Ekphrasis:
How words embroider, draw out, command, echo, what happens in paint? As paint is silent – by what means does a poet divine these words? The idea is to engage the senses make notes with words, brush, music so embued with vivid aliveness.
On Breughel: Hunters in the Snow : 3 poets, same picture -- and many more poems abound to capture an understanding of three hunters on the crest of a hill, overlooking a Flemish town, with the business of village life:
The idea is not merely to describe: Modern empiricism is based on an ideal of impersonal description that can provide the stability and impartiality of "the eye's plain version," "a thing apart". But readers run the risk of so stressing contemplative states and formal accomplishments that they lose the work's capacity to provide distinctive modes of felt intimacy with the actual world.
Image and imagination go gaily hand-in-hand.
Wallace Stevens (Esthetique du Mal) would abstract painting into part-whole relationships and then produce significance for those relations.
Baudelaire's numerous Salon reviews of art criticism and dedications of his poems to artists of his time, makes frequent thematic references to pictorial art in the body of various poems, especially in Les Fleurs du mal. (Baudelaire placed Delacroix in the historic canon of great masters in "Les Phares," including him with such giants as Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rubens and Goya. -- more on that another time.)
So let us look at what Berryman, Walter de la Mare and William Carlos Williams do.
All three refer to the return of three men, Berryman refers to men with poles and hounds; de la Mare to sinister spears and snuffling dogs; Williams to sturdy hunters and their pack.
Each refer to the distant village below -- for Williams, an objective pattern of skaters,
and winter-struck brush for the foreground; for de la Mare, mention of "life's mystery" which rhymes with "frozen sea" is set up by 14 lines where the even line has an O sound: below, show, go, lo, row, snow, crow. The last six lines call on all the elements of the painting, thus calling on us to look beyond -- all are in an octosyllabic lines, except "nor that slant inward infinite line" which has an extra foot, perhaps subconsciously stretching out the word "infinite."
As for Berryman, he has an anti-war ring in "the evil waste of history" which contrasts with the scene "lively with chidren". The sense of war, parallel to our unknowns – deliberately calls the spears, poles – twice. The people are "unaware"-- reflecting our incredulity as peaceful nations lie prey.
His view is peopled and alive, the three hunters, "witnessed by birds" have a mission -- and the fourth bird flies -- on the alliterative f's, with the last line escaping visually the scene sandwiched in by the descent of the hunters (and the ill-wind they carry). The alliterative "w" of While and watch, sandwich in three birds. The scansion of the last line:
Iamb / iamb, spondee / anapest and extra foot for flies.
The inner sandwich "while three" -- perhaps an idea of divine trinity -- is stopped cold in its tracks by the spondee: birds watch, with that mouthful of consonants chopping "watch".
Williams' poem does not concern itself with social or moral commentary. The title announces Hunters in the snow, but the subject is about their return with the disquieting detail of the inn-sign, a broken hinge on which a stag hangs with a crucifix between his antlers -- the lines refuse syntactic logic, as they divulge a sense of desertion, isolation, distance.
on Chagall + Robin Becker
and the multiplicity of our faces:
David/Beersheba
Chagall did a whole series of paintings based on Biblical texts: I love this one:
Marc Chagall, David on the Mount of Olives
and his David and Bathsheeba. Why this painting is called "Beersheba" which is a city and not Bathsheeba, I cannot find out. However, David, for all his love of God, did not behave well, sending off Bathsheeba's husband to the front lines and stealing her for himself.
Perhaps the problem of love, as two-headed journey -- David and his barren wife, David and Bathsheeba who eventually provides us with Solomon... this intertwining of God's plan and what happens is caught in this painting. The poem captures the complexity:
one head, two faces; red and blue angels; Janus; the double sense of terrible;
"We raise our several faces when we love --
family, village, woman, beats --
moaning in our technicolor sleep.
For him (David?) the store rooms of the heart
were never empty.
However, I am a bit lost at the next part:
...God's messengers arrived to guide
the action of the story, and we too have arrived
in time to catch the ark, leaving momentarily
through the stone arcade of Genesis
for our wild and blessed exile."
I don't see it -- this is Becker's journey --
If I were to write the poem I would whittle it:
We raise our several faces when we love --
waiting for God's messengers to arrive.
We cannot presume anything more.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Jan. 3 : Lucille Clifton
To bring in the new year, I have chosen Lucille Clifton. “In contrast to much of the poetry being written today—intellectualized lyricism characterized by an application of inductive thought to unusual images—Lucille Clifton's poems are compact and self-sufficient...Her revelations then resemble the epiphanies of childhood and early adolescence, when one's lack of preconceptions about the self allowed for brilliant slippage into the metaphysical, a glimpse into an egoless, utterly thingful and serene world." – Rita Dove
Sorrows
Blessing of the Boats
I Dream of being white
It was a dream
two versions of "Roots"
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note – Amiri Baraka
Sorrows
Blessing of the Boats
I Dream of being white
It was a dream
two versions of "Roots"
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note – Amiri Baraka
Jan. 10: Naomi Shihab Nye: Burning the Old Year/Kindness, Oppen,
One kind word can warm three winter months...
just like Naomi Shihab Nye's poems...
