MAX BEKCMANN

-Art is creative for the sake of realization,

not for amusement.. for transfiguration,

not for the sake of play.

-hardly need to abstract things,

for each object is unreal enough already,

so unreal that I can only make it real by means of painting

NAIVE, OR ........

In Italy in the 18th and 19th centuries, a popular performer of poetry called the improvvisatore and improvvisatrice could, as prompted, deliver extempore breath-taking sustained ottava rima poems on topics ranging from the glories of Italy to the tragic death of Hector. Byron and the Shelleys heard them in performance and knew personally the improvvisatore Tommaso Sgricci. They responded to performances or reports of them in their own poetry, alluding to the improvvisatori, ventriloquizing them, quoting the favored stanzas. Along with Byron and Shelley, other Romantic poets, later in the period, responded to them as well: Keats, Bryan Procter, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Felicia Hemans, the Coleridge of 1825, and Laetitia Landon all wrote poems with direct or indirect reference to the improvvisatori and to poetry as improvisation? What was it in the poetry of the improvvisatori that the British poets wished to incorporate or translate into their own, written, poems and to what end? One could easily imagine--and indeed I initially surmised--that the English poets were presenting a second-order engagement with spontaneity and experience, a reflective and interpretative one, an instance of Friedrich Schiller's sentimental, rather than naive, poetry, Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquility." In a poem like Hemans's "The Dying Improvisatore," for example, the performer speaks from his death bed, mourning the vanishing of his art and livelihood. Besides, how could one actually write that which by definition vanishes with its very speech and gestures? But, ever since the Romantic period, poets has found ways of "translating" that essential ephemerality into written equivalents. Literary history associates improvisational poetry with Byron's Don Juan, but only as a wonderful aberration, nothing one would define as the poetry of Romanticism. I propose, on the other hand, that the above-mentioned poets, including Byron, attempted to wrest improvisational poetics from the periphery and draw it into the center of Romantic concerns. Other poets and writers of the nineteenth century such as Pushkin in Russia, Thoreau in North America, and Adam Mickiewicz in Poland. have turned to improvisational poetics in their works. And with over a century of experiments in improvisation (such as the "automatic writing" of the Surrealists, the aleatory poetry of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low) and the "theory" to go along with them, it is now possible to describe with a new clarity the Romantic presence of improvisation. Moreover, I shall propose that improvisational poetics may have been defining for "later" British Romanticism. In this paper, therefore, I shall sketch a poetics of Romantic improvisational poetry, some of the formal possibilities chosen by Romantic poets to enact improvisational poetry, and speculate on the link between improvisation and a feminist Romantic poetics. Traditional notions of Romantic lyric, and lyric poetry in general, encourage a definition of the Romantic response to improvisational poetry as sentimental. Unsung as a kind of zeitgeist poetics for the post-Revolutionary era, Schiller's distinctions, in On Naive and Sentimental Poetry, between a poetry of immediacy and one of self-conscious contemplation and recollection became and continues to serve as a paradigm for thinking about poetic possibility during Romanticism and after. Thus although he associates a self-conscious poetry with the world of Romanticism, I nonetheless find Schiller useful for initiating a discussion about the fate of improvisation in Romantic poetry: indeed, improvisational poetry could be said to fulfill the conditions in the present of Schiller's apparently irretrievable naive. The naive, according to Schiller, rejoices in the "living presence of the object," encourages "serene spontaneity" and "the naive of surprise." At times it is difficult to distinguish between childish and child-like innocence. In the naive poem, signifier and signified are one. Schiller, describing Homer as the quintessential naive poet, observes that his method in the similes is juxtaposition, which he carries out in a "heartless" way, without sentiment. Moreover, Homer and other naive poets could be considered negatively capable, losing themselves in the referent. The sentimental (emotion-driven) poet, on the other hand, stands at a distance from such "perfection," dwelling in a state of striving, desiring, and progressing towards what he or she perceives as ideals. Elegiac by temperament, the sentimental poet looks upon the vanished world of the integrated self and nature as something to be mourned but its eventual return in the present in a new more complex form something to be hoped for. Similar to Schiller, in England, Wordsworth, defining poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility," sums up the conditions of the sentimental. First, "emotion"--that is, affect replaces the referent, is at the basis of it, but emotion itself stands at a remove from the present. Secondly, if the world and the self that produced the emotion define "experience," then poetry not only refers to experience that has already happened, but it appears in the poem as a recollection: the mental recuperation; the "drama of the lyric subject," is privileged over the experience itself. Similarly, third, a tranquil state is preferred over the startled, emotional, state of encounter with the other. (The naive poet, says Schiller, by contrast, "runs wild.") Apparently the predominance of the recollection of "emotion" or affect as a subject for poetry precludes the possibility of a poetry of the referent. When emotion and the drama of the lyric subject flood the poem's landscape, the world itself, including the world of other voices vanishes. It follows that the mistake of looking at improvisation through the category of the sentimental--in the works of Schiller, Wordsworth, and their followers--is the assumption of the originary status of the naive and of improvisation: that either is in some sense "pre"-poetic. Rather a poet of improvisation simply chooses a different emphasis and intention...

na·ive
Variant(s):
or na·ïve \nä-ˈēv, nī-\
Function:
adjective
Inflected Form(s):
na·iv·er; na·iv·est
Etymology:
French naïve, feminine of naïf, from Old French, inborn, natural, from Latin nativus native A Sampling of "Naive" Artists
Date:
1654

TORQUATO TASSO

Io, ch'altre volte fui nelle amorose
insidie colto,or ben le riconosco,
e le discopro, o giovinetti, a voi.
(from 'Quel labbro che le rose han colorito')

GERUSALEMME DELIVERÁ



.
O heavenly Muse, that not with fading bays Deckest thy brow by the Heliconian spring, But sittest crowned with stars' immortal rays In Heaven, where legions of bright angels sing; Inspire life in my wit, my thoughts upraise, My verse ennoble, and forgive the thing,If fictions light I mix with truth divine, And fill these lines with other praise than thine. (from Jerusalem Delivered)


SORRENTO DA MARE

Torquato play by German dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sixteenth-century Italian poet, Torquato Tasso. The play was first conceived in Weimar in 1780 but most of it was written during his two years in Italy, beabout the tween 1786 and 1788. From Torquato Tasso (play). For the opera by Donizetti, see Torquato Tasso (opera).

