Apollinaire
 

Here is why almost all work on the visual layout of a poem post-Apollinaire bores me:

https://www.google.com/search?q=apol...XWqDITJahhgqM:

My apologies for the long link. Googling Calligrammes will turn up a fair sample of what Apollinaire imagined and achieved. To my mind, it blows e.e. cummings, to start with, out of the water. cummings looks timid.

Cheers,
John

PS Apollinaire was a friend of Picasso's, as one might guess. He wrote the Calligrammes largely in the trenches and died early shortly after WW 1.

Funny, I thought this thread might generate more discussion! It seems there's been a bit of a logjam in the middle of the homepage recently. I was thinking I should have called this "Apollinaire and Visual Poetry," a topic I'd think just about everyone here has an opinion on. :-)
The poem I link to is about the Eiffel Tower, natch.

Cheers,
John

I like Apollinaire a lot, John, and agree that his picture-poems are stand-out. An Italian poet I translated, Giuseppe Ungaretti, was a close friend of his. There's a prose piece of U.'s that describes receiving the news of Apollinaire's death and attending his funeral. U. was fortunate to survive WWI, and also wrote his first book in the trenches--in his case in the Carso in northern Italy. It was a good time to be in Paris, but also very dangerous (Spanish flu as well, after the war, which Modigliani, another friend of A. and U., died of).

Sorry if I've gone off-topic--Ungaretti did not do visual poetry, that I recall. But there were so many great painters in Paris at that time, no wonder visual poetry was a thing.

Hi Andrew,

Was Ungaretti a Futurist? Giuseppe? I've heard the name vaguely, and would be interested in his Apollinaire poem. Apollinaire died of the Spanish flu on November 9, 1918, says google - two days before the Armistice. I think he was weakened by the German sniper bullet he took to the head. Like you, I am a fan of the Calligrammes. His earlier collection Alcools is good too.

As you say, lots of painters in Paris in the first years of the C20th!! Apollinaire was quite mixed up in that avant-garde.

Cheers,
John

Ungaretti was not a Futurist though he was in Paris then and knew them. He was one of the first Italian "Hermetic" (very compressed and elliptical) poet and one of the originators of Modernist poetry in Italy.

Here’s a bit from my introduction to U.’s Selected Poems (published in 2002):

And here’s U.'s prose bit (not a poem) about him learning A. had died:

Thanks for the passage, Andrew - I might quote "A mort Guillaume!" in class. Thanks also for the snapshot of Ungaretti.

Cheers,
John

*misposted*

You've probably seen Marinetti's concrete poem, John. Your thread got me looking things up, so I found this, which I remembered seeing pictures of at some point.


It's interesting that what the Futurists were doing with the printing press calligraphers Islamic and otherwise had been doing for centuries. Here's a piece by David Jones, which is a concrete or visual rendering of a traditional text:


https://www.library.georgetown.edu/s...61%20small.jpg

The description of it reads:

Lovely. And yes, Islamic and Jewish calligraphy had been experimental for centuries before Apollinaire; thank you for reminding me! I believe East Asian calligraphy didn't experiment with formatting in the same way.

Cheers,
John

Andrew, I recently discovered David Jones. Thanks for posting that. Here is a short video you may like if you're a David Jones fan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psQk...index=3&t=231s



John, I guess, and I'm not trying to be argumentative, but the comparison to Cummings and the apparent need for Apollinaire to be the greatest of the great shape poem is uncomfortable. You may be right but is his greatness great because he was better than Cummings? I don't know why they have to be compared.

As for the poem, I do like it. I'm working on reading it in French, so thanks for posting. I'm trying to relearn what I once knew of the language and to add more. It's slow going.

Thanks for posting this.

Hi John,

You're quite right. I just hear praise of Cummings and would like more folks to know his predecessor. Glad you're enjoying it!

Cheers,
John

Thanks for the video, John, I loved it. David Jones was remarkable, both as poet and painter. Read his book of essays on art Epoch and Artist, if you haven't already. His mentor Eric Gill was another one who inscribed words into visual patterns.

Here's a link to a recording of Jones reading from his poem In Parenthesis
, based on his experiences in WWI.

Thanks again,

Andrew

In South Asia there is the tradition of chitra kavya and in Chinese there is reversible poetry. About the latter I will share my Facebook post from April 2017:

"A fun discovery. I have been reading about Chinese reversible picture poems ["huiwen shi"]. The most influential of these is Su Hui's "Map of the Armillary," which she wrote and then weaved into a brocade to mail to her exiled husband. The poem consists of 840 characters placed in a circle, so that the lines can be read in whatever order the reader pleases—only her lover knew the correct way. The form results in thousands of possible readings, with one Sinologist claiming to have discovered at least 14000 such paths.

I became convinced that Borges must have known about huiwen shi when he wrote "The Garden of Forking Paths," despite the fact that almost all the major anthologies of Chinese reversible poetry were published only in the latter half of the twentieth century. That short story details an author who obsesses over the idea of an infinite book whose plot lines can be read inexhaustible ways. Rereading tonight I found this: the author's name is Ts'ui Pen, an almost-homonym of Su Hui's pen!

According to Google, this connection has not been made, meaning that Borges, Su Hui, and her fictional counterpart now have one less path to parse."

Hi Orwn (I like this handle),

And thank you for sharing that post. Fascinating stuff. I do like Borges and if you don't care much about credit, I'd suggest finding the Borges Society - there surely is one - and sending your insight their way. Borges was of course a *tremendous* reader.

Cheers,
John

Hi John,

My source to discover more about Apollinaire's predecessors is this great little book, Pattern Poetry: https://books.google.com/books?id=vLNjq4New-MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=pattern+poems&hl=en&sa=X &ved=0ahUKEwj6krWx0IjdAhXsyVQKHW-tBFcQ6AEIMDAB#v=onepage&q=pattern%20poems&f=false. One of my fave courses to teach is Graphic Poetry and the Graphic Novel, since so many people know about the graphic novel but are ignorant of the poetry tradition. Mary Ellen Solt is probably the best of those in the post-Apollinaire era, though I have a soft spot for Kenneth Patchen. See ya, Tony

Hi Tony,

Thank you so much for the Pattern Poetry reference and link. I appreciate it.

Cheers,
John