Is poetry a dead realm? [Archive] - Literature Network Forums

YesNo

04-13-2011, 10:47 AM

I recently read John Gardner's Grendal. The reason I bring this up in this thread is because it talked about language and specifically poetry. (Of course, I might have totally misunderstood it.)

Anyway, Grendal is captivated by the new poet that sings for Hrothgar. This poet uses language so well everyone is elated except for Grendal and the previous poet who leaves feeling that he was a failure compared to the new guy. The point to take from this: there is power in language when it is used well, but not everyone uses it well.

Later, when Beowulf tears off Grendal's arm he uses language as his chief weapon. In a sense Grendal was killed by Beowulf's chatting. Now it is not that other people haven't tried to talk Grendal to death, but unlike those other people Beowulf succeeded. No doubt, ripping off the arm helped, but Beowulf's language positioned him to do that.

How does this relate to poetry? Poetry is language that should be as powerful as Beowulf's words. Often it isn't. Language as powerful as Beowulf's is still being used, but rarely today in the context of what traditionally is seen as poetry. If you ever get bored when you read a poem, if the poem looks like a senseless literary sudoku puzzle, if the poem is dripping with self-righteousness, pity and egotism when it is understandable, it is basically a poem written by that poet in Hrothgar's court who was replaced when the real poet arrived.

blazeofglory

04-13-2011, 10:57 AM

Reading this thread some budding poets or posters may surmise that I have no passion for poetry. I am simply lamenting at the death of poetry. I personally want to revive it into its original beauty.

I know with the death of this beautiful art our lives have been dryer and more numb. People are living robotic-ally and dryly, passionlessly. Man has been a heap of bones and his voices the rattles of them.

We cannot be happy at the innocence of children, at the mystery of the universe and at the beauty of nature.

Now we have a computer or a TV set and a few dry newspapers and the clinking cell phone.

The whole community I turn around is messy. People have no time but too much of it to purse something meaningless but not for some creative persuasion.

Tell me now is poetry still living?

Alexander III

04-13-2011, 11:24 AM

Philip Sydney published The Defense Of Poesy in 1595

Percy Bysshe Shelley also published a Defense in 1821

Methinks you overestimate the importance and uniqueness of our times

blazeofglory

04-13-2011, 11:56 AM

blazeofglory

04-13-2011, 11:59 AM

Philip Sydney published The Defense Of Poesy in 1595

Percy Bysshe Shelley also published a Defense in 1821

Methinks you overestimate the importance and uniqueness of our times

Maybe I will write something in defense of poetry. Poetry is indeed a curative, an antidote to this sick world.

Alas! it has lost its earlier sheen.

But as the previous poster has marvelously said poetry can be revived by means of the beauty of language and I will be proved wrong then.

poetindisguise

04-13-2011, 12:51 PM

blazeofglory

04-13-2011, 01:04 PM

Poetry will never die. Not as long as at least one person still holds passion for the verse. I know that it is dying and dying fast but as long as I still have passion, and other loners such as myself continue to write it can never die. And even if no one is left who writes, if the words of past poets are still here then poetry is still alive.

Your reciting of poetry will not resound with the rest or your tone cannot be reverberated and the fire you have kindled will go dimmer and dimmer since the fuel is draining.

With that said do not desperate. Just a few loners musing it cannot make poetry alive and all you must do is to reinvent.

stlukesguild

04-13-2011, 09:01 PM

Is poetry a dead realm?
If not why (do) few persons read it...(?)

Since when does one measure artistic worth or relevance by numbers? How many readers did Virgil have? Were his poems commonly read across the globe? In India, Persia, China, Japan, Africa, South America, North America? In all reality, poetry and the more well-known poets are read today by a larger audience than they ever had at any time in history. Contemporary poets like Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill, Charles Simic, W.C. Merwin, and Seamus Heaney sell more books and are available through publication in magazines, newspapers, and the internet to a larger audience than William Blake, Keats, John Donne, Shakespeare, or Dante ever had during their lifetime.

Poetry admittedly remains an area of minority interest in comparison to prose and the whole of the writing... but again, of what relevance is this? Opera has but a limited audience... as does classical music as a whole, the ballet, the theater, painting, sculpture, etc... Are we to assume that only that which speaks to the masses is of any worth? Honestly, even the huge entertainment conglomerates of American professional sports and Hollywood films reach but a limited audience when one considers the population of the world as a whole.

The day is gone...

Again... what day exactly do you refer to? When and where was poetry a voice of the majority or the masses?

In those days, at least 3 decades ago quite a large mass of people relished poetry.

Three decades ago? The 1980s... the 1970s... the 1960s...? These were a time when poetry filled the lives of the masses? Really?

Reading this thread some budding poets or posters may surmise that I have no passion for poetry. I am simply lamenting at the death of poetry.

And yet the facts contradict you. More people than ever write and read poetry. More books and magazines on poetry are published than ever. The leading poets of today reach audiences that dwarf that of a majority of the greatest poets of the past. You notions of the past are based upon an illusion.

Shakespeare may have been the towering figure of his time... but he did not live during the "age of Shakespeare"... an illusory era when the masses recognized the voice of poetic genius and when the man on the street was reciting the words of the bard. He lived in a time when he was a successful playwright... but still competed against vulgar exhibitions of bear-baiting and was unknown by most of his fellow countrymen... to say nothing of the whole of Europe and the world.

Where and when was this "golden age" of poetry and the arts that you imagine existed in the past?

IceM

04-13-2011, 09:28 PM

If not why few persons read it and the fact that some people speaking in defense of poesy has to roam fruitlessly for the epoch of poetry is over and we are descending upon a new eon poems can no longer be epochal and poets no more epoch makers.

Today we live in an age of the Net and we are wired emotionally and what goes on inside you gets transmitted to me gets wired to me invisibly and inconspicuously. You have no fire for poems, if you speak sincerely.

The day is gone, the altitude of it has liquefied and the colossal monuments our composers, defenders or sponsors of poetry has broken down into the pieces of something which cannot be rewoven into any valuables that can reawaken human feelings and passions.

Picking this apart piece by piece:

Your first paragraph underscores the vast audience of poetry. I read and write poetry daily. So do countless others in my neighboring schools and city. Internet makes poetry much more accessible, video links record live performances, and poetry performances are more frequent, especially at our school where we host regional exhibitions. Poetry has perhaps never had a larger audience. Man's life and his society have evolved; only because there are more amenities and mediums for entertainment does not suggest that poetry is less relished or less read. It is just less prominent in a more-diversified world. But less-prominent does not mean less-read.

Paragraph two simply overestimates the influences of the web on our life. Man manipulating technology does not suggest Man is manipulated by it.

Paragraph three is utterly predjudiced, as is the other post I quote. Why ask about the state of poetry if you've already determined it has ended? The world today has a far greater literacy rate than ever before, and yet will still be lower than future rates will hold. More people read poetry today than ever before. Just because our current era lacks a prominent poetic giant (a statement either JBI or StLukes will contest) that contends with a Whitman, Byron, Blake or Shakespeare (something probably a true statement) does not insist that our poetry is diminished. Becoming a prominent poet today is perhaps harder than ever before. There are more and more precedents and illustrious figures who have defined the many genres. To escape their influence and create something innovative is far more difficult today than before, when less giants defined less genres.

A few loners like you cornering oneself and musing. The rest are in their in rat races in pursuit of something different. In those days, at least 3 decades ago quite a large mass of people relished poetry. I myself had never got a day unspent without poetry. But for the last 15 years not a single day was devoted to versification. Just a few people in isolation engaging in the pursuit of a poetic venture does not mean that poetry is alive in the same degree and intensity as it did a long time ago.
It is dying out though the heart beat is still there.

I'd argue that literature has no golden era. In the times of Dickens, literacy rates were in the teens, maybe. Few people could read; fewer probably committed to poetry. The fact is, the population is growing larger instantaneously. The amount of people able to read is growing too. Only because versification and memorization are less prominent does not suggest poetry has declined. Man's life and modes of entertainment have expanded, and poetry must compete with more options. This does not degrade poetry, just suggests it isn't as central to life.

YesNo

04-13-2011, 10:00 PM

This heralds a new dawn of poetry. Of course language is powerful. I am sure if a poet can use the beauty of language, in fact language is a beauty, I will withdraw this thread that claimed poetry is dead.

Maybe this gives an indication that today poetry could not flow with the stream of language. Or our language could not advance to contain the beauty of poetry. AM I RIGHT?
Thanks for your response, blazeofglory. I don't know if either you or I are right, but I'm glad you started the thread because it got me thinking. I'm no expert on this topic, but this is what I think is true:

1) The reader is not responsible for the success of poetry. The poet is. Movie goers or music listeners do not need to attend classes before they are able to enjoy movies or music. Neither should readers of poetry. Admittedly they might learn something, but the basic enjoyment of any art does not need to be taught. The fact that people don't enjoy poetry means there is something wrong with poets.

