Friday, July 04, 2008
A root of evanescence
Have you ever heard of Sankofa? It's a concept that stretches across many cultures in west Africa, about the idea of going back to get what you have lost. It's usually symbolised by a bird turning back to its own tail, sometimes with an egg in its mouth.
Sometimes a thought can be better expressed in poetry than in prose. Tell me what you think of this poem about Sankofa by my fellow blogger Fenix.
Sometimes a thought can be better expressed in poetry than in prose. Tell me what you think of this poem about Sankofa by my fellow blogger Fenix.
------
Sankofa
if it was important enough to be taken from you
then it is important enough to be fought for
if you've lost sight of your legacy
and you can't place your roots
if you know what was taken from you
Return and get it.
if it was important enough to be taken from you
then it is important enough to be fought for
if you've lost sight of your legacy
and you can't place your roots
if you know what was taken from you
Return and get it.
Black Fenix, "The Spirit of Sankofa"
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Let's meet
Festival Internacional de Poesía de MedellínHere is a really cool example of how poetry can be an integral, positive part of a local culture:
The International Poetry Festival of Medellín started as a protest against the political violence and hatred prevailing in Colombia and especially in Medellín. In the early 1990s, Medellín was ruled by fear, political terror and fighting between criminal groups. Some 100 people could be murdered on a weekend. After 6 pm, the city was usually dead due to a curfew imposed by the paramilitary.Initiator Fernando Rendón says: "It seems a difficult task to find flourishing and tranquil decades in our country in the last 150 years, but the decade of the nineties was particularly sombre and mournful. (...) The festival arose from a proposal to overthrow the wall of terror and fear imposed by the internal feuds of our country." It was an attempt "to create through poetry an atmosphere that without ignoring the spiral of death and the inertial strength of hate could put a little light in this sombre scene."
The idea was simple: By organising poetry readings in the streets, the Festival initiators helped people to re-establish a cultural life and reclaim their city. More and more listeners overcame their own fear and attended the poetry readings.
In 2006, the festival won the Right Livelihood award for its role in creating a vibrant, raucous venue for contemplation and beauty amidst an atmosphere of authoritarianism and intolerance.
Says Fernando Rendón: "The Festival has the conviction that culture must and has to play a fundamental role in any process of development. It has the certainty that arts and poetry will contribute decisively to the up-surging of a new humanity, a new human society."
"The International Poetry Festival of Medellín has maintained and will maintain its efforts, as a way of opposition to barbarism and of looking into alternative routes of democratic and peaceful resistance to the extreme violence that strikes our country, seeking the strengthening and defence of the fundamental rights of the Colombian people: the right to live, the right to have liberty of expression, the right of meeting and the right to create."
You can read more about it here.The motto of the Festival is "Por una paz más activa que todas las guerras." – "For a peace which is more active than all wars."
The mindful museum
'The fact is that poetry is not the books in a library... Poetry is the encounter of the reader with the book, the discovery of the book. '
When was the last time you read a bunch of Lord Byron sonnets for fun? Tell me honestly. When was the last time you actually sat down with Shakespeare outside of a classroom or a Hallmark store?
There is something wrong (okay, a number of things wrong) with the way we conventionally teach, discuss and dismember poetry. Not that there's anything wrong with dismemberment. Someone asked me the other day whether I really thought everyone should love poetry, whether it's even something everyone is capable of connecting to. My answer, of course, was a long, drawn-out Yes in such a way that she almost fell asleep while we were walking. I think that Yes is worth sharing, though. You are allowed to fall asleep.
When I read Rabindranath Tagore or Rumi or Yeats, I don't just see their writing as an interesting piece of history, difficult to analyse but worth dissecting for the sake of understanding the quaint ways of the past. They speak to me directly and immediately, of my own life and of the moment I am reading them in. There's a certain amount of thinking sideways involved, a semi-fluency you have to pick up to know how to interpret metaphors about Irish independence into nectar to pour into your own soul, but it's not so different from the multiple levels you have to think on to read an article or watch a documentary.
