The Objectivist poets were influenced by the works of Pound and Williams, specifically the ideas set forth by Pound's creation and championing of the Imagists. Pound's work for the magazine Poetry (edited by Harriet Monroe) allowed a model for subsequent avant garde writers to accept and react against, and writers such as Zukofsky and Oppen took elements of the Imagist contribution to free verse, and rejected the seemingly elitist preoccupation with mythology, classicism and intertextuality.
Zukofsky edited a manifesto for his poetic aesthetic aims throughout the entirety of his career, but it would be fair to say that the Objectivist poets were connected by a shared artistic ambition; Objectivist poetry was to be conceptional, in that it brought in many ideas and motives, and set purpose and meaning ahead of the works themselves. Objectivists were to see the poem as an object, as a construction, and a finished work should be secondary to this origin. Following precedents of the avant garde movement, an Objectivist should refuse the lyrical Poetic 'I', setting the poet's persona aside, and taking a theoretical focus, to deliberately astue a human connection. Reader engagement was to be challenged, as poetry would be unconcerned with narrative, focusing instead on language as a tool for this construction.
So what was the purpose, or reason behind, this ideology of the craft of poetry? The objectivist sought to show an object's true essence; that is, to showcase something as it truly is, rather than how you perceive it. The way I imagined it was that there is a universal, objective world, which everyone views from behind a veil of subjectivity. The Objectivists sought to show the reader something in the way it would be seen if that veil had been lifted, simultaneously showcasing the impossibility that it never can be. For the problem lies in the fact that this subjective veil is a construct of language. Language is the way that we see the world, and makes up our perception of it, because every word holds within it certain connotations.
Your understanding is made up from language, because it brings you into form, and gives you a form to fit things into. When you were a child, it would be fair to say that your memories started when you gained the ability to articulate your vision of things into descriptives. When this has been grasped you can truly connect to the world, as this subjective veil of language allows you to understand things, to fit them into some sort of framework and assert their qualities with signifiers.
Objectivist poets were aware of this inability to show the world without our veil, because language is ultimately a cage. You can try and strip back the language, to reduce it and make it clinical, but no matter how much you do this, you can never escape its signifiers - you will always attach connotations to the simplest of poems, and thus construct a narrative. In effect, you can reduce, but never be truly reductive.
To combat this, poets such as Zukofsky played with a technique called 'homophony', to interrupt our apprehensions, or preconceptions brought about by these connotations, by translating from how words sound and look from one language to another. A way to stop signification is to create new words, and use the textures of sound, layout and poetic construction to make a literary work not dependent on meaning from language.
One may ask why the poem, as a form, is used as a vehicle for this. Zukofsky wrote that poetry is good, because it calls attention to it's form and structure, in its artificiality. There is nothing inherently natural about a sonnet, for example. It is a work, like a sculpture, that has been carefully made, it is an object in that it is the literal craft of language, of language being used as a tool to make something beautiful within the restrictions of a set form (14 lines, with alternating ABAB rhyme scheme, usually ending in a couplet, normally with a romantic subject).
Poems invite discussion, whereas philosophy seeks to answer questions. Poetry is therefore closer to truth than truth itself, as it makes no assertions that it is true, which would only make it false. Grand Narratives such as religion, science and marxism, that seek to do this, are broken down, and subjectivism reigns instead. In this way, poetry is a microcosm of the world, for if you can understand how a poem works, you can understand how the world works. Why? because by calling attention to its own artificiality, it simultaneously does so to the world around it. This subjective veil of language causes the world to be a construction by many artists, we only get a picture of the world when, like building blocks, we arrange all of these perspectives of the world together, enabling us to see it in its entirety. This idea that we live in a world of fragments sets this manifesto in a postmodern framework.
And so, the resultant homphonic poetry, which seeks to challenge our preconceptions, is like nothing we have seen before. This is deliberate. Much like Picasso's artistic career, the technical lessons of poetry had to be learnt before they could be broken, for it is difficult to react with any merit when you are ignorant of what you are reacting against.
Members of our seminar group felt that works created from this movement did not constitute poetry, and as much as I didn't enjoy the poems themselves, I enjoyed the ideas behind them, which according to the Objectivist manifesto is the most important part of the eventual product anyway. I feel that the fragmented subjectivist elements of the manifesto correlate to my own views of poetry as a form of connection, and though the poems produced have no points of human touch, the ideas behind them do. By interrupting traditional concepts of perception, the objectivists challenged the reader to see the world in a new way, to see language in a new way, and to promote it as a tool for connection. The beauty of the world can be viewed through many eyes, and the world belongs, in this sense, to everyone. If these fragmented, personal perspectives replace an overarching, all encompassing but singular narrative, the world can only be seen in a richer, deeper entirety, and this promotes reason and value for the study of the English language, as the creator of the subjective veils which allow these contributory perceptions.
