This poem’s title refers to the empiricist philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and/or to the modernist painter Francis Bacon (1909–1992). I don’t mind which—if either—the reader has in mind. As Alan Loney puts it in remake7, 'I have neither right nor competence to suggest how anyone should read my writings', and at this point, it is for you.1  In any case, a self-portrait is often an encounter with something which is at once doubly prescriptive and doubly elusive, both for its maker/encoder and for its eventual decoders. 

This pinpointing elusiveness is exemplified in Bacon’s later self-portrait painting phase, but I’ve always been interested in what his oeuvre more broadly seems to be interrogating, in terms of attempting to understand corporeality and liminality. And wow, that palette! On the other hand, I really enjoy the OG Bacon’s inductive History of Life and Death (1623), which—like Herodotus’ Histories—mingles the fruits of protean enquiry with preposterous claims (my favourite is the assertion that thrusting the stump of a newly amputated limb into a fresh animal carcass stops blood loss, since the stump will apparently start sucking blood from the body of the dead beast).2 Bacon’s investigation into the nature of carnal mortality, with its impressive insights and near misses, is a memento mori of sorts (the endeavours of our own era may one day appear in just such a light). It is both relatable, and moving, in what it reveals about the nature of human desires. 

I’d never really attempted any formal writing exercises before I encountered Martin Porter, and this poem owes something to his influence; partly in relation to his interest in formal rules (which he discusses in remake4). Here, I have followed a prompt which instructs us to feed our own name into an anagram generator and then use the result as a point of departure. I have resisted—so far—the temptation to do anything with the many outputs that contained vaginas or lasagne; but the first line of each stanza of 'Self-portrait' is an anagram of my name, a stitch in the matrix I doubt anyone will notice (this is the part of the poem that was for me, perhaps). And so we step forward, in disguises.

notes

1. I agree with Loney wholeheartedly. Any urge that writers do have to monopolise meaning is probably doomed to failure. In my performance days I often became an interested spectator: a tearful young woman averring that my poem was a commentary on her breakup with her boyfriend, a schoolteacher telling his class that my poetry was all about trees, a pervasive pregnancy rumour circulating after a reading of ‘Leda and the Swan’ at a local theatre… I think I like poems better once they have a life of their own.

2. Bacon, Francis [1623; English trans. 1638/1858]. ‘The Operation Upon the Inteneration of the Parts Which Have Become Dry, or the Softening of the Body’, History of Life and Death, in The Works of Francis Bacon. Ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, & Douglas Denon Heath. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

olivia macassey