> Stephan,
>
> I remember Michelangelo's famous quote that "A great sculpture can roll
> down a hill without breaking". Perhaps this should be so also with
> poetry? In a sculptor's case, it points to an understanding of sprues
> and gates as well as to the aesthetics of form.
> I wonder how this translates to verse?
>
Interesting, Peter! I suspect Michelangelo hammered and chipped out all the
'breaks' in his stones - a little bit more sophisticated approach than
rolling a newly quarried stone block down a hill to break away the weaker
parts!
I don't know what you mean here by the use of 'sprues" and "gates" - aren't
those methods a bit old hat. Certainly of the 'art povera' that's
influencing Cornelia Parker - where materials are kept so unguilded, simple.
The relationship between, at least, art povera and language, is keeping the
materials (words) as clean and spare as possible. No dross. Found objects =
good. Guilding, no no!
The word 'verse' is eclipsed, replaced by 'pieces' joined or not; fragments
that may or may not hearken "a whole", more likely, the memory a whole, now
obliterated. The 'is' character of the piece. Against historicism.
If you read the article on Parker, a good accounting there of using the
charcoaled pieces of wood from two black Texas churches (one struck by
lightening, and one by white racist arson). She hangs the pieces of burnt
wood by invisible strings. A fresh resurrection of a unique sort.
Poetry then as a form of transfiguring a dead and/or destroyed instrument
or structure. A public, even ecological act, in which the medium (words
and/or wood) awakens (transfigured) once again.
Looking at your blog, Peter, I don't think you - as process - are stranger
to this. Intriguing, mysterious stuff!
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
>
>
> -Peter Ciccariello
> ARTIST'S BLOG - http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Sent: Fri, 16 Dec 2005 17:57:44 -0800
> Subject: The Poem as a broken object reassembled:
>
> 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&t
> ype
> =art
>
>
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