2) What we call "poetry" today is not what it was in the past. In the past poetry was what could be chanted. The enjoyment came from both sound and meaning. It's intent was to move you, not bore you. This sonic, chantable, Beowulf-worthy poetry continues today. It is what song lyrics, commercials and political slogans are made of. The other meaning of poetry, the kind that is likely dead, or rather still-born, is the academic exercises that are often associated with "images". Real poetry has nothing to do with images. This is the "poetry", the academic commodity, that people don't read. We really need another word for it. The other, older poetry is in our faces daily--and we love it.

Anyway, that's what I think. Thanks for starting the interesting topic.

Mutatis-Mutandis

04-13-2011, 10:23 PM

I think StLukes and IceM nailed it pretty well. Plus, I would hate if poetry became something that became popular in the mainstream, because than it would become corrupted by it (many would argue it is already corrupted, or populated, but subpar poetry, surely).

mortalterror

04-13-2011, 10:39 PM

stlukesguild

04-13-2011, 11:27 PM

1) The reader is not responsible for the success of poetry. The poet is. Movie goers or music listeners do not need to attend classes before they are able to enjoy movies or music. Neither should readers of poetry. Admittedly they might learn something, but the basic enjoyment of any art does not need to be taught. The fact that people don't enjoy poetry means there is something wrong with poets.

All art involves a learned vocabulary. You may enjoy a painting because it "looks real" or like the sound of a Mozart sonata or the movement of a dance... but have no deeper understanding of them. If someone reads two poems in French to me I may prefer the sound of one, but find with some understanding of the language that the other poem is far better. I can assure you that understanding Picasso or Bach involves as much effort on my part as understanding Dante, Donne, Milton, Keats, Yeats, or Anne Carson.

Art is a dialog. It involves an effort on the part of the artist AND the audience. If a small audience enjoys the work of a poet or a composer or a painter how does that mean something is wrong with the artist? Does it also mean something is wrong with those who do enjoy the work? Does it mean that the artist should pander to a larger audience? How large of an audience is needed before you no longer feel something is wrong with a piece of art?

What we call "poetry" today is not what it was in the past. In the past poetry was what could be chanted. The enjoyment came from both sound and meaning. It's intent was to move you, not bore you.

Art is always changing... and for an obvious reason. Art today is not what it once was because the world we live in today is not what it once was. In the past poetry could be chanted...? Yes... this is true of much of the poetry of oral cultures... but Dante was not exactly written to be chanted. Neither was Donne or Milton. There were poems that were thought of as songs... as lyrics... but for the last couple millennium we have been living in a culture that reads poetry. In spite of this, the "music" of poetry still exists. The strongest poets clearly revel in the sound of words and the turn of a phrase.

This sonic, chantable, Beowulf-worthy poetry continues today. It is what song lyrics, commercials and political slogans are made of.

And is this the strongest of what poetry has to offer? In reality, it is the music that largely makes the lyrics of most popular songs memorable. In most cases the popular song lyric is not exactly a exemplary work of stand-alone poetry.

The other meaning of poetry, the kind that is likely dead, or rather still-born, is the academic exercises that are often associated with "images". Real poetry has nothing to do with images.

So you are the arbiter of what poetry is or is not? That pretty much eliminates the majority of Japanese poetry, a good deal of Chinese poetry, much of French Symbolism, and a good deal else beside.

It would seem to me that poetry can achieve many things. It can be didactic, it can convey epic narratives, it can meditate upon nature, spirituality, existence, etc... And it can also capture the fleeting moment... the transitory... the fugitive "image"... not unlike that which the Impressionist painters achieved in paint. I have always loved the image or the captured moment conveyed in Richard Wilbur's poem:

Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning (The Spanish Square in Rome)

I can't forget
How she stood at the top of that long marble stair
Amazed, and then with a sleepy pirouette
Went dancing slowly down to the fountain-quieted square;

Nothing upon her face
But some impersonal loneliness,- not then a girl
But as it were a reverie of the place,
A called-for falling glide and whirl;

As when a leaf, petal, or thin chip
Is drawn to the falls of a pool and, circling a moment above it,
Rides on over the lip-
Perfectly beautiful, perfectly ignorant of it.

mortalterror

04-14-2011, 01:54 AM

Art is a dialog. It involves an effort on the part of the artist AND the audience. If a small audience enjoys the work of a poet or a composer or a painter how does that mean something is wrong with the artist? Does it also mean something is wrong with those who do enjoy the work? Does it mean that the artist should pander to a larger audience? How large of an audience is needed before you no longer feel something is wrong with a piece of art?

I'll suggest that it can be an indicator that something may be wrong with the art or audience. There are some funny cults out there, that champion garbage for very perverse reasons. Indeed, every bad work of art has an audience of at least one, the artist.

What we call "poetry" today is not what it was in the past. In the past poetry was what could be chanted. The enjoyment came from both sound and meaning. It's intent was to move you, not bore you.

Art is always changing... and for an obvious reason. Art today is not what it once was because the world we live in today is not what it once was.

I agree with Stlukes. You are looking at art in a very backward way, one where poetry was only supposed to produce pleasure in the reader. But with our advanced new age modern approach, we recognize that all art is about reaction. Even negative reactions, even boredom is a valid response, and thus we can assume, such being the case, that this is the most powerful age for art in history.

MorpheusSandman

04-14-2011, 04:06 AM

In all reality, poetry and the more well-known poets are read today by a larger audience than they ever had at any time in history. Contemporary poets like Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill, Charles Simic, W.C. Merwin, and Seamus Heaney sell more books and are available through publication in magazines, newspapers, and the internet to a larger audience than William Blake, Keats, John Donne, Shakespeare, or Dante ever had during their lifetime. Here's an interesting question though: Is the audience proportionally larger to the level of worldwide interconnectivity? I mean, it's one thing to say that contemporary poets are read more and sell more, but surely part of that is due to the global market and interconnectivity that only the 20th Century made possible. Shakespeare was certainly a giant in his time and in his circle, Blake was known but controversial, and Donne mostly wrote poetry for a small coterie, and he even seemed to consider it a rather embarrassing endeavor. I think he said that to his elegies and satires were owed "some fear and shame".

I think in the modern age the "mainstream" has drastically expanded while what is considered niche and obscure has taken up a realm that, in the past, would probably have constituted the mainstream. This is especially true in the age of the internet where anyone with any taste can find something to suit that. So, yes, it certainly connects poets and poetry readers together, but does that group really equal something that's proportionately larger than those who would've read it in decades/centuries past?

All art involves a learned vocabulary. You may enjoy a painting because it "looks real" or like the sound of a Mozart sonata or the movement of a dance... but have no deeper understanding of them. If someone reads two poems in French to me I may prefer the sound of one, but find with some understanding of the language that the other poem is far better. I can assure you that understanding Picasso or Bach involves as much effort on my part as understanding Dante, Donne, Milton, Keats, Yeats, or Anne CarsonI don't think, however, that you can really compare the "learned vocabulary" of music, painting, and other visual arts to that of literature and poetry. You can't look at text in a language you don't understand and experience that as art, certainly not on any primal level. While even a child can listen or watch and be affected by music and painting and cinema. Of course, we create a vocabulary for music, film, etc. to communicate what we hear, what we like, what we dislike, etc., but this isn't needed to experience and enjoy it. But you always have to have an understanding of language to experience and enjoy poetry. Even in the example you gave of listening to two French poems, you aren't really hearing poetry (which surely must involve the communication/thought behind it), but pure phonetics. Sure, you can enjoy patterned phonetics, but that's not the same as enjoying poetry. I don't think you can say the same about music or film, which can simply work on intuitive, emotional, sense levels without any intellectual, symbolic understanding of their particular vocabulary.

I think the reason behind this distinction is the difference in medium. Music, film, painting, etc. tap directly into our senses of sight and sound, and the imitative and representational aspects of the visual arts intuitively relate to our unconscious recognitions and understanding (even someone who didn't have a word for "human" could recognize a "human" in a painting) and can move us precisely because we aren't able to structure that experience inside the symbolic realm of language. In contrast, language is the medium we use to capture that realm of the real and the realm of the subjective, and part of the art is using that crossfire of extensional referent and intensional signified that the other arts can present and access directly.

Perhaps, put succinctly, music and the visual arts access the world of direct sense perception and experience that we can then symbolize in language to create a vocabulary, while literature and poetry uses that symbolic language vocabulary to evoke the direct sense perceptions and subjective "meanings" associated with them. Literature will always be a medium at least one more step removed from the realm of the real than the other arts.

