tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post2449494941159188016..comments2023-10-03T11:41:21.191+01:00Comments on The Truth About Lies: Ugly poetry (part one)Jim Murdochhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-20061302688997275082012-06-23T10:02:21.117+01:002012-06-23T10:02:21.117+01:00You know, seymourblogger, I sometimes think we wri...You know, <b>seymourblogger</b>, I sometimes think we writers just open our mouths and let our bellies rumble. Beauty is not a promise of happiness. I bet a lot of beautiful people make promises all the time they never keep. The saying ‘Beauty is skin deep’ is just as true; truer I would say. For any one saying—Too many cooks spoil the broth—there is another—Many hand make light work—that contradicts it. Too many people assume that if only they were more beautiful they’d be more successful and happiness would follow like a wee lap dog and although it is true that a lot of beautiful people have found success once you look a little closer the real reason is because they’re good at what they do; that they happen to be good-looking too is a bonus.<br /><br>Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-89714791367463853252012-06-23T07:22:25.070+01:002012-06-23T07:22:25.070+01:00Stendhal: Beauty is a promise of happiness.Stendhal: Beauty is a promise of happiness.seymourbloggerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02843717286012748265noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-74663633665033444872012-06-20T10:42:27.768+01:002012-06-20T10:42:27.768+01:00I wonder whether ‘musicality’ would be a better te...I wonder whether ‘musicality’ would be a better term here rather than ‘beauty’, <b>Marion</b>. It’s all semantics and I honestly don’t really have an axe to grind but exploring issues like this makes us thing a little deeper about how we define poetry even if that definition is hard to put into words. Of course as soon as I mention ‘musicality’ you say, “Well what about <i>beautiful</i> music?” and, indeed, it’s one of the adjectives most used to describe music. I’ll come back to that.<br /><br />I have only read Eliot’s poetry, <b>Art</b>, and, frankly, only the famous ones but there’s no doubt he could string a sentence together quite beautifully. I know nothing of his theories. I know that William Carlos Williams didn’t have much time for him and so I suspect neither would I as Williams is another poet—the first one after Larkin in fact—that I developed a connection with. The reason Larkin was such an influence on me growing up was that when I looked closely at ‘Mr Bleaney’ I didn’t see anything that looked like the poetry I’d read up until then. You could reformat it and pass it off as a piece of flash fiction and no one would notice the difference. So where the hell was the poetry? I didn’t have an answer for a long time which is why I kept coming back to look at it: What made this poetry? I never, not for a second, wondered if it might be chopped-up prose (ignoring, for the moment, the end rhymes which are lost anyway if you read it properly) but clearly ‘poetry’ was something other than what I thought it was.<br /><br />I faced the same challenges musically. I have been brought up on all the great composers and then one day I borrowed Stockhausen’s <i>Kontakte</i> from the record library and I had heard nothing like it. How on earth could anyone call this music? Certainly no one could call it ‘beautiful’ by any stretch of the imagination. I’d had no problems with Ives and I simply couldn’t see what the fuss was over Stravinsky. There really is very little musically I can’t appreciate but occasionally even I still occasionally struggle. Those groaning string quartets of Gloria Coates really stretch me as a listener but I keep coming back to the same question: What is it <i>she</i> sees in them? I have much the same problem with Robert Motherwell’s art but, again, the question is not what <i>I</i> see or other people see but what <i>he</i> sees. I’m sure that Messiaen’s experience of his own music must have been quite different to other people’s because of his synesthesia. And maybe that’s why I can’t see the beauty Robert Motherwell can or hear the beauty Gloria Coates can because, as the cliché goes, “beauty <i>is</i> in the eye of the beholder” or, in these cases, its creator.<br /><br />I wonder what the Tongans of the Fijians, two races who equate beauty with bulk would think about the cocaine chic models we (from all accounts) revere here in the west? They would need to re-educate their eyes and so would be when trying to see what they see in their women. We read to see the world through other people’s eyes and that involves seeing what they say is beautiful as beauty. It’s a challenge at times but a worthwhile one I think.