Attention, let poetry light up life
Oil painting Apollinaire, Picasso and Their Muse
This article was written by the poet cai Tianxin, a professor at the School of Mathematics of Zhejiang University, when he was 27 years old, and was published in the folk magazines "A Line" (1991), "Literary Freedom Talk" (excerpt, 1992), "Poetry Monthly" (2002.1), included in the author's criticism collection "On the Cliff of the Ear" (Peking University Press, 2011), and republished this article in the September 2021 issue of "Selected Poems". Cai Tianxin believes that when a poet is young, in addition to writing, he should also conduct some theoretical exploration...
The art of poetry
Cai Tianxin
I. Introduction: Imitation theory
And the sun cannot chase the moon, and the night cannot chase the day, and each floats in one orbit.
- The Quran
Imitation is to learn to do it according to a certain ready-made look. Aristotle believed that imitation was one of the origins of art and one of the differences between man and beast. He pointed out that there is always a pleasure in imitations, and experience proves this: some things themselves seem to cause pain, but the exquisite images can arouse our pleasure, such as corpses or the most despicable images of animals. The reason for this is that curiosity is a happy thing for us. We get pleasure when we see those images because we are looking at them and we are seeking knowledge, concluding that one thing is another.
Aristotle and Alexander the Great
Before the birth of modern art, all creative practice was inseparable from imitation. In other words, it is an imitation of man's universal experience, except that the techniques and objects of these imitations are constantly updated. For example, the problem of painting is how to represent the objects of space on a flat surface, and the earliest mural in ancient Egypt, "Fishing and Hunting Birds in Papyrus", was depicted by using the projection of the cross-section on the plane to see the position of the head and shoulders of the main character, which was the original method. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the emergence of no shadow point became a turning point in the history of painting. Later, straight-line perspective and atmospheric perspective dominated Europe for four centuries. Until the end of the nineteenth century, painters still liked expressions such as suggesting shadows with darkness, suggesting the wind blowing with curved trees and fluttering hair, and suggesting the movement of the body in an unstable posture. Even the Impressionists, at best, disrupted the contours of the phenomenon, subtly dissolving it in the changing of color, and it remained a representation of reality.
On the other hand, thematically, classicism is clearly inclined toward antiquity, while romanticism leans towards the Middle Ages or the exotic Orient. Another example is literature, whether it is realism or romanticism, cannot get rid of the imitation of human life experience. As Walter Scott points out in his evaluation of Jane Austen's novel Emma, "The art of imitating nature like nature itself shows the reader not the magnificent landscape of the imaginary world, but an accurate and astonishing representation of their daily lives."
Second, from imitation to wit
When man wants to imitate walking, he creates wheels that do not resemble legs.
—Guillaume Apollinaire
Imitation has its natural limitations. Pascal speaks in the Book of Thoughts that two similar faces, each of which alone does not make people laugh, but together they make people laugh because of their resemblance. It can be seen that imitation is a relatively low-level realization of curiosity. The sense of beauty requires an endless stream of new forms, and it is already a great embarrassment for modern artists to speak directly to the public through the depiction of common experiences. This forces us to lead the imitation to its higher form, wit.
Wit lies in the rapid association of similarities between things. Unexpected correctness constitutes wit. Wit is the product of the advanced stage of human intelligence development. According to George Santayena, the character of ingenuity lies in going deep into the hidden depths of things, where the remarkable situations or relations are picked out, and when the situation or relation is noted, the whole object appears in a new and clearer light. The charm of wit is here, it's something that's been proven after a lot of thought. Wit is an advanced mental process that, through the pleasure of imagination, is prone to produce effects such as "charming", "radiant", "inspired" and so on. Susan Lange points out that whenever emotion is conveyed in an indirect way, it marks the rise of artistic expression to a new height.
Picasso's Bull's Head
In 1943, Picasso put the saddle of the bicycle upside down and put it upside down on the handlebars, turning it into a Bull's Head. Chagall's Violin and the Maiden places the violin upside down on the ground, making the case and the girl's hips merge. There are also works by Magritte, such as The Walk of Euclid (1955), which depicts a cityscape seen through a window, with a wide, sharply visible thorough road that appears to be about to turn into a triangle, repeating the corner cone shape of the adjacent tower.
Poetry and wit
There is no other way but to be clever and wise.
——T· S. Elliot
Poetry is the art form that most needs wit and is the most expressive of wit. Wit is initially expressed in the poem as a metaphor, another way of saying something that often shows sentimental spirits or mystical thoughts, but more pleasant, as in Shakespeare's verse:
Come on, kiss me, young lover,
Fang age is a quality that cannot be endured.
