Viewing great art is falling in love

I don't know that the supposition in my header is true, but it seem rational based on a couple of principles I've accepted, some ideas that I gathered from my experiences.

The first idea, that I've stated here several times, is that great art is the art which captures our imagination. To say that another way, it holds our attention, it's visually catchy. It's infectious.

The second idea is a truth I've become aware of just recently: That the act of giving attention is the (one of the?) essential act(s) of love. As a parent, pet owner, friend, I realize what separates whom I care about from strangers is that I pay attention to their lives, AND it's their attention I want. Often a pet will do something loud - cry, make something fall off a ledge - and when I look I see them looking at me, and I say, "Emma, I see you," as if I know that's what they wanted. For me to see them. And what child does not look to see, while playing a toy drum for example, if their parent is watching them? Or while spinning until they fall, will not peek to see if mother sees them being silly? The child and pet depend on the mature person, and they want to know they're loved by feeling their attention. I'd say adults do this with each other to - having another's attention makes you feel cared about, important to someone other than yourself. We want someone other than ourselves to pay attention to ourselves. Hence Facebook, hence blogs ;)

I think I fall short of arguing adequately for attention being an act, possible the act, of love. But in my experience this seems true. And applying this knowledge to my daily interactions at work and home has strengthened my relationships recently, I think. It's practical. That's why I'm a stickler for empirical knowledge lately.

So if idea one and two are true (they may not be for you - they seem very much so for me), then the act of viewing something that holds your attention (great film, great song, great painting) is sort of like love at first sight, the sensation / feeling of it. And who doesn't say about their favorite anything, "I LOVE that movie / song / etc!"

It seems so obvious, but spelled out like that, it's pretty interesting.

Two Poems up at Mock Turtle Zine

Great journal for local poets here in the Dayton, OH area, run by the inimitable, immaculate M.T. Birdsall. Here is a link:

http://mockturtlezine.com/online-issue/

Poem up at Exercise Bowler Issue 15

Check this link to see my poem, The Ankh of Newfoundland.

http://www.exercisebowler.site90.net/issue15.htm

Taking Aristotle's Lead

(From an email responding to a fellow poet-friend who commented about the difficulty of finding meaning in a rather incoherent poem of mine recently)

K, 

Glad you enjoyed the poems! I've thought more recently about poetry - function, outcome of reading it, meaning... I've come to some heady conclusions that I'm not sure would be embraced by others. I think the important point is I believe art is a chance to manifest the impossible (function) and that the outcome is wonder and finally inspiration, and that inspired feeling let's the reader feel more alive, more perceptive and attuned to his surroundings, and like nothing is impossible. I think art, like other great things, can inspire us to self actualize. The reason autobiographical / nonfiction poetry seems to have meaning is because it does, but only by virtue of life itself having meaning, meaning being some sort of tangible knowledge. But what is knowledge but experience? For me, I procure knowledge from my personal experiences by reflecting and journaling, which I feel others do in lines and call it poetry. Is it not poetry? That's a matter of opinion, but I'd argue what really has power is the impossible, and that writing something possible and probable risks being everyday and boring. The impossible made manifest is never boring. 

I actually teased this idea, inspired by Aristotle, a bit further: 

1) The possible-probable art work has little effect but clear meaning, the way a hug in a poem means love and a mom hugging a daughter can be interpreted as the love between child and parent (interpreters look for the universal in the particular, but to do so from one experience-poem seems risky; my universal-ish ideas of life come from a lifetime of experience, and there are always outliers, exceptions to the rules). 

2) the possible-improbable makes great comedy (the ridiculous behavior of comedic characters in sitcoms, the stupidity of cartoon villains ie getting caught in his own trap) or horrible drama like a villain with a gun being struck by lightning letting the hero get away (the audience groans "that would never happen!") I thought humor might hinge on local customs since that is what makes certain behaviors improbable ie farting at a fancy restaurant is funny because it's so "uncivilized" and no one would willfully do it except an absurd comedic character

3) the impossible-probable is art / poetry: the witches and madness of Macbeth (people in impossible situations but the events being considerably reasonable despite that ie lady macbeths suicide), my other example is giving your loved one the moon - it's impossible but probable since lovers give large impressive gifts to each other. Another example: the Grand Canyon loving water: it's impossible for the Grand Canyon to love but reasonable if it did it'd love the Colorado river for making it.

