Modernism: Art & Its Poetic Ing

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Connor F

For our final project we have created a online presentation using the program Prezi. In our Prezi we examine several different art and literary movements as well as the artists and writers that influenced and occupied them. Beginning with the emergence of Cubism and Gertrude Stein’s attempt to use this school in language and ending with an Examination of Surrealism, both in art and literature, particularly Elliot’s work. Other movements and styles examined include: Imagism, borne out of Realism and practiced by poets H.D. and Pound; Futurism, as it affected Mina Loy’s writing; Feminism, Mina Loy’s manifesto that stemmed from Futurism; and finally Vorticism, the shocking offspring of Cubism and futurism that Ezra Pound enjoyed so much. Modernism as a movement was created through interdisciplinary artistic interaction which is exactly what our presentation focuses on.
http://prezi.com/o_zi1gaoomp3/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

http://prezi.com/o_zi1gaoomp3/modernism-art-its-poetic-influence/

Works cited

D, H. “Hermes of the Ways.”. Bartleby.com. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.

Dix, Otto. The Match Seller. 1921. Paint\

Eakins, Thomas. The Gross Clinic. 1875. Oil on canvas. N.p.

Elliot T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair.    The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003.                              463-66. Print.

Ezra Pound In Context / Edited By Ira B. Nadel. n.p.: Cambridge, UK ; New York : Cambridge University   Press, 2010., 2010. Library Catalog. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.

II Volto Di Mae West. 1935. Oil Painting. N.p.

Lewis, Wyndham. Workshop. 1914-15. Tate Collection, n.p.

Loy, Mina. “Der Blinde Junge”. Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. The Norton             Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 274. Print.

Loy, Mina. “Feminist Manifesto”. Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. The Norton        Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 932. Print.

Picasso, Pablo. Gertrude Stein. 1905. Oil. Metropolitan Museum of Art

Picasso, Pablo. Three Musicians. 1921. Museum of Modern Art

Pound, Ezra. “The Temperaments”. Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. The Norton   Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 353. Print.

Pound, Ezra. “In a Station of the Metro”. Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. The                         Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 351.                    Print.

Skaff, William. The Philosophy of T.S. Eliot: From Skepticism to a Surrealist Poetic, 1909-1927.                                      Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, 1986. Print.

Stein, Gertrude, “A Carafe, That is a Blind Glass”.  Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003

 

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A Chronology of the Harlem Renaissance

Posted on April 16, 2014 by oliphantgg

The purpose of this timeline is to show a running historical context of the Harlem Renaissance. The timeline itself spans from 1890 to 1935. I decided to include events long before the Harlem Renaissance. This was because as Cary D. Wintz states in her book Harlem Speaks: a living history of the Harlem Renaissance, “the Harlem Renaissance did not emerge out of a literary and cultural wasteland” (Wintz 9). I found that the cultural and political events of the late 19th century were absolutely crucial to the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. For example, the records of race-based court legislation (e.g. Plessy v. Ferguson) showed the racial tensions and attempts at reform that continued into the Harlem Renaissance. I also found early black reform to be very important. Examples of this are exemplified in the early work of W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. These two men expressed views in the 1890’s that laid the ground work for organizations crucial to the Harlem Renaissance like the NAACP. I also thought that a profound detail to include was statistical data about African Americans at the end of each year. I more specifically included the number of recorded lynchings per year to show that with each years accomplishments came more barbarous treatment of African Americans. This is the reasoning for my inclusion of the many race riots that continued into the 20th century. The most interesting thing for me is how African Americans continued to flourish in the wake of such suppression. They were constantly prosecuted yet they created new art forms like Jazz and Blues that spurned a new and exotic cultural attitude. According Alfonzo W. Hawkins Jr. in his book the Jazz  Trope, these new art forms produce a new musician who “must explore within him- or herself all the emotions that lie suppressed and expressed through a myriad of bends and curves, moving up and down the musical scale to achieve the goal of personal assertion against a confined reality” (Hawkins 3). They were prosecuted and continued to progress these art forms while revolutionizing civil rights, art, poetry, and literature in the Harlem Renaissance. If anything the Harlem Renaissance is a story of expression in the midst of suppression from oppression. This is something that is most effectively illustrated by an extended timeline like this Tiki Toki entitled “History of the Harlem Renaissance”.

Bibliography:

Cowan, Thomas Dale, and Jack Maguire. Timelines of African-American history: 500 years of Black achievement. New York: Berkley Pub. Group, 1994. Print.

