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Do any of you have comments on the process for putting together your artistic works?
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Process of a Painting
Ah, dear reader, the few of you that there are. I can't pretend to know much about the visual arts besides film, but I loved the visual of the process for putting together a painting provided by Lynette Hensley on one of her blogs.
Maybe it isn't T.S. Elliot--So?
Poetry is many things to many people, and often, just like kids who don't like vegetables because they have tasted raw broccoli, the young reader stays away from it because they are not read to tackle the intricacies of philosophical poetry. But a great many fine poets are accessible and write on popular topics, from Robert Frost to Alice Walker. Alice Walker has a new book recently covered in this NPR audio
The background story can be found at:
Czesla Milosz, Deceased
The famed Polish poet, Czesla Milosz has died at age 93 and here, without further elaboration is a requiem for him from NPR.
Criticism
I've just read a review of a book by Northrop Frye, an eminent literary critic. I'm going be reading The Educated Imagination and suggest you go to Spenser Boersma's blog, After Orthodoxy and read the review:
Friday, October 22, 2010
Catholicism and Poetry #3 Soto
Gary Soto is a contemporary American Poet, raised in Fresno, Ca who writes about growing up as a Catholic migrant farmworker kid. Not all of his poems, of course, are on this topic, but no one in America today has explored this area so well or so deeply. Soto has authored many books, poetry, novels and children's books. A complete list can be found on Wikipedia. I highly recommend his "Home Course in Religion and I tried to find some U-Tube readings from that, but u-tube posting are not infinite. Only in heaven will we have infinite u-tube posting.
Here is a poem that touches a little on being a Catholic School Boy.
Here is another poem that touches more simply the question of being a young boy:
But neither of those poems give us much of the Catholic feeling of Gary Soto. So I found a link to a poem about confession:
In this poem Soto sees his Catholic Childhood with very old eyes and gets us to look at our own childhood with our own old eyes. He talks about the Monsignor he knew as a boy, a character in several of his poems. Another poem, from Home Course in Religion that talks about the Monsignor is Pink Hands
In this poem Soto gets at a lot of what the culture of Catholicism was when he grew up, and what it is now. And beneath the changing culture we see the spirituality of the religion.
Soto is a free verse narrative poet, but it would be wrong to accuse Soto of being chopped up prose. Read some of this poems out loud and listen. Soto knows that poetry is rhythmical and he knows how to tell a narrative story with rhythmical phrasing. I believe Soto is on the better living American poets, and I love his poetry, even though it's style is very different than my own.
Wikipedia on Soto:
Here is a link to some more Soto poems:
Wow--Jazz Too!
For those of you who think I only like folk music, bluegrass etc here is a little surprise. I like this Herbie Hancock enough to post it. I like this rendition of Cantelope Island for it's mastery of rhythm in Jazz. We don't usually think much of the rhythms that occur in contemporary Jazz, because the emphasis is on the stretching of the framework of sound. I was alerts of this wonderful music by the friend Conor Apperson, a local Seattle Jazz and Rock drummer.
Language is No Barrier to the Language of Poetry!
Listen to this wonderful poem by the German poet, Heinrich Heine. Even if you know little or no German, the sound enriches the meaning of the translation. You can hear where the stress fall. Poetry is always a tension between sound and sense. The background music is from Franz Liszt.
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