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08-11-2018, 05:47 AM
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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.
Last edited by John Isbell; 08-11-2018 at 05:50 AM.
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08-12-2018, 03:22 AM
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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
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08-12-2018, 03:27 AM
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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.
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08-12-2018, 03:37 AM
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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
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08-12-2018, 03:48 AM
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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:
Ungaretti was in Paris for less than two years, but that was long enough for him to refer to that time, more than fifty years later, as his cultural and social coming-of-age. He attended Henri Bergson’s and other lectures at the Sorbonne, became a close friend of Apollinaire, and came into regular contact with the major exponents of the avant-garde: Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Giorgio De Chirico, Max Jacob, and others. Having become friendly with the Futurists Giovanni Papini, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Soffici, he was invited to collaborate with them on their new journal, Lacerba, where Ungaretti first published his poems. Lacerba, edited in Milan, and La Voce, in Florence, were the main organs for the earliest stages of Italian modernism.
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And here’s U.'s prose bit (not a poem) about him learning A. had died:
Quote:
Some days before the Armistice, when it was already predicted, I’d been sent to Paris to take part in a magazine for soldiers of our army corps. The magazine was called Sempre Avanti! Apollinaire had asked me to bring some boxes of Tuscan cigars, and, just having arrived in Paris, I hurried to the house of my friend. I found Apollinaire dead, his face covered by a black cloth, and his wife crying, and his mother crying.
Along the streets they were shouting, “A mort Guillaume!” Apollinaire, too, by heartbreaking coincidence, was named William, like the defeated kaiser.
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08-12-2018, 04:27 AM
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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
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08-12-2018, 05:19 AM
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*misposted*
Last edited by Matt Q; 08-12-2018 at 05:24 AM.
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