War Servant

FinsburyParkCarrots

*deserves*

ISN

I understand what you're saying, and if I knew more about it, I would probably agree, but at the same time, I take most things very personally....ie....pearl jam songs, bob dylan songs, the odd poem written by you guys, because I'm delusional and schizo-effective......but at the same time, I really think these songs are personal to people without the mental problems that I have......they transcend categorization and definition, and that's what makes them art......they are interpreted by different people according to their lives, they become a personal canon......like for me, that's easy.....I'm delusional....so anything vaguely resembling my life.....like that little haiku you wrote about a baby in its pram and small garden beads.......speaks directly to me.....but I think others experience the songs similarly.....and that's how ambiguity is apparent, although I'm no expert on music......

ISN

one of history's visionaries

is the peom about Yeats?

FinsburyParkCarrots

ISN wrote:

they transcend categorization and definition, and that's what makes them art......they are interpreted by different people according to their lives, they become a personal canon.......

Yes, they have the power to keep an artistic autonomy from being categorized as political polemic. And I think what you say is vital to appreciating art, wherever it rates on anyone's canon. We personally construct the meaning of an artistic work, and the ambiguous nature of artistic theme and form makes us interpret it according to our lives and our linguistic/perceptive memories, associations and maybe above all, feelings. All poetry, if it's successful, makes use of ambiguity or at least some kind of transformation in language from an original idea to a novel way of describing and seeing it. That transformation or multi-facetedness brings us back to the work over and over again to find all kinds of responses to it, whatever they may be.

That old chestnut "The personal is the political" is important to art that can through the skilled use of ambiguity, tropes, images, metaphors and similes, explore personal themes and issues to make broader social points and observations.

FinsburyParkCarrots

ISN wrote:

is the peom about Yeats?

I believe that the reader writes the poem so if you say it's about Yeats, it is!

ISN

well, this is great - I've learned something today.....even if it's only small, and I don't remember it.....I know how to use ambiguity and how to place words and phrases in poems and prose, so as to maximise the multiplicity of their meanings, connotations and interpretations, but I have never read anything academic about this.....and now that you mention it, I suppose that's exactly what lyricists are doing......I don't normally do that with poems......only with what I say.....written or verbal, and this whole idea of different levels of ambiguity strikes me as being very clever indeed, and makes me wonder what a sap I am to be manipulated so.....when I thought I was so clever with words and manipulation......and all the while I am the victim of it.....!!!!!! (or the beneficiary)

DopeBeastie

good convo. in here. i suppose that personally, i wish ambiguity were just plain ole outmoded for a little bit. i feel personally betrayed by it in others, but especially by it in my self (see new song lyrics).


"gimme some truth"... as it were


yes. art overflows in ambiguity where words are concerned. and generally I am a huge fan of putting the puzzle of someone else's emotive together. today, though... i'm tired, lol. as for politics, specifically, I say let 'em have it, bold and true... don't fight glad hands with glad hands. they're ass holes and they deserve nothing but the most open accusation. (did i say I was tired?... lol)


peace, yo!

FinsburyParkCarrots

PastaNazi wrote:

good convo. in here. i suppose that personally, i wish ambiguity were just plain ole outmoded for a little bit. i feel personally betrayed by it in others, but especially by it in my self (see new song lyrics).


"gimme some truth"... as it were


yes. art overflows in ambiguity where words are concerned. and generally I am a huge fan of putting the puzzle of someone else's emotive together. today, though... i'm tired, lol. as for politics, specifically, I say let 'em have it, bold and true... don't fight glad hands with glad hands. they're ass holes and they deserve nothing but the most open accusation. (did i say I was tired?... lol)


peace, yo!

But isn't truth impossible in language?

I'm not a Nietzschean but this is a good essay by him:

http://www.geocities.com/thenietzschechannel/tls.htm

Right, I'm off to feed my budgie a tomato.

DopeBeastie

before reading that article... my first reaction is to say NO... as in NO WAY

photographs tell the truth and hopefully, poetry tells at the very least the truth, albiet in the given moment, yes?

i understand that my conveyance of truth only speaks to the reader's (or listener's) ability to find their own truth within it... BUT... i do believe that if I perservere, the listener can and WILL understand what I mean... what my truth is. which has an amazing effect of allowing them to convey thier truth and to also have it heard and understood


and all of a sudden, we evolve, don't you think?

