Just to say I find the conversation on this fascinating, & it does
invite me t think about the ways one might cull the weak words out of
one's poems. I thought the article very interesting Stephen, although
it made me wonder, what text if any accompanies the sculptures? It
sounds like they require a certain amount of introduction? Or, at
least, after reading the interview, or anything on her, one can't
approach the works 'clear.'
Doug
On 16-Dec-05, at 9:11 PM, Stephen Vincent wrote:
>> 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
>>
>>
>
>
Douglas Barbour
11655 - 72 Avenue NW
Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
the precision of openness
is not a vagueness
it is an accumulation
cumulous
bpNichol
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