All entries for March 2006

W.B. Yeats

The poor fellow looks a little gormless in most of the photos I've found of him, but that's by no means a judgement of character!

from A General Introduction for my Work

This essay is personal compared to Pound's objective essay outlining his fundemental principles for anyone writing poetry. Nonetheless, there are moments which I thought worth relaying to you.

A poet writes always of his personal life, in his finest work out of its tragedy, whatever it be, remorse, lost love, or mere loneliness; he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table, there is always phantasmagoria…He is part of his own phantasmagoria.

Yeats steeped himself in classical literature and was of the belief that literature should show the mark of the traditions that came before it. He was also a spiritual man and pursude various branches of mysticism throughout his life. This inevitable affected his writing and the following quote is an example of hoe he uses mystical influence to express his beliefs about the tradition of literature:

'When mind is lost in the light of the Self,' says the Prashna Upanishad, 'it dreams no more; still in the body it is lost in happiness.' 'A wise man seek in Self,' says the Chandogya Upanishad, 'those that are alive and those that are dead and gets what the world cannot give.' The world knows nothing because it has made nothing, we know everything because we have made everything.

and

I am a crowd. I am a lonely man. I am nothing.

The second quote is particularly resonant of mysticism. I recall a Sufi saying: 'One should be alone in the crowd.' It means to live a life of devotion to God among society, not in seclusion. Similarly, Yeats says that one should write new poetry in the context of literary tradition, not by introducing "originality" that is not connected to anything that has come before.

…romantic literature…had one quality I admired and admire: they were not separated or individual men; they spoke or tried to speak out of a people to a people; behind them stretched the generations.

I hated and still hate with an every drowing hatred the literature of the point of view. I wanted…to get back to Homer…I wanted to cry and all men cried, to laugh as all men laughed…

Style is almost unconscious. I know what I have tred to do, little what I have done.

This quote makes me hark back to my previous argument about criticism – how reliable is it that we take the words of critics for granted when even the author himself did not know exactly what it was that he had written? Sometimes critics seem to me to be more like psychoanalysts than literary analysts, deducing what the authors subconscious wrote rather than what the author was conscious of writing. Just a thought.

I tried to make the language of poetry coincide with that of passionate, normal speech. I wanted to write in whatever language comes most naturally when we soliloquise, as I do all day long, upon the events of our own lives or of any life where we can see ourselves for the moment…It was a long time before I had made a language to my liking.

With regards to the importance of form:

…all that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.

'Tragedy must be a joy to the man who dies.' …neither scholars nor the populace have sung or read anything generation after generation because of its pain. The maid of honour whose tragedy they sing must be lifted out of history with timeless pattern…imagination must dance, must be carried befond feeling into the aboriginal ice.

When I speak blank verse and analyse my feelings, I stand at a moment of history when instinct, its traditional songs and dances, its general agreement, is of the past. I have been cast up out of the whale's belly though I still remember the sound and sway that came from beyond its ribs…The contrapuntal structure of the verse combines the past and present.

What moves me and my hearer is a vivid speech that had no laws except that it must not exorcise the ghostly voice. I am awake and asleep, at my moment of revelation, self-possessed in self-surrender; there is no rhyme, no echo of the beaten drum, the dancing foot, that would overset my balance.

: 26 Mar 2006 16:18 |  Tags: Practiceofpoetry Quotes |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Arms

Writing about web page http://dura.cell.free.fr/home/swf/arms12.swf

: 25 Mar 2006 21:05 |  Tags: Animation |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Strong Words

I've started to read Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry for my Practice of Poetry exam, and I'm enjoying it. It instructs wisely, confirms and questions much of what I believe/think about poetry and the practice of writing it, and I've decided to blog up extracts of the essays that particularly speak to me.

So, I'll begin with Ezra Pound.
from A Retrospect

In this essay, Pound lays down his fundemental 'rules' for writing poetry. His definitive metaphor for the practice of poetry is music:

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

This sums up the undercurrent of this essay which is that, at the end of the day, writing a poem is hard work and should not be taken lightly; everyone knows that to play music like a virtuoso one must practice hard, learn the musical directions so that one can play the music at the right pace, at the right dynamic, and create suitable musical mood. To write well requires the same amount of dedication and rehearsal:

Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft.

His three main principles for writing the poetry of vers libre are outlined at the beginning of the essay:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.

On criticism:

Criticism is not a circumscription or a set of prohibitions. It provides fixed points of departure. It may startle a dull reader into alertness.