At the end of the nineteenth century, there was a cultural debate in the West, between the realists who argued that art should basically be imitated, and the symbolists who claimed that the essence of art was wit or mystery. This protracted debate opened the door for the witty introduction of poetry, as the French poet Apollinaire, who opened a generation of poetry, wrote in The Hunting Horn:
Memory is a hunting horn for it
The sound will disappear in the wind
Apollinaire commemorative stamp issued by France
Tomb of Apollinaire, taken by the author at Lachaise Cemetery
Let's talk briefly about the expression of wit in poetry.
A. Wit can be a drawing back quickly transformed into another. as
Those faces that emerged from the crowd:
Wet petals on dark branches.
--Ezra Pound, "Metro Stations"
Pound's Tomb, Venice
As the sky slowly spreads out at dusk
It is as if the patient is anesthetized on the operating table
——T· S. Eliot, "Love Song to Prufolk"
Elliot's childhood home, written by St. Louis
B. Wit can also be a rapid transformation between a picture and an abstract thing. as
Black crows echoed in the autumn wind
It is a small part of pantomime
—Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways to See the Black Crow"
The obsession of your mind
Crossed by gray branches
—John Ashbury, "Rain"
Ashbury and O'Hara in New York
C. Wit can also be a rapid transformation between one abstract thing and another. as
I rested naked. Naked
Naked is my shield
—Theodore Rottke, "The Open House"
Wherever I am
I am the missing thing
—Mark Strand
In all this, the poets have achieved a certain emotional meaning by means that are completely beyond the scope of imitation, and have achieved an abstract effect. Of course, wit is more in content than in form, which requires the efforts of modern poets.
Fourth, wit and surrealism
A poet, if he is not a realist, will perish. But a poet who is merely a realist can be destroyed.
--Pablo Neruda
The greatest challenge for modern artists is to understand the abstract language of art. Their task is to explore the roots of nature and man's meaning, not to describe its superficial form, for there is no other way but to understand the causes that enable us to see clearly beneath the surface of things. But their attempts to understand and develop this insight have not always been successful, with the obvious exception of Surrealism.
Surrealism was the last famous movement in modern European art, the last expression of effective collaboration between artists and poets of this century. Surrealism resolutely rejects the daily habit of the relationship between things, believing that outside the real world, there is still a world on the other side, which is hidden in people's subconscious, and only when this dream situation emerges can it most sincerely show people's true thoughts and wishes. This is clearly distinguished from symbolism, which is meant to suggest and create another world through the deformation of nature. But it reminds me of a quote by the mathematician Bauer in the early nineteenth century after completing the founding work of non-Euclidean geometry: In nothingness, I have created a new world. Here, science and art are in love, and it is wonderful.
Like Freud, Surrealism placed great emphasis on the importance of the material of dreams, and the selection of the materials of dreams required "poetic wisdom", which is the highest expression of wit and the essence of Surrealism. Strictly speaking, the so-called "automatic writing method" does not exist, or is unrealistic, otherwise it will become a "useless fantasy". Salvador Dalí, the representative of surrealist art, has adopted a very rational attitude to examine himself in the illusion, and the Belgian René Magritte is obviously another genius artist with "poetic wisdom", who uses the magician's devious hand to compose the unexpected adventures of real life, through wandering, dislocation, contrast and collision, to reach surprising conclusions and give us the shock of revelation. His works hover between memory and hope, a realm of warmth and indistinct, so that "dream" and "reality" can be perfectly unified.
Erúya and Gala
"Collage" is an important feature of twentieth-century art, from the Cubist painter Brack to the representative of American Pop art Rauschenberg like this way of expression, and like the previously mentioned wandering and dislocation, "collage" also needs a kind of "poetic wisdom" hidden behind it. The first generation of transcendentalist poets, Elujah, first mixed accidental components into poetry through the unconscious collage of two or more pictures, breaking the boundary between subjectivity and objectivity, willingness and reality, making language full of vitality, making the reader look back at himself and experience a confusing pleasure. As in his poem "Lover":
She was standing on my eyelids
Her hair was tucked in my hair
Her color was the same as my eyes
Her body is one of my hands
She was completely surrounded in my shadow
It was like a stone lining the blue sky
She would never close her eyes
She also refused to let me sleep
She had dreams in broad daylight
As a result, a lot of sunlight turns into vapor
I couldn't stop crying and laughing and then laughing again
I kept talking when I had nothing to say
In writing the poem, Elujah at least inadvertently noticed that each person and his lover got along differently, and ambiguity was therefore favored.
