Spotlight on Everyday, Ordinary Objects

I've been looking at Social Realism and have discovered that in the 1950s there was a group of painters known as the "kitchen-sink artists" - more of that later, I'm on to poetry at the moment and it seems there is a similar trend there for taking the everyday and holding it up for more focussed examination that it might ordinarily merit. The Guardian's Aidan Andrew Dun invited poets & would-be poets to write on everyday objects. The poems are about diverse things - a cigarette, a cup, the backyard, a garden fence, and yes! the kitchen sink. That final poem is here below, I don't like it particularly but one aspect of the kitchen sink to which it draws our attention is one that I want to suggest in my own work - there is some suggestion of the ebb and flow of items through the kitchen process which to me, suggests something of the theatre. When out of action in between meals, especially if they are tidy, the kithen sink is redolent of an empty stage. But when there are people in the kitchen, cups and pans the sink, ashtrays, voices and interactions going on around this central point in the kitchen; then, the characters are on stage with all the props. Looking at a tidy kitchen sink makes me think of what drama might have gone on in front of it's impervious self (the poem touches that imperviousness - "unmoved, unmoving") and also what dramas might be acted out when the characters appear again, very soon.

A grill that lets too many things slip through,
a stopper raised and lowered on command,
holding-pen for dirty plates, stray angel hair,
onion peel, potato that didn't make the cut.
Always there.
Holder of the lipsticked glass and coffeed cup,
the last recourse for burning rice, the half-gnawed bone,
the lettuce leaf, the juiceless lemon wedge.

Our meals are parsed within its gut
in greying suds with time's old gurgle and sluice ...
As water washes through to drain
the earth spins, circling liquid clockwise in its bowels
returning water to its earthly source.

But where hands scrub daily grit from skin
fill up the cup, rinse out the soiled glass,
this oblong trough of our despond
sees excess and carelessness.
And there's its dull sheen, that steel opacity, obstinate walls.
A kitchen sink's no mirror, nor a flatterer,
reflects so little of our inner selves, rejects
as it absorbs our modest shard of light.

Unmoved, unmoving witness of the messy mortal's trend,
so present, yet elusive to the end!

I have linked to the relevent page on the guardian's website, if you want to see more of the poem's you need to scroll down to Aidan Andrew Dun's workshop and click on that.