I have, in recent years, been interested in why I am personally more attracted to the particulars of poetry and painting/drawing as opposed to the particulars of music. I took up the guitar in high school and I still play it, but I never could stick with--what I now see to be--the abstraction of music (I'm not talking about what we call lyrics here but what we might call tune). (I also could never muster up the energy to handle the exactitude needed to really learn how to play "my axe"). Stephen Henderson over at Trees Walking has an insightful quotation by the poet Richard Wilbur on this subject. I'll insert a little of it below.I think I can say why there are more painter-poets, or poets who are would be painters, than there are poets who have to do with music. It strikes me that music is infinitely more abstract then painting or poetry. That you can't make any precise statements as to what music is up to. Poetry simply has to be exact and concrete or it bores to death. And on the whole, I think--despite some successes in abstract painting-that it's the same with painting.
5 comments:
Interesting observation, Michael. Also interesting to note that so many composers throughout the centuries have looked to poets and painters for inspiration.
Glad to have discovered your blog. Look forward to stopping by again.
Chandler Branch
Hey Michael,
Your sister-in-law, DF, sent me to your blog. That is a nice picture of you and W.
I noticed, though I don't think you mentioned in your post, that you chose a William Blake piece to put next to this particular post. He was a great poet and his visions expressed in his artworks are wonderful. I was in London over Thanksgiving break and saw several of his pieces at the TATE.
I tend to disagree a little about the relationship between poetry and music and poetry and visual art. I believe that poetry contains aspects of both. It is linear in structure like music, but the images created in the mind while reading poetry are similar to visual art. Visual art, however is not usually structured linearly as a narrative or as a time-based musical composition. A visual expression can be entered at any point and taken in pieces that act a wholes in themselves. This is difficult to achieve in either music or poetry. One verse, one measure, one movement doesn't mean much on its own, but traversing linearly through its parts the whole statement achieves resolution.
Jimmy says....What the heck are you talking about?
Thanks for visiting, Rich...
I did know that the image I chose was a Blake piece. I chose it on purpose: he was a poet/visual artist.
True, (and I wasn't very clear about this) poetry is musical. As we teach our younger students in the lower grades at my school, poetry is made up of music and pictures. I think what Wilbur is trying to say--and what I'm trying to echo--is that poetry, b/c it is concerned with "pictures," or incarnating reality--making images to "get at" what is true--it is less abstract than music--or what I called "tune." I guess you could say I'm talking about what most call classical music--probably better termed "art" music. Music without words. Music is abstract: you can't deny that. It's not concerned with images, metaphor, concrete details, etc. As Wilbur says, "You can't make any precise statements as to what it's up to." Why? B/c it doesn't use words. It uses sound, which is abstract.
So, I think Wilbur is also saying (and I am too) that what goes on in poetry and what goes on in making art music are two different things. Sure, poetry is musical, but perhaps it is only musical secondarily. I don't deny that the music of poetry can affect it's meaning--the meter, etc.--but perhaps, it only does so in line behind the use of tropes, etc. I don't know.
Anyway, all I was trying to say is that art music is abstract and not concrete, and I agree with Wilbur, that, therefore, visual art and poetry--b/c they're both concerned with incarnating the unseen through image--are more similar than poetry and music.
Thanks for commenting. You helped me think through this some more. Come back again and sit a spell.
Rich: By the way, I stole your color scheme for my blog: the gray background with the orange letters. I had the orange letters already but not the gray background. Thanks! As TS Eliot once said, "Mediocre poets borrow; great poets steal." I stole, but I don't know if that necessarily makes me great.
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