Poetry and Painting

     I am really starting to believe that Sexson has divine powers. Or falling short of that some sort of foresight that allows him to weave connections that seem too amazing to be mere chance. Over the weekend I finally got around to cracking open the book I randomly grabbed out of the bag circulating the room. I chose, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination written by Michel Benamou. Intrigued by the title alone and the simplicity of the cover I stored this book on my bookshelf and repeatedly wrote in my planner to blog about the borrowed book.
   Chapter one of Benamou's book is titled, "Poetry and Painting". How bizarre that Friday in class we were talking about Stevens and his tie to painting. Another strange coincidence is that I had talked about Stevens and Picasso's "Man With the Blue Guitar" connection, and also that I did a blog on two paintings just last week. It seems as though poetry and painting have been a large part of my Stevens studying since the start of class, and now by some sort of weird concurrence I am reading a chapter focused solely on that.
    Stranger still is that just a few pages into the chapter Benamou sites "A Postcard from the Volcano" as an example that even "the meanest and most derelict thing can thus be made significant, beautiful. 'A Postcard from the Volcano' typifies this procedure; it shows
      A dirty house in a gutted world,
      A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
      Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
...Stevens teaches us that the center of modern art is metamorphosis" (8-9). Just Friday I was assigned this poem to put to memory and then perform for the class. If these chance overlapping of subject matter are not some sort of predestined, and already worked out series of events I don't know what else could help to explain them; other than Sexson has magic powers.

    The chapter does a very nice job of explaining the importance of art and how it connects the real, external world to the metaphorical one. The influence of artistic imagination over the real world and the reflection of it is hugely important and a large focus for Stevens. Sexson has mentioned in class that Stevens is a weather poet, writing about the sun, and seasons, a subject that the readers can easily grasp onto. Benamou summarizes a very complex idea of poetry and art by saying that "the metaphors of poetry and the metamorphoses of painting tap the same reservoir of analogies" (11). Art is expressive, written or painted it is the artist trying to communicate something. The medium is important, but only if the artist is able to convey the message. I struggled when I was first reading Stevens’ poetry because I was trying to do too much. When I just opened my mind and read the words and unpacked the complexity little by little I was able to get more from the poem as a whole. Just as when I first looked at Picasso, and other more challenging painters I had to step back and accept the work as a whole before I was able to focus on any smaller part and start to unpack the complexities of that.

    As I move forward in my readings of Benamou's book and Steven's work and even Harold Bloom's Anatomy of Influence, which is appearing in various other aspect of my classes this semester, I look forward to the final culminating moment of clarity. Until then I will just keep reading...

  

The Birth of Venus--Sunday Afternoon

     For whatever reason this painting by Georges Seurat, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, had morphed itself in my memory to The Birth of Venus by Botticelli. I have no idea why my mind remembered The Birth of Venus like this, I had to google "dot painting of a park" in order to even find Seurat's painting because it was buried so deep in my memory. I must have studied both of these paintings in my past art history classes, most likely separate classes at different points in my academic career and yet they showed themselves as one in the same in class when Sexson asked me to describe Botticelli's painting in class. So here is the "park" that in my minds eye I saw at the right of The Birth of Venus. 

        I was tricked. My own memory deceived me. I did a little more internet creeping to see if I could find a modern morph of these two paintings that I may have come across previously to explain my weird rendition of two very famous, very separate, very different paintings. I came up with nothing. But then I started to look at both paintings and realized that they could be connected. Botticelli does not provide viewers with what lies beyond the trees, and maybe that is where Seurat sought inspiration for his work. This is all my own speculation, and based solely on my thoughts. I have not looked up Seurat's life to see who he was actually inspired by, nor do i intend on ever looking at that, I just dot care that much. 

        This whole blog post however, ties into class because we morphed Stevens poems into our own back stories for it. By unpacking his poem we made them one with the "Postcard From a Volcano".  I was simply writing what I saw in my mind when I read Stevens's poem. The title, and the words conjured up my own rendition of the poem. It has been interesting to read others backstories because they are seeing, and writing things, that never occurred to me. In this way we are all becoming tied to Stevens and the poem. Just as I became the obscure tie between Botticelli and Seurat. 