Friday, 11 February 2011
A lesson in Ekphrasis
See the tiny legs near the boat to the right of the painting? That's Icarus - The Greek fellow who was overambitious with his wings of wax. He flew too close to the sun, melting his malleable feathers and drowning in the sea. Wikipedia, the ever reliable source (Cringe) describes Ekphrasis as "the graphic, often dramatic description of a visual work of art. In ancient times it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name." In today's context, it is the translation of the visual to the verbal, or the image to the writing, and our task in seminar was a suitably dramatic description of the above work of art, in the written style of William Carlos Williams. Despite my previous aquiescence that anyone could write like he did, I found the exercise surprisingly difficult. My own past ventures into the field of creative writing preferred a more florid, archaic style, and I found it difficult to reduce the language without being reductive of the meaning. The hot sun beats down
Ships enter port
Admiral's hats observe
Woollen sheep.
So much life.
A splash in the sea
I find my effort cringeworthy, but it has been faithfully reproduced from my scrap of ten minute workshopped paper to prove the following:
1) WCW's style is not to be mocked(!) because
2) It's harder than it looks.
My creative slant was similar to WCW's own poem (Titled: 'Landscape, With the Fall of Icarus'), and that of the original painting Pieter Bruegel - That an event so subjectively monumental is so insignificant to others. Someone can be literally drowning, and yet not attract any attention.
It was interesting that when I was searching for the above image, google provided a few 'cropped' versions of Bruegel's paintings, where the middle section, focussing on the people in the foreground, made the entirety of the image. The ship to the right, under which lies Icarus' flailing leg, and the integral, though not necessarily most visually central, theme is altogether removed (Making the painting, just 'landscape', surely?)
I played with punctutation, hoping to hint at an ambiguity with a lack of a culminating full stop, in a similar way to that of WCW. Though I didn't do this with a particular meaning in mind, I thought that if it was left open, a reader would speculate a purpose or reason, creating a welcomed personal engagement, much like the lack of capitalisation at the start of The Red Wheelbarrow. The lines
'So much life.
A splash in the sea'
are set in juxtaposition, to show that the focus in the image is that of vitality, as opposed to the dying Icarus, who represents mortality. The first line introduces the 'hot sun', bringing the poem full circle, with the resultant 'splash in the sea', showing that even though both Cause and Effect are present, they are not the main visual focus. For, with this group of poets, the image is the most important element of the poem.
The language is simple, to mirror Williams' dislike for Pound and Eliot's academic elitism and allusions to foreign languages. My choice of the word 'woollen' for the description of sheep is because it is almost ononmatopoeic, in both its simplicity and nostalgic pastoral connotations.
The language is simple, to mirror Williams' dislike for Pound and Eliot's academic elitism and allusions to foreign languages. My choice of the word 'woollen' for the description of sheep is because it is almost ononmatopoeic, in both its simplicity and nostalgic pastoral connotations.
Tuesday, 1 February 2011
Modernism and Phenomenolgy
Phenomenology refers to the way that we view the world through our perceptions of it; it is an empirical connection, a sensory observation and analysis of what physically exists. The philosopher Immanuel Kant creates a distinction between two principle ideas:
The Phenomena : The world of things, the material and the substantial.
The Noumena : The world of thoughts, of concepts and ideas, and how we view the physical world through our own mental construction.
At first I found this distinction quite difficult, "The World" is all encompassing and I found it hard to divide it into two camps of 'thoughts' and 'things'. I could not understand how one could view the world as Isherwood's protagonist in Goodbye to Berlin, as "a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking", surely it is impossible to simply view the world without an emotional, and therefore mental connection. Antoine De Saint Exupery wrote, in The Little Prince, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye", an opinion that I have always championed.
John Gould Fletcher disliked imagist poetry because of its lack of substance and human touch. I agree, and wonder whether this best describes my own dislike for the poetry of this week's session.
Our focus was the works of William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and August Kleinzahler, poets who use simple language and informal structures to document the world they see, and their responses to it, without dressing things up into a beautiful grand narrative.
Though this poetic manifesto is admirable, I see no beauty in the works such as WCW's 'The Red Wheelbarrow', cited as his 'masterpiece'
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams was a Doctor by profession, and so his poetic products were often the result of the scribbling of mere minutes. He began publishing poetry in 1909, yet didn't attain renown until after 1946, with his larger publication 'Patterdale', an effort enabled by his retirement. Labelled 'anti poetic', he does the opposite of what poetry normally aims for, with a focus on direct form with no concession to poetic music.
The works of the Imagists favoured clear, simple language, much like Wordsworth's manifesto to use 'the common tongue of the common man'. The majority of the imagist poets simultaneously came under the heading of 'modernist' poets, reevaluating their place in a changing world, unlike their Georgian contemporaries who happily stuck to archaic tradition. D.H Lawrence was an interesting figure, in that he contributed to Lowell's Some Imagist Poems anthology, placing him as both a Georgian and Imagist poet. The influence of imagism will go on to be seen in the works of the Objectivists, who worked in a mainly free verse form, and the Beat Poets, who defined performance poetry.
