Doesn’t Nnyone Want Regularity Nnymore?
Where’s gone the meter?
I can’t find the rhyme - inner or outer?
Thematic material usually meaningful,
Often important, I have to admit -
So we’ll skip that critique.
Syntax? Well, I can accept unformed sentences –
Part of the license poetic. But why
Waste the time
When the poem
Is an appellation for prose, actually
I want, no, I need
A nice, friendly,
Clear-but-not-shallow
Un-arcane/-ambiguous,
Straightforward verse
To learn from, take some pleasure in,
Not knocking ‘noodle’ to hell,
And/or busting a gut
Just to figure it out.
Scuola di Atene (School of Athens) -- Raphael
[For centuries word-things, called poems, have been made according to
primary and defining craft principles of, first, measure and, second,
alliteration and rhyme. Word-things not made according to
those principles are not poems. -- Michael George Gibson, Queen’s English Society]
Spiegel Blutort (Mirror, Blood Red) -- Gerhard Richter
[There is poetry in everything we say or do, and if something is
presented to me as a poem by its creator, or by an observer, I accept
that something as a poem.-- Poetry Society]
Poetry
ReplyDeleteI, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond
all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one
discovers that there is in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because
they are
useful; when they become so derivative as to become
unintelligible, the
same thing may be said for all of us—that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand. The bat,
holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless
wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse
that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician—case after case
could be cited did
one wish it; nor is it valid
to discriminate against “business documents and
school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must
make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets,
the result is not poetry,
nor till the autocrats among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”—above
insolence and triviality and can present
for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them,
shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand, in defiance
of their opinion—
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand,
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.
-- Marianne Moore
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino "(Raphael") painted Scuola di Atene between 1509 and 1511 as part of his commission by pope Julius II to decorate the Stanza della Segnatura (renamed Stanze di Raffaello) in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. It was the first room to be decorated, and this fresco was probably done after "La Disputa" (Theology) on the opposite wall, and the "Parnassus"(Poetry, including Music). Each theme is identified above by a separate tondo containing a majestic female figure seated in the clouds, with putti bearing an approprite phrase, in this case "Causarum Cognitio" (Seek Knowledge of Causes), echoing Aristotle's emphasis on wisdom as knowing why. According to Giorgio Vasari, the scene included Raphael himself, as well as marquis Francesco II of Mantua, Zoroaster, and some Christian Evangelists, but there is no consensus about which figure represents which "philosopher," and the painter had to invent a system of iconography to allude to various figures for whom there were no traditional visual types. The identities of some of them, are certain, however, especially Platon and Aristotle pointing to the heavens and down to earth. Socrates, Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Sodoma, and Diogenes can be identified with less certainty; some other prominent guesses include Zeno of Citium, Epicurus, Heraclitus, Democritus, Boethius, Anaximander, Empedocles, Averroes, Pythagoras, Alcibiades, Alexander the Great, Antisthenes, Xenophon, Timon, Fornarina as a personification of Love, duke Francesco Maria della Rovere of Urbino, Aeschines, Parmenides, Diogenes, Plotinus, the painter Apelles of Kos, and Protogenes, while Raphael seems to have modeled some of the figures on his teacher Pietro Perugino, his young associate Timoteo Viti, the painter Giovanni Antonio Bazzi "Il Sodoma," the sculptor/architect/military engineer Giuliano da Sangallo, the author/coutier Baldassare Castiglione, and architect Donato Bramante. The picture has long been seen as his masterpiece and the perfect embodiment of the classical spirit of the Renaissance.