The arts, always, when I went through school - and I only went as far as one uncompleted semester at college - the arts were always considered secondary. And the arts are an older discipline than any of these upstarts like science, and cooking; yet cooking is an art in terms of its condition as being an old discipline. So today we are gathered about poetry and film. And I want to say some simple things which are always hard to teach because I have to dig thru a lot of pitchblende to get to the radium.
I think that one of the greatest lessons I ever had in poetry was one night I was invited over to Kenneth Rexroth's house in the early 1950's in San Francisco. Rexroth was one of the two centers of poetic activity in San Francisco at that time. He would send out calls to those who came to his house, and those who would be interested gathered informally in his living room. On this particular night a man from India began to read Tagore in Bengali. Now, I have read a lot of translated Tagore, and I never liked it very much; but now out came these extraordinarily beautiful sounds. First of all I was learning that poetry was not translatable. Second, because this was such a great experience beyond anything I had ever had before, or usually sense in poetry, I realized how important it was to approach poetry first thru its sounds. And then I learned, later, that was a way for some people to approach film first, just through its vision. People who had found difficulties with films of mine and other contemporaries because of their subject matter, like they say, or the lack of it, as some thought, or their dislocation of things in subject matter, could suddenly recognize a beauty, just in the tailoring of the light. They saw that this was more than decoration -or something like a light show- but that it was very articulate rhythm, that is, it carried motion. One could feel something about just the qualities of the lights. (...)
(de "Poetry and film", em "essential brakhage", McPherson & co.)
areudirty
germansingergirl
titsay
romaincrisis
dailybridgerton
origamiaround