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Chromapoetica

Tag Archive: poetry

Method of Loci

Filed under: Art, Science — 38 Comments

March 24, 2012

This is a digital alteration of a polaroid picture I took when I was 6. The original was purposely out of focus.

Lenses initiate selective focus
a fantastication only possible when young
encased in the vault of unextinguishable incunabulum
developing the picture as it comes into being
peering deep into the essence of life

Showing one moment, one side of perception
in its inability to capture without speciousness
belying motion, upheaval and change
in the niveous nature of memory
its meandering dreams recast

Glimpses of truth like a halation appear
ocular glitches reinforce tathata
of what can be distinguished and claimed
encoding through elaborative rehearsal
all known and unkenned phenomena

Converging lenses limited by one focal length
growing as depth of field expands
while patulous schemas incubate
evolving mind forms eidetic imagery uniting
as episodic memory stitches identity

Holographic retrieval reveals
clarity amidst the circle of confusion
this positive bias memory distortion prevails
polaroid process makes positive images
without negatives, not lost but never created

Artmaking acts as a nepenthe
coalescing strands of experience
collaging each image of striving
into a concatenation, aspects of self
lighting recesses in the kistvaen of the past

Notes: Method of Loci: A mnemonic device that relies on memorized spatial relationships to establish order and recollect memorial content. Selective Focus: Is a technique in photography that allows one part of the image to be sharp while the rest of the image is out of focus. It works to great effect in macro shots where the foreground should stand out intensely from the background. Fantastication: Action of framing in fancy. Incunabulum: Early stages of development. Speciousness: An appearance of truth that is false or deceptive; seeming plausibility. Halation: Spreading of light beyond its proper boundaries to form a fog round the edges of a bright image in a photograph. Tathata: Ultimate nature of all things, as expressed in phenomena but inexpressible in words. Encoding: The process of transforming information into a form that can be stored in memory. Elaborative Rehearsal: A memory strategy that involves relating new information to something that is already known Unkenned: Unknown, strange, unperceived, unexplored. Converging Lens: Lens such that a beam of light passing through it is brought to a point or focus. The lens of your eye and that of a camera are converging lenses. Focal Length: The focal length of an optical system is a measure of how strongly the system converges or diverges light. In most photography where the subject is essentially infinitely far away, longer focal length (lower optical power) leads to higher magnification and a narrower angle of view; conversely, shorter focal length or higher optical power is associated with a wider angle of view. Depth of Field: In optics, particularly as it relates to film and photography, depth of field (DOF) is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image. Although a lens can precisely focus at only one distance at a time, the decrease in sharpness is gradual on each side of the focused distance. Patulous: Open, expanding, gaping Schemas: The integrated frameworks of knowledge and assumptions a person has about people, objects, and events which affects how the person encodes and recalls information. Eidetic Imagery: The ability to retain the image of a visual stimulus for several minutes after it has been removed from view. Episodic Memory: The type of declarative memory that records events as they have been subjectively experienced. Circle of Confusion: In optics, a circle of confusion is an optical spot caused by a cone of light rays from a lens not coming to a perfect focus when imaging a point source. In photography, the circle of confusion is used to determine the depth of field, the part of an image that is acceptably sharp. Positive Bias (Memory Distortion): States that pleasant events are better remembered than unpleasant ones and memories of unpleasant events become more pleasant over time. Nepenthe: Something capable of causing obliteration or reduction of grief or suffering. Concatenation: A series of interconnected or interdependent things or events. Kistvaen: A stone burial chamber. Linked to the Poetics prompt by James Rainsford on photography and poetry here http://dversepoets.com/2012/03/24/patterns-pictures-and-poems/.

Tags: poetry

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Inner Character

Filed under: Art, Philosophy, Tribute — 43 Comments

March 20, 2012

Alice Neel (c) 1980 Self Portrait National Portrait Gallery

For Alice Neel 1900-1984
(all quotes are hers except where otherwise indicated)

You passed the civil service exam
to support your parents at a time
when women didn’t work
going to night school in painting
determined to be an artist
to reach escape velocity

Lure of the wealthy Cuban artist
his well-mannered promises:
joys of marriage,
intellectual circles, artists, literati,
philosophical vistas all called to you
before the Great Depression converged
the country’s agony paralleled your own

Santillana died, Isabetta removed from your care
prescribed a year in the sanatorium on suicide watch
your daughters lingered in every subsequent interaction
whispered themes of loss at each sitting
made you cry in front of aquariums
even as an old woman standing in the dark
you claimed it intimated your life

Really seeing into the other, each model’s
psyche revealed in a less static form
portraiture never capturing only a moment
but the continuous life of something greater
when they inducted you he said:
‘she probes courageously, almost violently’*
and called yours a difficult art to bear
you believed in the veracity of humanism
sometimes when they left
you ceased to exist, lost somewhere in them

Your sons sought succor in opposing ideologies
unable to face the consequences of bohemian chaos
Richard beaten, unprotected, loved you
Hartley proclaimed his loyalty to you
each caught in ‘blocks of ice’
consumed by corporations in the rise of capitalist fervor

Beautiful, wounded Isabetta
walks out to the seawall
takes the sleeping pills
was it that you were never there?

Feminist icon, they never felt you acculturated to the movement
outrageous behavior claimed psychic space for women
‘I never just paint my pussy; I think that’s absurd,
I mean, to do your pussy over and over, how monotonous.’
a collective gasp as you asserted there’s no difference
between paintings made by either sex

Until the retrospective at the Whitney, validated by the establishment,
‘I always felt…I didn’t have the right to paint.’
there were children to care for, men to uplift
you painted ‘without ingratiation,
without pretty nuances of color and drawing,
but with great validity.’* now the Academy approves
a lifetime membership but you’re already dying of cancer

Precociously out of your time
longing to be a great artist
for recognition from a society
that believed you should be bounded by conformity
all those contradictions, complexity, and sacrifice
your perseverance carried a high price

‘When you’re an artist you’re searching for freedom,
you’re never going to find it
because there isn’t any freedom.
Art could be called the search.’