Hawkins, Alfonso W.. The jazz trope: a theory of African American literary and vernacular culture. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Print.

Hornsby, Alton. Chronology of African American history: from 1492 to the present. 2nd ed. Detroit: Gale Research, 1997. Print.

Kramer, Victor A.. The Harlem renaissance re-examined. New York: AMS Press, 1987. Print.

Wintz, Cary D.. Harlem speaks: a living history of the Harlem Renaissance. Naperville, Ill.: Sourcebooks, 2007. Print.

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Move or Be Moved

Posted on April 16, 2014 by matthew.horton

I’ve been up all night for weeks.  Now it is time to “lift up your heads!” as Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto proclaims.  I have read books and articles and poems and ogled at art, and now I present to you my website of manifesto research: The Manifesto Marketplace.  Please do enjoy the details of The Futurists, The Vorticists, and The Surrealists.  The genre of the manifesto has not received the attention which I believe many modernist artists and poets devoted to it.  Art movements of the modernist era were defined by manifestoes and these documents allowed for art to be in the eye of the public.  Without bold art movements and belligerent declarations of the state of art, art is distanced from the general population.  There must be a renewal in energy, artists must drive fast cars and through manifestoes, make the general public realize that art is necessary to understand the world we live in.  We must either move or be moved; we must be a movement.

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Critical Review of Visuals

Posted on April 10, 2014 by helmsjl

     Jody Smiling, an author for The Rumpus website, writes a short review for Pethybridge’s Striven that includes excerpts from an interview and analyses of the various features of the poems. She talks about the purely visual qualities of the book, and draws attention to the function of the black pages. In the interview she quotes from Pethybridge talks about how the pages serve to function like a “ ‘Renaissance printer’s tradition, like ‘pouring one out’ a show of respect, honor and grief for the departed by wasting a (scarce) resource, the point is exactly the excessive waste — a sign of love in that waste.” Smiling analyzes the pages in terms of a visual and emotional confrontation. The reader experiences a “deadening effect” of repetition. She states that the effect is heavy and mimics the darkness that one might be challenged with during depression. Another visual that she addresses is the fold out pages. Smiling likens this to a more traditional aspect of a centerfold; the unfolding action creates a sense of “anticipation, voyeurism, and distanced intimacy”. Pethybridge, she states, mimics these aspects by objectifying the bridge into a visual fold out, while also being reproving.  In his final section, Fathom-line, the poem is also represented visually. She writes that the line of the poem joins the pages together and has the same purpose that a true nautical fathom line has. It poetically “join[s] all points having the same depth to expose the ocean’s floor,” to expose the connection of grief.

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Striving to Imitate/Innovate

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Patrick Walker

I realize now that when you write a poem in a calligram form in microsoft word and then try and copy/paste that poem into a blog post things don’t go so smoothly. Well this blog post is meant to be a response/imitation Jeffrey Pethybridge’s Striven, The Bright Treatise. 

The poem is about a young Japanese philosophy student named Misao Fujimura who in 1903 committed suicide by jumping from the top of a waterfall. I learned about him when reading The Autobiography of Satomi Myodo. although Wikipedia doesn’t mention this, this source claims him to have written in his note that “life is incomprehensible,” a phrase denoting his despair. While the root cause of his despair is a failed romantic relationship, his death began to encapsulate a general sense of social unrest during this period of rapid urbanization and modernization in Japan.

The poem highlights the belief in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism that things in the Microcosm, i.e. your family or work or social life can have effects in the macrocosm, i.e. the natural world. That is why Misao (at least in this poem) jumps, because he believes that the failure of his microcosm is the failure of the macrocosm. With not hope in one there can be no hope in the either.

MisaoFujimura

Sorry about the word document format but it’s all I could manage. I tried to depict the jumping off of the cliff and landing in the water below. The large line splitting the poem is meant to be the water line. The last line of the poem is supposed to be the body after the ripples have calmed.

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Marianne Moore’s Torrid Family Life

Posted on April 10, 2014 by dixmt

Moore with her mother, MaryA review recently published in the New Criterion by Bruce Bawer of a new Marianne Moore biography caught my attention this week. The review begins by chastising a decades old biography penned by Charles Molesworth, a biographer Bawer accuses of stubbornly ignoring the peculiar social environments in which Moore lived for the majority. These environments were, according to Leavall, forged by the psychological illnesses of Moore’s mother and father; father John Moore, described as a shopworn ruffian, is simply labeled “a full-blown psychotic,” while mother Mary is presumed to be driven insane by her irreconcilable Christian principles and open lesbianism.

