“My Bed” by Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin has been pushing boundaries since she emerged as one of the Young British Artists of the early 1980s. Prolific and controversial, she’s never been reluctant to use her personal life as inspiration for her art.
An article in the 11/3/23 New York Times Weekend Arts section reminded me of the time when Emin’s art inspired to me write a poem.
Back in 2019, I came across an article about the sale of Tracey Emin’s unmade bed. The article, which featured the click-bait title, “Tracey’s 4.3 Million Dollar Bed: Would you pay over $4 million for an unmade bed? Well, someone did,” included a photograph of a bed surrounded by the detritus of heartbreak: empty vodka bottles, used condoms, a pregnancy test, and blood-stained panties. Emin had spent four days in that bed after breaking up with a boyfriend, drinking, smoking and trying to cope. After she recovered, she looked at the bed and said, “I made that.” She decided to turn the bed into a work of art.
Something about this collection of intimate items, strewn across the floor where they presumably landed after Emin tossed them from the bed, moved me to write. A day or so after I saw the photograph, I wrote a poem about it, which I titled “Sixteen-Year-Old Unmade Bed Sells for $4.3 Million Dollars.”
I started by describing the things in the photograph. Their presence was so painfully honest, more indicative of heartbreak than any sappy love song. Here are the things—as William Carlos Williams told us years ago, “no ideas but in things”—that bear the stamp of Emin’s heartache. They told the story of this breakup in terms of the body, from the birth-control pills to the empty bottles of vodka.
The tension in the poem comes from my question about the person who bought the bed, German Count Christian Duerckheim, and why he wanted to possess this trauma-filled piece. Like me, he was moved by this work of art, so nakedly personal, so filled with the pain of a breakup. I still wonder about him. After he bought the piece, he loaned it to the Tate Museum in London, where it’s been on display ever since.
I sent the poem to the journal, Poets Reading the News, and it was published in the February 2019 issue.
Emin’s unflinching commitment to telling the truth about her life isn’t for everyone, but I find her and her art refreshing, albeit in a cold-shower way. Learning about how she uses her life for her art woke me up to the possibilities in poetry.
Tracey Emin’s “6 Lessons to Become a Successful Artist” are:
- Discipline yourself.
- Use real emotions.
- Never censor yourself.
- Defend your work.
- Be savvy with your money.
- But ALWAYS love what you do.
Not bad advice for poets either.