This brings us back to an earlier post, in which I questioned what makes a piece of work 'poetry'? One could make the statement that "Anyone could do that", the answer would be "But they don't", which leads us to the question, why don't people do it, and what difference does it make to culture that it exists?
I suppose the answer is that in order for cultural progress, one must sometimes be truly revolutionary, casting aside all that is 'old', in favour of what is 'new'. The old is still present, as its absence is what defines it as new. WCW hated the use of traditional structures for the sake of being traditional, and questioned how, for example a Sonnet, could fit into his everyday life. By breaking away from traditional English poetic forms and structures, he is able to write with the idiom of America, a poetic Declaration of Independence. This idea coexists with the previously mentioned manifesto of presenting things in their most pure form, without dressing them up. The result is that the subject shines in its actuality, the subject is what it is, and that is enough. An image of a red wheelbarrow, for example, is for WCW beautiful enough, without the need for literary decoration, and though this specific picture is arguably boring, the fact that the mundane can be inspirational truly is admirable.
Though I have not been favourably swayed by the poems this week, it has given me a fresh perspective on the portrayal of beauty, it has made me realise that objects are objectives, and poems are a subjective expression of perspective. Their form and use of language are tools that can be used to provide insight into this perspective, and the words chosen for this description or portrayal are not merely content, but evidence of construction.
The Phenomena : The world of things, the material and the substantial.
The Noumena : The world of thoughts, of concepts and ideas, and how we view the physical world through our own mental construction.
At first I found this distinction quite difficult, "The World" is all encompassing and I found it hard to divide it into two camps of 'thoughts' and 'things'. I could not understand how one could view the world as Isherwood's protagonist in Goodbye to Berlin, as "a camera, with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking", surely it is impossible to simply view the world without an emotional, and therefore mental connection. Antoine De Saint Exupery wrote, in The Little Prince, "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye", an opinion that I have always championed.
John Gould Fletcher disliked imagist poetry because of its lack of substance and human touch. I agree, and wonder whether this best describes my own dislike for the poetry of this week's session.
Our focus was the works of William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and August Kleinzahler, poets who use simple language and informal structures to document the world they see, and their responses to it, without dressing things up into a beautiful grand narrative.
Though this poetic manifesto is admirable, I see no beauty in the works such as WCW's 'The Red Wheelbarrow', cited as his 'masterpiece'
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.
William Carlos Williams was a Doctor by profession, and so his poetic products were often the result of the scribbling of mere minutes. He began publishing poetry in 1909, yet didn't attain renown until after 1946, with his larger publication 'Patterdale', an effort enabled by his retirement. Labelled 'anti poetic', he does the opposite of what poetry normally aims for, with a focus on direct form with no concession to poetic music.
The works of the Imagists favoured clear, simple language, much like Wordsworth's manifesto to use 'the common tongue of the common man'. The majority of the imagist poets simultaneously came under the heading of 'modernist' poets, reevaluating their place in a changing world, unlike their Georgian contemporaries who happily stuck to archaic tradition. D.H Lawrence was an interesting figure, in that he contributed to Lowell's Some Imagist Poems anthology, placing him as both a Georgian and Imagist poet. The influence of imagism will go on to be seen in the works of the Objectivists, who worked in a mainly free verse form, and the Beat Poets, who defined performance poetry.
This brings us back to an earlier post, in which I questioned what makes a piece of work 'poetry'? One could make the statement that "Anyone could do that", the answer would be "But they don't", which leads us to the question, why don't people do it, and what difference does it make to culture that it exists?
I suppose the answer is that in order for cultural progress, one must sometimes be truly revolutionary, casting aside all that is 'old', in favour of what is 'new'. The old is still present, as its absence is what defines it as new. WCW hated the use of traditional structures for the sake of being traditional, and questioned how, for example a Sonnet, could fit into his everyday life. By breaking away from traditional English poetic forms and structures, he is able to write with the idiom of America, a poetic Declaration of Independence. This idea coexists with the previously mentioned manifesto of presenting things in their most pure form, without dressing them up. The result is that the subject shines in its actuality, the subject is what it is, and that is enough. An image of a red wheelbarrow, for example, is for WCW beautiful enough, without the need for literary decoration, and though this specific picture is arguably boring, the fact that the mundane can be inspirational truly is admirable.
Though I have not been favourably swayed by the poems this week, it has given me a fresh perspective on the portrayal of beauty, it has made me realise that objects are objectives, and poems are a subjective expression of perspective. Their form and use of language are tools that can be used to provide insight into this perspective, and the words chosen for this description or portrayal are not merely content, but evidence of construction.
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