JBI

04-14-2011, 08:04 AM

I don't get it - poetry in itself is not particularly difficult. Identifying the scenes in Renaissance Historical paintings is far trickier (you need the Bible at the back of your head the whole time), much else knowing which saints are what, and what they represent.

Poetry has its difficult poets, and its super accessible easy ones - that being said, nobody seems to notice that poetry is not difficult in itself, and to get the language takes hours maybe.

What the learned eyes and ears discover is really a sort of vocabulary and methodology for discussion - essentially what New Critics created in the 20th century, and rhetoriticians labelled centuries before them - the words to express each action, and its effect. You don't need it, but poetry is nice to share and discuss, as is all literature.

Generally the beauty of poetry is that it connects much closer to metaphor than other forms, something which our mind does easily, as that is one half of all language (the other half being metonymy) - poetry is closer, and therefore requires a step on the reader to break it down - that isn't necessarily difficult, but perhaps some people are not used to actually reading, and so need that spelled out for them (the woods signify a sort of death, etc.).

MorpheusSandman

04-14-2011, 08:21 AM

Poetry has its difficult poets, and its super accessible easy ones - that being said, nobody seems to notice that poetry is not difficult in itself, and to get the language takes hours maybe.Problem is that those difficult poets tend to be the ones most frequently labeled as great, and the ones that are (or used to be?) taught in schools. Maybe we consider Burns' "My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose" a "great poem", but it's so simple that there's not much that can be said about it. In comparisons, pieces that are more complex and obscure invite more thought and interpretation, but also more difficult. As for the language taking hours, I think it depends on what we're talking about. I'm still learning the nuances of ME and EME.

Alexander III

04-14-2011, 09:04 AM

JBI

04-14-2011, 09:13 AM

Problem is that those difficult poets tend to be the ones most frequently labeled as great, and the ones that are (or used to be?) taught in schools. Maybe we consider Burns' "My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose" a "great poem", but it's so simple that there's not much that can be said about it. In comparisons, pieces that are more complex and obscure invite more thought and interpretation, but also more difficult. As for the language taking hours, I think it depends on what we're talking about. I'm still learning the nuances of ME and EME.
I don't know what you are talking about of Me and EME, but Shakespeare's Sonnets, for instance, are not difficult, and can be talked about for hours. I am particularly fond of Chinese and Japanese poems, in that the language can be very simple, yet you can talk forever because of their expansiveness, they invite the reader, and one can be lost in them without difficulty.

竹林馆，王维
独坐幽篁里，弹琴复长啸。
深林人不知，明月来相照。

The Bamboo Hut,

Alone Sitting in the secluded Grove,
I play the lute, its melody soars;
In deep woods where men are not known,
Just the lone Bright Moon watches.

Translation mine, no copying it elsewhere without permission, despite its mediocrity.

The poem is rather simple (I tried to be accurate, but translation is hard work!), but can easily be expanded. It begs questions, like what is man's relationship to nature, what does the solitary presence of the moon represent
relative to the solitary presence of the man - what is the connection between the sound of the Lute, and the light of the moon?

I can go on, but I am boring you - the poem itself is simple though, anybody can get it (far more easily in Chinese too). But why then do we say poetry is difficult? What is so damn difficult about it, that you need to question things? Is questioning so hard, is looking for significance, and discussing significance so difficult? There is no barrier other than an unwillingness to discuss, and poetry aught not apologize for that.

Mutatis-Mutandis

04-14-2011, 09:14 AM

As opposed to the corruption it already receives from the academic elite?
:lol: Exactly!

JCamilo

04-14-2011, 10:16 AM

I think difficulty came from pratice. Keats is more difficulty (not specially so) than Wordsworth and Blake than then, but Keats and Blake have poems that are more easily accepted or understood. Someone much more philosophical as Coleridge can be understand by heavy metal fans. Paradise Lost is nowhere as difficulty as the Comedy either...

YesNo

04-14-2011, 10:18 AM

Does it also mean something is wrong with those who do enjoy the work? Does it mean that the artist should pander to a larger audience? How large of an audience is needed before you no longer feel something is wrong with a piece of art?

There might be something wrong with the people who enjoy poetry, especially the older kind. If the poetry comes in the form of a political hate message that Hitler might deliver, most of us today would look back and say there was something wrong with those listeners who enjoyed it.

If I remember correctly, didn't Plato ban the poets from his Republic? I can imagine why he might have wanted to.

For the new academic commodity, probably the most that could be wrong with the person who is enjoys it is a kind of elitist egotism that isolates the person from others. The damage is more contained.

The reason to put the responsibility for poetry on the poet is because the poet wrote the words. The reader didn't. The readers would be responsible for their actions after hearing the poetry. The problem with the poetry that I think blazeofglory refers to is that it fails to move people, few or many, who actually do read it.

So you are the arbiter of what poetry is or is not? That pretty much eliminates the majority of Japanese poetry, a good deal of Chinese poetry, much of French Symbolism, and a good deal else beside.

:) I have no power to arbitrate anything.

I think there is a misunderstanding of the written Chinese characters that makes people think the Chinese language is based on images rather than sound. If I recall correctly, this was an idea promoted by Pound and Fenollosa. Like every other language, Chinese is sonic and meaningful, that is, poetic. It is not an example of an ideal "imagist" language. I assume the same is true of Japanese.

poetindisguise

04-14-2011, 10:21 AM

I agree with Stlukesguild. The popularity of poetry is at a high level. Just because it is not in the "mainstream" does not mean that it's dying, it means that it's flourishing with people who are actual lovers of good literature. Proof of that is this thread. If poetry were really dead don't you think you wouldn't be getting this many responces? Or in this site, a whole section devoted to poetry. blazeofglory you talk of technology as a bad thing, although I am no fan of becoming conssumed by technology, it also has its benifits. Things such as this site allow poets, who without this would never have come out of the "poet closet", to further their works and knowledge of poetry.

JBI

04-14-2011, 10:47 AM

There might be something wrong with the people who enjoy poetry, especially the older kind. If the poetry comes in the form of a political hate message that Hitler might deliver, most of us today would look back and say there was something wrong with those listeners who enjoyed it.

If I remember correctly, didn't Plato ban the poets from his Republic? I can imagine why he might have wanted to.

For the new academic commodity, probably the most that could be wrong with the person who is enjoys it is a kind of elitist egotism that isolates the person from others. The damage is more contained.

The reason to put the responsibility for poetry on the poet is because the poet wrote the words. The reader didn't. The readers would be responsible for their actions after hearing the poetry. The problem with the poetry that I think blazeofglory refers to is that it fails to move people, few or many, who actually do read it.

:) I have no power to arbitrate anything.

I think there is a misunderstanding of the written Chinese characters that makes people think the Chinese language is based on images rather than sound. If I recall correctly, this was an idea promoted by Pound and Fenollosa. Like every other language, Chinese is sonic and meaningful, that is, poetic. It is not an example of an ideal "imagist" language. I assume the same is true of Japanese.

Well, there is that misconception with the characters themselves, and, well, I cannot speak for Japanese poetry with the same confidence, but Chinese poetry as verse functions mostly on associative relationships between different character thoughts (Alone/seat(to sit), quiet/secluded, grove, in / Lute, repetition, great/grown/long, flute-sound) the actual understanding of things is based on a reconfiguration of the various elements, in part on their placement in the poem, and their relationship to each other, and in part on their associative connections to other poems. Western Poetry functions in a similar manner - though the composition of the characters themselves rarely enter into the understanding of the poem (there are times when they do, of course) the images of characters themselves certainly do.

I'll give you another example.
终南望雨雪
租咏
终南阴岭秀，积雪浮云端。　
林表明霁色，城中增暮寒。

Snow Seen on ZhongNan Mountain
Zu Yong
The splendor of the Northern Peak,
Snow Floats above a sea of clouds.
The forest dyed with the glow of the sunset
The town enveloped by evening chill.

Translation mine, do not steal or copy it without permission.

IF we break it down by character.

终南 - name of the mountain 阴岭 - moon peak (peak facing Chang'an, the capital also, being the north peak (Xu Yuan Chong, 300 Tang Poems)秀 - splendor, elegance.
积-gathered, accumulated,雪 - snow, 浮-float, 云 - cloud端 - head, beginning ->top
林表 - forest part, 明 - bright/illuminated 霁-after snow色 - colour.
城 - city/town/fortification/city wall中-middle, within, centre, among增-add, increase, augment暮-sunset/the sun sets/ to set(of the sun)寒 - cold, chill, wintry。

You see how I arrived where I did, I basically made a big comparison of different images, and arranged them, like the poet, I cracked into it in my head by following the flow of the poem and assembling within my vision. IF that is not playing with images I do not know what it is. I couldn't even get translations into the poem of the more particular bits, since they are so abstract.

stlukesguild

04-14-2011, 01:45 PM

Here's an interesting question though: Is the audience proportionally larger to the level of worldwide interconnectivity? I mean, it's one thing to say that contemporary poets are read more and sell more, but surely part of that is due to the global market and interconnectivity that only the 20th Century made possible.