Kindess.
Before...
Before...
Before...
Then
Kindness does not come quickly. Emptying out to make room, understanding death, mortality, putting yourself in another's shoes, understanding "the simple breath" that kept someone else alive. There is no equivocation: kindness is the deepest thing inside next to sorrow.
"you must speak to sorrow till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth." --
She promises the magic of kindness, like a shadow or a friend.
Her other poem, Burning the Old Year is filled with lively languable, sizzle, swirling, crackle,
think celebration of absence, leaving a space... and that crackle after the blazing dies -- a possibility that is still alive.
Five poems about Poetry: Oppen -- The Gesture:
wonderful suspensions -- demanding pauses at each line --
The question is -- with a colon; with an enjambement and stanza break, ambling through two more couplets to end in a question. The question is -- has two questions attached:
apple/filth. intention-- to grasp or sell; The final time, the question is mysterious -- just what is "THAT" gesture mistaken for a style...
just like Naomi Shihab Nye's poems...
Kindess.
Before...
Before...
Before...
Then
Kindness does not come quickly. Emptying out to make room, understanding death, mortality, putting yourself in another's shoes, understanding "the simple breath" that kept someone else alive. There is no equivocation: kindness is the deepest thing inside next to sorrow.
"you must speak to sorrow till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth." --
She promises the magic of kindness, like a shadow or a friend.
Her other poem, Burning the Old Year is filled with lively languable, sizzle, swirling, crackle,
think celebration of absence, leaving a space... and that crackle after the blazing dies -- a possibility that is still alive.
Five poems about Poetry: Oppen -- The Gesture:
wonderful suspensions -- demanding pauses at each line --
The question is -- with a colon; with an enjambement and stanza break, ambling through two more couplets to end in a question. The question is -- has two questions attached:
apple/filth. intention-- to grasp or sell; The final time, the question is mysterious -- just what is "THAT" gesture mistaken for a style...
O Pen 1/24-- Hoagland, Voyage, 2 by Shapiro, Lora on the Telephone, Kipling
Shapiro’s “ to a muse” was about writer’s block; “Give me a first lie, you who are far away. “ possibility (and longing)
“A student laughs. I died once. Red is gray.” back to writer’s block – short choppy sentences.
a little possibility — and the jays’ shrill seem to add to the annoyance. More a diary piece.
Desire Lines: we made fun of it. Who cares about the “I” who can see, cannot and namedrops?
For the Hoagland — this had a good 1/2 discussion — fabulous poem — an Odyssey with unusual details --
The first two stanzas — delightful — the imbedded voyage in a book about voyages; the pulse of the line, the enjambements... (see below)
Doesn’t matter that metaphor messy? Set up: book. characters that die makes us
Voyage -- by Tony Hoagland
I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on
in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful. too ironic like ending?
sweet? death set up
—And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, "I'm only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold." mundane details;
Sunset like a burning wagon train unusual
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe trying too hard. vs. relationship
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage—
relationship with himself; with life.
And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass unusual
I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,
The sunset like a burning wagon train (the power of words to evoke connotations — wild west, indians, menace, fire)
the sunrise, less fresh, (overworked perhaps) as a cantaloupe, the crazy detail of the “blue” parka in chatty colloquial dialogue, after spreading out a map — good irony
As for the ending : troubling, perhaps
a little too clever…
redemption…
Made a few people think of Stanley Kunitz : the Layers – next chapter in our transformation
seasons, time, chronology… emotional layers…
“You can’t go home again” – cliché…
We enjoy punishment in fiction
Wherever you are, there you aare.
choosing the level of interconnectiveness.
do we know what we’re looking for?
Lorca: looking at the title: The Poet Speaks to His Beloved on the Telephone --
We talked about how the title serves. I like the notes about the image of the wooden booth or coffin, the way to translate a physical situation to an emotional with the voice... All in the condensed form of a sonnet...
Kipling: the form gives a sense of a liturgy... And the “not this time” insinuated in “not this tide” which is coupled with
tidings…
“A student laughs. I died once. Red is gray.” back to writer’s block – short choppy sentences.
a little possibility — and the jays’ shrill seem to add to the annoyance. More a diary piece.
Desire Lines: we made fun of it. Who cares about the “I” who can see, cannot and namedrops?
