The Art of Poetry: final thoughts....

I find Poetry difficult to understand. It really is a personal interpretation of the lines which are affected by your own life experiences and understandings. So is there ever a 'wrong' interpretaton?

Poetry is about expression and is an opportunity to delve into yourself and explore your feelings and emotions.

Andre Breton, 1924, photo booth shot.


Recently I visited the Surrealism: The Poetry of Dreams exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery. It was here that I learned that this artistic movement was founded by a French writer and poet; André Breton. André Breton decided (along with the Dadaists) that rational thought was at fault for the world’s problems and that change could only come about through the subconscious mind.

The one thing I now really appreciate about poetry is its effect upon Visual Art and vise-versa. Being an Visual Arts student this subject has helped to further my knowledge and understanding abut the different eras; from Romantic to Contemporary.

Throughout the blog I have included some pictures of art that have helped me to better understand my research on these periods from a Visual Arts perspective.

I am also currently completing my Bachelor of Learning Management and I have also found this very uselful as a cross curricular reference that I can incorporate in my Visual Arts and English lesson plans.

Why am I not a Painter?



'Sardines', Michael Goldburg, 1955, inspired O'Hara's 'Orange'.

Many contemporary poems in this week's selection seem to focus on concerns (eg the essential self) and forms (eg the sonnet, the elegy) which pre-date modernism. Discuss drawing on a number of poems/poets.
O'Hara's work is a first person narrative poem, conversational and casual in tone. "Why I Am Not a Painter (1957)," in fact, like many of O'Hara's poems, reads as if O'Hara had simply improvised it off the top of his head. Inspiration from the arts- visual arts.

"Why am I not a Painter" utube link.

Koch’s ‘Permanently (1961)’ is the same in that it uses a narrative, conversational and casual tone. It is quite quirky, drawing inspiration from the arts- literature.

A Wilbur poem is insightful and enjoyable, humorous and touching. He avoids any grand historical or hysterical private adventures in his poems, believing that the lyric poem was never intended to bear such weight. “Junk” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, each line is alliterated and broken into two halves, the second of which is indented, making each full line two-tiered.

Howard Nemerov has a reputation for his poems being witty and playful in their form.

Reference:

thecourthostess, 2010, "Why am I not a Painter", http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3LtDb0Jgik

Alec Derwent Hope, 'Australia', published 1972.

'Death of Constable Scanlon', Sidney Nolan, 1946, ripolin on board.

Hope's ‘Australia’ is characterised by the kind of counter-nationalistic ambivalence seen in the poetry of E. E. Cummings ‘next to of course god America I’ or Lawrence's ‘The English Are So Nice!’. Discuss.

A D Hope ‘Australia’.
A Nation of trees, drab green and desolate grey
In the field uniform of modern wars,
Darkens her hills, those endless, outstretched paws
Of Sphinx demolished or stone lion worn away.

They call her a young country, but they lie:
She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
Still tender but within the womb is dry.

Without songs, architecture, history:
The emotions and superstitions of younger lands,
Her rivers of water drown among inland sands,
The river of her immense stupidity

Floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth.
In them at last the ultimate men arrive
Whose boast is not: ‘we live’ but ‘we survive’,
A type who will inhabit the dying earth.

And her five cities, like five teaming sores,
Each drains her: a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores.

Yet there are some like me turn gladly home
From the lush jungle of modern thought, to find
The Arabian desert of the human mind,
Hoping, if still from the deserts the prophets come,

Such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare
Springs in that waste, some spirit which escapes
The learned doubt, the chatter of cultured apes
Which is called civilization over there.

Hope’s ‘Australia’ is in opposition to the devotion to the interest of Australian as a culture and nation. In the first five stanzas, his description of the land is ‘drab, desolate, endless, worn away, an empty dying earth with teaming sores for cities populated by criminal second hand Europeans’.
He creates an image of an old country, ‘a woman beyond her change of life’ with a ‘dry womb’, a land in which you cannot live but merely survive. He calls Australia’s people stupid and devoid of culture. He is condemning the state of Australia’s modern culture. This description is horrible, however he then opposes the feelings and attitudes towards Australia in the last two stanzas, admitting he turns ‘gladly’ away from the modern thoughts of the ‘chattering cultured apes’ from ‘civilisation over there’ (the cities dotted along Australia’s coastline). This juxtaposition is a common feature of satirical writing, of which Hope is best known for. His initial negative descriptions of Australia’s features are in fact the very things that the artist approves of. Hope’s link to Modernist poetry is in his satirical slant, its greater purpose to draw attention to shame individuals and society into improvement; to be proud of our poetry, music, literature, song and dance, our people, climate, vastness and to build a culture that fits this uniqueness.

T.S. Elliot & Ezra Pound, 1920's.



Piet Mondrian, Gray Tree, 1912.

Although Imagism isolates objects through the use of what Ezra Pound called ‘luminous details’, Pound’s Ideogrammic method of comparing concrete instances to express an abstraction, such as representing the abstract concept of ‘red’ with concrete imagery of ‘rose’ or, ‘cherry’, is similar to Cubism’s manner of synthesizing multiple perspectives into a single image.





Compare and contrast two poets from the Modernist Era.

Similar subject in title only, both poems are considered to mark the beginning of their careers as influential poets. Both poets are American born however moved to Britain and became known as the forefathers of the Modernist poetry movement. Many art lovers in London in the 1910s were interested in art that was outwardly attractive but not deeply beautiful, all style and no content, immediately pleasing but not enduringly rewarding, and both of these poems seems to deal with the poets ‘growing up’ and profound changes in their poetry due to world events (WW1). They focused less on imagery (Romantic era) and more on clear sharp language to present values in directness, presentation and economy of language. Both poets have experimented with poetic forms throughout the structure of their poems, which is quintessential to the poetry of the Modernists and the Imagists.

T. S. Eliot: 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock', 1920.
· Dramatic monologue.
· A stream of consciousness.
· Seems to be full of frustration- sexual, life, society.
· Not sure who the author is talking to (someone else or himself?).
· A theme of time span throughout the poem- a single day.

Ezra Pound: 'Hugh Selwyn Mauberley', 1920.
· Autobiography.
· Deals with large time period.