Month: August 2020

Cormorants Diving – Poetics of Scent (poem #5)

Posted on by Ross Belot

 

Uji River Cormorant Fishing © Uji City Tourism Association Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

 

This poem comes from a discussion in a class I was in where we had read and then were discussing Robert Hass’ wonderful book “The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, & Issa ” and we were talking about the poetics of Bashō, who Hass calls “one of the world’s greatest lyric poets”. One of the key concepts Bashō, who was a master poet and teacher in 17th century Japan, developed in his lifetime was the idea of the “poetics of scent”. 

 

Traditionally in the linked poems of the time the mode that was used for linking verses were either “lexical”, words with classical or cultural association, or “content”, where the linked verse expanded or extended the material of the previous verse explicitly. But Bashō proposed that instead the linkage should be less direct, the linkage should be more of overtone or aesthetic. He called this linking by “scent”.  

 

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12 Dancers on 12 Tables (poem #4)

Posted on by Ross Belot

 

 

This week’s poem, 12 Dancers on 12 Tables,  is material collected from watching and listening to  an MFA in Dance group rehearsing out in the middle of the quad of Saint Mary’s College of California. The area was used by many students for eating and talking.  And in the middle of this normal every day occurrence, dancers unexpectedly got up on the large tables and performed in the middle of the rest of us.  A surreal experience where the observers were in the same space as the performers and yet also not formally an audience.  In addition as the performance developed there were crows, who were always about, that seemed to become part of the performance, at least for me. 

 

The material of the poem includes description of the scene, found dialogue, observations about the crows. But the mixture of material is attempting to provide the reader with the experience of being in that place and watching that wild mixture of something unusual happening in a usual place.

 

On the page the form of the poem mirrors this disorientation.  It has unusual line breaks, dropped lines and some material is grouped into stanzas while others into single lines.  Also the dialogue is not indicated except for “here” “we” “go”, which means it is up to the reader on whether terms like “really beautiful” is from the dance choreographer or from the speaker of the poem.  This mirrors the experience, who is just an observer and who is a participant.  Like as if you were at a table with one of the 12 Dancers on 12 Tables. 

 

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Marriage – Magical Realism (Video #3)

Posted on by Ross Belot

 

This week’s video and poem go all in on magical realism. I found what I think is a good definition of magical realism in a blog post by the author Neil Gaman:

 

“Within a work of magical realism, the world is still grounded in the real world, but fantastical elements are considered normal in this world.”

 

The narrator in the poem takes as normal that furniture moves and arranges itself and has some kind of motivation for doing so.  So a typical Sunday afternoon early in a  marriage is shaded by these fantastic happenings.  If the poem had just said the “we” in the poem moved the furniture around on Sundays it loses something compared to the furniture moving itself.  The magical realism in this poem functions as representing an external force that is frustrated around Sunday afternoons, that time of the week the busyness of life disappears, and the couple are just observers rather than active with respect to this force. 

 

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Black and White Image…. – Ekphrastic Poem

Posted on by Ross Belot

Beach Ice BW

 

This blog post will talk about two aspects of this poem both of which relate to choices made in the making of the video as well.  

 

The first is this is an ekphrastic poem. Ekphrasis, Poetry Foundation tells us, is: 

 

“Description” in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.

 

This poem is a response to a photograph I took of a winter scene in Port Dover Ontario. Often in ekphrasis we are responding to someone else’s art. It actually can be any art form involved in either the subject or the art chosen to do the response. But there is a long history of ekphrastic poetry, perhaps because poetry is often digging for what’s underneath the words, and images are so inherent to the art form of poetry that it’s a natural medium for this type of response to other’s work.  

 

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