[conny]

sigh. This is really crap.

[Nigel Mace]

Apparently the unhappy poet once said, "Home isn't where our house is, but wherever we are understood." I was obviously out when this one called.

[John Whitworth]

Children like this sort of thing. That's not a criticism; it's an observation. I'm a great fan of Morgenstern's nonsense poems as translated by R F C Hull. 'A knee walks lonely through the world...'

Here's one, though translated by someone else.

The Seagulls

The seagulls by their looks suggest
that Emma is their name;
they wear a white and fluffy vest
and are the hunter's game.

I never shoot a seagull dead;
their life I do not take.
I like to feed them gingerbread
and bits of raisin cake.

O human, you will never fly
the way the seagulls do;
but if your name is Emma, why,
be glad they look like you.

(Translated by Karl F. Ross)

[R. Nemo Hill]

Re: conceptual art (which I do have a fondness for)...from an article about Yoko Ono, by Lisa Carver, in this week’s Sunday Times Magazine.


“...she is not easy, her paintings aren’t recognizable, her voice is not pretty, her films are without plot and her happenings make no sense. One of her painting you are told to sleep on. One of her paintings you are told to burn. One of her paintings isn’t a painting at all—it’s you going outside and looking at the sky. Most of her stuff is not even there. This is why I love her. This is why we need her. We have too much stuff already. It clutters our view, inward and outward.

We need more impossible in our culture. Go out and capture moonlight on water in a bucket, she commands. Her art is instructions for tasks impossible to complete. We already have a billion lovely things and a million amazing artists who have honed their talent and have lorded it above us. People wearing their roles as artist or writer or filmmaker or spokesman as a suit of armor or as an invisibility cloak or as an intimidatingly, unaquirably tasteful outfit.....

There are two schools of art. One is what is made beautiful by the artist; the other is to make way for the viewer to see or feel what is already beautiful.

The first is to make something ornate and unreachably special with skills. The viewer or listener is awed, their belief regarding the order of things is confirmed and they are reminded by this unachievable beauty of their own powerlessness. And I do love that kind of art, the beautiful kind.

The other way to make art is to tear down what’s between us and nature, us and eternity, us and the realization that everything is already perfect. In this experience of art, the viewer or listener loses respect for the current order or arrangement of civilization and thus becomes powerful, like King Kong, and outside civilization, like God—or simply like the shuffling janitor who is pleased with his own work and sleeps well....

Ono used the negative positively.....It takes an enormous lack of ego to not put your imprint on everything you do, to not employ your learning and position. To stand back, to hold back, to keep your mouth shut. To yell with your silence, when you know you very well could make soothing and welcome sounds at the drop of a hat.....It takes willpower to overpower the will to power....."


Plenty to chew on there, methinks.

Nemo

[Bill Carpenter]

There is a sweetness to this, no doubt enhanced by the presenter, that distinguishes it from merely intellectual cleverness. The poet pretends to imagine a piscine creature's wordless, rhythmic lullaby or paean; that is touching. That said, I would prefer to draw a broad gray line between verbal and non-verbal compositions, and declare that non-verbal compositions are not poems. This is an object of visual art, as Don said, but also an imitation of a musical score (a series of non-verbal notations instructing the reader to make sounds in time) displayed as a visual object. But we don't even know what the sounds are, so it is only an abstract of a score.

From another point of view, when representational painting is abstracted into color, line, and mass, you still have color, line, and mass, with the intellectual and aesthetic suggestions the painter can make them carry. This display is not an abstraction from a poem in the same way. There are no sounds, no letters, no words, no syllables, but only signs used in prosodic analysis that are applied to syllables -- as if you marked a canvas with partial formulae for the chemical compositions of pigments or with partial verbal or mathematical descriptions of the spaces to which the absent pigments could apply.

I would be surprised if I ever saw another non-verbal printed construction I liked half as much!