<br /><br>Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-64433977639309864682012-06-20T04:58:01.401+01:002012-06-20T04:58:01.401+01:00This is one topic in which anyone is worth listeni...This is one topic in which anyone is worth listening to more than to Eliot. Eliot could write some beautiful poetry, particularly later on, but his theorizing is crank philosophy and pretty wrongheaded. This topic is one in which I, not a huge Larkin fan compared to some, think that Larkin has more to say than many. Larkin's critical writings and published reviews ought to be required reading for all poets, even when you disagree with him. <br /><br />John Cage was actually talking about subjectivity: how so-called standards of aesthetics are always limited to the time and place (and person) of their making, and are never universal. We have expectations about what is "Art" and that skews how we perceive art and non-art alike. Cage's whole point, in most of his work, was to remove personal taste from the aesthetic experience, and simply experience what is actually there. <br /><br />The Zen influence is strong here. Zen is about removing the filters we usually see life through—expectations, assumptions, past experiences that lead to current prejudices—so that we can see the world as it is, not just as we THINK it is.<br /><br />Cage, like Larkin, was willing to look at ugly things to find the beautiful IN them, where it could be found—which is what Keats really meant. Larkin's quote on truth and beauty completes Keats', I feel.Art Durkeehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07463180236975988432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-30944364104427542982012-06-19T21:17:37.086+01:002012-06-19T21:17:37.086+01:00The thing about poetry is that the sound and actua...The thing about poetry is that the sound and actual texture / physicality of language itself is just as important, if not more important, than the actual sense / meaning. Well that's how it is to me. <br /><br />I find Hopkins' use of language intensely beautiful -<br /><br />"Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;<br />Not untwist -- slack they may be -- these last strands of man<br />In me {'o}r, most weary, cry I can no more. I can"<br /><br />The richness in sound, the tortured tense, the tight language, the passion in the voice.<br /><br />I find in Eliot a similar beauty in the way multiple senses are impacted by the texture, sound and visual, for example - <br /><br />“Red river, red river,<br />Slow flow heat is silence<br />No will is still as a river<br />Still. Will heat move<br />Only through the mocking-bird<br />Heard once? Still hills<br />Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees,<br />White trees, wait, wait"<br /><br />It's not beauty in the traditional sense but that doesn't mean it's not beauty...Marion McCreadyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04657757253873577465noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-34078631833169093292012-06-19T15:15:27.969+01:002012-06-19T15:15:27.969+01:00It all boils down to the old idiom, Tim: Beauty is...It all boils down to the old idiom, <b>Tim</b>: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What I object to are those who tell us what should or should not be regarded as beautiful. But it’s like all the words we squabble endlessly over—like what is or is not a poem—and there is no answer; I’m not even sure that consensus should be trusted considering how easily the masses can be persuaded that black is white. I mentioned Angelina Jolie in a <a href="http://jim-murdoch.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/drowning-in-chocolate-apology.html" rel="nofollow">post</a> back in May. No one in their right mind would say that she’s not beautiful but her beauty doesn’t move me and I don’t mean that she doesn’t turn me on; I mean what I said. I have never been drawn to popular ideas of what (or who) is beautiful. Probably the old poets have done us a disservice by equating poetry with beauty or trying to get us to view beauty as an abstract concept. Maybe ‘beauty’ is prettiness, physical attractiveness and poetry is something else entirely.<br /><br>Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6327348657265652781.post-43314714030346172372012-06-19T08:41:10.619+01:002012-06-19T08:41:10.619+01:00I eagerly await the next part.
"beauty"...I eagerly await the next part.<br /><br />"beauty" (like "meaning" or "understanding") deserves to be replaced in many contexts, but we lack convenient replacement words, and using a phrase to replace a word isn't going to catch on.<br /><br />You write "The problem with the word ‘beauty’ is that we use it mainly to describe physical attractiveness". Thinking about how we use "pretty" and "beautiful", I think ‘beauty’ sometimes means "high physically attractiveness" (a beautiful girl vs a pretty one), but sometimes it's used to contrast with mere physical attractiveness (one says "a beautiful equation", not "a pretty equation"). One can have a beautiful day, so why not a pretty one?<br /><br />I like the long Lisa Samuels quote. I'll look out for her books.<br /><br />I think there have been some developments re beauty of late (though not everyone would agree). People have gone further with trying to explain aesthetics by considering evolution (extending the "symmetry is beautiful because symmetrical mates are healthy" ideas). Also it's interesting to see which parts of the brain light up when people experience beauty - I think abstract art tickles different parts of the brain to what figurative art tickles, for example. Its effects are closer to those of music, I think.<br /><br />Because of our expectations, an ugly poem (like a plain one) goads us to look harder at the text - "there must be more to it than this", we think, and read it again.Tim Lovehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00578925224900533603noreply@blogger.com