The Fine (Art) Line Between Poetry and Painting
Catherine Lin (ISB 12)
Soon to join Jane Austen and James Baldwin in the literary wall of fame, Catherine is a literature and art aficionado both in and out of ISB. Her passion for the subjects has led her to write essays during her free time (that is, the little amount she has) to submit to competitions. In her piece, she takes on the prompt “When asked if she felt able to imitate her favourite painters in her poetry, Denise Riley replied that her attempts ‘are always going to end in tears; black and white typography on the page is so remorselessly different.’ Do you agree that poetry, or any other kind of literature, is ‘remorselessly different’ to painting or the visual arts?”
In some ways, literature is indeed "remorselessly" different from the visual arts. After all, simply reading the word "red" on a page hardly invokes the vibrant flame-red on brilliant-blue that color field painter Barnett Newman's Voice of Fire has captivated observers with. But, at its core, literature and the visual arts aim to achieve the same goal and share the same mechanisms —neither is remorselessly estranged from the other.
Robert Frost once said that “poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words,” while Paul Cézanne, one of the most revered post-impressionist artists of his time exclaimed that “a work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.” As such, to say that literature is “remorselessly different” to the visual arts is also to say that they do not aim at the same core: a visceral expression of emotion, of the nuances of the human heart.
Drawing on the surrealist, the Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong writes "Notebook Fragments" based on his own childhood experience as a refugee from the Vietnam war and as a queer person of color growing up in rural America. In it, Vuong utilizes short stanzas with no temporal or locational connection to each other, unified by only their theme of love and loss, to suggest the lucidness of memory and consciousness. Like Dora Maar, a surrealist photographer from the 1930s, Vuong's poetry reaches into dream imagery: metaphorizing mundane events into surrealism without drawing attention to the impossibility of its contents. This technique is used in order to integrate emotion into the physical world. In one stanza, Vuong's auto-biographical narrator is faced with "spil[t] orange juice all over the table…Sudden sunlight/I couldn't wipe away." This moment is realistic only in the palest way (one can say that the colour of orange juice is enough to be like sunlight), but more importantly, it brings an emotion—a brief moment of joy which is enough to stain “[his] hands…daylight all through the night”—to the forefront, in the same way as the surrealist’s automatic paintings express their hidden thoughts and feelings —here, writing becomes un-estranged from painting.
Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire (1967) on display in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
(From the National Gallery of Canada)
To say that literature is “remorselessly different” to the visual arts is also to dismiss the versatility of language in being able to convey a “sense of immediacy of colour and speed…or a painterly, heavy drag or sweep of words” (Riley). Where a visual artist uses the texture of paint and the quality of brushstrokes, literature has on its side syntax and diction, enjambments and polysyndeton and other literary techniques— a “black and white” mirror for the idiosyncrasies of painting.
Even in the examples above, writers employ different techniques in order to exemplify their emotions and experiences—"black and white typography on the page" may be unyielding and pale in comparison to paintings, but literature is so much more than that. Of course the mere reading of "red" does not invoke the same vividness as a painting, but consider Marge Piercy's "Colors passing through us" —more than just red, the colour becomes "Red as henna, as cinnamon/as coals after the fire is banked/the cardinal in the feeder/the roses tumbling on the arbor/their weight bending the wood." Each simile in this poem is a distillation of color. Where paintings like Newmann's Voice of Fire presents in front of our eyes the visual representation of red, Piercy instead relies on invoking the colour in our mind’s eye, amalgamating the reds in our memory —the spark of red fire against the night sky, the crimson birds buzzing in a childhood yard, rosebushes in a shaded garden, and so on. The red within her “black and white typography” becomes realistic by the last line of the weight of the roses “bending the wood,” anchoring its expression in our truth, and conjuring an image which is as vivid, if not more, than the single colour a painting can show us.
“‘anchoring its expression in our truth, and conjuring an image which is as vivid, if not more, than the single color a painting can show us...’”
Piercy also refers to speed, not in the sense of physical speed, but rather “trace [and] gesture,” as an aspect which literature cannot imitate. But just as art can be marmoreal, writing can be granted the grace or franticness of speed.
Futurism, an artistic movement born in the 20th century from Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is perhaps the best form to emphasize the conveyance of speed within literature. The futurists admired the speed and sleekness of the future, and their poetry (and their art) were manifestations of their idolatry. Aiming for speed and aggression in his works, Marinetti writes the sound poem “Zang Tumb Tumb” in rejection of previously established poetic and prose forms. In it, he takes advantage of the interplay between sounds and the written word to imitate the high-velocity feeling of battle. Marinetti abandons grammatical coherence and punctuation in favour of a disjointed, staccato descriptions of the imminent siege in “1 2 3 4 5 seconds” where “[the] siege guns split the silence in unison tam-tuumb sudden echoes all the echoes seize it quick smash it scatter it to the infinite winds to the devil.” In a single stanza without pause, the smoothness created by the sibilance is broken by the alliteration of t-sounds, mimicking the rapidity and suddenness of gunfire. Through words, Marinetti fragments the contiguousness of the experience, which is fluid and representative of a gestural motion.
Zang Tumb Tumb, Marinetti’s first published collection of parole in libertà (words in liberty), a form of visual and verbal poetry.
(From MoMA)
On the other hand, heaviness, the weight of gesso paint and of heavy brushstrokes can be mirrored in the cascade of words, layered on in much the same way as the brush strokes of de Kooning, can also be found in literature.
In Dorothy Sayer’s The Nine Tailors, the main character, Lord Peter Wimsey, makes his way up through a bell tower as the bells sound out an alarm for an impending flood. In this, Sayers takes advantage of the prose format of the novel, integrating punctuation breaks and repetition into dense paragraphs to convey the sensorial assault of the bells. Rather than manifesting speed in a visual form, Sayer's piece lends weight to an experience—the dreadful, panicked tempo of Wimsey's journey up "through tile floor, tile brazen fury of the bells …[where] the whole tower was drenched and drunken with noise…[and] rocked and reeled with tile reeling of the bells." With each repetition of "tile," Sayer's recreates the protagonist's increasingly frantic observations, while mimicking the roiling, overbearing sound of bells through alliteration. By interjecting the word into nonsensical, grammatically incorrect locations, we can draw a parallel between the crushing oppression of the bells on Wimsey's doubts and rational thought. Fragmenting the description of the effect of the bells into "a grinding, bludgeoning, ran-dan, crazy, intolerable torment", Sayer's use of punctuation-breaks makes reading the piece as relentless as Wimsey's experience. In the novel, the sound of the bells are heavy enough to have killed Deacon, a man tied up in the tower for two days. As much as any painting, Sayers relates through literature a frenetic, oppressive quality, mirroring the heaviness presented in the visual arts.
As Leonardo Da Vinci once said, "Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen." If art is the expression of emotion through visual image, then literature is the expression of emotion through the invocation of an image. If the techniques of the visual arts are numbered in colour, mediums and texture, then the techniques of literature are counted in syntax, diction and style. Even Riley herself, in the very same interview where she called the art and literature "remorselessly different", notes her own integration of the very qualities she accuses writing of being incapable of imitating —admitting that her poem "Stair Spirit" reflects in some way the quality of movement in the act of descent, capable of conveying many of the same things as the visual arts.
“‘Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt...’”
So rather than saying the two forms are remorselessly different, incomparable like apples to oranges, perhaps it is better to say instead that they are different aspects born of the same beginning, each taking advantage of the strengths of their own forms to examine and explore the human experience.
