This from an article titled Extreme Welsh Meter by Gwyneth Lewis
The more beautiful the art, the more it is essentially the work of people who feel themselves wrong; — who are striving for the fulfillment of a law, and the grasp of a loveliness, which they have not yet attained, which they feel even farther and farther from attaining, the more they strive for it. – John Ruskin
According to the Writer’s Almanac today is the birthday of Wallace Stevens, and The Emperor of Ice Cream was the poem du jour:
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Which was great coincidence since I’ve spent the last couple commutes listening to the online yale modern poetry teachers talk about Wallace Stevens. Interesting guy, “the dean of surety-claims men in the whole country” according to an insurance company colleague, one of many who didn’t know what he dictated to his secretary upon arriving at work each morning. In the class, the tale was told that he would walk to work, a couple miles each way, composing as he went. He’d arrive at work, dictate, the secretary would type up that day’s poem or poems and he would put them in a desk drawer for a month. He would pull them out, thirty days the cooler, revise and edit and make whatever he felt good part of the current collection he was working on. The rest went in the wastebasket never to be seen again.
Good to have a system.
From: The Man on the Dump
One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that which one believes.
That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump” from Collected Poems.
And yes, I did a back up already tonight.
Today wasn’t the most productive day off. I missed a couple hours sleep between 3:15 and 5:30 or so… That’s really rare for me but it was really real this morning. Anyway, that weird delay led down some strange internet searching and some laundry and finding out that a fitted sheet had worn out because it wasn’t the super quality it was billed to be and then a weird dinner and then some drawing and a cup of hot tea.
Letter #332
From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Anthon van Rappard
Date: The Hague, on or about Wednesday, 21 March 1883
I dislike writing or talking about technique in general, Rappard — although all the same I sometimes long to talk about how to realize some idea or other that I might have, be it with you or with someone else, and I don’t take the practical value of such discussions lightly.
However, this latter doesn’t alter the first thought — which perhaps I’m not expressing properly. That first thought — I can’t exactly put it into words — is based not on something negative but on something positive.In the positive awareness that art is something larger and loftier than our own skill or learning or knowledge. That art is something which, although produced by human hands, is not wrought by the hands alone but wells up from a deeper source in our soul, and that I find something in dexterity and technical knowledge about art that reminds me of what, in religion, they’d call self-righteousness.
My laziness this afternoon sent me to the online letters of van Gogh where I discovered that the letter listed in Penguin’s The Letters of Vincent van Gogh listed this as being part of a letter to Rappard in late March 1884. That’s sort of confusing but the website offers this: “Arrangement: In De brieven1 990 a sheet was included as part of this letter that we have placed, on grounds of content, with letter 332. It contains a false reference to an earlier part of the letter, and the duct of the handwriting and type of paper differ from that of the present letter. See also letter 332, Arrangement.”
and so from various letters, all to Rappard, about art and technique:
And now the painters — is the purpose and non plus ultra of art those singular spots of colour — that waywardness in the drawing, that which is called distinction of technique? Certainly not. If one takes a Corot, a Daubigny, a Dupré, a Millet or an Israëls — fellows who are certainly the great forerunners — their work is beyond the paint, it stands apart from the chic fellows, just as an oratorical tirade (by, say, a Numa Roumestan) is something very different from a prayer or — a good poem.
One must therefore work on technique in so far as one must say what one feels better, more accurately, more profoundly, but — with the less verbiage the better. But the rest — one needn’t occupy oneself with it.
and this
What I’m saying in this letter amounts to this — let’s try to get the hang of the secrets of technique so well that people are taken in and swear by all that’s holy that we have no technique.
Let the work be so skillful that it seems naive and doesn’t stink of our cleverness.
Behind the cloud the sun is still shining.