For the Hoagland — this had a good 1/2 discussion — fabulous poem — an Odyssey with unusual details --
The first two stanzas — delightful — the imbedded voyage in a book about voyages; the pulse of the line, the enjambements... (see below)
Doesn’t matter that metaphor messy? Set up: book. characters that die makes us
Voyage -- by Tony Hoagland
I feel as if we opened a book about great ocean voyages
and found ourselves on a great ocean voyage:
sailing through December, around the horn of Christmas
and into the January Sea, and sailing on and on
in a novel without a moral but one in which
all the characters who died in the middle chapters
make the sunsets near the book's end more beautiful. too ironic like ending?
sweet? death set up
—And someone is spreading a map upon a table,
and someone is hanging a lantern from the stern,
and someone else says, "I'm only sorry
that I forgot my blue parka; It's turning cold." mundane details;
Sunset like a burning wagon train unusual
Sunrise like a dish of cantaloupe trying too hard. vs. relationship
Clouds like two armies clashing in the sky;
Icebergs and tropical storms,
That's the kind of thing that happens on our ocean voyage—
relationship with himself; with life.
And in one of the chapters I was blinded by love
And in another, anger made us sick like swallowed glass unusual
I lay in my bunk and slept for so long,
The sunset like a burning wagon train (the power of words to evoke connotations — wild west, indians, menace, fire)
the sunrise, less fresh, (overworked perhaps) as a cantaloupe, the crazy detail of the “blue” parka in chatty colloquial dialogue, after spreading out a map — good irony
As for the ending : troubling, perhaps
a little too clever…
redemption…
Made a few people think of Stanley Kunitz : the Layers – next chapter in our transformation
seasons, time, chronology… emotional layers…
“You can’t go home again” – cliché…
We enjoy punishment in fiction
Wherever you are, there you aare.
choosing the level of interconnectiveness.
do we know what we’re looking for?
Lorca: looking at the title: The Poet Speaks to His Beloved on the Telephone --
We talked about how the title serves. I like the notes about the image of the wooden booth or coffin, the way to translate a physical situation to an emotional with the voice... All in the condensed form of a sonnet...
Kipling: the form gives a sense of a liturgy... And the “not this time” insinuated in “not this tide” which is coupled with
tidings…
Sunday, January 16, 2011
3 books... Endo, Brooks and Hollander
Shusaku Endo : Deep River
The cast of characters, interwoven into hints of Japan, France, India, with of a bit of French literature (Therese Desqueroux, looking for what lies in the depths of her heart) ), Christianity, Hinduism, and importance of the Ganges, all search for something larger than themselves. For Isobe, it is understanding there is such a fundamental difference between "being alive and truly living" and in following his wife's request to look for her reincarnation, the reader can join him to think about what can be embraced in a marriage; For Mitsuko Naruse and her confused relationship to Otsu, we can observe disbelief and belief, lack of faith, and faith. For Kiguchi, we understand the horrors of war. As Mitsuko tell him, "the Ganges is a deep river, so deep, it's not just for the Hindus for everyone." And so at Varanasi, where the characters end up, the deep river takes the dead, embracing everything about mankind, and carries them away. Will Otsu be taken there? Will someone else do his job of carrying those too weak to reach the river themselves? Will the guide, Enami feel differently about being a Japanese guide in India? And for us, how do we understand the tension as creation pulls at destruction, life at death?
People of the Book : Geraldine Brooks
on tape...
I want to READ this book now... not hear it on tape.
Intricate weaving of the "People of the Book" : Christians Jews, Persians... and Muslim acceptance... the tension of modern "saving" of a book, that tells the story of the people who created it, how it traveled through time and places to end up in Bosnia.
"As she explains in an afterword, little is known about this book, except that it has been saved from destruction on at least three occasions: twice by Muslims and once by a Roman Catholic priest. Building on these fragments of information, Brooks has created a fictional history that moves to Sarajevo in 1940, then back to late-19th-century Vienna, 15th-century Venice, Catalonia during the Spanish Inquisition and finally Seville in 1480, the new home of the artist responsible for the Haggadah’s illuminations.
The history of this holy book is a bloody one, bound with brutality and humiliation. Families who protect it are torn apart; the book itself is plundered to pay for a questionable medical cure, then lost in a game of chance. A particularly disturbing scene occurs during the Inquisition in a grotesquely named “place of relaxation” where those accused of heresy by the Spanish authorities are tortured".
I agree with the critic -- too much melodrama -- the mother/daughter relationship, the idea of a father artist the daughter book saver, with the Gerald Manley Hopkins
"What I do is me. For that I came."
What is our life's work?
**
John Hollander : The Gazer's Spirit
A LONG list of ecphrastic poems Hollander doesn't address is at the end.