A Postcard from the Volcano

       Sitting out on the deck, the old man enjoyed a glass of wine in the chilly autumn evening. He had had the same routine for several decades. Siblings, children, grandchildren had all been there and left at some time or another, running around exploring the rows of grape vines. Oblivious to the fact that most of the vines were older even than the old man. Little notice given to the gate at the front, possessing their name and guarding the big house that secured the sprawling acreage. But as the seasons come and go, still no one took the same interest the old man had, in what their family had been doing for so long. And so the vines and mansion fell to disrepair. And so did too the old man. As he sat upon his deck and gazed out at the sun which always seemed to be shining down on his house upon the hill.....


     "A Postcard from the Volcano" proved to be a sort of legacy poem to me. For some reason I couldn't shake the imagery of a person at the end of their life looking back at what was in front of them and what they had done and realizing that the future children will never be able to understand it all. I think thats what Stevens does by having volcano in the title. I always think of volcanoes and eruptions. Eruptions usually mean the major destruction of everything around and the preservation of the stuff that was covered in it. Pompeii is the city that is most prominent in my mind. The volcano froze the city and left it to be discovered much later, but still will never be completely understood, no matter how much studying is dedicated to it.
    I guess if the title had been different I would have most likely never come up with this backstory. I am coming to think that that is apart of Stevens's talent as a poet. He comes up with these bizarre tittles that stick in the readers brain and set a path for the interpretation for the rest of the reading of the poem.

Metaphors of a Magnifico
By Wallace Stevens
Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges, Into twenty villages, Or one man Crossing a single bridge into a village. This is old song That will not declare itself . . . Twenty men crossing a bridge, Into a village, Are Twenty men crossing a bridge Into a village. That will not declare itself Yet is certain as meaning . . . The boots of the men clump On the boards of the bridge. The first white wall of the village Rises through fruit-trees. Of what was it I was thinking? So the meaning escapes. The first white wall of the village . . . The fruit-trees . . .

      As suggested by Sexson I decided to just read Wallace Stevens. I didn't try to analyze or even make the smallest attempt to engage the poems for deeper meaning. I just read. I read one poem after another for about ten minutes and I was really starting to get into a rhythm and enjoy the words for just words and the way the poems were each so different and yet they all link together in a pleasant way. Then I came to "Metaphors of a Magnifico" and I paused. Not a pause in a bad or abrupt way but this poem struck me in a way the others had not. I really liked it. I like the metaphor, I like the juxtaposition, I like the ellipses that leave the reader wondering and yet satisfied. I can not claim to have grasped some deeper meaning from the poem or that after reading it a few times I now know exactly what Stevens is trying to convey to the reader, because i don't.  I am just saying that I liked it.
    I just finished writing a short response paper for my literary criticism class and it was on Robert Scholes and how he defines what literature is. In that class we discussed Wallace Steven's poem "The Man With the Blue Guitar". Scholes defines literature in part as something that can be recovered or is repeatable. I felt that as I was reading "The Man With the Blue Guitar" that I could hear a song melody in it. This for me is a part of what makes literature, the ability to engage the reader and cross over to a different medium. "Metaphors of a Magnifico" struck me because I was engaged, I had a mental picture of men crossing the bridge then just one man then a white wall. If I were more artistically adept I may be inclined to paint a rendition of this poem just because its overflowing with imagination and as the tittle gives aways, metaphor.
    I feel sometimes as a reader I try to do too much with the words, but letting my mind relax and just read was really nice and I think helped me to get more enjoyment from the poems.

Wanderer

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818)

"What is wonderful always goes together with a sense of dismay."
-Longinus on the sublime
From Harold Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life

   This is one of my favorite sublime paintings. Friedrich is a German Romantic painter of the 19th Century and this painting for me, capture perfectly the idea of Sublime; at least as far as the art movement was concerned. The part I have come to associate sublime with is beauty derived through terror. This painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, has the man atop a cliff with presumably a vast space beneath him, it is terrifying because he could fall to his death but it is beautiful and majestic because of the fog that expands and encompasses the land in front of him.  
    I chose to start my blog with this painting and not a text we have for the class for a few reasons, one of the easiest to articulate is that I got caught up in reading The Anatomy of Influence and have not delved into Stevens with both feet yet. Also, I see myself as the wanderer of the painting and the fog this class. It is vast, expansive and a bit overwhelming at the beginning and it will not be until I leave the cliff and jump into the material that I will be able to form some, at least slightly, cohesive posts.