Literature and Art

Comment

Comment by Guido Vermeulen on August 27, 2011 at 3:15am

Funny;

I made a papercut Wednesday (because of the positive reactions on the papercuts, I do them occasionally, almost therapeutic, they calm me down because of the concentration but hard on the wrists!). Also I wanted this to link with an Emily Dickinson poem, a conversation between life and death and that's a major theme in the oeuvre of ED as well as a classic theme in Lit. altogether.

First I made the papercut, will post the image later and then choose a matching poem:

That such have died

Enable us

The tranquiller to die

That such have lived

Certificate

For immortality

ED

Or one dead makes us accept we all have to die (bye bye ego)

But the twist is the second stanza where ED opens the door to immortality because of the life the dead has lived, and it's of no importance how long that life was.

Shocked me after I put everything together, cried a bit and made another note on the back of the papercut "thinking of Gabriel again"

 

One of the most powerful death poems I know:

In a + sense: Renaissance by Edna Vincent St Millay (a young girl wants to die, buries herself in a coffin under the earth but is lured back to life by the tapping rain on that same earth, Edna wrote this when she was 17)

In a more negative sense: a dead poem by Joyce Mansour that ends with the desperate cry "oh God, how lonely I am in my grave".

Mansour is a major poet by the way, Egyptian, wrote in French and part of the surrealist movement but like so many wonderful femails in that movement completely overlooked and overshadowed by her male compadres. It's a shame!

Long live TOYEN, MANSOUR, ZURN, TANNING, CARRINGTON, MAAR, MILLER and others, you are all invited to discover their art, writings, photo's and meaningful lives.

Guido

Comment by Nancy Bell Scott on August 26, 2011 at 8:37pm

Yes, it is life-affirming. It's the same for everyone, for everyone who has ever lived, and that's one connection, one universal experience and destiny, that can't be denied no matter how individual or lonesome we want or don't want to be.

I love that term "great ego smashing poems"! It's almost like smacking.

Comment by De Villo Sloan on August 26, 2011 at 7:40pm

Wops? I guess to support my idea, I should say: Wisecracking with Charon.

Comment by De Villo Sloan on August 26, 2011 at 7:37pm

Thanks for posting the Ted Berrigan, Bifidus. Seeing that disjointed syntax and punctuation like a rapid-fire journal entry (yet everything so perfectly placed) and those acrobatic line breaks - dazzling!

 

And I agree so much with Nancy, the sly undercurrent of irony that carries us on this journey across the River Styx to death (because isn't that what the whole journey is? a classical theme ultimately?) wisecracking with the Grim Reaper - "It's no big thing. anyway" - maybe what you call "gallows humor."

 

Purely wonderful.

Comment by Nancy Bell Scott on August 26, 2011 at 7:25pm

Those lines hit me too, Theresa. And then right after:

 

It's total pain & it breaks your heart

In a less than interesting way.

 

Maybe all broken hearts behave the same, and so can't be interesting.

Thanks for posting good writing and food for thought, Bifidus ~ I have not read him.

Comment by Bifidus Jones on August 26, 2011 at 4:09pm

Have a peaceful weekend everyone

Wrong Train
by Ted Berrigan

 

---

Here comes the man! He's talking a lot
I'm sitting, by myself. I've got
A ticket to ride. Outside is, "Out to lunch."
It's no great pleasure, being on the make.
Well, who is? Or, well everyone is, tho.
"I'm laying there, & some guy comes up
& hits me with a billyclub!" A fat guy
Says. Shut up. & like that we cross a river
Into the Afterlife. Everything goes on as before
But never does any single experience make total use
Of you. You are always slightly ahead,
Slightly behind. It merely baffles, it doesn't hurt.
It's total pain & it breaks your heart
In a less than interesting way. Every day
Is payday. Never enough pay. A deja-vu
That lasts. It's no big thing, anyway.
A lukewarm greasy hamburger, ice-cold pepsi
that hurts your teeth.

Comment by Guido Vermeulen on August 24, 2011 at 4:15pm

That's familiar Theresa, went thru the same stages with my writing! Exactly the same, even!

Comment by Bifidus Jones on August 24, 2011 at 1:39pm

Theresa, that's a wonderful combination of art and lit. I like your writing a lot. thanks for posting, Nancy!

Comment by Guido Vermeulen on August 24, 2011 at 11:19am

Great work and I'm quite nuts by E.D. I collect her poems and also the music. Some of her poems have been set on music by amongst others Aaron Copland. There is a great CD with these songs sung by the American soprano Joyce Di Donato, who left the USA to have a carreer mainly in France. I met her in person at the royal opera house here in Brussels and asked she signed the recording of the ED songs and poems. She was over the moon. You have that album! she said, that's one of my early recordings (she now sings a more commercial repertoire like Rossini and stuff). Yes, I answered, I love Ed and also AC, that was a real and true socialist, not a weak social democrat like we have here. She exploded in a big laugh and gave me a big hug. You should have seen the reaction of the rich people in the CD shop of the Royal Opera house. They were shocked to the teeth !!! I left the opera with a BIIG smile on my face.

Comment by Nancy Bell Scott on August 24, 2011 at 3:48am

Theresa's mail art on Emily Dickinson, including great epistolary poem, arrived last week. I love it, and it took me a while to blog because I am digital-camera challenged. The piece is 8"x20", so the usual scanning wouldn't do! It's big! The blog post itself can be found here, and below are two pictures:

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