I do not agree with a tradition of criticism that defines the interpretation of a particular poem, that sets in stone the poem's meaning and nuances, that seems to be an 'effort to explain away ambiguity, to reduce the poem to statement like any other' (SW, 12). However, the purpose of criticism as outlined by Pound above justifies its necessity for me. He also warns: 'Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.' How many of the critics we read and whose words we take for granted have ever written a significant work which is not the criticism of someone else's work?

I was struck by his wonderfully succinct description of what 'an image' is:

An 'Image' is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time…It is the presentation of such a 'complex' instantaneously which gives the sens of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.

These are the statements of his that I though particularly resonant:

Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose.

What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.

Use either no ornament or good ornament.

When Shakespeare talk of the 'Dawn in russet mantle clad' he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he had discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from this point onward.

A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure.

That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginitive eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the orginal.

This is why I'm finding translating Persian poetry hard. A lot of the beauty is in the way the words sound, and also the word play which can hardly ever be translated with the same nuances.

If you are using a symmetrical form, don't put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush…Don't mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another. This is usually only the result of begin too lazy to find the exact word.

I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use "symbols" he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of a passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.

I think there is a "fluid" and well as a "solid" content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase.

It is tremendously important that great poetry be written, it makes not a jot of difference who writes it.

No good poetry is ever written in a manner 20 years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from book, convention and cliche, and not from life.

Yeats' influence on poetry has been to make it a 'speech without inversions'.

20th century poetry…will, I think, move against poppycock, it will be harder and saner…'nearer the bone'...its force will lie in its truth, its interpretive power…At least for myself, I want it so, austere, direct, free from emotional slither.

And finally a little comic relief:

I believe in everyone writing poetry who wants to; most do. I believe in every man knowing enough music to play 'God bless our home' on the harmonium, but I do not believe in every man giving concerts and printing his sin.

: 25 Mar 2006 12:37 |  Tags: Practiceofpoetry Quotes |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Idealism and honesty

And so it is with these idealists – it is always the case. Up to the last they adorn the man with peacock-feathers, to the last they hold to the good, and, although they have a forboding of the reverse of the medal, they put away their thoughts, and will shut out the reality with both hands, until in the end the idealised man mocks and laughs at them and shows himself as her really is.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment

Honesty, especially with yourself as well as others, is harder to live by than most think. Don't put away your forboding thoughts, deal with them as they arrive. Otherwise you'll end up like this:

: 22 Mar 2006 17:19 |  Tags: Quotes |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

It's been a while

Haven't blogged in a while…since sri lanka things have been hectic with trying to catch up and now, all of a sudden, term 2 is finished and as Persian new year approaches I find myself looking back over the past year.

It's passed so quickly, I can believe I'm over half-way through my degree, yet its happened so slowly – does that make sense to anyone? This time last year I had just landed my first acting role in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, I was somewhat obsessed with the moon and the haiku form, I'd just discovered Jeff Buckley and met Fred.

How things change…

I was feeling a little down recently, a little too absorbed in myself, worrying that I had not made the most of this year. Looking back it was a stupid worry to have fostered; I've done so much and learned a lot along the way…Since last new year I've toured Europe, choreographed belly dance for Lysistrata, been to Iran, performed in The Lover, worked for One World Week, been to Sri Lanka, started teaching bellydance, and somehow kept my degree afloat. Oh, and met so many more wonderful people and established some really strong friendships. Other things have gone on, not things I like to write about, not things that were fun or productive to have experienced, but they've happened and I've learned from them.

I find myself looking to the future more and more. What happens next? I've always been like this…I get bored easliy…maybe bored is the wrong word, I'm not bored with Warwick – I love it – I just have itchy feet, I keep wanting to move forward in leaps and jumps, not shuffling steps. I know a lot of people who prefer not to think about what comes next, and that's fine…but I can't help wanting a plan.

So, I think it's going to be business management. Call me crazy – and you will – but I think that's the way forward. I've applied to some summer internships and we'll see where they take me. Also applied for work experience at a London Publisher this easter…we'll see what happens.

On the other hand, I must do more dancing. I want to learn Tango and I can't keep dreaming of it forever. There is something about the passion of the dance that makes me want to weep every time I watch/think of it:

Recently watched some scenes from Carlos Suera's Tango, a film in which he devises a piece of theatre that re-enacts World War II through Tango dance. It is phenomenal choreography, wonderful music and some stunning dancers – watch it!

Anyway I either need to shut up about Tango, or put my words into action :) So, Tango, Salsa, bellydance, and maybe some tap and Yoga classes too…

I should be writing more now that it's the holidays. I have a portfolio to write for poetry and a non-fiction article. Hopefully they will be of a post-able standard and I'll put them up for your viewing, if I get them done that is :)

: 12 Mar 2006 15:39 |  Tags: Journal |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem