Visual art, intuition, reader-time

[nelson]

I`m thinking about what visual art contributes to poetry, not in terms of visual layout or visual images so much as in intuition.

This intuition is related to time.

In visual art viewer time approaches zero. All internal references
are simultaneously explicit, initial interpretation is intuitive reaction. This unification of presentation allows for communication in a manner that is simply not available through an extended
discourse.

I propose the reduction of reader time in poetry as a method for introducing more intuitive argument.

This can be done through a reliance on lyricism and brevity,
or converseley thru construciton of very tightly woven narrative structures, wherein character time is equal to reader time. See Jee Leong´s "The Connoisseur Inspects The Boys," wherein the
monologue is necessarily spoken by character and recieved by reader at equal rate.

This idea relating time and intuition is important to me because while I believe narrative rhetoric is predominant in contemporary poetry in English (please contradict me on this point and direct me to readings as possible) i write in a largely lyric style.

While the writing of longer poems and practice in narrative form
would surely benefit me, I find my efforts along those lines
artificial and unconvincing, I feel as tho I could easily paraphrase and reduce the argument from these texts without compromising their effectiveness, and that for this reason the extension of form is for me nothing more than a cultivation of blindness to intuition.

I would appreciate any clarification, amplification, or directions that you can offer these ideas. Thanks.

-nelson
36 hours without a cigarette

[SarahJF]

Hello Nelson,

I’m not going to address the rest of your argument, if you don’t mind, because I’m not sure of my facts – for example, I wouldn’t have said that you wrote ‘lyric’ poetry, but I don’t know my stuff well enough to argue my case. This point I’ll have a bash at, though:


originally posted by Nelson
In visual art viewer time approaches zero. All internal references
are simultaneously explicit, initial interpretation is intuitive reaction. This unification of presentation allows for communication in a manner that is simply not available through an extended
discourse.

In visual art viewer time does not always approach zero. It takes time to walk up to a picture, and walk around a picture. If you stand in any art gallery, you’ll see lots of people standing back from pictures, then walking forward, then scratching their ears and making quizzical faces. This all takes time. The longer you spend looking at a picture, the more time you spend analysing it.

Pictures are not flash-cards or split-second screen images.

Plus, what about things like the ‘Rothko room’, where the experience of going into the room and seeing the paintings all together is as important, if not more so, than gazing at each individual one.

What about modern installation art? Lots of that fills huge areas. Time does not approach zero whilst wandering through them.

How the hell can all internal references be simultaneously explicit.

Either I’m very, very stupid, (which is more than possible) or you’re telling me that a picture kind of explodes sensorily in front of the viewer. If the latter, then that's nonsense. Pictures are approached just as cerebrally as poetry – both in conception and appreciation.

Lots of painters, past and present, have an very healthy wish to manipulate the viewer’s reactions, and lead their eyes to exactly where the painter wishes them to go – and where that is will often have a 'deeper' meaning. Just look at Vermeer (http://www.nga.gov/feature/vermeer) and
have a look at the notes on composition, and ‘symbols and meaning’.


This unification of presentation allows for communication in a manner that is simply not available through an extended discourse

Nelson, I'm finding your language a little confusing. I don’t understand ‘unification of presentation’. Paintings aren’t unified. Paintings are all different kinds of things. And not all poems are ‘extended discourse’. For me, some imagist poetry can be just as hard-hitting visually as many pictures, because it will conjure up pictures in my head. And lots of paintings (like those of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) can be terribly, boringly narrative, with the eye being led all over the place to various meaningfull symbols.

I’m not great at this sort of argument, nor would I pretend to be, so if I’m just being stupid, then I apologise. But either I'm not understanding you properly, or I simply disagree.


Sarah

[Harry R]

The way you're using the terms 'narrative' and 'lyric' seems a little non-standard to me.

People more often say that most modern poetry is in a lyric mode (i.e. is subjective, introspective, and dealing in emotional reactions and charged moments of time) rather than narrative (i.e. used to tell a story). There's overlap between the two, of course, but I'm not sure 'lyric' is the right word for what you're talking about.

I might have missed the point entirely, of course, in which case please explain.

Harry

[nelson]

Hi Sarah. Interesting. My message actually started as a response to one of your poems, but i thought it was too vague and so i put it here.

I don´t mean to be making any kind of claims about visual art with this. I only referred to it very generally, because the fact is that I don´t know visual art very well. I´m sure you´re right about the points that you challenge in what i said.

I should have said "pacing," not "time," because I was referring to the differences between the internal and external time a work presents. For example a movie might address 10 years in the life of an internal character, and take 2hrs for the viewer to watch.
Similarly a song necessarily has a fixed listen-time that can be totally seperate from it´s internal references to time.
My point is that a poem doesn´t have the same static duration in time that a movie or a song do. Reader time ultimately depends on reader. Although the author influences it.