Of course there are reasons that Anne Carson has more readers than Shakespeare or Dante did during their lifetime. The movable type printing press was invented after Dante's time and modern presses far surpass the capabilities of the press in Shakespeare's time. The population of the world has greatly increased as has the percentage of that population which is literate. We have far fewer distinct languages today than in the past where the shift from one town to the next might involve a shift in dialect and spelling so drastic as to result in a virtual different language. At the same time, we have seen an increasing spread of certain languages which leads to an increasing accessibility to writers in certain languages. International trade, and communications add further to this all.

Admittedly the audience for poetry... but also serious literature, classical music, jazz, bluegrass, Indian ragas, the films of Bergman, painting, sculpture, opera, and most other art forms is limited... a niche audience if you will. Even the popular arts are largely limited by culture. The best selling novel at any point on the NYT Best Seller's list is unlikely to be a huge hit in Japan or China. Blazeofglory seems to be suggesting that it is a failure on the part of the poet that he or she does not have a larger audience. The notion of a universal audience, however is ridiculous. A book like Harry Potter reached a huge audience. A large part of its success (beyond the vast marketing machines employed by the publishers) was owed to the employment of certain elements... including a relative simplicity. For all its success, a novel like Harry Potter failed to interest other readers who demand something more challenging... who avoid the cliche, etc... The size of the audience is no measure of the merit of the art... for or against. Lady Gaga currently appeals to a larger audience than Mozart but I doubt this says anything about Mozart's artistic failings.

I will agree (in part) with Mortalterror's assertion that a very small niche audience can be an indicator that there is something wrong with the art. There are those who employ art as a means of asserting social status and there is a certain status in liking... even being aware of the latest art or music or literature... especially that which fails to resonate even with a majority of those who are well-versed in a given art form. One becomes a cognoscenti among cognoscenti. But again... such is no proof for or against a work of art. Most great artistic innovations begin with the support of a very limited audience... whether we are speaking of William Blake or Van Gogh.

I don't think, however, that you can really compare the "learned vocabulary" of music, painting, and other visual arts to that of literature and poetry. You can't look at text in a language you don't understand and experience that as art, certainly not on any primal level. While even a child can listen or watch and be affected by music and painting and cinema. Of course, we create a vocabulary for music, film, etc. to communicate what we hear, what we like, what we dislike, etc., but this isn't needed to experience and enjoy it.

What we need to recognize is that our "learned vocabulary" in art, film, music, and literature is being continually developed by what we experience everyday and what we are formally taught. The distortions and abstractions of Cubism and Expressionism left the original audiences baffled... if not outraged. Today children grow up looking at comic books and cartoon figures that employ the same vocabulary to such an extent that they seem "natural". Sergei Eisenstein employed great cuts in time and space in his films that also left initial audiences dazed and confused. We have grown up with these to such an extent that again they seem wholly natural.

The same might be said of literature. The first novels shocked with their abstractions and their artifice. Most of us have grown up with this notion of fictional prose to such an extent that we no longer recognize the artifice involved. Poetry, drama, and some post-Modern forms strike many contemporary readers as far more "affected"... "mannered"... "artificial"... in spite of the fact that in reality they are often rooted in far older traditions. Poetry is a challenge for many readers for the simple reason that they haven't been exposed to it often... either at home or in their formal education.

stlukesguild

04-14-2011, 02:16 PM

Problem is that those difficult poets tend to be the ones most frequently labeled as great, and the ones that are (or used to be?) taught in schools.

This may be due to the fact that it is far easier to "prove" the "genius" of a work which is complex... as opposed to the simple lyric. The same holds true in other art forms as well. Many new-comers to classical music struggle with Mozart... not because his music is so difficult... but rather because it seems so simple in comparison to the obvious complexities of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner. The same is true in painting. It is easy to argue for Raphael's genius based upon this painting:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5305/5619269185_d0e2cde805_b.jpg

as opposed to this one:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5105/5619269227_cf1a3d5959_b.jpg

The School of Athens is laden with levels of symbolism and iconography of the sort to make the art historian salivate. The Portrait of Baldasar Castiglione, on the other hand, is... well, just a portrait. In spite of being recognized as a supreme masterpiece by artists as different as Rembrandt, Rubens, Cezanne, and Picasso, it is not a work that opens itself readily to an analysis as to why it is so good.

The same might be true when looking at some examples from Modern art:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5308/5619269489_d2290f0f3f_b.jpg

Picasso's iconic Les Demoiselles d'Avignon shattered notions about painting and truly heralded Modernism, Cubism, and even abstraction. The writer can gush about its innovations and its impact and spend entire pages exploring the iconography... the elements drawn from El Greco, from Romanesque Spanish painting, from Cezanne, and from archaic Greek and Etruscan figures, and from African sculpture.

This painting is far more difficult to analyze:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5062/5619859506_837f21950f_z.jpg

In spite of the reference to the sculpted Venus in the mirror and the magical handling of paint and color, the painting largely seems to be a mere representation of everyday reality: a woman bathing in her home/apartment.

The same obviously is true in poetry. How much more can be spent unveiling the references and "meanings" in T.S. Eliot's Wasteland than in a simple lyric like this:

Über allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh'
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde
Warte nur, balde
Ruhest Du auch.

or this:

Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle,
Assise auprès du feu, dévidant et filant,
Direz, chantant mes vers, en vous émerveillant :
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.

Lors, vous n’aurez servante oyant telle nouvelle,
Déjà sous le labeur à demi sommeillant,
Qui au bruit de mon nom ne s’aille réveillant,
Bénissant votre nom de louange immortelle.

Je serai sous la terre et fantôme sans os :
Par les ombres myrteux je prendrai mon repos :
Vous serez au foyer une vieille accroupie,

Regrettant mon amour et votre fier dédain.
Vivez, si m’en croyez, n’attendez à demain :
Cueillez dès aujourd’hui les roses de la vie.

or this:

She walks in Beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

And yet these seemingly simple lyrics which so resonate may not be any less perfect than the more complex work. They simply evade analysis or dissection.

stlukesguild

04-14-2011, 02:29 PM

The problem with the poetry that I think blazeofglory refers to is that it fails to move people, few or many, who actually do read it.

Again, how is that a "problem" of the poet? You are assuming that the goal of the artist is (or should be) to reach the largest audience possible... if not everyone. Chinese music does nothing for me. That is not necessarily a failing on the part of the composers, but rather it is a failing on my part. I have decided that I am not interested in putting forth the time and labor need to understand an appreciate this music. The fact that opera or modern painting or Bergman's films or poetry do not resonate with an audience unwilling to put forth the effort need to meet the artist half-way... to appreciate the work... is not the fault of the artist.

JCamilo

04-14-2011, 04:57 PM

As if the artist can or have any control of the process of Art beyond the production of his work. That is like assuming Virgil had planned to be a Chritian honoris causa or Dante to have his named related to the grotesque and not the sublime, Milton to rebels without cause, Shakespeare to freudians, Cervantes to buffons... People try to uncover the mistery of Mona Lisa, which mistery may be none, just like "She walks in beauty", a perfect portrait which story of production have caused probabilities which - for someone as keen to mind games, charades, etc - was not that relevant to da Vinci. Heck, La Fontaine and Perrault didn't wrote for children, the arabians did not understand a 1001 Nights like a metaphor of eternity, Dostoievisky never had the pretession to be a psychologist, Flaubert buffed with people liking Emma Bovary (the character, who he said was a portrait of people he disliked), Goethe would laugh of the idea of nationalism, much more of Germanism...

In the end, the artists can be even erased (I doubt there will ever a movement which slogan will be "the reader is dead") and the art will be sustained. Nobody knew Red Ridding Hood author, yet, that simple like a kid scratch tale which is obviously just about the relation with wild wolves, is interpreted in hundred different ways. I will blame someone like Basho for writing conteplative poems for the XX century western readers...

YesNo

04-14-2011, 05:43 PM

I'll give you another example.
终南望雨雪
租咏
终南阴岭秀，积雪浮云端。　
林表明霁色，城中增暮寒。

...IF that is not playing with images I do not know what it is. I couldn't even get translations into the poem of the more particular bits, since they are so abstract.

There is also meter in the Tang poem you quote. This is the sonic part that I believe dominates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese_poetry_forms

I suspect they were playing more with sound than images.

JBI

04-14-2011, 07:31 PM

There is also meter in the Tang poem you quote. This is the sonic part that I believe dominates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese_poetry_forms

I suspect they were playing more with sound than images.

You couldn't be more wrong. Sound is like metre, is Homer playing with sound, or images? That's like you saying an artist is playing with ink.

