TALKING POINTS
so Kenny G talks about his own transition from the art world to poetry, where he found that there was still an avant-garde, yet "there was work to be done; many of the strategies and attitudes I knew from the art world hadn't been considered here." fine! but the totality of strategies and attitudes appropriate to the development of visual arts in modernism and post are not commensurate with the same strategies and attitudes in poetry. which is what I think he's missing. What the people who hate on Kenny are missing is that merely reacting against avant garde attitudes and strategies by asserting or “reverting to” or re-asserting tropes as fundamental, lasting truths about the "tradition" or whatever is not only ineffective, it’s not the point. what is always going to be the differend between (even) the (conceptual) poem and the work of art is prosody, right? So now, in the comment box, define prosody. Ready? Set? Just kidding.
But this has preoccupied me of late. I’ve been thinking about Suzanne Stein’s work, for one, as radically opening questions about prosody.
Moreover, I was reading recently works by Joseph Kosuth and Nicholas Bourriaud (“Art After Philosophy” and “Postproduction”). While there was a ton of interesting material in those two works, indeed much that is germane to some of the contemporary questions in poetics, there is also the sense of a difference—hardly articulable.
2. Alex Gordon, the Great Nebraskan Hope, was demoted to the minor leagues today. I don’t know what it’s like for fans of other teams. Like, if you’re a Yankee fan, do you not really experience this fetishization of the young prospect who’s going to bullet through the minors and save your organization (Tim Lincecum, for ex.), meanwhile being paid peanuts for 7 long years? Because the Yankees have the kind of strategy where you mostly trade those boys for mid-season free-agents-to-be who will come over in July, hit .325 and win you a champeenship? But for teams like the Royals, the one tiny fleck of gold in the fountain of shit the season dissipates into, is that you get to draft high. And then you end up with these hulking monsters out of high school, etc. It just never stops being heartbreaking to love the Royals.
3. I really don’t have a third talking point today. I just want to put three up here so it looks more substantial. Even #2 was kind of extraneous.
8 comments:
Prosody: the study of Alexander Dovzhenko's 1930 film Earth.
not just prosody, but metaphor...you could think of line, e.g., as analogous to prosody in visual arts...actually, metaphor might be more "essential" a differend here, as what we're talking about in ANY case (or what KG is talking about) are transpositions and substitutions of tropes, which presumes a practice (not just a tropics) of substitution etc.....
I don't understand KG haters. But I understand how, from a perspective that takes "poetics" in certain ways, his stuff is, as Kevin Costner put it to Madonna, "neat."
So, hi. Is prosody always an intentional thing? or is it rather an always-already-there phenomenon, as Tom Mandel said (famously?) about emotion in language: it's like "calories in food"
I'm not sure an appropriated text has less prosody than whatever the opposite of an appropriated text might be: it could be that it's a different sort of prosody that is there to be noticed (or not) rather than painstakingly constructed. In fact, that latter kind of prosody can sometimes be a little tiresome.
I do think also that if the "totality of strategies and attitudes appropriate to the visual arts in modernism and post are not commensurate with the same strategies and attitudes in poetry," that SOME of them may be commensurate (especially if they are, as you write, "the same") and OTHERS may be analogous, if not commensurate, and still others may be INSPIRING and HELPFUL. I don't think we can set poetry off to the side in some sort of ghetto immune from the strategies of the other arts (not that you were exactly suggesting that).
I don't know Suzanne's work, to be honest, besides her embroideries and her blogging and accounts of her performances, so I'd love to know how it radically opens questions about prosody. Explain, giving plenty of examples to support your argument. :-)
I know what you mean, Brandon. What Kenny says--the way he phrases it, anyway--does create the impression that he believes all poetry needs to do is map on the exact strategies used by the larger art world, making sure it keeps up with the most recent "developments," and that will ensure that poetry stays properly updated.
Like Nada, on the other hand, I think that poetry can certainly benefit from the example of the visual arts, and even ignores it to its detriment. I don't hear you trying to ghettoize poetry, but rather just saying something like I've said above: right?