In visual art this concept of time would be even more distinct, because a painting, for example, can provide all of íts sensory information in an instant. That doesn´t mean that the viewer wont contemplate the painting. It would be ridiculous to imply that pictures are any less cerebral than poetry in conception or in appreciation. I mean that the viewer can (potentially but not necessarily) percieve all of a painting at once, without dealing with the progression of time that a movie presents from idea one, to idea two, to idea three, over the course of several minutes.

And I´m saying that because reader-time is not static and we can do whatever we want with it (well i can´t do whatever i want with it, but someone skilled in this respect could) that perhaps we should try to reduce it as much as possible so that, as in visual art, the viewer can deal with all of the piece at once. Like seeing a whole movie in a very few lines of poetry. (Not intended to provoke the wrath of those inclined towards cinema, not at all intended to position the value of poetry relative to cinema, only it´s temporal quality.)

Anyway, there´s my point again, hopefully more complete. Thanks for the link Sarah. As i´ve said, i want to know more about visual art.

and i also want to investigate the potential of reducing the time that it takes to present ideas in a poem to the point of being nearly simultaneous.

ok.
later,
nelson
39 hours without a cigarette

[nelson]

Hi Harry.

When i say that i find our contemporary body of poetry largely narrative i mean that the fabric of logic, that which structures a collection of ideas and makes it effective discourse, stems from association with social ideas of cause and effect and therefore with a rather fixed concept of time.

I don´t dispute the validity of the concept of time. It´s what i use, and basically what all of us use, to structure our interpretations of experience. We understand our lives as stories. And we constantly reference that story-telling tendency, it pervades virtually all of our poetry.

When a writer negates this tendency our first response is that we "don´t understand."

Ted Berrigan: Sonnet XLI

banging around in a cigarette she isn´t "in love"
my dream a drink with Ira Hayes we discuss the code of
the west
my hands make love to my body when my arms are around you
you never tell me your name
and I am forced to write "belly" when i mean "love"
Au revoir, scene!
I waken, read, write long letters and
wander restlessly when leaves are blowing
my dream a crumpled horn
in advance of the broken arm
she murmurs of signs to her fingers
weeps in the morning to waken so shackled with love
Not me. I like to beat people up.
My dream a white tree


This poem doesn´t make sense as a story, but the series of poems definitely creates a type of sense, albeit idiomatic. But the vast majority of what we write today does not assume the position of creating it´s own system of logic.

Maybe i´m just saying that we keep writing things that assume the same basic "position in front of reality" or that have the same function. We keep writing " ________ happened. It was _______ and so X felt ________. Get it?" Even if it´s subjective and emotional, it´s still structured as a story.

The division between lyric and narrative poetry seems like
principle division in our poetry. I want to understand this situation better, because i´m totally stuck on it. I suspect that i am confused.

Thanks.
Later,
nelson
40+ hours

By the way, I guess this poem is an example of drastically reduced reader time like i was talking about earlier.

I Know a Man
by R. Creeley

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking,--John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.

[SarahJF]

Hi Nelson,

I should have said "pacing," not "time," because I was referring to the differences between the internal and external time a work presents. For example a movie might address 10 years in the life of an internal character, and take 2hrs for the viewer to watch.

Good-oh. I understand that much better. Although I would say that any idea of 'how long' we look at/ think about/ appreciate something is surely more indistinct than you imply? So, yes, of course, there's a sudden, obvious distinction between the time taken to 'see' a movie and the issues it addresses. But when we've watched the movie, bits of it stay with us, and we think about them for longer than two hours, perhaps? I'd take that into consideration when tying this argument in to structuring poetry.

I suppose I'm saying that it isn't, for me, the structure of the poetry that gives it impact. It's the words the poet uses.

Have you heard of Multiple Intelligence theory? It might be interesting for you. At it's most basic level, it is a division of people into 'visual' learners, 'kinetic' learners, 'logical' learners etc. I'm no expert (god forbid), but a link to website is here (http://www.edwebproject.org/edref.mi.th.html)

Because it dwells on aspects of how we understand information, you might find it interesting, since each aspect of learning would have, I suppose, a different relationship to how many minutes of time we spend processing the data found in a poem.

Personally, as I've said, I think that it's all a bit looser than 'how long we look at something'. I spend aaaaages enjoying and appreciating poetry when the poetry is remembered in my head. Same with pictures. Same with movies. I've certainly spent more than two hours thinking about an image like:

'The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough' (Ezra Pound)


But it took me about three seconds to read it.

