Poetry in the Cubist Zone: Labwork for Picassoheads

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Apollinaire, Captain Lavender, cubism, cubist, ee cummings, ekphrastic poem, Gertrude Stein, Grace Nichols, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jimmie's Squidoo Picasso, Majorie Evasco, Mary Ann Caws, Mary Jo Bang, Maya Picasso, Medbh McGuckian, Musee Picasso Paris, National Poetry Month 2014, Pablo Picasso, Picasso at the Bus Stop, Picasso Coloring Pages, Picasso inspired poems, Picasso news, Picassoheads, poetry lab, Shuzo Takiguchi, Stephen Gibson, The Blue Room, The Old Guitarist, Wallace Stevens, Woman Sitting in Armchair

Woman Sitting in Armchair (1939)

There has been much in the news recently about the great master painter Pablo Picasso.  Musée Picasso Paris today announced that its October 25th reopening will celebrate new work donated by his eldest daughter Maya Widmaier Picasso (78) along with the 133th anniversary of the artist’s death.

According to The Guardian article, the donation consists of a drawing of a woman’s face from his Cubist period and a notebook containing nude studies done in 1960.

Interesting to note, that the drawing’s reverse features the bottom half of a partial sketch of the Picasso-smitten, French poet Guillaume Apollinaire. The top half of which is already in the museum’s collection.  With some 5,000 of Picasso’s works on hand, including over 300 paintings, only a small fraction can be displayed at any one time.  How lovely to have even a taste, and what fun it would be to sneak into those storage alcoves!

This past month, we also learned that the painter’s “The Blue Room” hides a mystery man (in a bow-tie no less) behind the surface painting. Look out Doctor Who #11. You may have a rival.

This was, of course, on the heels of last year’s scandal when Picasso’s stepdaughter accused her handyman of stealing over 400 of the artist’s sketches and watercolors.  While a few months prior to this astonishing news, an Ohio man stumbled upon the find of a lifetime, snatching up a rare print (worth a tidy sum) for less than $20 at a thrift store.

So it seems, that the celebrated artist’s face has been popping up everywhere. Even here on this blog!!  Back in the spring, I wrote a piece on Literary Rub-offs that introduced you to the Picasso/Gertrude Stein connection.  That particular association fascinates me to no end, and other poets seem a bit stuck on the Cubist painter as well.

Here are just a handful of poems inspired by his groundbreaking artwork:

If I Were Told, A Completed Potrait of Picasso by Gertrude Stein (with audio)

Picasso XXIII by e.e. cummings

The Old Guitarist

The Chicago Picasso by Gwendolyn Brooks

excerpts from The Man With the Blue Guitar by Wallace Stevens

Solsequiem (after Pablo Picasso’s Maternidad, 1905) by Marjorie Evasco

Pablo Picasso from Seven Poems by Shuzo Takiguchi (translated by Yuki Tanaka &Mary Jo Bang)

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Stephen Gibson

Picasso at the Bus Stop by Kayla Cagan (for National Poetry Month ’14)

 

And if your looking for a whole collection that sprung from Picasso-watered earth,: Captain Lavender by Medbh McGuckian is for you.

You might also like to explore some of Picasso’s (Own) Poetry with Mary Ann Caws or try your hand at some of the FUN art activities at Jimmie’s Squidoo.

===>Once you have thoroughly immersed yourself in the Cubist zone, your assignment is to write your own Picasso-inspired poem on the back of one of these nifty coloring pages.  A small gallery below for color reference and inspiration:

 

 

 

 

 

Locard’s Exchange Principle & Literary Rub-Offs

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experimental writing, fiction disections, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Locard's Exchange Principle, Picasso, Sherlock

A Study in Pink by Alice X. Zhang (Download Wallpaper or Buy Print)

Fans of BBC’s Sherlock will have heard of Locard’s Exchange Principle.  In its simplest form, it is a forensics concept that states “every contact must leave a trace.”  In other words, if I bump into a table, I leave something of myself on it as much as it leaves something on me.

This is an interesting concept to explore in a literary context. The symbiotic relationship of Hemingway and Gertrude Stein comes to mind.

Stein has often been called the mother of the “Lost Generation”—which besides Hemingway counted Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald—but really it was a two-way street in Gertie’s Paris salon.