Besides, this poem is far less dominated by sound than, lets say, a Du Mu poem. The think doesn't even rhyme, which is quite common in curtailed forms. These short poems in general are dominated by images, as that is all the form allows - there is no room for fancy "sound games" that are better suited for longer poems. That being said, there is metre, but that just effects sound - the way you read is tracing images, and moving with the eye of the poem. I don't need a wikipedia article to tell me that, I have the fancy edition of the book with the two page commentary in front of me if I need someone to tell me how to read.

I trust you are reading it in Chinese?

Jozanny

04-14-2011, 07:31 PM

I will agree (in part) with Mortalterror's assertion that a very small niche audience can be an indicator that there is something wrong with the art. There are those who employ art as a means of asserting social status and there is a certain status in liking... even being aware of the latest art or music or literature... especially that which fails to resonate even with a majority of those who are well-versed in a given art form. One becomes a cognoscenti among cognoscenti. But again... such is no proof for or against a work of art. Most great artistic innovations begin with the support of a very limited audience... whether we are speaking of William Blake or Van Gogh.

There is, more correctly, a problem with how poetry is marketed by the publishing industry. There is a disconnect between literary journal dependence on university/college sponsorship, and traditional commercial marketing, and projects like DoubleTake, which heroically attempted to bridge the gap, still fail. What does Amazon highlight on a random visit? Mystery, thrillers, romance, Christian, YA. More esoteric tastes take some labor.

Poetry also suffers, like fiction, from ghettoization. Everyone writes it without making an effort to accomplish anything with it as a craft. I started out that way. Write and submit. Now it's write and email, and, as authors get more established, they limit their exposure, which also has reverberations. I wouldn't get caught dead in most online writing forums, though I still post in the LNF when I can stomach it.

MorpheusSandman

04-15-2011, 04:38 AM

But why then do we say poetry is difficult?Maybe it's because I came to poetry through Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare, but it definitely required a reorientation of how I approached and mentally processed language. For most people, language is a tool for direct communication. The fewer ambiguities, the better. If my friends are I are hanging out and I say "I'm hungry; you guys want to grab a bite to eat?" there's no ambiguity, no metaphor, no rhetoric, no subtlety, no "between the text meaning". If I instead said, "Like the mouth of the sea that indiscriminately swallows the travelers who dare to tread her wavering face yet are digested in Poseidon's grave, so could I partake in victuals" then they're going to look at me as if I lost my mind. Yeah, that's an extreme example, and it's not even a difficult one to follow for those accustomed to encountering metaphor, but for those NOT accustomed, it just comes across as white noise.

Most people are all about content. When I first got into cinema, I argued with my parents frequently that were more important things to film than the story. When my mother wanted to convince me a movie was good, she's relate the story, If I told her one was good, she's ask me to relate the story, as if a plot outline ever determined the quality of any work of narrative art. Poetry is almost defined by its insistence on indirect communication and evocation, by its emphasis of form as used to express content (more than the naked content itself). Even if you take your example, which simply works in evocative (if not metaphoric) images, it still becomes clear that the significance lies deeper than the surface content of what the words refer to, and people simply aren't use to processing art on that level. It does, indeed, take a certain amount of effort of looking beyond the surface of things. And poetry, perhaps more than any other art, requires this. Hence, the "difficulty".

Admittedly the audience for poetry... but also serious literature, classical music, jazz, bluegrass, Indian ragas, the films of Bergman, painting, sculpture, opera, and most other art forms is limited... a niche audience if you will.I'd really be interested to read any kind of study on just how "niche" these art-forms and genres are. My hunch is that there's a bigger audience for classical music, jazz, Bergman, and the visual arts than for poetry. Of course, it's just a hunch, and I have no idea how you'd substantiate it.

The notion of a universal audience, however is ridiculous. A book like Harry Potter reached a huge audience. A large part of its success (beyond the vast marketing machines employed by the publishers) was owed to the employment of certain elements... including a relative simplicity. For all its success, a novel like Harry Potter failed to interest other readers who demand something more challenging... who avoid the cliche, etc... The size of the audience is no measure of the merit of the art... for or against. Lady Gaga currently appeals to a larger audience than Mozart but I doubt this says anything about Mozart's artistic failings.But surely it must take some positive quality in art to appeal to so many different people on a basic level? It's easy to sit back and criticize Harry Potter or Dan Brown or Michael Bay or Lady Gaga or any massively popular artist, but I've always felt that it must take some talent, some artistry, some ingenuity, some something to be able to produce works that mean something to so many. I'm not saying all worldwide popular art is automatically great art, but I think it's one indicator of quality. I also think that needs to be combined with something lasting. The Beatles were also just a heart-throb pop band when they started, Hitchcock was just a director of thrillers who stood in the shadow of Ford and Griffith (and it wasn't until the French New Wave that he really stepped out of that shadow). I also don't think it's fair to compare contemporary artists to classic ones, because classic ones have finished their careers and have etched their way into the canon. It's not as if Mozart would've been the same Mozart when he was the age of Lady Gaga.

What we need to recognize is that our "learned vocabulary" in art, film, music, and literature is being continually developed by what we experience everyday and what we are formally taught.I have no doubt that certain vocabulary becomes ingrained and what was once ordinary becomes commonplace, but that isn't quite what I was getting at. No matter one's vocabulary, what I was saying is that music and the visual arts can be appreciated even by those with no vocabulary at all. I knew nothing of film as an art-form when I saw my first films, yet I remember enjoying them as a young child. The same went for music. But I couldn't read until I learned language, and even then the vocabulary of certain literature was far out of my reach. To use a good example, I remember Kubrick once said that children understood 2001: A Space Odyssey better than adults did, because they knew how to connect to it directly on an aesthetic level - the power of images and music and seeing something extraordinary - while adults had been biased by the typical vocabulary of cinematic narrative. Yet 2001 is undeniably one of (if not the most) complex work of cinema in terms of cinematic vocabulary ever made. You can't give the most complex work of literary vocabulary (say something like Finnegans Wake) to a child and expect they'll get anything out of it.

This may be due to the fact that it is far easier to "prove" the "genius" of a work which is complex... as opposed to the simple lyric. The same holds true in other art forms as well. Many new-comers to classical music struggle with Mozart... not because his music is so difficult... but rather because it seems so simple in comparison to the obvious complexities of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner.That's a good point. Complexity certainly provides more meat for analysis than simplicity. Although, I might object to the inclusion of Mozart in your examples; there's no loss of complex musical ideas in his late works, especially. His 41st Symphonies is one of the most impressive symphonies from a technical standpoint ever composed, and his late operas contain a wealth of rich ideas about how music and theater should compliment and enlighten the other, rather than being separate constructs stuffed together.

YesNo

04-15-2011, 10:40 AM

You couldn't be more wrong. Sound is like metre, is Homer playing with sound, or images? That's like you saying an artist is playing with ink.

Besides, this poem is far less dominated by sound than, lets say, a Du Mu poem. The think doesn't even rhyme, which is quite common in curtailed forms. These short poems in general are dominated by images, as that is all the form allows - there is no room for fancy "sound games" that are better suited for longer poems. That being said, there is metre, but that just effects sound - the way you read is tracing images, and moving with the eye of the poem. I don't need a wikipedia article to tell me that, I have the fancy edition of the book with the two page commentary in front of me if I need someone to tell me how to read.

I trust you are reading it in Chinese?
My view is that language does not deal with images at all. It uses ideas. If you want an image, you paint a picture or take a photograph.

Regardless of what poets think they are doing with "images", what actually happens is that the readers get snippets of abstractions. The readers are then forced to put the snippets together and they often do this sentimentally--or they just put the book of poetry down because they refuse to participate in the game. They realize, correctly, they have better things to do and there is more interesting art to enjoy.

I don't know enough Chinese to appreciate the sound and meaning of the poetry. I also assume you know Chinese better than I do. However, I have relatives who are Chinese and this keeps the language in front of me on a daily basis.

Also, I didn't mean to insult your intelligence with the Wikipedia article. I provided it to give you an idea that meter is important in these classical forms. This is a point that is not often understood. One source I have used in studying these poems is James Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry, (U of Chicago, 1962). Although this is still an elementary text, I have found it interesting.

Just as a teaser, this is what Liu says in Chapter 3, Auditory Effects of Chinese and the Bases of Versification:

Just as the visual effects of Chinese characters in poetry have been exaggerated, so have the auditory effects of Chinese poetry been relatively neglected by Western translators and students.

Since you offered a translation, here is one of mine, done many years ago of a poem by Wang Zhihuan about climbing Stork Tower. My original motivation in writing the poem was to learn the language and I was told that children are taught Chinese by memorizing some of these Tang poems.