I know this is a bit hurried, and apologies for that. I just wanted to give you the link, really, and then got side-tracked. But reader-time isn't always linear. It bops around all over the place - thinks about other things like it that R's read already - relates it to personal experience - remembers a picture than is similar.

My worries about your time-condensing theory is that I think a R mind could be much messier than you give it credit for. I'm really interested in what you're trying to do, though.

Sarah

[nelson]

Hi Sarah.

Right on with the websites. I think our culture is cultivating visual intelligence more and more.

Between television, computer games, and internet, the information that we deal with is increasingly visual. And the text we deal with in these mediums is arranged very differently.

whether in newspapers, magazines, or on the internet, we tend to read small, quite intentionally formatted blocks of text. never big blocks of it, prose like. text books are going through similar changes. our primary school system is starting to follow the trend by catering towards devloping skills for different styles of thinkers, but it is generally still closed to visual thinking.

(i worked as a psych aid in public schools for a while, and plenty of times i saw teachers forcing kids to stop drawing in order to take nice organized notes. often i realized that the kids would be lost and tortured with notes that were not predominantely visual, like their drawings)

lots of people say this tendency is a bad thing, that it´s shortness of attention. but i don´t know. i think it´s just a trend towards reliace on visual intelligence. while we may not be fixing our attention for extended periods, we´re generally receiving information from several sources at once.

i try to arrange my poems to make sense visually, without going to the extreme of caligr...i dunno how to spell that word, without going to the extreme of making explicit shapes.

i do that because when i see a poem that looks like this post looks next to a poem that looks like the creeley poem i posted above, i´m already hugely predisposed to the creeley poem. or the berrigan poem which also has a nice closed shape.

if it makes sense visually, i feel that the text has some innate connection and structure. poems have visual form just like they have sonic form (meter.)

I´m accustomed to taking in information as fast as possible and if a longer poem is not very snappy between the lines, if it drones, then i´m not going to read it. Unless it´s excellent work, or i already have some other seperate reason for reading it.

i´m starting to ramble, and so i´ll leave it here.

thanks for the links Sarah.

-kn
people i haven´t smoked a cigarette in 3 days now.

[Little Skittle]

Sorry to but in guys, but I had to add my two cents.

From nelson's ramblings I've become interested, especially since he's started to talk about school and learning.

Music actually also has a great effect on learning as well. Even though visual learning is easier for a majority of people, music can help children to concentrate on the subject matter better. Studies have shown that children's educational programs on the tube with fast appealing music keep the attention of viewers. Even though visual learning has a huge impact of how much children actually learn, music also has a huge impact. The simplicity of background music really can help people concentrate.

I don't want to ramble on, soooooo...

Here's a link (http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/ED690MJ/Examples/LitRev/Levy.htm) explaining a bit of what I'm talking about.

Have fun with the rest of your conversation.

people i haven´t smoked a cigarette in 3 days now.

Congrats!

Little Skittle

[SarahJF]

Hello,

Good point there, I think, Little Skittle. I'm pushed for time, but I wanted to pop past to say that I think the problem with experimental website-poetry like in the link I mentioned in nelson's thread, is that the author has to be terribly careful of words and sounds, or it runs a great risk of being very, very silly - like this (http://www.geocities.com/sarahlel2000/) (you have to scroll down)

(I knew someone once who did that, y'know. Seriously. Now there's adoration for you)


Sarah

[veinglory]

Hi Nelson,

I would query your assumption that visual art is appreciated almost immediately. I have presented art to people wearing an 'eye-tracker' which shows exactly where their gaze is. It actually seems that it take much longer than zero-time for them to gain even a general impression of what a picture is about. Using pre-Raphaelite art I found that they consider each of the main features in the picture several times while building up their impression. To even look at the main features once took at least ten seconds and normally much longer.

[Donner]

"I propose the reduction of reader time in poetry as a method for introducing more intuitive argument."

What, "read more poetry as fast as possible"? I'm afraid I don't see the point. Why? You're also assuming that poetry is a strictly visual form. It's not--it's meant to be heard, as well.

Donner,
on the fast break

[nelson]

Hi.

Donner, I don´t mean to imply that poetry is strictly visual; this idea just pertains to a visual aspect of poetry. I´m also not saying that one should "read more poetry as fast as possible." I´m trying to get at the reciprocal of that: to write poetry that reads as fast and clean as possible.

veinglory, i guess i meant that it presents all information at once. but it´s interesting that that´s not the the case. you guys like the pre-raphaelite art? i´ve never really liked it but people keep mentioning to me.

Sarah: interesting poem at that link. it makes me think of the way that you create space in your more traditional poems that you post here. it would be impossible to post that poem, but i wonder if you could post a link to it and ask people to check it out and critique.