>Could it just be that he's an enormously gifted visual artist and most of the poets aren't? Grenier mentions Cy Twombly as a counterpart whose work may relegate his own and I'd have been interested to see how he might pursue this...perhaps he does - I haven't finished.
Interesting question. Brushing against other arts doesn't necessarily have to mean those arts at the top of their game. It mattered profoundly to Zukofsky's poetry that Celia was a composer. But she was (I think) basically an amateur composer, she was no Schoenberg.
On the whole I think there's a value transformation when art meets art. Looking at a Cobbing mimeo I feel it's irrelevant to judge it as a graphic or as a text (supposing I could even do that) ; the challenge is to engage with it as something sui generis, a new art. That's how I think I should approach Grenier too.
Of course it's fun to imagine an artwork that is somehow both a landmark visual and a landmark poem. But I don't know if that's a coherent concept. Maybe it's oil and water. Could Cezanne and Zola have cooked up something like the ultimate painting-novel?
Well there's no limit to how the arts can meet. I'm looking forward to following up that Xu Bing reference.
Relevantly or not, here's a French broadcast about composer Frédéric Pattar´s realization of Lisa Samuels Peephole Metaphysics. It seems clear the music needs to break and misconstrue the poem in order to be able to grow from it.
http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/alla-breve-l-integrale/2014-2015/peephole-metaphysics-de-frederic-pattar-diffusion-integrale-11-23-2014-23-30
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