Jimi replied.
‘I adore your high notes,’ Handel whispered. ‘But listen!
You cannot cheat sleep. I went blind when I tried.

Make friends with your sound man. Then fix the fuzz pedal.
But discipline, boy! Cut your endless tracks short.’
Jimi shook his fine head. With no more breaths to meddle
George sank to roast chicken, his cellars of port.

Alison Brackenbury

Alison Brackenbury, Poet in Residence at Front Row this week, reflects on how she came to write her Museum Unlocked poems, one of which she will be introducing and reading each evening.

Which small thing do you miss, in lockdown? Most trivially, I miss the coffee shop, my sunlit space before I board a long-distance coach...

ÌýEach life has its seasons. Mine had its own mid-life lockdown. I worked in our small metal finishing business, which seldom shut. I had commitments to three generations. My life was awash with loved but demanding animals. I rarely travelled.

ÌýSeven years ago, in changed times, I retired. Excited and apprehensive, I crossed Britain to poetry events.

ÌýOn each trip, I was drawn to museums, In London, I saw the narrow house where Handel composed. Next door is the attic flat, where Jimi Hendrix met Handel’s ghost. It is hard not to hear echoes in such buildings. The echoes became a poem.

ÌýIn another early home, the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street, I was moved by the intimacy of what I saw: Dickens’ clothes, a copy of his wife’s one book... I thought about youth, and hope. I wrote.

ÌýTravel surprises. I knew something of Mary Queen of Scots. But I had read little of her great adversary, John Knox. In Edinburgh, I read his plea for the poor: ‘Their living has been dolorous and bitter’. Then I stood in the claustrophobic chambers where he confronted Mary. I was still working on their poem when lockdown began.

ÌýAt home, I saw news from museums I had visited and loved. The Museum of Somerset, where I saw a national masterpiece, is collecting contributions for a community archive. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, where I gazed at the Pre-Raphaelites, is running a competition for lockdown art. Others, including the Charles Dickens Museum, are appealing for funds to survive.

ÌýSo I hunted out my museum poems, revised and added to them. In lockdown, I realise how important their spaces have been to me. The past lives on in our lives, often without us realising it. It is good to have a place where history is vivid, yet we have time to reflect upon it.

ÌýI am glad to have a chance to pay tribute to Britain’s museums, national and local. We need them to survive. I look forward to returning to them. And I hope Radio 4’s serious listeners will forgive me if I mention that museums, too, have coffee shops. Some are sumptuous. One of my many hopes, after this crisis, is to visit Birmingham Museum’s famous ‘Edwardian Tea Rooms’. Perhaps there will be a poem...

Image: Alison Brackenbury

Image credit: Emma Fynn

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