Following Mary’s separation from her husband resulting from to his worsening “religious mania,” the single mother of two adopted strange codes of conduct, which she stringently imposed on her children. According to the review, Leavall unearths disturbing minutiae from Moore’s home-life: a unique “language” spoken by the family and Mary’s partner (who began living with the Moores when Marianne was thirteen), brother Warner’s virtual exile after marrying, Mary’s insistence of implementing male pronouns when referring to Marianne.

And then a prognosis is conjectured from these one-dimensional facts—one which creates a hypothesis that, though bombastically sure of itself, constructs a fascinating lens with which to observe Moore’s poetry.  To “escape” the imprisoning world by which Mary fettered her daughter to her side, the Leavall argues and Bawer concurs, Marianne turned to poetry. Her verse is characterized as perseverating and obsessive, as driven by a paradoxical coherent madness. Despite the pathos of her poetry, Moore witnessed herself decline in popularity before her death in the early 70s as confessional poetry and feminist theory overtook the “‘ archetyp[al] quaint literary spinster’” character, an image to which Moore was seen, until recently, to have subscribed.

Based on Bawer’s review, Leavall’s work provides an interesting look into the life of Moore and the strange formative environment in which she was raised. However, I am nonetheless wary of the conjecture strung together from these biographical “facts,” despite its undeniable appeal. Perhaps the biography in full boasts more convincing details; published this winter by FSG, Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore is but a quick 480-page read.

Some more reviews:

The New York Review of Books

The Guardian

The New York Times

Slate Book Review

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Lucid Waves

Posted on April 10, 2014 by oliphantgg

In the penultimate section of Jeffrey Pethybridge’s book of poetry entitled Striven, The Bright Treatise, Pethybridge takes an unexpected, yet perfectly executed, departure by employing many characteristics of Romanticism. I feel that he does so to share the sensations of his brothers final flickers of what Pethybridge paints as a helplessly heavy emotional state.

      I think the most intriguing example of this is Pethybridges steady-handed reference of the artistic technique of Rückenfigur. Rückenfigur is basically a person seen from behind contemplating a view. An example of this can be found in Caspar David Friedrich’s very famous Romantic Era work entitled Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.                                                      

      The painting shows a man with his back turned facing an extremely sublime and seemingly unearthly landscape. The landscape is basically a foggy sea with cliffs jutting from it. From the onlookers gaze, it appears that the man on the cliff has no where to progress safely in any direction. The idea that it is a foggy sea is also significant. It helps to really represent the pure both frightening and exciting uncertainty that plagues the human conscious with every unfolding moment. According to historian John Lewis Gaddis, the man’a back being turned extremely crucial to the meaning of the work. You cannot tell whether his expression is one of terror or excitement or both at the same time. Also, the man appears to be able to represent a person in any stage of their life. His hair it painted fiery red put with some patched of white that could be fog or aging. I also, personally, found the cane significant. It’s there to help the man along but it would fail him if he were to go over the edge. Overall, this one reference, puts Pethybridges brother’s state into perspective.

Like the man in Friedrich’s painting, Pethybridge’s brother’s real emotions are masked. One couldn’t tell if he was terrified, uncertain, or excited or all three. He was heavy with sadness and confusion. Like every human, he was completely blind to what was ahead of him. For some it is exhilarating and makes life more worth living. For him, it was apparently too much. He is described by Pethybridge as standing on the Golden Gate Bridge looking at a description of the western sky that can’t help but make even me feel uneasy, confused, excited, terrified, dwarfed, and insignificant at the same time. He was also looking out over a foggy unforgiving bay a four second’s plummet below him. Pethybridge calls this “lucid waves” (Pethybridge 61) which suggests, as well as dreams, nightmares. It brings to light a petrifying and nightmarish uncertainty of what is real from his likely feelings of complete enclosure from the rest of society. Eventually, everything “all gargantuan” (161) surrounded him too heavily and he jumped.

Romanticism was employed by Pethybridge to effectively describe his brothers feelings that led to his eventual suicide. It was also employed to maybe even suggest a heroic suicide. One that was caused by being overly regulated by society and not being able think or act freely. As if being able to decide when he leapt permanently from the quotidian.