4) impossible improbable: I could only think of children's movies and books ie toy story where toys do comedic things or cars where cars act like funny people. 

I think this is a practical way of breaking down made things with no clear function like a tool (hammer for building) aside from being their for man to experience (art). I take life / experience as my source of meaning, art as my source of inspiration (nothing in this beautiful world is impossible!). 

I hope this clarifies the "why / intention" of my work. I'll put this on my blog today if you want to direct others to it. I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you look up the Wikipedia article on "naive physics" it explains experiments where infants became habituated to an event and then would stare for a long time after a seemingly impossible version of it occurred. As if captivated by something beautiful. 

Jake

I was thinkin' about Alicia Keys (Good Art Makes You Think)

As a goof, I quoted a silly Bob Dylan lyric in the Post's title (I included the part in parentheses for its simplicity and with the hope that someone would Google that phrase and find my blog). 

*** From here you can skip down to the other section buttressed by triple-asterisks if you want the impetus of this post - the two paragraphs leading up to it are really just prologue ***

Anyway, I'm thinking often about how critics like to "interpret" art / poetry, and how there is even a specialty in journalism called Art Journalism (thank you, Art in America). Today, I synthesized that knowledge with my own experience of art and poetry, and came up with this "quality" ("requirement") of great art. 

Before espousing any kind of "rule" of great art, I'd like to state clearly here I never attempted to make any "definition" of poetry until I came up with a foundation, that foundation or most-basic of definitions being "Poetry is an object made of words." That was a major moment for me because I shed then the idea of "universal truths" and the idea that poetry therefore must be made of biographical information and state (directly or indirectly) a meaning that at least I, the poet, am aware of and can restate in prose. 

*** The essence (of the art object) is unfamiliarity, but the effect of experiencing it is 1) you feel it grab your attention / capture your imagination, and 2) (here's the new part) “it makes you think.” The pleasure then comes from having your mind go places within you that feel deep. Maybe, contemplating the poem or piece of art, you come up empty; that is, you don’t find sense, you can’t relate it exactly to your life experiences. But you are happy, happy to have gone deep, and to be seeing and feeling within yourself the depths your consciousness does not normally plumb or reside in. ***

Couple of bobo-LINKS

This is a great article - I would've benefited from reading it when I first started getting interested in poetry. Of course, it all seems so obvious now having read so much since then.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/246914

Thank you, Poetry, for publishing it. Would've been better if my poems were in the issue as well, but that can be forgiven :)

The other was this link:

http://www.kenyonreview.org/kr-online-issue/2011-summer/selections/on-poets-on-teaching-a-sourcebook/

The link itself doesn't matter, although the book reviewed sounds really interesting. This portion I think would've benefited me when I first started digging deeply into poetry:

And the next time a student praises clichéd writing as “easy to relate to,” I’ll have Mark Yakich’s response on the tip of my tongue: “If your main claim to a poem is that you can relate to it, you aren’t reading it sufficiently. Poems are not meant to be related to; they are meant to offer you something you didn’t know, experience, or imagine before.” I’ve muddled through an explanation along those lines countless times; it’s not a new idea. 

My aesthetics briefly

A friend and I were discussing a poem - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175608 - and it led to a discussion of our aesthetics. She said the poem didn't "make a point," to which I said poetry is not language employed for that matter. She essentially then broadened her definition of point to mean just about anything, and followed by inquiring indirectly into my aesthetics. Here's what I said:

I agree with Shelley that poetry - art for that matter - makes the familiar no longer so. For me, the experience of any art, including poetry and this poem, is strange, and I come away from it with a heightened awareness of my perceptions, of the world. The poem, to borrow Ezra Pound's words, is "charged with meaning" because (in my words) it contains new knowledge. This is why I love Picasso for saying art is the lie that lets us see the truth. I'm not currently big on Rimbaud's poetry, but I understand perfectly how deranging the senses creates "news that stays news" (Pound again).

The poem had beautiful diction and evocative images, the rhetoric kept me listening, it just didn't take any risks. It didn't risk a "close call with nonsense" (to borrow the title of Stephen Berg's interesting collection of criticism) and for me those close calls are like home runs or touchdowns, they're the fireworks.

Jake