I tried to translate this using as close to as many syllables as the 5-character form uses. I have two more syllables than the original. I understand from Liu that the second and fourth line are required to rhyme in this form and so I placed a rhyme there. For meter I picked an alternating accent-unaccented pattern and added alliteration.

I'm sure you'll notice the difference in our approaches to translation.

白日依山盡，
黃河入海流。
欲窮千里目，
更上一層樓。

Mountains shine in sunlight.
River runs to sea.
Climb those stairs, one storey--
Miles of majesty.

Just to see if a machine can do it better, Google translate does it like this:

Sun mountains,
Yellow River flows into the sea.
For a grander sight,
A higher level.

Jozanny

04-15-2011, 01:05 PM

blazeofglory

04-15-2011, 07:44 PM

I did not read the entire thread, but if the question centers on whether or not poetry is still relevant, it is not the right question. There are hundreds of web zines and magazines that I have published in during my lifetime. They are accessible and available regardless of how trained we are in reading poets.

The more acute observation, which applies to literary fiction, as well, is that the function of creative writing has changed, and what you are all actually debating is whether this change is good or bad. As one writer on Slate noted, the US is adept at manufacturing athletes, but doesn't care about creating geniuses like Shakespeare, who lived in an era of fulsome European hegemony that actually did value cultured intellect.

So to that extent, you are all boring me. As a published poet, I will always care about poetry. Whether you do or not depends on what aesthetic you choose to cultivate. There is a diehard, loyal audience to small press culture, just as there are people like luke who are aesthetes toward the rare and obscure.

Poetry is not competitive with pop culture? Big deal, and not entirely accurate, as the university system has turned writers into a self-perpetuating class that really doesn't care if the average online poster reads them or not. We tend to be appreciated by each other, and that, too, is old news.

You are right in some instances and wrong in some others. Poetry cannot be compared with pop culture. I agree hundred percent. But poetry is a dead domain now. The reason is poetry does not sell the way it did a few decades ago only. If you enter a bookshop you can hardly come upon books of poetry on display. Even one percent people going there ask for a book of poems. You cannot find any kids reading poetry. Those who have kin interests in poetry are like you who do not belong to this generation. There are so many choices and why people choose to write poetry. We do not need Shakespeare today and if anybody tries to be a Shakespearean type he does not fit in today's world. Maybe people read poems at times but none red a Shakespearean dramas except for academic persuasion. Then why should any government sponsor and promote this dead culture. It has no implication, nothing for today's generation. You may be an aesthete, someone still hooked to the bygone values and tradition that have died out half a century ago. Today we have so many things as pastimes. In today's world our values have undergone a dramatic turnarounds. There are so many pursuits people are after- college, dating, sex, separation and travel, the Internet, movies, TV, soap operas, clubs, sports, politics, restaurants, drinks the economic meltdown, books of comics, the goings-on around the globe and the like. Of course poetry too with a few ones in their dim candle-lit room secluding oneself from the glamors of the outside world. There is no time for the rest for poetry.

Poetry is a beautiful persuasion. It makes both the poet and the reader beautiful but beauty itself has been a misfit in today's world. Where is beauty? It is in your poetry and not even in your imagination. We are in a world of materialism and the concrete matters not the abstract.

You maybe the last poet or the one who is yet to understand the goings-on of the present world. You can write poetry for self gratification. If you have publishers to publish your poetry, you have a special relation with them or else few publishers will publish the artifact that does not sell.

JCamilo

04-15-2011, 08:18 PM

You are right in some instances and wrong in some others. Poetry cannot be compared with pop culture.

This because? They should not be compared, only because one is a form to deal with language and the other is a form to relate to culture. Pop culture is far from a form of production that lacks creativity, artistic talent or complexity. Even pop musical idols behaviour are nothing but a pale shadow of Lord Byron. And it should be noted, that pop culture is considerable more complex than just american mainstream. Pop art for example was rather marginal. Pop icons write their poetry books (Tim Burton, Bob Dylan, Chico Buarque de Holanda, etc)...

I agree hundred percent. But poetry is a dead domain now. The reason is poetry does not sell the way it did a few decades ago only. If you enter a bookshop you can hardly come upon books of poetry on display. Even one percent people going there ask for a book of poems. You cannot find any kids reading poetry. Those who have kin interests in poetry are like you who do not belong to this generation.

I have twin sisters. They turned 17 now. One is a big fan of Lord Byron. The other of Emily Dickison. They recite brazilian poets from XIX century - obscure poets for the majority - and they get happy when I give them poetry books. This since they are young. They have friends who do the same and online wise, I have meet several teens trying to write poetry, having one or another love for, perhaps bad poets, but few shunned the classical poets when I suggested them. A poem like "The Raven" is present in Simpsons, quoted by all, heavy metal fans have the tendency to know Coleridge just because of Iron Maiden. Even the movie - bad - as Bewoulf popped publishing and distribution the poem. I wonder which numbers give you a basis, that is the past there was many top best sellers poets and now we have none.

There are so many choices and why people choose to write poetry. We do not need Shakespeare today and if anybody tries to be a Shakespearean type he does not fit in today's world. Maybe people read poems at times but none red a Shakespearean dramas except for academic persuasion.

Shakespeare keep selling well. Right now, a brazilian soup opera has part of its plot based on him. And not even a top play. The Shakespeare Society is actually buying lands to build a Shakespeare theatre in Brazil and Buenos Aires showed the interest too, because the increasing interest on the guy. I may note, no teacher in university told me to read Shakespeare.

Then why should any government sponsor and promote this dead culture. It has no implication, nothing for today's generation. You may be an aesthete, someone still hooked to the bygone values and tradition that have died out half a century ago. Today we have so many things as pastimes. In today's world our values have undergone a dramatic turnarounds. There are so many pursuits people are after- college, dating, sex, separation and travel, the Internet, movies, TV, soap operas, clubs, sports, politics, restaurants, drinks the economic meltdown, books of comics, the goings-on around the globe and the like. Of course poetry too with a few ones in their dim candle-lit room secluding oneself from the glamors of the outside world. There is no time for the rest for poetry.

We have more options? Sure. Poetry has competition (sure, it is from Novels and Romances). Sure. But we do not work 20 hours a day. We get information much faster. There still room for poetry - the academic poetry you talk about was never popular (Shakespeare was a popular playwriter, not poet), as if dominated by masses.

Poetry is a beautiful persuasion. It makes both the poet and the reader beautiful but beauty itself has been a misfit in today's world. Where is beauty? It is in your poetry and not even in your imagination. We are in a world of materialism and the concrete matters not the abstract.

I would argue there was a never a world that cared for the abstract. Medieval word had solid castle walls, armies. Romans had taxes. Romantics banks and factories. Some had slaves. In fact, in the past, it was so expensive to learn to read and write, that few poets would go writting.

You maybe the last poet or the one who is yet to understand the goings-on of the present world. You can write poetry for self gratification. If you have publishers to publish your poetry, you have a special relation with them or else few publishers will publish the artifact that does not sell.

Jozanny is rambling. Cann't you see? He is telling us to bug off. Not crying a river about one more death of poetry. People complaning about the death of peotry in a website and could not even write poems themselves. Slow death and pain to all who are to dumb to see poets exactly where they want to be.

blazeofglory

04-15-2011, 08:40 PM

This because? They should not be compared, only because one is a form to deal with language and the other is a form to relate to culture. Pop culture is far from a form of production that lacks creativity, artistic talent or complexity. Even pop musical idols behaviour are nothing but a pale shadow of Lord Byron. And it should be noted, that pop culture is considerable more complex than just american mainstream. Pop art for example was rather marginal. Pop icons write their poetry books (Tim Burton, Bob Dylan, Chico Buarque de Holanda, etc)...

I have twin sisters. They turned 17 now. One is a big fan of Lord Byron. The other of Emily Dickison. They recite brazilian poets from XIX century - obscure poets for the majority - and they get happy when I give them poetry books. This since they are young. They have friends who do the same and online wise, I have meet several teens trying to write poetry, having one or another love for, perhaps bad poets, but few shunned the classical poets when I suggested them. A poem like "The Raven" is present in Simpsons, quoted by all, heavy metal fans have the tendency to know Coleridge just because of Iron Maiden. Even the movie - bad - as Bewoulf popped publishing and distribution the poem. I wonder which numbers give you a basis, that is the past there was many top best sellers poets and now we have none.

Shakespeare keep selling well. Right now, a brazilian soup opera has part of its plot based on him. And not even a top play. The Shakespeare Society is actually buying lands to build a Shakespeare theatre in Brazil and Buenos Aires showed the interest too, because the increasing interest on the guy. I may note, no teacher in university told me to read Shakespeare.

We have more options? Sure. Poetry has competition (sure, it is from Novels and Romances). Sure. But we do not work 20 hours a day. We get information much faster. There still room for poetry - the academic poetry you talk about was never popular (Shakespeare was a popular playwriter, not poet), as if dominated by masses.