The Foundations of Poetry: The Principle of Similarity
Economists who abhor theories, or who claim that there is no theory to live better, are only governed by a more outdated theory.
——J· M. Keynes
In 1956, Roman Jacobson, while studying the phenomenon of so-called aphasia, a linguistic disorder, found that two major and opposing combinations of confusion ("similarity confusion" and "proximity confusion") were closely related to two basic rhetoric ("metaphor" and "metaphor"). For example, in the metaphor "Car Beetle-like driving," the movement of the Beetle and the movement of the car are "equivalent," while in the metaphorical phrase "The White House is considering a new policy," a particular building is "equivalent" to the president of the United States. Broadly speaking, metaphors are based on the similarity between the actual subject (the movement of the car) and its figurative pronoun (the movement of the Beetle). Metaphors, on the other hand, are based on the close or successive associations that people make between the actual subject (the president) and its "neighboring" pronouns (the place where the president lives). Analyzed by Saussure's concept, metaphor is generally "associative" in nature, it explores the "vertical" relationship of language, while metaphor is generally "horizontally combined" in essence, and it explores the "flat" relationship of language. On the basis of the above findings, Jacobson proposed a linguistic concept of universal significance: the concept of equivalence. In composing poetry, we both "choose" words and at the same time "combine" words, paying attention to "symbols of equivalent value" in the process, and the words that we associate together are those that are semantically or rhythmically or in other ways equivalent. Jacobson thus derives the most famous assertion of the function of poetry: the function of poetry is to bounce the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of composition. In other words, in poetry, similarity is attached to proximity. It is not like in everyday language, where words are simply connected together for the sake of the ideas they are meant to convey, and attention should be paid to the problems of proximity, symmetry, and parallelism caused by their sounds, meanings, and connotations.
Jacobson also made a distinction between metaphor and metaphor, for example in painting he reduced Cubism to the mode of metaphor, and Surrealism to the mode of metaphor. Quoting Mukarovsky's statement about "prominence" (i.e., the "aesthetic" use of language pushes the "act of expression" itself to the most important place), Jacobson points out more precisely that in poetry the metaphorical pattern tries to be highlighted, while in prose the metaphorical pattern tries to be highlighted. So how do metaphorical patterns stand out in poetry? Susan Lange explains this: metaphor is not language, but a concept reached through language, which itself acts as a symbol to express something. At some point, our grasp of a holistic experience is carried out with the help of this metaphorical symbol. Since this experience is completely new, and the words and sentences in the language we usually use can only be suitable for expressing familiar ideas, the language will expand with the emergence of such nameless cognitions.
In short, similarity is crucial to poetry. Similarity is manifested in the process of selecting words, and the so-called choice of words is not a simple process of imitation, modern poetry requires wit, and it is witty or poetic wisdom that helps us to select individual words from the storage room of words and combine them into specific discourses.
Euclid's Walk, by Margaret
VI. Conclusion: Poetry is revelation
...... any
Noble words do not die, I know
Words are the only eternity: the soul
Promise, I know that one day pure people will appear
It is based on a very solid language foundation
—Pierre Emmanuel
So what is poetry? This fascinating thing needs to be pursued forever because it is never fully grasped. Antonan Aalto said: Good poetry is a hard, pure, luminous thing. Something of nature of a magic or a crystal is shattered or split (Paul Valéry).
"Poetry is revelation," Franzi Kafka, who is in the midst of joy at the dawn, tells us, "Poetry is not an escape (like a novel) from reality." "Indeed, the poet is our master in the cognitive aspect of the mind," André Breton quotes Dr. Freud in a surrealist manifesto. Even William Faulkner politely admitted in his later years: "I cannot be a poet." Perhaps every novelist initially wants to write poetry, and when he finds that he can't write it, he tries to write short stories, which is the most demanding art form besides poetry, and if he can't write it, he can only write a long novel (which makes me think of a runner).
It is both obvious and difficult to prove that in all fields of art poetry requires genius. The French poet Rimbaud, the "most remarkable boy" (In Weerlen), who ended his poetic life at the age of nineteen, co-founded modern poetry with Baudelaire and Maramé, just as Cézanne, Van Gauguin and Gauguin pioneered modern painting, just as (later) Debussy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky pioneered modern music. Perhaps only the mathematician Galois in the history of human civilization can match this compatriot of Rimbaud, who lived in the same era as Ellen Poe, who died in a duel with his lovers at the age of twenty, and who had been imprisoned twice as a political prisoner, but was one of the greatest mathematicians of the nineteenth century.
May 1990, Hangzhou
This article was contributed by author Cai Tianxin