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tags:poetryduchamp
rel: AKA Marcell Duchamp
Can one make works that are not works of art?
Many of us, for instance, write poetry at some point in our lives, but our poems, written for this or that occasion, are not likely to interest anyone outside our personal circle.
Thought
This is a simple idea but it’s profound. What if all you created was just made for your personal circle, and they loved for you for that. I’ve spent days on small gifts that would otherwise be put on my portfolio as a project. As it stands socially and professional, I can’t really put these publicly. Even if I did, they’d lose of their intended purpose as a gift and something made for only certain eyes.
As a kid we went for a walk at the park, first stopping to pick up my grandmother. When we returned my grandfather had written my mother’s name in buds that had fallen off the tree. He’d ran out of buds partially, and omitted letters from her name.
Imagine him, as we left his house and she was on his mind. He saw the buds, made the connection and said, “I know what, I’ll spell her name.”
Probably, we are too concerned with the chase of these performative posturings, when an audience of those you love will ideally listen, and not fully take you for granted.
rel:Improvement to social media
And they will also grant, I believe, that poetry is, in Ezra Pound’s now familiar words, news that stays news. Which is to say that poetry can’t just be read and deleted like the most recent Instagram; it demands to be reread.
Toward an Infrathin Reading/Writing Practice
Duchamp said you cannot define Infrathin, but only provide examples.
- The warmth of a seat (which has just be left)
- Sliding doors of the Metro - the people who pass through at the last moment.
- Velvet trousers - their whistling sound.
- When tobacco smoke smells also of the mouth which exhales it.
- The separation between the detonation noise of a gun and the apparition of the bullet hole in the target. Others have raised other examples
- Intrathin (adjective) not a name - never make of it a noun.
- In time, the same object is not the same after a one-second interval.
- The difference between the contact water and molten lead make with the walls of a given container.
- The difference between two objects of a series (made of the same mold) when the maximum precision is attained.
On the last one, “And as Stein shows us in her endlessly complex iterative prose, the slightest repetition or shift in con- text changes the valence and meaning of any word or word group. A rose is a rose is a rose. And by the third enunciation, it is already something else.”
rel:Effective Summarization
Duchamp in providing a concept that was the result of examples:
Moreover, Duchamp knows only too well that he is exaggerating, but exaggeration seems necessary at a time when it would seem that generalization— the generalizations of the social sciences, of the media, of political discourse— has prevailed over any other discourse.
We are bombarded by language that is abstraction and dead metaphor.
And now, together— on eagle’s wings— we embark on the work that God and history have called upon us to do.
The poet, Duchamp here implies, is one who understands that “ate has nothing in common with eat,” that the same is never the same, and that hence every word, every morpheme and phoneme, and every rhythmic form chosen makes a difference.
The poetry is the art of the infrathin, of which difference is more important than similarity.
Words as we use them do not appear alone. They are embedded.
The Question of Formalisms
“Genuine novelty in literature,” wrote Kruchenykh, “does not depend upon content… . If there is a new form, there must also exist a new content.”
Duchamp’s nagging question: “Can one make works that are not works of ‘art’?”
Thought
Can I make a word that is a standalone word? All words seem to exist embedded in their context. I cannot just say “Fox”?
Also a single word seems packaged with definitions, other words which describe. At the heart of this chain, there isn’t a single word which describes all? Is there something connected to all?
Duchamp’s delay The Bride was a delay in glass. “I wanted to give ‘delay’ a poetic sense that I couldn’t even explain. I was trying to avoid saying ‘a glass painting’ and the word delay pleased me at that point, like a phrase one discovers.
“The word,” wrote Jurij Tynjanov in 1924, “does not exist outside of a sentence. An isolated word is not found in a nonphrasal environment. Rather it is found in a different environment from the word in a sentence. If we pronounce an isolated ‘dictionary’ word, we do not obtain the ‘basic word,’ a pure, lexical word, but simply a word in new circumstances.”
Whereas for the referential use of language it makes no difference whether the word astre (star) can be found within the adjective désastreux (“disastrous”) or the noun désastre (“disaster”) … for the poet this kind of “discovery” is of prime relevance.
Mania for Change
Duchamp’s detractors have suggested that he realized his early paintings could not compete with those of Picasso or Braque and hence he had to find something else to gain recognition.
rel:Unoriginal Genius by Marjorie Perloff The Anxiety of Influence - Harold Bloom
Language not Lyric
rel:Lyrics derived from the Greek musical instrument: the poem was accompanied by the lyre.
rel:Podcast Ideas
Wordsworth’s “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It is emotion recollected, in tranquility.”
countered to
Eliot’s “Poetry is not the expression of emotion, but an escape from emotion.”
Goethe’sWanderer’s Nightsong
Above all the peaks It is calm In all the treetops You feel Barely a breath; The birdies in the woods are silent. Just wait, soon You will rest soon.
