Cornelia Parker, an English sculptor, is having an exhibit open locally at
San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center. Without going into detail about her work
(I find it fascinating), Ken Baker, the Chronicle Art Critic wrote today:
In a 1992 piece, "Words that Define Gravity," Parker wrote longhand a
dictionary definition of "gravity," replicated each written word in cast
lead and threw it off a high cliff. To complete the work, she collected the
lead words, mangled by the fall, and suspended them on threads just above
gallery floor level. "The words got made illegible by real gravity," as
Parker put it.
I been thinking about this quote all day. I misread it the first time. I
thought she said, "The words got made 'legible' by real gravity." Or, I
would have preferred it, if she had said that. That the words cast in lead
became tested and real by the experience of falling. And I had gone from
there with the idea or query of whether or not a person's new poem could
stand such a test - that, in some form or other - to achieve the legibility
of the purest possible poem - we should drop the poem off the side of
building to discover how its language survived or gets transformed through
such a fall. (Ideally, all the cliches, fatuous phrases, rhetorical
thoughts, useless sentiments, silly pauses, artsy line endings & closures,
etc. would be knocked out of their polite frames). As with Cornelia Parker,
we could then pick up the poem's pieces and hang each word and/or line by
invisible threads from the top of a fresh page. Ideally, it would be the
purest form of poetic legibility.
From this point on, I thought, both poet's and writing workshop classes
should be situated on the edges of cliffs overlooking smooth rock hard
plateaus on to which poems - one by one - could be thrown down, violently
broken apart, their pieces recovered, and located in the most accurate
possible way on the page.
Yet, as luck would have it, I am also reading Ital Calivino's Invisible
Cities. All day I find myself running into chapters that close with cryptic
little phrases, "There is no language without deceit," and "Falsehood is
never in words; it is in things."
Is a poem, or its language, such "a thing."
I think a lot of new poems and old poems - mine included - should be cracked
again and again. Otherwise they be lies.
Isn't this Biblical? Broken tablets, fresh revealed truths, et al?
Sounds to me, at least, like Cornelia Parker has found some real pleasure in
the discovery & making of it.
The whole interview with Cornelia Parker can be found here:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/12/16/DDGTUG89VC1.DTL&type
=art
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