*From the American Academy of Arts and Letters induction speech

Connected to the Open Link Night prompt at dVerse Poets Pub here: http://dversepoets.com/2012/03/20/openlinknight-week-36/ please link up and read some world class poetry.

Tags: poetry

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Mnaomai*: Inventing Vowels

Filed under: Love, Philosophy — 29 Comments

January 21, 2012

(c) 2010 Anna Montgomery

mindful inquiry processes mirroring
eros as an act of imagination
sounding an eternal song of bittersweet promises
our invitation to the sublime

delight is its kinetic drive
lack its animating catalyst
expressing desire in oracles and riddles
Aristophanes’ closest possible union*

existing at the edge of the actual and possible
a liminal being pines for embodiment
craving pomegranates and blue lotus blossoms
travelling arabesque corridors of self-awareness

we lovers define the boundaries
pictorial and phonetic glyphs
capturing thought in intimate arrangements
phonemes and diction engage wild twists of cognition

vocalized syllabary refined to acoustic components
sacred vibrations joined in fluid succession
our mouths formulate the symbols
breath conducts seductive influence

written pages the conductors, energy arcs distance
ornate signifiers, rugged paths trace emotion
bas-relief, each line a tactile sensation
memorized by the nuanced flourish of hands

semantic impertinences, Aristotle’s epiphora*
metaphors poured upon the surface of poetry, etching passageways
these epiphanies define our pilgrimage
encountering the nature of love

Notes:

Mnaomai: 1. To be mindful, to have in mind, to direct one’s attention to 2. To woo, court, be a suitor.

Aristophanes: No, obviously the soul of each is longing for something else which it cannot put into normal words but keeps trying to express in oracles and riddles. Suppose that, as the lovers lay together, Hephaistos should come and stand over them, tools in hand and ask ‘O human beings, what is it that you want of one another?’ And supposed they were nonplussed, so he put the question again: ‘Well is this what you crave, to be joined in the closest possible union with one another, so as not to leave one another by night and day?’

Aristotle’s epiphora: ‘To give names to nameless things by transference [metaphora] from things kindred or similar in appearance’ is how Aristotle describes the function of metaphor…There is in the mind a change or shift of distance, which Aristotle calls an epiphora, bringing two heterogeneous things close to reveal their kinship. The innovation of metaphor occurs in this shift of distance from far to near, and it is effected by imagination. – From Anne Carson’s magnificent book Eros The Bittersweet.

Linked to dVerse Poetics prompt hosted by the talented Claudia! Please join in the fun at http://dversepoets.com/2012/01/21/poetics-b-%c2%a6-o-%c2%a6-r-%c2%a6-d-%c2%a6-e-%c2%a6-r-%c2%a6-s/#comment-8475

Tags: poetry

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• Hypatia

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  When words penetrate deep into us they change the chemistry of the soul, of the imagination. We have no right to do that to people if we don’t share the consequences.

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• Postmodernism

  Postmodernism is an intellectual, artistic, philosophical, and/or cultural mindset that questions institutionalism, hierarchy, power, and simple, knowable truth. Alternatively it embraces complexity, contradiction, ambiguity, fractured metaphysics, multiplicity, deconstruction, and diversity. In poetry it offers semiotic liberty.

• Robert Anton Wilson

  Semantic noise also seems to haunt every communication system. A man may sincerely say, ‘I love fish,’ and two listeners may both hear him correctly, yet the two will neurosemantically file this in their brains under opposite categories. One will think the man loves to dine on fish, and the other will think he loves to keep fish (in an aquarium).

• Witold Gombrowicz

  Here is the writer who with all his heart and soul, with his art, in anguish and travail offers nourishment – there is the reader who’ll have none of it, and if he wants, it’s only in passing, offhandedly, until the phone rings. Life’s trivia are your undoing. You are like a man who has challenged a dragon to a fight but will be yapped into a corner by a little dog. from Ferdydurke

• 

  I’m an Executive Director with a doctorate in education, a consultant, painter, photographer, composer, poet, and vocalist.

• Gustav Flaubert

  Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

• Dušan “Charles” Simić

  Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.

• Monique Wittig

  Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it… Language as a whole gives everyone the same power of becoming an absolute subject through its exercise. But gender, an element of language, works upon this ontological fact to annul it as far as women are concerned and corresponds to a constant attempt to strip them of the most precious thing for a human being – subjectivity. Gender is an ontological impossibility because it tries to accomplish the division of Being. But Being is not divided. God or Man as being are One and whole. So what is this divided Being introduced into language through gender? It is an impossible Being, it is a Being that does not exist, an ontological joke, a conceptual maneuver to wrest from women what belongs to them by right: conceiving of oneself as a total subject through the exercise of language. The result of the imposition of gender, acting as a denial at the very moment when one speaks, is to deprive women of the authority of speech, and to force them to make their entrance in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely. The result is to deny them any claim to the abstract, philosophical, political discourses that give shape to the social body. Gender then must be destroyed. The possibility of its destruction is given through the very exercise of language. For each time I say ‘I’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality. This fact holds true for every locutor.

• W.S. Merwin

  All the things that really matter to us are impossible…Writing poetry is impossible. I don’t know how to write a poem. A poem – there has to be a part of it that is not my own will; it comes from somewhere that I don’t know. There is so much that comes out of what we don’t know and what we don’t have any control over. I think that one of the only things we can learn as we get older is a certain humility. – from Doing the Impossible

• Thomas Aquinas

  Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.