The same evening, Goethe wrote one of his nightly letters to his great love, Charlotte von Stein, this time re- minding her of the time she had accompanied him to a nearby cave, where he had carved her initials in the rock. Declaring his passion for her, the letter concludes:
The sky is quite clear and I am going out to enjoy the sunset. The view is extensive but plain. The sun has set. It is the landscape of which I made a drawing for you when it was covered with rising mist. Now it is as clear and quiet as a large and beautiful Soul, at its calmest and most satisfied. If there weren’t, here and there, some mists rising from the mines, the whole scene would be motionless
A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose Selavy
Picasso was suffering from painter’s block. He stopped painting to take up writing, and Gertrude Stein recalls his poetry:
Your poetry … is more offensive than just bad poetry I do not know why it is but it just is, somebody who can really do something very well when he does something else which he cannot do and in which he cannot live it is particularly repellent, now you I said to him, you never read a book in your life that was not written by a friend and then not then and you never had any feelings about any words, words annoy you more than they do anything else so how can you write you know better… . all right go on doing it but don’t go on trying to make me tell you it is poetry
This reaction wasn’t prompted just by Picasso’s invasion of her craft, or her traditional insistence of separation of the arts - but also because Picasso had never so much so as pretended to read Stein’s writing.
Picasso’s Prose poems were modeled by surrealists like Breton.
I mean a dish a cup a nest a knife a tree a frying pan a nasty spill while strolling on the sharp edge of a cornice breaking up into a thousand pieces screaming like a madwoman and lying down to sleep stark naked legs spread wide over the odor from a knife that just beheaded the wine froth and nothing bleeds from it except for lips like butterflies and asks you for no handouts for a visit to the bulls with a cicada like a feather in the wind
Stein on the Surrealists:
The surrealists still see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complications of the 20th century but the vision is that of the 19th.
Duchamp also said the surrealists did not go far enough (though they did go outside of it somewhat), but were still interested in painting in the retinal sense. “It must change.”
Thought
Hilarious and amazing below.
“The young Duchamp,” Stein wrote a few days later to Mabel Dodge, “looks like a young Englishman and talks very urgently about the fourth dimension.”
In “Sacred Emily” (1913) - “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.”
On why he made Rose Selavy “Asked by Calvin Tomkins why he felt the need to invent a new identity, Duchamp responded, It was not to change my identity, but to have two identities.”
Fresh Widow: Suggesting Fresh Window, panes are impenetrable: we can’t see what’s behind them. The window is also closed, but the little knobs suggest it could be opened.
Eliot’s Auditory Imagination
Eliot:
People often wonder why poets do not remain content with the vocabulary and the verse forms inherited from older poets who have done well with them, and why poets insist on devising new forms which seem at first uglier or more disorderly… . Something is constantly happening to any living language; the changes in the world about us and in the lives we live are reflected in our speech; so that a verse form which once was natural, which once was a development of the way men talked in ordinary intercourse, can become artificial. I think that this superannuation has happened to blank verse; that the way we talk nowadays does not fit naturally into that frame.
Reading the Verses Backwards
Rhyme is no longer a requisite for poetry and neither is any kind of fixed meter or even recurrent rhythm.
W.B. Yeats had no use for blank verse, much less free verse, stating:
If I wrote of personal love or sorrow in free verse, or in any rhythm that left it unchanged, amid all its accidence, I would be full of self-contempt because of my egotism and indiscretion, and foresee the boredom of my reader. I must choose a traditional stanza, even what I alter must seem traditional.
Pound and Eliot realized the typewriter offered possibilities that made the traditional stanza, a print block surrounded by white space, seem constrictive.
Fountain and R. Mutt:
Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no im- portance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life and placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view.
Word Frequencies and Zero Zones
W.B. Yeats: Our words, must seem to be inevitable.
The idea that green can be cold comes to me from Thoreau, who notes pine- green coldness in winter woods and the way light straggles.
A day or two before Thanksgiving we had a light fall of snow in Hartford. It melted a little by day and then froze again at night, forming a thin, bright crust over the grass. At the same time, the moon was almost full. I awoke once several hours before daylight and as I lay in bed I heard the steps of a cat running over the snow under my window almost inaudibly. The faintness and strangeness of the sound made on me one of those impressions which one so often seizes as pretexts for poetry.
A Wave of Detours
John Ashbery “automatic writing” as practiced by the Surrealists seems to have been merely a euphemism for extreme haste. Most is uninteresting from the standpoint of language, and for all their spontaneity they were careful to observe the conventions of grammar and syntax.
On Pierre Reverdy’s poem: on the conscious and unconscious: Since we do not inhabit either world exclusively, the result is moving and lifelike.
Russian Formalist called sdvig, also associated with collage, this device of displacement or dislocation.