I would argue there was a never a world that cared for the abstract. Medieval word had solid castle walls, armies. Romans had taxes. Romantics banks and factories. Some had slaves. In fact, in the past, it was so expensive to learn to read and write, that few poets would go writting.

Jozanny is rambling. Cann't you see? He is telling us to bug off. Not crying a river about one more death of poetry. People complaning about the death of peotry in a website and could not even write poems themselves. Slow death and pain to all who are to dumb to see poets exactly where they want to be.

I was a poet myself and no more now. I wrote thousands of poems and I cried over many beautifully and poignantly written sad poems. Poetry used to be my cup tea for decades. Suddenly there came a break. Some other persuasions, career, politics, economics took that place. I have a heart for poetry and yet it has been months, if not years since I haven't read a single poem. I often, however read the type that feature both poetry and prose.

I read Khalil Gibran and Rumi. Gibran is not the poet the poets do write. His is a different style. I am not advocating against the significance of poetry. I will be more than happy if poetry continues to survive. I am only lamenting the death of poetry. If someone campaign for it I will be more than happy.

stlukesguild

04-15-2011, 10:02 PM

But poetry is a dead domain now.

According to whom?

The reason is poetry does not sell the way it did a few decades ago only...

You have made repeated assertions about this golden age of poetry which never existed, and ignored any facts to the contrary. I have seen nothing in the current sales of poetry to suggest that it is worse off or facing an eminent demise.

If you enter a bookshop you can hardly come upon books of poetry on display.

If you enter most book stores you will find little outside of what sells well to the mainstream audience on display. That is no different now than it was in the past.

Even one percent people going there ask for a book of poems. You cannot find any kids reading poetry. Those who have kin interests in poetry are like you who do not belong to this generation.

Very few "kids" are interested in poetry... or anything outside of popular culture. Big deal. Was it ever different? I'm sorry, but you're sadly deluded if you thing the masses were ever walking around reading Keats, Shelley, or T.S. Eliot. Like many, I didn't really "discover" poetry until later... until I was in college.

There are so many choices and why people choose to write poetry. We do not need Shakespeare today and if anybody tries to be a Shakespearean type he does not fit in today's world. Maybe people read poems at times but none red a Shakespearean dramas except for academic persuasion.

I'm sorry, but that's pure nonsense. Shakespeare continues to sell quite well and continues to be regularly performed to audiences well beyond academia.

Then why should any government sponsor and promote this dead culture.

Governments continually support the arts for a multitude of reasons. Most of these have little to do with aesthetics and far more to do with promoting their own traditions and values. The arts of the past remain important because they allow the audience to engage in a dialog with those of other times, other places, other beliefs, other values... which may just be of real value in developing empathy as opposed to focusing solely upon the self. The arts of the past are also supported for the simple reason that there is an audience... quite sizable... if not on the same scale as the audience for popular culture... that find pleasure in these.

It has no implication, nothing for today's generation.

And this would seem to be a problem in your thinking... the notion that only that which has practical utilitarian value to us here and now is of any merit.

There are so many pursuits people are after- college, dating, sex, separation and travel, the Internet, movies, TV, soap operas, clubs, sports, politics, restaurants, drinks the economic meltdown, books of comics, the goings-on around the globe and the like. Of course poetry too with a few ones in their dim candle-lit room secluding oneself from the glamors of the outside world. There is no time for the rest for poetry.

Poetry is a beautiful persuasion. It makes both the poet and the reader beautiful but beauty itself has been a misfit in today's world. Where is beauty? It is in your poetry and not even in your imagination. We are in a world of materialism and the concrete matters not the abstract.

You maybe the last poet or the one who is yet to understand the goings-on of the present world. You can write poetry for self gratification. If you have publishers to publish your poetry, you have a special relation with them or else few publishers will publish the artifact that does not sell...

I was a poet myself and no more now. I wrote thousands of poems and I cried over many beautifully and poignantly written sad poems. Poetry used to be my cup tea for decades. Suddenly there came a break. Some other persuasions, career, politics, economics took that place. I have a heart for poetry and yet it has been months, if not years since I haven't read a single poem. I often, however read the type that feature both poetry and prose.

In all actuality this is less a lament for poetry and more of a sniveling, self-indulgent complaint that poetry isn't what you think it should be, and that your own poetic efforts aren't recognized as they should be.

JCamilo

04-15-2011, 11:21 PM

I was a poet myself and no more now. I wrote thousands of poems and I cried over many beautifully and poignantly written sad poems. Poetry used to be my cup tea for decades. Suddenly there came a break. Some other persuasions, career, politics, economics took that place. I have a heart for poetry and yet it has been months, if not years since I haven't read a single poem. I often, however read the type that feature both poetry and prose.

I read Khalil Gibran and Rumi. Gibran is not the poet the poets do write. His is a different style. I am not advocating against the significance of poetry. I will be more than happy if poetry continues to survive. I am only lamenting the death of poetry. If someone campaign for it I will be more than happy.

Good for you. People here give too much self importance to their own reactions... If anything, poetry is written more than needed...

MorpheusSandman

04-16-2011, 12:37 AM

If anything, poetry is written more than needed...Couldn't you say all art is created more than needed? Of course, "need" is pretty subjective unless we tie it down to the basic essentials. As Lear said:

"O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life's as cheap as beast's: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear'st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,--"

JCamilo

04-16-2011, 01:30 AM

Well, I cannt tell if ballet shows are produced more than the market demands :D

IceM

04-16-2011, 01:37 AM

You are right in some instances and wrong in some others. Poetry cannot be compared with pop culture. I agree hundred percent. But poetry is a dead domain now. The reason is poetry does not sell the way it did a few decades ago only. If you enter a bookshop you can hardly come upon books of poetry on display. Even one percent people going there ask for a book of poems. You cannot find any kids reading poetry. Those who have kin interests in poetry are like you who do not belong to this generation. There are so many choices and why people choose to write poetry. We do not need Shakespeare today and if anybody tries to be a Shakespearean type he does not fit in today's world. Maybe people read poems at times but none red a Shakespearean dramas except for academic persuasion. Then why should any government sponsor and promote this dead culture. It has no implication, nothing for today's generation. You may be an aesthete, someone still hooked to the bygone values and tradition that have died out half a century ago. Today we have so many things as pastimes. In today's world our values have undergone a dramatic turnarounds. There are so many pursuits people are after- college, dating, sex, separation and travel, the Internet, movies, TV, soap operas, clubs, sports, politics, restaurants, drinks the economic meltdown, books of comics, the goings-on around the globe and the like. Of course poetry too with a few ones in their dim candle-lit room secluding oneself from the glamors of the outside world. There is no time for the rest for poetry.

Poetry is a beautiful persuasion. It makes both the poet and the reader beautiful but beauty itself has been a misfit in today's world. Where is beauty? It is in your poetry and not even in your imagination. We are in a world of materialism and the concrete matters not the abstract.
You maybe the last poet or the one who is yet to understand the goings-on of the present world. You can write poetry for self gratification. If you have publishers to publish your poetry, you have a special relation with them or else few publishers will publish the artifact that does not sell.

Your assertions are unsubstantiated and indefensible. You cling to this romantic notion that, because of your self-heralded esteem for poetry and it's unfortunate demise, all of poetry is dead. That is ignorant.

The novel has, perhaps since the time of Virgil, been the dominant commercial form of writing. Even in the eras that produced Dante, Yeats, Keats, Donne, Neruda, Poe, and countless others, poetry was not dominant. Until perhaps the 1900s, maybe even earlier, literacy rates were incredibly low. For there to be a "golden age" of poetry in eras with far fewer readers is ignorant to the tremendous growth in both literacy and audience size. More people read poetry than ever before. Far more people are writing it.

Even amongst the youth, who you lament don't read poetry, poetry is in fact growing. Slam Poetry, while by no means an equivalent (although just as enjoyable) is in effect a movement to return poetry to it's oral roots. It's dominated by the youth. More and more teenagers and adolescents are bridging the discrepancies of school curriculum by studying and crafting poetry independently. The craft will never become mainstream, and the youth embracing populist trends will never embrace poetry as the literary minds do. But the proportion of those reading poetry is growing. I, and my group of friends, are a testament to that, as we read and analyze poems, or books of poetry, monthly.

Literature itself has always commented on and adjusted to societal changes. Poetry is no different. The poetry of the coming age will reflect society's evolution. Lamenting the death of a craft is ignorant to it's dynamic changes and the imminent evolution to match society's changes.

