Category: October 31 (Page 2 of 3)

True Listening

November 12, 2017 / / 0 Comments

This week, Professor Colangelo from the University of Bologna offered us an insight into his study of poetry with his presentation: “Voice and Verse: At The Origins of Contemporary Poetry”. Colangelo’s lecture was rich in powerful quotes and excerpts from philosophers, poets, and historians. His slides focused exclusively on the textual, offering both the Italian and English renditions of the text being discussed. The importance of presenting the original form of the text aligns with Colangelo’s argument that foreignness is key to origins.

Colangelo explained that poetry has no distinct origin because poetry is absolute and a state of mind. He referenced Benedetto Croce who said, “Art is pure intuition or pure expression… but a kind of intuition not at all devoid of concepts and judgments, the primordial form of knowledge, without which it is impossible to understand its other more complex forms”.

Colangelo’s discussion of foreignness and origins was centered around the claim that if one’s view is too rooted in a certain culture, then no origins can be created due to a person’s understanding of a topic being dependent upon previously acquired knowledge. In this sense, nobody can be a true listener if they have or draw upon previous knowledge in their interpretation of the matter at hand. Along these lines, no origin can be achieved without novelty.

A story was told about a man who traveled from country to country without any understanding of the local languages. This man displayed an intent to hear something without being subjected to its constructed meaning. He made an attempt to view something simply for its aesthetic qualities rather than any attached conceptual signification.

This idea that meaning may in fact be detrimental to speech (or writing) is powerful in relation to poetry. Gaston Bachelard was brought up by Colangelo. Bachelard was noted for saying, “While all other metaphysical experiences are preceded by endless introductions, poetry rejects all preambles, general principles, methods and proofs. It rejects doubt. At the most it requires a prelude made of silence. At first, drumming on concave words, it quiets prose and those reverberations that would leave in the soul of the reader a continuity of thought or a few murmurs. Then after these empty sounds, it produces its moment.”

I feel this passage aptly captures poetry’s nature as something more primal and powerful than constructed meaning. Simply its vocalization and presentation completes the art form. Pre-existing knowledge needs not be drawn in to appreciate work in the genre. In fact, it may even spoil it. This notion applies in situations far beyond just poetry. Using poetry as an example, it highlights how much of the content we digest ought to be truly listened to, rather than comprehended through our preexisting filters.

Intuition and Expression

November 8, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Last week Prof. Colangelo gave us a thoughtful speech about “Voice and Verse: At the origins of contemporary poetry. ” He introduced us several figures related to his topic, and especially I found it interesting the doctrine of Benedetto Croce(1866-1952), who is the famous Italian philosopher. Prof. Colangelo highlighted the phrase “Art is pure intuition or pure expression” from the Croce’s book “Breviario di estetica”(1913). According to prof. Colangelo, here “Intuition” is something you think deeply and “expression” is something you push out. Those joining is underlying an art which includes poetry. Then it made me think that those items are not something unfamiliar to us but it is something we human has as an privilege in nature. The doctrine of Croce tells us that homo nascitur poeta (human is born as a poet) rather than poëta nascitur (A poetry is born). Namely every humans are born as a poet and some men can be great poets, and little poets others. But he also claims that in both differences are not qualitative but quantitative. We all have intuition but we have different quantity of expressions which cause people to be great poets or little.

 

What would allow people to express our intuition? According to Paul Valery, “voice” would play very important role in order to revive poetry. It is necessary to create a connection of voice, develop it within time, make people listen to arouse their emotion. Although as prof. Colangelo said that it is hard to define the origin of poetry because it is always abstract in the history, “voice” can lead us to get close to the origins of poetry. Because “voice” was the only tool in ancient times to transmit ideas or arts including verses one person to another, from generation to generation before writing system was invented.

 

The video prof. Colangelo introduced in the lecture reflects how voice effects in poetry. The experimental piece A-Ronne(1975), composed by Edoardo Sanguineti starts from the sound of “a” uttered by a man. It sounded like he is trying to get someone’s attention. Following voice uttered by another person was “hamm”. It somehow for me sounded like responding the first utterance but it seems like it gave each person different interpretations. For instance, in italian culture, this sound evokes prof. Colangelo that an adult tries making a child eat. If you are just looking at the text, those “a” or “hamm” would not give us any strong impressions. However, once they are vocalized in musical tones or articulation, they obtain the meanings. It is common to all experiences such as daily speech or theatre, where changes in expression imply changes in meaning.

 

Let’s go back to the book “Breviario di estetica”(1913) by Benedetto Croce. The title has the Italian word “estetica” which means “aesthetics”. If we break down the word “estetica”, we can see that it contains the Italian word “etica” which means “ethics”. Ethics is necessary to determine our morals and to hold a society together. This overlap of two words indicates that the principle of artwork creation is fundamentally lying underneath of human principles. We can not have only “intuition” which is related to chaos but we also need “expression” which allows us to organize those chaos into order which enable people to share and connect our thoughts each other.  

 

Boundaries in poetry

November 8, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Last Tuesday, professor Stefano Colangelo from the University of Bologna opened his talk on the origins of contemporary poetry with a statement that “poetry reject boundaries.” Throughout his talk, Prof. Colangelo focused on this “boundary-less” by analyzing poetry quotes from a variety of poets and writers that were well-known and crucial to the development of this form of literature.

