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): Quote:
Quote:
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Thanks for the passage, Andrew - I might quote "A mort Guillaume!" in class. Thanks also for the snapshot of Ungaretti.
Cheers, John |
*misposted*
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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: Quote:
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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. |
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