I was at a friend's house last night just chilling and hanging around. Some of the walls had paintings on them, done by one of the house mates, and one in particular caught my eye. My first thought when I looked at it was modernist. The correlation was striking to me; it just seemed to scream modernist. But why? How could a painting remind me of poetry? It's hard to articulate this because I can't really do justice to describing the painting, but I'll do my best. The painting was definitely abstract; that might have been one of the cues I took as a relation to modernist poetry. However, I could make out something. It seemed to be a lone eye, looking into what I could only guess was a small mirror, and behind the eye was an object I could not discern. It was as if this painting was just presenting something to me to be appreciated, and not necessarily something to be read too deeply into. It was not a conventional beauty, as of a landscape of a meadow with a stream or something of a more "romantic nature". It was just a beauty you could appreciate for its own - kind of hard to describe.
Additionally, a lot of the music I listen to reminds me of poetry, in particular modernist poetry (I listen to a lot of weird music). For example, this song by Mum, titled "We Have A Map of the Piano":
Please don't flow so fast
You little mountain hum
I'll take a bottle down to you
Please don't flow this fast
You hold a little hum
I'll bottle sounds of me for you
Please don't flow so fast
You little mountain din
I'll bottle piano sounds from you
Please don't flow so fast
You little mountain noise
I'll close my eyes and bite your tongue
If I were to to have read this in a poetry book, I would not blink for a second and think this actually wasn't a poem, but lyrics to a song. It just seems like something I would read from a more modernist poet. I really can't for the life of me discern what is actually being talked about here, and the title is strange to because nowhere is there a mention of a map in the lyrics. And why the deviation in form in the last line of the last stanza? What does all this mean? Ah, maybe I'll never know, and in that respect it just reminds me so much of modernist poetry. It is beautiful, but perhaps you're just not quite sure why.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Yeah I can definitely relate to the experience with modern art. I vistited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and there were so many works that were so valuable and renowned, but just completely flew over my head. Sometimes with the whole Modernism movement, I feel that creativity and originality takes too much away from comprehensibilty.
A good physics problem, or math problem, should not be readily apparent. It should be thought provoking, to test the understanding of the student rather than the ability to regurgitate information, or equations.
In the same way, I can appreciate that disciplines of the arts would want to make their viewers or readers think.
There is a difference between the two scenarios, however. A student's physics problems are worded clearly; their descriptions seem self evident. Real world problems rarely are.
The arts seem to skip the learning phase; there seems to be no tolerance for a lenient transition from "student of the arts" to "person well-acquainted with the real world."
Thus, we might consider that a poem is not meant to be read or solved just once. It is meant to be read over a lifetime, and different meanings pop up over the course of individual maturation. Comprehensibility comes with time, with due consideration. Art is not meant to be immediately obvious; that would cheapen its value.
Post a Comment