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Semiotics

November 7, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Semiology: An academic discipline devoted almost entirely to the study of dichotomies. More specifically, the dichotomies between what you mean and what you say, what the significance of a signifier is and what its aesthetic is, what the form of a phrase is verses its function, et cetera, et cetera. In all honesty, I wrote one essay on this topic in my senior year of high school and expected to never again address the subject. At first glance, semiology (a more common term is semiotics, but I prefer the former because it sounds cooler, which is an interesting semiological implication in and of itself) embodies everything wrong with academia. It is a discipline for the Jean Baudrillards and Roland Barthes’ of the world: Stuffy, white sexagenarians sitting in ivory towers deciding–with an almost comical sense of self-importance–what the words of the plebeian class mean.

 

This cynical view of semiology is one towards which I am personally fairly partial. I believe that the things that we do and the things that we say almost always carry some implicit meaning into which further study is generally redundant, pointless, or a combination of the two. However, last Tuesday’s presentation did help shine some light on a couple of rather topical implications of semiotic analyses.

 

I distinctly remember the how Professor Colangelo talked about a man who went from country to country without the knowledge of even two words in the local languages. Though this isn’t even close to being a good idea, a desire to hear things without knowing what they mean–in essence, a desire to observe an aesthetic but not its significance–embodies the postmodern idea that meaning can actually be harmful to language. Baudrillard, a semiologist whom I mentioned earlier, wrote thousands upon thousands of pages across multiple books and articles (ironically, each page with explicitly signified arguments and conclusions) about how meaning–the abstract concept of being able to attach a signification to a signifier–is, in large quantities, harmful to society and to the individual.

 

It’s this postmodern idea to which Professor Colangelo alluded that is so interesting to me. Why bother to observe a signifier if you haven’t the slightest clue as to what it’s actually signifying? Not wanting the natural sounds of a language to be corrupted by knowing how they relate to other sounds is all fine and dandy, but why bother? Couldn’t you just stay home and take a walk down to the railyard and listen to trains all day? It’s essentially the same principle: Hear everything, but derive meaning from nothing.

 

As it pertains to this question, I think that the key thing to note ties right back into my earlier discussion of semiology. Train horns don’t have much signification on which to miss out (aside from maybe, “get out of the way!”), but Moroccan Arabic, for example, does. Therefore, making the conscious decision to not get any sort of meaning out of what can be heard is just that–a conscious decision. It’s a conscious decision to understand the aesthetics of your surroundings as opposed to merely listening for meaning. In a world with too much meaning already (That’s basically Baudrillard’s central argument, in case you were wondering), it’s not a puzzling choice to take extreme measures so as to try and focus solely on the form of language as opposed to function. 

The Origins of Contemporary Poetry

November 7, 2017 / / 0 Comments

Stephano Colangelo came to lecture about origins of contemporary poetry. He first mentions before getting into the heart of the lecture that poetry is a study of literature that produces metaphors to understanding something new about topics. He also expanded that the origins of poetry and especially contemporary poetry is difficult to trace since poetry is abstract and defined it as a state of mind. He said he would use metaphors to understand different parts of contemporary poetry.

One of the more interesting ideas he discussed was Benedetto Croce’s quote that, “art is pure intuition or pure expression.” I believe this is true for all art. There is fluidity in this statement that art is a pure intuition. When someone hears, sees, smell, taste, or feel any art form it, is the person interpreting that is giving the meaning to the art form, and it is all based on intuition without the primordial form of knowledge. You can also see this from the perspective of the artist, where the artist doesn’t have any concepts, but has an intuition and uses his art as his or her way of expression. There are ideas and concepts of the art, but there is no primordial form, and this is what art is by Croce. Croce also believes poetry as art and this intuition might be the beginning trace of origins for contemporary poetry. I think you can connect the idea of order vs. chaos in this definition of art. When art is a pure expression or intuition it gives it order because expression and intuition there is some understanding and intention behind it, however, the lack of primordial knowledge is similar to the idea of chaos where there is no understanding of where, how, and why this intuition or expression came to be.

Another significant point discussed in the lecture is the notion of relating voice, poetry, language, and body. Colangelo mentions that the multilingual poet, Paul Celan, says “poetry is timeless, and poetry can be an empty space. It doesn’t always have to be fully understood; it can be just left empty.” These components of poetry are crucial to discover some evidence to origins of poetry. However, it is also the reason I think why finding origins of poetry difficult. If poetry is timeless than it becomes more challenging to pinpoint when poetry has started because any literature with verses can become poetry from any time, but also most origins share the same characteristics of being timeless, such as origins of the universe there is no definite time when the universe started. Leaving poetry vague and incomprehensible also shares similar characteristics with the origins of universe and art. We also don’t fully understand why the universe was created and trace the origins of art. It is challenging to find origins of universe and art. For art, it is mainly due to defining what qualifies as art that makes tracing origins of art difficult, and for origins of the universe, we are not technologically and scientifically able to trace our universe at the beginning of time.

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