Scholar Phillip Young documents “striking” resemblances to Hemingway’s prose in Stein’s Three Lives, and much of Hemingway’s works display Stein’s favorite techniques such as repetition and sparse sentence structures.

In interviews, Stein said she was working towards a modified cubist style that applied Picasso’s radical ideas to the printed word.  For more on her innovative use of rhythm, rhyme and repetition, see Ruland and Bradbury’s From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature.

As I said, Hemingway adopted much of Stein’s experimental style, but he also achieved a clarity in his prose that ultimately forced her to revisit some of her own ideas about communication and consciousness. Her attempts to capture the transitive elements of human thought (influenced by philosophy) were not always successful.

You can find out more about her language experiments in the NY Times article “Reconsidering the Genius of Gertrude Stein” and also in Understanding Steinese at The New Yorker. Also, visit the interviews and recordings available at PennSound.

For a more in-depth analysis of her style, see Irresistible Diction: Gertrude Stein and the Correlations of Writing and Science. Do pick up Reynolds’ Hemingway: The Paris Years and his own A Moveable Feast for more on Stein’s impact on Hemingway.

One more Stein-link if you will indulge me: this time an application of Locard’s principle to the art world itself. Earlier, I mentioned that Stein was attempting a “cubist” writing style. This was largely due to her great admiration of Picasso’s paintings, which she was one of the first to avidly collect.  You can see some of the paintings she acquired at the San Franciso Museum of Modern Art.

Picasso was so moved by her admiration that he asked her to sit.

You can see from the resulting portrait, that he himself moved away from some of his own techniques to try to capture a darker, more brooding mood. Sherlock would have been happy to point out Locard’s principle at work here.

And that’s all chickadees!  Special bonus prize available to those of you who can find more literary examples.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wild Things in Art & Verse: ANIMAL Rocks the Poetry Lab

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ANIMAL, Cynthia Huntington, Derain, Dufy, Fauvism, Gertrude Stein, Matisse, Muppets, Natalie Goldberg, Pablo Neruda, Peter Jay Shippy, poetry prompt, Writing From the Body

Muppets are good therapy, especially when faced with the worst kind of writer’s block–inabilitytowriteapoemitis. Kermit’s wise words tell us to embrace our differentness, but ANIMAL may be the real key to unlocking our truest selves.

He knows how to rock the beast, how to unleash that wildness that is sorely lacking in much contemporary literature and art. I’m not talking about debauchery or creating for shock. I’m talking about tapping into your animal core. Be the wild beasts, like Les Fauves.

ANIMAL would have loved these guys! They were a tight group of French painters that decided to shake up the art world at the dawn of the 20th century.

Theirs was a wide departure from the subtleties of the impressionists and the more structured post-impressionist style, with an ultimate goal of capturing crystallized emotion in their big, lusty brush strokes and bold colors.

While not immediately popular in the art world, their work took off amongst the literati, most notably with writer Gertrude Stein, who purchased A Woman in a Hat (left) from Matisse very early on in his career.

Other key artists of the movement were Derain, Braque, Vlaminck, Camoin and Dufy. Just a few representative pieces, and then I move on.

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Though Fauvism as a movement was largely over by the time that Pablo Neruda came onto the scene (having been absorbed by the German Expressionists), its influence is strongly felt in his work, both in his use of color (scroll to the Ode) and raw emotion.

For instance, in this poem:

I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
—————————————————————–

What passion! The man was surely a genius. And he got there by throwing off worldly constraints and embracing his animal instincts. Think about that. Think about how that would feel. It would give you the wild energy that John Lee talks about in Writing From the Body (ch.7). ANIMAL would approve.

Even more so, the exercise recommended by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones (pgs. 83-84). She asks us to “be the Animal..to walk in the world in touch with that present, alert part of ourselves, that animal sense part that looks, sees and notices…to move slowly, stalking your prey, which is whatever you plan to write about.”

In other words, write through animal eyes. Let it make a new way into your poetry. No boundaries. Just go with your emotions. RELEASE THE ANIMAL. And write.

Then perhaps come back and take a look at Peter Jay Shippy’s poem, The Palm of the Paw, or Cynthia Huntington’s, From the Dunes.

And if you end up with something great of your own, please feel free to share.