The poems he chooses that speak to silent works of art
Jacopo Sadoleto : on the Statue of Laocoon
Pietro Aretino: Sonnet on Titian: Portrait of Francesco Maria Della Rovere, Duke of Urbino
Ben Jonson: The Mind of the frontispiece to a book! Renold Elstrack, Engraved title pge of sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World.
Sir Richard Lovelace: to my worthy friend Mr. Peter Lilly: Sir Peter Lely: Charles I and the Duke of York.
Samuel Roger: To the fragment of a statue of Hercules: Torso.
Washington Allston: On the group of the three Angels before the tent of Abraham, but Rafaelle, in the Vatican.
George Gordon, Lord Byron. from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage... canto 4: Apollo Belvedere.
Shelley: on the Medusa of da Vinci -- no longer attributed to Leonardo.
Joseph Rodman Drake: The National Painting. John Trumbull, the Declaration of Independence.
Rosetti: for our Lady of the Rocks: da Vinci
and 2 more pages.
Writings from people in the 15th century until the 20th.
Whoever writes about writing will be a sort of triple fool:
Question the statue, and receive answer. And then publish the account!
The cast of characters, interwoven into hints of Japan, France, India, with of a bit of French literature (Therese Desqueroux, looking for what lies in the depths of her heart) ), Christianity, Hinduism, and importance of the Ganges, all search for something larger than themselves. For Isobe, it is understanding there is such a fundamental difference between "being alive and truly living" and in following his wife's request to look for her reincarnation, the reader can join him to think about what can be embraced in a marriage; For Mitsuko Naruse and her confused relationship to Otsu, we can observe disbelief and belief, lack of faith, and faith. For Kiguchi, we understand the horrors of war. As Mitsuko tell him, "the Ganges is a deep river, so deep, it's not just for the Hindus for everyone." And so at Varanasi, where the characters end up, the deep river takes the dead, embracing everything about mankind, and carries them away. Will Otsu be taken there? Will someone else do his job of carrying those too weak to reach the river themselves? Will the guide, Enami feel differently about being a Japanese guide in India? And for us, how do we understand the tension as creation pulls at destruction, life at death?
People of the Book : Geraldine Brooks
on tape...
I want to READ this book now... not hear it on tape.
Intricate weaving of the "People of the Book" : Christians Jews, Persians... and Muslim acceptance... the tension of modern "saving" of a book, that tells the story of the people who created it, how it traveled through time and places to end up in Bosnia.
"As she explains in an afterword, little is known about this book, except that it has been saved from destruction on at least three occasions: twice by Muslims and once by a Roman Catholic priest. Building on these fragments of information, Brooks has created a fictional history that moves to Sarajevo in 1940, then back to late-19th-century Vienna, 15th-century Venice, Catalonia during the Spanish Inquisition and finally Seville in 1480, the new home of the artist responsible for the Haggadah’s illuminations.
The history of this holy book is a bloody one, bound with brutality and humiliation. Families who protect it are torn apart; the book itself is plundered to pay for a questionable medical cure, then lost in a game of chance. A particularly disturbing scene occurs during the Inquisition in a grotesquely named “place of relaxation” where those accused of heresy by the Spanish authorities are tortured".
I agree with the critic -- too much melodrama -- the mother/daughter relationship, the idea of a father artist the daughter book saver, with the Gerald Manley Hopkins
"What I do is me. For that I came."
What is our life's work?
**
John Hollander : The Gazer's Spirit
A LONG list of ecphrastic poems Hollander doesn't address is at the end.
The poems he chooses that speak to silent works of art
Jacopo Sadoleto : on the Statue of Laocoon
Pietro Aretino: Sonnet on Titian: Portrait of Francesco Maria Della Rovere, Duke of Urbino
Ben Jonson: The Mind of the frontispiece to a book! Renold Elstrack, Engraved title pge of sir Walter Ralegh's History of the World.
Sir Richard Lovelace: to my worthy friend Mr. Peter Lilly: Sir Peter Lely: Charles I and the Duke of York.
Samuel Roger: To the fragment of a statue of Hercules: Torso.
Washington Allston: On the group of the three Angels before the tent of Abraham, but Rafaelle, in the Vatican.
George Gordon, Lord Byron. from Childe Harold's Pilgrimage... canto 4: Apollo Belvedere.
Shelley: on the Medusa of da Vinci -- no longer attributed to Leonardo.
Joseph Rodman Drake: The National Painting. John Trumbull, the Declaration of Independence.
Rosetti: for our Lady of the Rocks: da Vinci
and 2 more pages.
Writings from people in the 15th century until the 20th.
Whoever writes about writing will be a sort of triple fool:
Question the statue, and receive answer. And then publish the account!
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