 

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A Glimmer of Happiness in a Time of Grief: Striven, the Bright Treatise

Posted on April 10, 2014 by T'Rese M.

Jeffrey Pethybridge’s  Striven, the Bright Treatise contains both grief and the process of looking back on memories to help him mourn his brother’s death. In my opinion, grief is definitely the emotion that is mostly evident in this work, but there are glimpses of happiness as he looks back on memories he and his brother shared.

The poem that shows this the most is located on page 97 of the book. Basically, the overview of this poem is Pethybridge’s memory of when he and his brother were in a hotel and enjoying the Spring weather. This is shown as the Pethybridge writes, “The April window will/be open or, the breeze/… the hotel curtain” (1-5). This moment sets up the scene of how Pethybridge delves into a moment where he and his brother enjoyed their fun times together. He does this by talking of how they had high expectations that the month of April is the best time of year because there weren’t any tourists and they can enjoy the scenery with no distractions. Pethybridge illustrates this as he says, “we’ll joke that this time/ of year is best, since the tourists/aren’t there yet, & we’ll take/that bottle of sherry/ for the chill after swimming” (6-10). Here, it is evident that the memories are forever lasting to Pethybridge, especially since they are the only two involved which makes the moment that much more intimate. The last line of the poem brings together the nature of Pethybridge and his brother’s relationship. The last line reads, “wit sun tide” (12) which is a exaggerated spelling of the traditional Whitsun which is a Christian Festival with parades and such after the seventh Sunday after Easter (Wikipedia). By Pethybridge acknowledging their relationship in this way, it shows that he and his brother had fun times and also cherished the vernacular.

Pethybridge, Jeffrey. Striven, the Bright Treatise. Las Cruces, NM: Noemi, 2013. 97. Print.

“Whitsun.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Mar. 2014. Web. 10 Apr. 2014.

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A Fascination with Anagrams

Posted on April 10, 2014 by BrittenyR

In a large number of Jeffrey Pethybridge’s poems, one can find anagrams and anagrammatic poetry styles; indeed, the title of his book is an anagram of his brother’s name. I looked into the history of anagrams in order to understand the appeal behind anagrammatic poetry and the use of scrambling important information to make new meanings. It turns out, anagrams have been prevalent throughout history, since perhaps even Ancient Greece, as a way of expressing hidden meanings or definitions behind a certain name or phrase. This practice was once called “themuru” which literally means “changing.” The practice was often used to find the mystical and mysterious meanings behind phrases or names heard in dreams, or to interpret the powers of that name in relation to a deity. Anagramming was considered an “Alchemy of Wit,” and was practiced as both a method of revealing secrets and of hiding them from prying eyes. One example of an anagram that expresses this especially well is from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. In this novel, the anagrammed name of Tom Marvolo Riddle is rescrambled, and reveals the phrase “I am Lord Voldemort,” thus revealing the truth behind the secret and the hidden powers of names. Anagrammatic poetry uses this method of scrambling and rescrambling phrases and words in order to pull out these hidden messages and give that name or phrase a double weight, both as simply what it is and what it reveals about itself through the play on words. Pethybridge uses anagrams in order to reveal certain aspects of his brother, the man’s suicide, and the poet’s debate over the state of the afterlife for a person who has committed suicide. The title seems to suggest both a eulogy for his brother as well as an attempt to find hope in darkness, a “striving” for something “bright,” but it is unclear whether this is fully reached. The murkiness of conclusions seems also to reflect the secrecy of word play and anagrams, as if his brother’s death were itself an anagram that he is trying to solve, but perhaps cannot.

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Reasons to Live: A Modernist Collage

Posted on April 10, 2014 by Katherine Bartter

Jeffrey Pethybridge’s Striven, The Bright Treatise does something so many modernists have done before him: provide a reason for living created from the ghosts of the dead.

Whether the things dead are people, tradition, symbols, the environment, poetic forms or culture, modernists and Pethybridge show their significance, their beauty, their life even while standing amongst the gravestones.

I decided to create a collage poem formed from most of the poets read throughout the semester. I attempted to form a broad representation of the tensions felt between loss and despair and then eventual hope and recovery seen in so many of the poems we covered.

I made a Flipsnack of the poem and all the sources used within the poem. You can view it here, but I also included the poem below without the sources.

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