I was a poet myself and no more now. I wrote thousands of poems and I cried over many beautifully and poignantly written sad poems. Poetry used to be my cup tea for decades. Suddenly there came a break. Some other persuasions, career, politics, economics took that place. I have a heart for poetry and yet it has been months, if not years since I haven't read a single poem. I often, however read the type that feature both poetry and prose.

Do not be so arrogant as to assume your dormant appreciation for poetry serves as a microcosm to global trends. Poetry's audience today dwarfs those even able to read 100 years ago. Your experience speaks only on behalf of you. It isn't representative of the craft, for it is growing.

JBI

04-16-2011, 06:21 PM

My view is that language does not deal with images at all. It uses ideas. If you want an image, you paint a picture or take a photograph.

Regardless of what poets think they are doing with "images", what actually happens is that the readers get snippets of abstractions. The readers are then forced to put the snippets together and they often do this sentimentally--or they just put the book of poetry down because they refuse to participate in the game. They realize, correctly, they have better things to do and there is more interesting art to enjoy.

I don't know enough Chinese to appreciate the sound and meaning of the poetry. I also assume you know Chinese better than I do. However, I have relatives who are Chinese and this keeps the language in front of me on a daily basis.

Also, I didn't mean to insult your intelligence with the Wikipedia article. I provided it to give you an idea that meter is important in these classical forms. This is a point that is not often understood. One source I have used in studying these poems is James Liu, The Art of Chinese Poetry, (U of Chicago, 1962). Although this is still an elementary text, I have found it interesting.

Just as a teaser, this is what Liu says in Chapter 3, Auditory Effects of Chinese and the Bases of Versification:

Since you offered a translation, here is one of mine, done many years ago of a poem by Wang Zhihuan about climbing Stork Tower. My original motivation in writing the poem was to learn the language and I was told that children are taught Chinese by memorizing some of these Tang poems.

I tried to translate this using as close to as many syllables as the 5-character form uses. I have two more syllables than the original. I understand from Liu that the second and fourth line are required to rhyme in this form and so I placed a rhyme there. For meter I picked an alternating accent-unaccented pattern and added alliteration.

I'm sure you'll notice the difference in our approaches to translation.

白日依山盡，
黃河入海流。
欲窮千里目，
更上一層樓。

Mountains shine in sunlight.
River runs to sea.
Climb those stairs, one storey--
Miles of majesty.

Just to see if a machine can do it better, Google translate does it like this:

Sun mountains,
Yellow River flows into the sea.
For a grander sight,
A higher level.

To go straight to your translation first, you are missing the verbal epigram quality of the end, and also missing all the logical associations which the specific words use. By going for effect, the charm of association is lost, as it is in the Google translation; The verb on the first line, Yi, for instance, has more of a lean on connotation from my reading, or rest on perhaps by extension, the last character 尽 of that line gives the feel of and endless gaze.

The next line more literally reads, The Yellow River entering the sea flows - thereby playing with the image of the endlessness of the panorama, but there is an about face in the 3rd line;

We see a move toward scope - the gaze is greeted with the notion of limitation, through use of the words "穷 and 更“ - the third in effect gesturing something along the lines of "desiring to consume a 1000 li glance/view", with the next line reading, "switch/replace yourself up one level of the tower." - the poem is very visual, as clearly the most dominant aspect of the poem is the gaze of the poet/speaker - the sense of sight is the poem, so clearly what is seen, the visual imagery, is essential to the view.

As to return to James J. Y. Liu's book, of which I read, I believe you are taking the line out of context (I don't have it with me, so I cannot verify), but if I recall the line is somewhere near the beginning of the book, and is not talking about what I am talking about directly, but rather addressing a previous generation of translators and readers following Pound and his precursors, who sought to read each character itself as an image. By extension, though sound has been neglected, he would not argue that image and view in the poem you translated is the most dominant sense. He also wasn't, it would seem, a great advocate of sound the same way various linguists are - his translations of Li Shangyin, for instance, focus far more around imagery and rhetoric than sound or spirit (in places being quite boring as a consequence).

Liu is basically just trying to get the notion of versification out there - clearly one doesn't say metrics are the most important element of Shakespeare, despite he writing in closed form - likewise, Chinese poetics relying on sound have the pleasure of sound associations some of the time, but that is hardly the defining element, especially of these (for other poems, it is far more prevalent). His promotion of sound then can be seen similar to post 1970s academics promotion of the study of rhetoric, in that it tries to get another element into the debate and appreciation which has been neglected, though is necessary.

I do not agree with your notion of language as ideas, my understanding of it is of dealing with metaphor and metonymy - basically defining by comparing and sampling - I recall reading something of linguistics on the subject, but my memory is failing me to recall the name. As it is though poetry relies heavily on certain elements, and one of them, I would say particularly for East Asian verse, is image, and by extension, metonymy - cranes symbolize x, ducks y, - and metaphor - what is the significance of the gaze in the poem above, what is the significance of the speaker within the tower, what are the comparisons with desire and climbing, with the suns view of the land, and the poets gaze over the skies - what does the river between it symbolize? What are the associations with the landscape there in 山西 - something which is alluded to by the geographic location of the poem, and, by extension, why does the poet choose to look east (following the flow of the yellow river) and not west to the frontier (following the flow of the soldiers of Emperor Xuanzong who had a Western gaze)?

All these notions are brought up by the shift of the gaze, and comparison of elements - I do not think Sound particularly can play a role in achieving meaning, only in creating a frame work for the other elements - that's my problem of calling this a tonic poem - I can think of other examples that are far more tonic, notably Song dynasty poems that were written to be so, but these ones feel far more reliant on rhetoric than sound - sound just creates the rules of the game.

YesNo

04-16-2011, 10:26 PM

To go straight to your translation first, you are missing the verbal epigram quality of the end, and also missing all the logical associations which the specific words use. By going for effect, the charm of association is lost, as it is in the Google translation; The verb on the first line, Yi, for instance, has more of a lean on connotation from my reading, or rest on perhaps by extension, the last character 尽 of that line gives the feel of and endless gaze.

The next line more literally reads, The Yellow River entering the sea flows - thereby playing with the image of the endlessness of the panorama, but there is an about face in the 3rd line;

We see a move toward scope - the gaze is greeted with the notion of limitation, through use of the words "穷 and 更“ - the third in effect gesturing something along the lines of "desiring to consume a 1000 li glance/view", with the next line reading, "switch/replace yourself up one level of the tower." - the poem is very visual, as clearly the most dominant aspect of the poem is the gaze of the poet/speaker - the sense of sight is the poem, so clearly what is seen, the visual imagery, is essential to the view.

As to return to James J. Y. Liu's book, of which I read, I believe you are taking the line out of context (I don't have it with me, so I cannot verify), but if I recall the line is somewhere near the beginning of the book, and is not talking about what I am talking about directly, but rather addressing a previous generation of translators and readers following Pound and his precursors, who sought to read each character itself as an image. By extension, though sound has been neglected, he would not argue that image and view in the poem you translated is the most dominant sense. He also wasn't, it would seem, a great advocate of sound the same way various linguists are - his translations of Li Shangyin, for instance, focus far more around imagery and rhetoric than sound or spirit (in places being quite boring as a consequence).

Liu is basically just trying to get the notion of versification out there - clearly one doesn't say metrics are the most important element of Shakespeare, despite he writing in closed form - likewise, Chinese poetics relying on sound have the pleasure of sound associations some of the time, but that is hardly the defining element, especially of these (for other poems, it is far more prevalent). His promotion of sound then can be seen similar to post 1970s academics promotion of the study of rhetoric, in that it tries to get another element into the debate and appreciation which has been neglected, though is necessary.

I do not agree with your notion of language as ideas, my understanding of it is of dealing with metaphor and metonymy - basically defining by comparing and sampling - I recall reading something of linguistics on the subject, but my memory is failing me to recall the name. As it is though poetry relies heavily on certain elements, and one of them, I would say particularly for East Asian verse, is image, and by extension, metonymy - cranes symbolize x, ducks y, - and metaphor - what is the significance of the gaze in the poem above, what is the significance of the speaker within the tower, what are the comparisons with desire and climbing, with the suns view of the land, and the poets gaze over the skies - what does the river between it symbolize? What are the associations with the landscape there in 山西 - something which is alluded to by the geographic location of the poem, and, by extension, why does the poet choose to look east (following the flow of the yellow river) and not west to the frontier (following the flow of the soldiers of Emperor Xuanzong who had a Western gaze)?

All these notions are brought up by the shift of the gaze, and comparison of elements - I do not think Sound particularly can play a role in achieving meaning, only in creating a frame work for the other elements - that's my problem of calling this a tonic poem - I can think of other examples that are far more tonic, notably Song dynasty poems that were written to be so, but these ones feel far more reliant on rhetoric than sound - sound just creates the rules of the game.

Thanks for the extensive comments on my translation, JBI!

I've got your comments noted in case I ever attempt to rework it.