As for prosody, you raise an interesting question: how is it fundamentally different from, or at least a unique subset of, artistic technique figured more broadly? In all honesty, I'm not yet entirely convinced it is, but I'll play. Give me some polemical propositions.
Isn't one of the critiques of KG that he is advocating poetry's embrace of an old-fashioned, 20th century art world?
It's a little humiliating to suggest that all that poetry can do is re-enact nostalgia for the height of art's makeout session with capital.
I think there is a lot to be learned from art in the ultra-contemporary -- its decentralization, its leaving the gallery, what is happening in social practice, etc. Poetry has a lot to offer in a conversation with art as it is now (though not so much if poetry's "avant garde" is represented entirely by uber-nostalgic, masculinist steak eaters).
I'm all about the possibilities of metaphor, too.
hey everybody,
all of these comments are so generous and rich, that a generalized holla back doesn't really suffice--these questions are tremendous.
quick clarifications, made necessary by off-the-cuff talking points sloppiness:
--my understanding of prosody absorbs metaphor, that is, it goes beyond the analogy to line in classic visual art.
--for Nada and Kasey, if I made it sound like I think those strategies (appropriating tactics and gestures from postmodern, recent, and contemporary visual art practices) are across-the-board irrelevant or uninteresting for poetry, YIKES. Au contraire. I admire KG's and many of my closest people's work on these very accounts, and those same tactics/gestures are hugely important to my own work.
I guess the only thing I keep wanting to do is look for ways that things can become broader or wider, or I want to live inside aporias. The sense I get from the utter coherence and assertiveness in some of KG's writing feels, I don't know, not aporetic enough? sheesh.
--hi Ben! I'll watch it.
-hi Anne. yeah. yeah! yes, yes, yeah. what's terrific is that as poets we get to take whatever we want.
the challenge that this blog may or may not be up for living with for a while is talking exactly about prosody not just in terms of sonic or visual shape, i.e. Nada's suggestion of "more or less"--like, for example, I don't think prosody is quantifiable, tho that's kind of a dorky classicist joke.
big love ya'll.
Prosody -
"When Computers will really understand what you say when they know how you feel when you say it, like in the future a robot could relate to a horse, or humans could appropriate robot speaking. The Goal is to be 'non-ended'. It is also crucial the robots not be made of Legos due to the sexual phonemes implied. The subspace constraint assures that the prosody of the syn-thesized speech will actually make it easier for men to socially and intellectually take a bootstrap to those friendly, naive speakers. But the emotion of infants is strongly exaggerated, so don't get all anthropomorphic on me, bro.
We will now analyze your face... ... ... Oops. We kissed it. Sorry, robots are not doctors. Yum. We have the tone, rhythm and volume of your face mapped. If we are correct you are an abnormal segment of prosody which strongly calls attention to itself, as in, 'I'm just a simple robot looking for some prosody.'"
Remember, do not feed the robot speaker machines with your monotonous, meaty little fingers. Thank (I will hurt) You"
Oddly enough, I looked at my soon to expire CPR card and noticed that I had taken the class exactly two years before to the day, hour and minute. August 20th.
There we were....pumping and pasting the electrodes on the dummies once again...have done this approximately fourteen times in my nursing career.
They have this new device however...came out in the relatively recent past (some time after Byzantium)...it's called an AED or automated external defibrillator. Literally, we can revive Lazarus and the machine gives the commands. Not to be confused with the IED or improvised explosive device which is an entirely different ballpark if you know what I mean.
A nurse that I work with chirped...."I love the voice."
The AED tells you what to do and it uses inflection and intonation to do so because research says that we are much more likely to do something if asked to do so in a nice voice.
Like I am coding someone who is most likely looking into the eyes of the Angel of Death, my head is screaming and my body is ready to pounce and this nice computer voice tells me in a quasi sexual, quasi authoritative tone...DO THIS and DO IT NOW.
So.
Sure. Prosody is not only important but it can be duplicated non verbally on the page with large white spaces, sudden changes in syntax and the stop on a dime "last line" of a poem.
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