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January 22, 2008
Poetry...poatry?
So, we've been talking about boundaries a lot, but I want to take kind of a different spin on boundaries and the whole idea of poems. I am still having difficulty accepting the whole greatness factor of Limited Fork Poetics. I don't know if it's just because I'm not connecting with the teacher's video "poams," but I still strongly feel that poetry is made more beautiful and more widely open to interpretation when in the written form. I tried watching the "Snowmen" video poam, but was so distracted by what seemed to me to be random images and tampered audio recordings, that I could barely focus on listening to the actual words behind all the electronically-generated content. When I finally realized that the script of the video was none other than the written poem in Tokyo Butter, I quickly turned off the movie and referenced the book. I guess in the teacher's favor, I didn't much understand the written poem either, but was at least able to direct all my attention to trying to understand it, rather than having to fight with the technological distractions of the video. I guess I'm just frustrated. I feel like the discourse between students and teacher in this class is being muddled by an excess. Instead of just explaining a simple concept in straight English, I feel like complex language and random tangents are complicating what should be a simple exchange of information. For example, take this excerpt for Professor Moss' blog:
Snow falls, and often (more in the past than now outside of constructions in my mind) an impulse to interact, to collaborate with snow is not overcome, and, given a suitable consistency of the snow for the making of snow people, a community of snow people would populate my yard,
Instead of just saying "I don't really have as big of a desire as I used to to make snowmen when it snows," she complicates a simple declaration with ornate language, inappropriate in the context of this discussion.
I agree with your end goal, Professor--to more accurately dissect and understand the surrounding world and thus transmit that understanding to others through the manipulation of words, sounds, pictures, etc. In fact, it seems as if Amado Nervo (a scholar cited in one of my Latin American Poetry class readings), agrees as well when he says that "that to continue singing to the sea, to the mountain, to the sky in that way, in a rough manner, without contemplating their tenuous and infinite marvelous structures, their extremely varied modes of being, their innumerable shades and the miraculous intertwining of their secret affinities, is to offend the sky, the sea and the mountains (Gwen Kirkpatrick, The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo, p. 46)." That is, to more fully comprehend the complexities of nature and life, it is necessary to participate in an in depth introspection that will allow each person to make external connections and realizations that only can be transmitted to another through words.
To challenge that notion is the whole idea of the concept of language as a barrier in itself:
The poet, by using as his material the world's form of exchange, enters into a problematic and paradoxical relationship to it. The poet deals with worldly materials but seeks to transcend them. On a certain level, this refusal to use words for their practical exchange value, or communicative usage, deprives the poet of an active participatory function in external reality. ~Gwen Kirkpatrick, The Dissonant Legacy of Modernismo, p. 46
This being said, and the challenges of poetry being pronounced, I will agree with both the professor and my Spanish coursepack once again:
One must possess, above all, a rich language, superlatively rich, to such an extreme that no emotion remains without its real and true expression. A rich language, and above all, one's own language. ~Lugones as cited in Kirkpatrick, p. 49
To me, this passage is beautiful. To think that every contour of human understanding and feeling has the ability to be expressed through words is exasperatingly beautiful. I don't know if I can completely agree with it, but in an idealistic sense, it's perfect.
On a side note, if I succeed in transmitting seemingly incommunicable emotions through poetry this semester, I think I have found a subject matter with which to proceed. In the past couple of days, I have been lucky enough to take part in some of my favorite activities, and found myself contemplating the resulting joy that overtakes me when I'm involved in something that I love. It's almost as if I'm transported to another world...an almost heaven-like existence on earth for those few fortunate moments when the ugliness of this world disappears. I want to share that with everyone, or at least to encourage them to revel in that overwhelming feeling of contentment and gratefulness.
Posted by thulyk at January 22, 2008 06:09 PM
Comments
Hm; I'm insterested in knowing more about the fight with technological distractions --all of which are part of the video poam attributes, part of what can be read, part of what is available for the construction of doors, windows,
part of which asks for/assumes other ways of reading/perceiving;
in its presentations seeks other configurations of framing, invites questions for what it means for apparent coexistence to be in progress.
Before there is any sound in the video poam, there is text framing the video poam as "simultaneity studies," which can be used as entry points (and not just exit points).
What are the intersections, forced or not, between text and images, images text forms in the mind and visual images of the video? What are the forms of intersection/interaction that occur? Is an ostrich culture of snowmen something volatile?
If, in this instance, there was not a smooth, uncomplicated entry of the ostrich into the culture of snowmen, why is that? which framing (sub)systems challenge/threaten the smoothness? For the ostrich and the culture of snowmen DO intersect, even if an observer feels that they should not --what are framing configurations that can consider aspects of the nature of the interactions of the elements that meet, in various ways, on various scales, in this video poam?
Limited Fork extends words to include the range of what perception processes, for visuals and sounds affect, in varying degrees, what words do, how and why words behave as they do, words existing in partnership with a range of perceptual information.
Posted by: thyliasm at March 10, 2008 01:02 PM
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