TWO IMAGES FOR HAIKU LOVERS

cats..wind

black nigth

yellow grey winter in sunset

SURRENDER TO BLAKE

The are painters who belong

to books

JUST BEFORE DAWN

 Non si levav'ancor l'alba novella

(Public domain music sourced from the Wikimedia Commons)

Claudio Monteverdi (baptised1567-1643) wrote this madrigal when he was the Maestre di Capella at Mantua, about twenty years before he became the Maestre di Capella at the Basilica di San Marco a Venezia. It predates the baroque period by about a decade.

"About ere yet the dawn had come" is from Monteverdi's second book of madrigals, a historical examination of musical styles. 

"About ere yet the dawn had come", "Non si levav'ancor l'alba novella" in Italian, is a madrigal in two parts for five voices, SV 40, with lyrics by the Italian poet Torquato Tasso (1544-1595).

The piece hearkens back to, and is a tribute to, renowned late Renaissance madrigal composer Luca Marenzio's (1533?-1599) "Non vidi mai dopo notturna pioggia" which used the fifth stanza of Francesco Petraca's (1304-1374) Canzoniere "In quelle parte dove Amor mi sprona". (For clarity, yes. Petrarca is called Petrarch in English.)

NEW YEAR SUNSET

Instrumental Music at Sunset
Also named Xunyang Lute and Xunyang in Moonlight, Instrumental Music at Sunset is one of the representative works of ancient Chinese lute music. The author is not known.
Beginning to be popular as early as in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the music's name was first seen in Textual Research of Contemporary Music compiled by Yao Xie (1805-1864) in the Qing dynasty. The original version was made up of six untitled sections and an epilogue. Later it was expanded into a ten-section piece. In the years between 1923 and 1925, this music was adapted by Liu Yaozhang and Zheng Jinwen into concert music of traditional string and woodwind instruments. And the name of the music was changed to the present name - Moonlight of Spring River.
Instrumental Music at Sunset is a melodious lute music that expresses emotions and feelings. Beginning with various techniques of performance, the music depicts a beautiful landscape. The following sections express a profound feeling by employing many techniques of variations, with the embellishing murmuring voices of ripples and oars at opportune moments.
Now this music is included in the repertoire of folk orchestra.

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SAY ME...

SAY YOU.....

I JUST

INTRODUCE

mySELF

JOHN MILTON, excerpt from his invocation to his muse

John Milton, 

Paradise Lost, 

Book 1, lines 17-23 of the 1667 version...

And chiefly Thou O Spirit, that dost prefer 

Before all Temples th' upright heart and pure, 

Instruct me, for Thou know'st; Thou from the first 

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread 

Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss 

And mad'st it pregnant: What in me is dark 

Illumine, what is low raise and support; 

I am humbled to be asked to join your team, Elaine Erig.

I will not post often; this is your blog. 

And I will contribute.

Thank you very much.

I am honoured.

Chris

CANADIAN EUNUCH

PERSIAN KING

RAINER MARIA RILKE

—A new sound poem forpercussion orchestra& spoken voicebased on the famouspoem sequenceof Rainer Maria Rilke go to
German/English text DOWNLOADfirst nine movements:[Windows: r click; Mac: opt + click]the voices: I-IV, Interlude I,V-VII & Interlude II.mp3 [c. 23' 9 Mb]

ALWAYS WAS PAY IN THIS WAY

THE FINDING

OF MOSES

THE DEATH

OF PHARAOH

FIRST-BORN-

SON

CARNIVAL IN RIO

PRIOR TO 1840 ,THE STREETS OF BRAZULIAN TOWNS RAN RIOT DURING THE THREE-DAY PERIOD LEADING UP TO ASH WEDNESDAY WITH PEOPLE IN MASKS HURLING STINK BOMBS AND SQUIRTING EACH OTHER WITH FLOUR AND STRONG-SMELLING LIQUIDS, ; EVEN ARSON WAS A FORM OF ENTERTAINMENT IN 1840, THE ITALIAN WIFE OF A RIO DE JANEIRO HOTEL OWNER CHANGED THE CARNIVAL CELEBRATION FOREVER BY SENDING OUT INVITATIONS, HIRING MUSISIANS, IMPORTING STREAMERS AND CONFETTI, AND GIVEN A LAVISH MASKED BALL.IN A FEW YEARS THE MASKED BALL BECAME THE FASHION AND THE WILD PRANKS PLAYED ON THE STREETS DISAPPEARED

NO COMMENTS

If the ability of communicate seems to me

always diplomatic and political,

anyone can read or write merely for knowledge?

WE COME FOR HELP

SAY YOU

BRIGHT STAR

KEATS

BELOVED PEOPLE OF GAZA

NEVER FORGET

N´OUBLIEZ

JAMAIS

RIEN DE RIEN

EDITH PIAF

I AM INHABITED BY A CRY.

NIGHTLY IS FLAPS OUT

LOOKING,WITH ITS HOOKS, FOR SOMETHING TO LOVE

---- SYLVIA PLATH -ELM

SHAME

floaters.....