I've been reading the comments of educated bloggers who object to nearly everything Ron Silliman says about poetry of the last thirty years - and more. Deeply ingrained conservative hostility to arts, I reckon. Very sad. The advice with the 'new' & seemingly 'difficult' to read over, take time & read aloud goes unheeded. The pleasures from the works prodcued by arts are largely acquired by working at them, going over them, as if composing them oneself, until, strangely, a relish for them appears. [Josh. Reynolds recommends this process in his Discourses, beginning with 'feigning a relish']
Poetry certainly functions in print, but it is easy to forget that it has a very strong tradition of using printed text as a score for a performance -- the pleasure of a poet reciting or reading aloud. Virginia Woolf writes about hearing often her father reciting poetry, which he knew by heart [nice phrase that] for her and her siblings -- & not liking to read from a text.
The adoration among Russians of Pushkin's poetry often appears as poetry learned by heart and recited.
Marie Rambert, Dalcrozian, Diaghilev dancer, and the great teacher & producer of English dancers, choreographers and ballets ballets, had a particualr facility at remembering poetry, as she relates in her autobiography 'Quicksilver' [see my comments yesterday on http://www.fflap.blogspot.com ] There's a photo of her in the book reciting Pushkin to the ballerina Tamara Karsavina, the pair of them in middle to old age looking blissed out.
She was also an insomniac -- & unlike Matisse whose remedy was, we learn, eating fish & chips [see Wystan Curnow's poem in NZepc's FUGACITY http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/features/fugacity/index.asp ] Marie Rambert had a use ofr poetry "for it is when I lie awake at night that I go through all the poetry I ever learnt" [p.20] She can also be found "improvising dances to music or to poems which I recited to myself" [p.21].
Regarding improvisation, she recalls Dalcroze improivising amaxingly at the piano & getting his students to try to do likewise.
She also recalls hearing Dalcroze, who was primarily interested in the relation between rhythm and movement, not in theatre-dance, & certainly not ballet, playing altered piano, something that John Cage did later. [p.87]
Rhythm & improvisation are always closely linked, whether in jazz, or it seems in Dalcroze's music, or Rambert's dancing, or Jack Kerouac's prose [& poetry] or Clark Coolidge's poetry, composed on the tongue and breath with real words that can be used in real sentences, for the ear, but also for the meaning-seeking-mind that finds itself catching only fleeting glimpses of connections within the mouth-music, surprising juxtapositions.
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