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[CCBC-Net] Poetry and Art
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From: Maia Cheli-Colando <maia>
Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2006 11:35:01 -0700
Random thoughts --
As a poet, and a poetry-reader, I find this conversation confusing. Does poetry need illustration? Does dance need music? Does milk need chocolate? Sometimes it seems to me that we get wrapped around ourselves in searching for some high, pure, absolute that doesn't have much to do with the life-form we are pondering.
Poetry is an art-form? Art and form are a paradox, if the form is rigid. Art-membrane might more closely reflect nature.
A poem can be one quite lovely beast when illustrated here, one way, and another creature entirely when illustrated differently somewhere else. But I don't think that a poem is ever un-illustrated. If it is spoken aloud, it is illustrated by the warmth, texture, and rhythms of the speaker, as well as by the surrounding sounds and even the "sound compression" if employed. If it is printed, the type-face, the paper weight and color, the sheen, the room at the sides and most certainly its context within other poems or prose illustrate it. (Many times, I have chosen which printing of a book I will read based on the font and the paper, for how they speak to me.)
Just as a song changes every time it is sung or heard -- singer, space and audience all making the song what it is -- so does a poem. Are we trying to hold poetry to a singularly enlightened state where the purity of the words step on a bright empty brain? As a poet -- as a writer, and for that matter, a singer -- I would be grieved to see my poem-beast placed in context where it loses what made it lively to me, but I don't see why this is different than for any other illustrated work.
Perhaps some of the difficulty arises from a belief that youth truly can't listen well, so we need to give them visual clues, to "see" for them what an active listener should hear? Or does it arise from the sense many adults have that poetry is incomprehensible and deliberately obtuse?
Is our educator culture comfortable with the idea that hearing a poem is a learned craft, a skill? That it may take many years to become a poetry-reader?
Are we okay with reading (and singing) to children with NO EXPECTED OUTCOME in any immediate sense, just that they will hear the sounds, feel the rhythm, learn the pace of poem-story that will someday allow them to walk other paths in their brain if they so choose? Or do we read to them, or have them read, requiring a quick turn-around product? Do perhaps some folks sub in pictures to produce the appearance of an immediate (measurable, no child left behind) result?
I'm all for milk in my milk and chocolate in my milk. :) I'm awfully picky about both the chocolate and milk, though. Yes, a dance danced in silence can be a most profound thing... that can bring you past weeping when a lone flute sweeps in lightly beneath the dancer. I think it's a mistake to see any form as pure, and frozen, alone -- doesn't it die then?
Maia
Received on Sat 08 Apr 2006 01:35:01 PM CDT
Date: Sat, 08 Apr 2006 11:35:01 -0700
Random thoughts --
As a poet, and a poetry-reader, I find this conversation confusing. Does poetry need illustration? Does dance need music? Does milk need chocolate? Sometimes it seems to me that we get wrapped around ourselves in searching for some high, pure, absolute that doesn't have much to do with the life-form we are pondering.
Poetry is an art-form? Art and form are a paradox, if the form is rigid. Art-membrane might more closely reflect nature.
A poem can be one quite lovely beast when illustrated here, one way, and another creature entirely when illustrated differently somewhere else. But I don't think that a poem is ever un-illustrated. If it is spoken aloud, it is illustrated by the warmth, texture, and rhythms of the speaker, as well as by the surrounding sounds and even the "sound compression" if employed. If it is printed, the type-face, the paper weight and color, the sheen, the room at the sides and most certainly its context within other poems or prose illustrate it. (Many times, I have chosen which printing of a book I will read based on the font and the paper, for how they speak to me.)
Just as a song changes every time it is sung or heard -- singer, space and audience all making the song what it is -- so does a poem. Are we trying to hold poetry to a singularly enlightened state where the purity of the words step on a bright empty brain? As a poet -- as a writer, and for that matter, a singer -- I would be grieved to see my poem-beast placed in context where it loses what made it lively to me, but I don't see why this is different than for any other illustrated work.
Perhaps some of the difficulty arises from a belief that youth truly can't listen well, so we need to give them visual clues, to "see" for them what an active listener should hear? Or does it arise from the sense many adults have that poetry is incomprehensible and deliberately obtuse?
Is our educator culture comfortable with the idea that hearing a poem is a learned craft, a skill? That it may take many years to become a poetry-reader?
Are we okay with reading (and singing) to children with NO EXPECTED OUTCOME in any immediate sense, just that they will hear the sounds, feel the rhythm, learn the pace of poem-story that will someday allow them to walk other paths in their brain if they so choose? Or do we read to them, or have them read, requiring a quick turn-around product? Do perhaps some folks sub in pictures to produce the appearance of an immediate (measurable, no child left behind) result?
I'm all for milk in my milk and chocolate in my milk. :) I'm awfully picky about both the chocolate and milk, though. Yes, a dance danced in silence can be a most profound thing... that can bring you past weeping when a lone flute sweeps in lightly beneath the dancer. I think it's a mistake to see any form as pure, and frozen, alone -- doesn't it die then?
Maia
Received on Sat 08 Apr 2006 01:35:01 PM CDT
