ART ATTACK: a writing prompt for the amaurotic
Hello P/T members, (Practitioners?)
I am out of my mind this evening, feverish and enamoured by Olivia's selection of the words Peripety and Tronies. MY HEADACHES and I contort, too. Are we reaching peripeteia now? Dénouement is boring. I love spinning. I love when TV series end badly, end suddenly.
Do poems even turn at the end anymore?
As an experiment, I am providing a prompt for "engagement" (which can of course take the form of writing, if one wishes). With the possible disintegration of twitter, new modes of discourse are préoccupation majeure for artists—forcing our niche communities to consider not just means of communication but the underlying web itself: what makes community and why is community necessary to make art? While these seem like basic questions we should already have the answers too, we very clearly don't. (And since I don't teach anymore, I must torture an audience somehow with sincere + stupid questions like "What is Art?")
I used to tell my intro to poetry students that we aren't seeking 1-to-1 communication when we read or write poetry: the point of a poem isn't to pass on a packet of information as clearly as possible but to instead create an experience. Possibly, too, we shouldn't be thinking of community vis-a-vis twitter (though that accessible gathering space is necessary and important for many reasons) and all its instantaneous grief and dopamine. As a way for us to begin thinking about community/communication/communion in new ways, I will pluck out your eyes.
JB: That's another thing I was encouraged to talk to you about: being influenced by or in conversation with visual art, but not ekphrasis.JG: I wasn't really describing the painting as I was being affected by the painting. And sometimes I imagined talking to the girls, and sometimes I looked at the tree in the background. Sometimes it seemed like the girls were maybe my daughters. So I wasn't—my poems were never really description in that sense, but they were a different type of ekphrasis where the relationship between me and the painting was not as set, as stable; the power dynamics were not as clear. I was obsessing over the painting and the painting was maybe exerting its influence on me, even when I wasn't writing about it. In a certain sense the whole book is ekphrastic, but only if ekphrastic is something permeable and multidirectional and possibly—[...] creates an atmosphere, an ambiance in which I started creating the poem. Can you write an ekphrastic poem that has nothing to do with that painting?
ART ATTACK!
I've long been interested in the interplay between text & image especially pertaining to poetry. Traditional ekphrasis is a particular pet peeve as there's nothing duller than exposition. Wow! You are describing the thing I can see with my own actual eyes! What is this even adding to the experience! Please stop! (This does not pertain to alt-text, btw)
(For instance, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's double works: the paintings are revelatory but the poetry is about as exciting as a bowl of soggy cheerios. In comparison's Christina Rossetti's Sing-Song nursery rhymes —which were written for literal children— are doing fascinating and complex text/image interplay. Don't take yourself so seriously, kids.)
Johannes' description of ekphrasis as a visual work creating an atmosphere or influence for writer/text is fucking fascinating. I have buried in my notes from the mid 2010s a sentiment that feels familiar: "write a sensation for a novel instead of a novel." I feel this sentiment perhaps in slightly different shapes, in Summer, as well as Phil Sorenson's Solar Trauma, and James Pate's Mineral Planet--which reads to me like a slick, black mirror.
The world is saturated with images. Perhaps I am bored by them, or know too well what they want. Perhaps I am seeking an ekphrasis for enchantment, or a new obsession. Scoop out your eyes, young Tiresias: feed them to birds! Send me your lover's eye, wrap it around your throat. I will leave you with this sensation for your ART ATTACK: a rose colored tower.
The Rose Tower by Giorgio de Chirico, 1913.
Oh, Meg! I love this so much. I think about your EYES (I mean, through your book) all the fucking time. I cannot even tell you how often. I feel like my gaze is both disgusting and liberated, and I think, often: Meg's Bernini, Meg's Bernini. A thing to behold. An inflection of the gaze of art history. Laser eyes. Weeping eyes. Poison.
ReplyDeleteI will have to write a real post with real sentences (maybe I will deal with that art attack red tower) but for now: YES.
I have had the same desire re: the sensation of a novel (and Phil's and James' books).
I too refuse ekphrasis that is simply description but am addicted to any ekphrastic infection (once before, in a twitter interview that Johannes did with my students, he said, in describing his translation of this book (https://www.blacksquareeditions.org/product-page/which-once-had-been-meadow-by-ann-jaderlund) something like: that he was "under the influence" of the original while mutating the text to English (this kind of mimics things that he and Joyelle say here: (https://issuu.com/uglyducklingpresse/docs/deformation_zone_web). Jay just posted about Amina Cain's new book and I just read before bed last night her enjoyment of an ekphrasis that animates rather than describes, which came from a reading of AS Byatt. I think that might be Margaret Drabble's sister? Am I mis-remembering? Could I google it? LOL. I wanted to write Drabble books when I wrote parts of my Louise book. I thought I could fake novel-writing.
I know you say things like that in Eye.
Why do we like this kind of tinkering-hypnosis-art-attack? Cuz it's fucking fun.
Once Phil and I made up a school of thought called EFFECTISM.
But I don't know, maybe the official novelists around here have something to say.