[New-Poetry] Guided tours of the abyss

[Anny Ballardini]

Thank you for mentioning Morandi. I went to see a very comprehensive show they dedicated to him in Bologna in 1990 (or around that time). The date is important because I was suffering from an inflammation of the sciatic nerve. I never suffered so much and I wished to die. These two friends passed by and wanted to take me to see Morandi's show. They convinced me and with the many kilometers by car, pills, wine, walking and what-have-you my unbearable pain disappeared _forever_ I would say. We were in one of these houses they call agri-tourists' homes in the country, slept there overnight.  
Morandi lived in the hinterland, rounded hills one after the other, during the summer yellow with burnt grass and hay. He spent his life at home with two sisters and during the war - before and after - painted bottles, bottles and bottles. His dedication to his work, his seriousness in facing life, I remember they rebuilt his room, a small bed similar to Van Gogh's. That is probably how you can become a master, by refining your sensitivity through the most monotonous life. Pessoa is another good example. 
But then Leonardo da Vinci breaks the rule, or Dante, or Caravaggio. There is no rule, as a matter of fact, there are accidents, incidents, there is genius, there is something but it is not the same for everybody.
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: jforjames at aol.com 
  To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu 
  Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 10:02 PM
  Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Guided tours of the abyss


  I'd hate think that sane and safe domestic lives weren't fit for poetry. I hope that's not the case. Part of the literary feminism's initiative was to allow women room to make art from subject matter presented in their domestic lives and family relations. To take away from men the ability to deem what was 'acceptable subject matter' for literature and art-making. 

  I think with some mastery almost any life experience can be made into art, the good, the bad and ugly. In some ways the readership for the ugly is just another form of 'rubbernecking' that you get on the highway passing a bad wreck. Didn't Auden say something like confessional poets were like beggars displaying their open sores for small coins?

  I'm very delighted when I encounter a poem that seems to emate from joy alone. It's hard to 'make a joyful noise' poem. There are many more 'funny poems' than poems that come out of pure pleasure and happy times. Easier to write those elegies of loss and grief's dirges.

  I often think of the artist Morandi when this subject comes up. He managed to paint bottles most of his life and yet make of them something greater and more interesting than just bottles. Strange, peopleless cities one might call his still lifes. Or is that Morandi's art is interesting because his subject matter was so simple and his attention obsessively small, just paintings of bottles after all.

  Finnegan
  http://www.ursprache.blogspot.com/

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