[Michael Cantor]

I'm still with Rick. When i write about poetry, I concentrate on the craft of creating poetry - and making it work - and it you do it well that results in art. Art is created by focusing on and working at your art, not from writing about "art", or about other people who write about "art". They may be critics, and they may be philosophers, but talking about art in the abstract is not the same as working your art.

[R. Nemo Hill]

"talking about art in the abstract is not the same as working your art."

I don't think anyone said they were the same thing, Michael. Nor do I see why one thing cancels the other. Rather, they enhance one another for those who, like myself, are so inclined. Setting up false either/or choices seems counter-productive to me: I prefer 'and' to 'or'.

I also think that those who 'work their art', when they talk effectively about that work and that art, are not talking "in the abstract". On the contrary, they are reflecting on their working experience. And nothing is less abstract than experience, regardless of the style of language it is expressed in.

Nemo

[Michael Cantor]

Originally Posted by R. Nemo Hill

[i]
I also think that those who 'work their art', when they talk effectively about that work and that art, are not talking "in the abstract". On the contrary, they are reflecting on their working experience. And nothing is less abstract than experience, regardless of the style of language it is expressed in.

Nemo

I agree. But talking about your art means just that - talking about your art, or (assuming you're a poet) related poets or other artists, with the emphasis on craft. It does not mean rattling off a tour of philosophers and theories. I was at the Picasso sculpture show at MOMA a few weeks ago and it was mind-blowing (if I'm lucky, I'll get a decent ekphrastic poem out of it), and one of the things that struck me was how workmanlike it all was, how his art bent to what materials were available, how the painters and sculptors in that - or any era - influenced each other. That's what I mean by "working" or "talking about" your art; and I have to believe that if Picasso materialized he'd be full of very down-to-earth talk on what he was trying to do, and how the paint or wood or metal had to be handled; and he wouldn't spend a lot of time on Kant or Heidegger or pure theory.

[Ed Shacklee]

If one were to tally up the poets whose art was aided by discussing the nature of beauty, and those who shied away from discussing beauty in the abstract but yet somehow created beautiful poems, then added in those honest souls who followed some theory down a rabbit hole in pursuit of art and never came back, I think all three groups would be dwarfed by those who have deluded themselves about or even pawned off their bad poetry by dressing it up with bogus theories and movements.

If it works for you to consider these ideals, that's all to the good -- and from where I sit, I'll know it's all to the good not by your cerebral discourses, but by your poems. But for me it comes down to this: I can no more think grandly or long about such things and write than the centipede in that old joke can keep from tripping up when it starts thinking about how to walk. For me, craft and life are the wellsprings of art.

Best,

Ed

[Roger Slater]

Why can't a person be interested in more than one thing? I'm wary of telling other people how they should go about writing, or suggesting that an interest in philosophy or aesthetics is counterproductive for them because it might be for you. Plenty of fine writers had a deep interest in philosophy and aesthetics. Keats didn't only give us an aphorism, but his letters give us some rather profound ruminations on art. And Coleridge was as tedious as any modern philosopher with his philosophical ramblings but still managed to give us Rime of the Ancient Mariner, among other works. I certainly wouldn't suggest that a deep interest in philosophy or the nature of beauty, etc., is a prerequisite for an artist or poet, or that it wouldn't be an actual impediment for some, but I'm wary of artists telling each other how they should go about creating their art. Some poets swear you must use pencil and paper, others insist on getting up early, while others are most productive late at night on their laptops. Just do what you think is right for you and don't presume your methods or your approach are so marvelously successful in your case that others would be a fool not to copy them.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

Originally Posted by Michael Cantor

I have to believe that if Picasso materialized he'd be full of very down-to-earth talk on what he was trying to do, and how the paint or wood or metal had to be handled; and he wouldn't spend a lot of time on Kant or Heidegger or pure theory.

"Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs. ”
-Pablo Picasso

"The idea of research has often made painting go astray, and made the artist lose himself in mental lucubrations. Perhaps this has been the principal fault of modern art. The spirit of research has poisoned those who have not fully understood all the positive and conclusive elements in modern art and has made them attempt to paint the invisible and, therefore, the unpaintable"(Paris 1923).

[Norman Ball]

"Why can't a person be interested in more than one thing?"

They can. Poets no less than others often pursue dual vocations.

http://sostrenews.com/english-teache...ncis-thompson/

[Andrew Frisardi]

Originally Posted by Roger Slater

Why can't a person be interested in more than one thing?

Thank you, Roger. I’ve been struck in this conversation by how defensive people have seemed, as though I or Bill was saying: Ok, we’re going to tie you to a chair now to talk about beauty and make you write a poem at the same time. People have been free to ignore the subject, but have chosen not to. And I’d be blind not to notice that many great artists and writers would have rather filed their taxes than discuss the nature of beauty.

The Picasso example is a case in point. I’m sure you’re right, Michael, that Picasso would have talked the practical hands-on realities of making those sculptures (which I saw in a Newshour documentary just the other day). The same no doubt is true of Michelangelo, no slouch of a sculptor himself. Did you know, however, that his work was informed from start to finish by the Neoplatonic ideas on beauty that were de rigueur at the Academy (there’s that word again) just outside Florence, run by the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who personally translated Plotinus and the so-called Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus? True fact. Those works and discussions they evoked have much to do with the approach to form, the theory of perspective, notion of beauty, that Michelangelo and others were on about. And yet, Michelangelo in his workshop probably would rather have talked about more practical things, his tools, the stone, some little section he couldn't get quite right, the weather, what he was having for lunch.

Of course he didn’t think consciously about Hermes Trismegistus while he was painting or sculpting. But his education in the Neoplatonic philosophy of beauty that catalyzed the Florentine Renaissance was behind everything he did. If you've read his sonnets you’ll have seen references to it.

This is why, Ed, I disagree that the proof of the worthiness of what I’ve stated here is in any poems I write or do not write. The proof is already out there, in the art I mention above, in centuries of Islamic art, in the poetry of Dante or Rumi—all of which was saturated with such thought. Rather, the burden would be on you to show how art in the present, which generally lacks any ideological bearings beyond art as self-expression and a vague sense of art for art’s sake, approaches the scope and transformative power and penetrating depths and heights of the Florentine Renaissance or the Caliphate of Cordoba or for that matter the English or German Romantics. All of which were deeply informed by a consciously articulated, metaphysically-rooted idea of beauty.

[Andrew Frisardi]

And Michael Ferris, wow and thanks on that Szymborska poem. Fabulous.

[Andrew Mandelbaum]

I think another example of idea integral to the beauty of the out pour would be Gerald Manley Hopkins work that had a lot of idea behind the wild.

Ed, the centipede is just an example of the grand ideas operating intuitively or underneath, and the need to keep them quiet when pen goes to paper, not evidence that the ideas aloud are "silly", right?

I admit I do find this sort of chatter helps me in writing my own centipedia on the closet wall: whose feet are these? where should we go on them? how do we pass on the inscapes, centipede to centipede or even centipede to ant?