FinsburyParkCarrots

PastaNazi wrote:

before reading that article... my first reaction is to say NO... as in NO WAY

photographs tell the truth and hopefully, poetry tells at the very least the truth, albiet in the given moment, yes?

i understand that my conveyance of truth only speaks to the reader's (or listener's) ability to find their own truth within it... BUT... i do believe that if I perservere, the listener can and WILL understand what I mean... what my truth is. which has an amazing effect of allowing them to convey thier truth and to also have it heard and understood


and all of a sudden, we evolve, don't you think?

I don't think photos tell the truth. They're art, which is arbitrary from truth. If photography was truth it wouldn't be art. I don't think we can ever know what truth is. It's something outside language and all we have to apprehend a truth is language, which isn't truth.

FinsburyParkCarrots

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

I don't think photos tell the truth. They're art, which is arbitrary from truth. If photography was truth it wouldn't be art. I don't think we can ever know what truth is. It's something outside language and all we have to apprehend a truth is language, which isn't truth.

Having said that, truth in art is its ability to say the unsayable, and ambiguity helps as do that.

DopeBeastie

oh, that's horseshit, lol
no offense intended, i promise


silverbells & cockleshells


Rachel

DopeBeastie

(that in response to the photo as art comment, btw)


and yes ambiguity is sometimes good
today, it's unnerving




cya

FinsburyParkCarrots

How is it horseshit? A photograph is a signifier of a reality. A photograph might signify a dog, but it is not the signified dog. A novel might signify reality but it is not the signified reality itself. And what's that signified anyway but another concept, another construction of reality rather than reality itself.

What's the essence of reality in a photo? Maybe its print-ness and its paper-ness, but not the image it depicts.

FinsburyParkCarrots

Here's something what explains the basics of semiotics, touches on photography and talks about common misinterpretations of signifiers as the thing they signify:

http://www.criticism.com/md/the_sign.html

DopeBeastie

i understand what you mean. i really do.
i think we're just talking 'bout different kinds of truth
yours, the big "T" kind... that the photo of the dog is not the dog
mine, the little "t" truth... the photo of the dog is a photo of the dog

what it "is", rather than what it "isn't"

what i'm thinking in all of this, is... that sometimes I prefer to read poetry about little truths. even if they're fictitious little truths. sometimes, trying to attain a universal truth via ambiguity would be better gotten to albiet circuitously, in specifics, and perhaps even more beautiful in the end.


yes, i think that's what i'm going for. when i listen to the Writer's Almanac, the poems read always seem so much about the mundane. the little truths. and what's striking about those kinds of poetry is how much big truth is available in them. an unintended ambiguity, if you will. but come upon through interpretation. like lyrics. like art.

your poem above is about Blair, but it could be about any self-important politician.... Hussien, Bush.... all of 'em, really. What would've happened if you had made it clear you were talking about Blair? That's what I'm wondering.

DopeBeastie

oh, and i daresay. i see a progression from those linguistic studies concerning intent v. interpretation to these... those discussions we had last year.

now we see it's both, rather than one or the other... cool

FinsburyParkCarrots

PastaNazi wrote:

i understand what you mean. i really do.
i think we're just talking 'bout different kinds of truth
yours, the big "T" kind... that the photo of the dog is not the dog
mine, the little "t" truth... the photo of the dog is a photo of the dog

what it "is", rather than what it "isn't"

what i'm thinking in all of this, is... that sometimes I prefer to read poetry about little truths. even if they're fictitious little truths. sometimes, trying to attain a universal truth via ambiguity would be better gotten to albiet circuitously, in specifics, and perhaps even more beautiful in the end.


yes, i think that's what i'm going for. when i listen to the Writer's Almanac, the poems read always seem so much about the mundane. the little truths. and what's striking about those kinds of poetry is how much big truth is available in them. an unintended ambiguity, if you will. but come upon through interpretation. like lyrics. like art.

your poem above is about Blair, but it could be about any self-important politician.... Hussien, Bush.... all of 'em, really. What would've happened if you had made it clear you were talking about Blair? That's what I'm wondering.

I think I might have created less of a poem and more a piece of ephemeral polemic. I believe in TS Eliot's statement "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood", and while I'm a bad poet I still feel that some of the magical quality of poetry is to produce something bright and diaphanous enough to shine for all readers of places and ages, on a conscious or unconscious level.

DopeBeastie

yes, but wouldn't THAT be a challange to get around?

avoiding poelmics while being "clear" (not diaphanously clear, mind you, just "plain")?

opaque v. transparent?

like poems about love and sex and kids in the sprinklers, and all things "good"?


is there any way to get to this subject this way?

i kinda feel like this is "let him who hath knowledge know the number of the beast is 6 6 6", you know? cryptic and afraid of getting busted.

Ms. Haiku

FinsburyParkCarrots wrote:

while I'm a bad poet

Please don't think this.