Almost all of us intuitively know what to draw from those types of media, what to exclude, and how to apply it to the way we live and the choices we make. The difference, I think, is that our culture surrounds us with chances to develop those drawing/ excluding/ applying skills almost every day, and a thousand different ways to do it. Poetry lacks almost all of this support in our everyday lives, so when we are confronted with it we're usually a little bit baffled, bored, and embarassed by the encounter. Understandably.
How do we actually read poetry? Well, I started thinking about all this tonight listening to the very-functionally literate Adam Gopnik talk about the changing roles of museums. The great museums of a hundred, two hundred years ago, he says, were essentially mausoleums: institutions that presented artifacts and totems of the past as facts, as headstones of what was in a context that made it very easy to see them, to digest them.
As the 20th-century started winding down, Gopnik says, this role mutated into the one our generation is probably more familiar with. For those of us who are young enough to have tender memories of the Bug Room at the Provincial Museum, the museum's role was that of the educator. The audio tape. The walking tour. The informative interpretive brochure telling you what you should know about these Greek marbles, and why.
Today though, the role of the museum is changing again. From a place to learn, it's changing into a place to have a discussion, to argue, to teach and be taught. Gopnik says that's the process that places like the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto are part of now, transforming themselves into places where it's not just okay to talk, your talking is actually part of the experience of the museum. You are part of the exhibit. That sounds a little bit creepy, actually.
Gopnik says it's partly because our museums are becoming places to engage with artifacts, sculptures, and memorabilia as a way of interpreting, discussing, and dismembering ourselves. What he calls the Mindful Museum is less of a monologue and more of a conversation. Instead of walking through a curator's 'clandestine bid for power' by being forced to interpret objects from their perspective, he says the 21st-century's museums are going to draw you into the discussion. But, you know, probably shush you if you go on for too long. You get the idea.
This is how poetry should be taught. This is how poetry should be loved.
Who cares what Harold Bloom thought about anything? To frame different ways to approach poetry, great, let's spend five minutes talking about his opinion on Elizabeth Bishop. But it's the rest of the day spent tearing her poems apart, gushing over them with your friend, whispering them to your lover, that count.
Poetry means nothing before it leaves the shelf.
Another interesting thing Adam Gopnik brought up is the what an amazing tool chronology is for telling a story. It's immediate, it's universal, it's easy to understand. Things start at one place and end in another, and you can interpret what happens in between because we think in terms of time. It made me wonder what the arc of this blog has been so far. Where do you guys think the story is going?
More to the point, what can I do to bring you into the discussion?
-Jorge Luis Borges
When was the last time you read a bunch of Lord Byron sonnets for fun? Tell me honestly. When was the last time you actually sat down with Shakespeare outside of a classroom or a Hallmark store?
There is something wrong (okay, a number of things wrong) with the way we conventionally teach, discuss and dismember poetry. Not that there's anything wrong with dismemberment. Someone asked me the other day whether I really thought everyone should love poetry, whether it's even something everyone is capable of connecting to. My answer, of course, was a long, drawn-out Yes in such a way that she almost fell asleep while we were walking. I think that Yes is worth sharing, though. You are allowed to fall asleep.
When I read Rabindranath Tagore or Rumi or Yeats, I don't just see their writing as an interesting piece of history, difficult to analyse but worth dissecting for the sake of understanding the quaint ways of the past. They speak to me directly and immediately, of my own life and of the moment I am reading them in. There's a certain amount of thinking sideways involved, a semi-fluency you have to pick up to know how to interpret metaphors about Irish independence into nectar to pour into your own soul, but it's not so different from the multiple levels you have to think on to read an article or watch a documentary.
Almost all of us intuitively know what to draw from those types of media, what to exclude, and how to apply it to the way we live and the choices we make. The difference, I think, is that our culture surrounds us with chances to develop those drawing/ excluding/ applying skills almost every day, and a thousand different ways to do it. Poetry lacks almost all of this support in our everyday lives, so when we are confronted with it we're usually a little bit baffled, bored, and embarassed by the encounter. Understandably.
How do we actually read poetry? Well, I started thinking about all this tonight listening to the very-functionally literate Adam Gopnik talk about the changing roles of museums. The great museums of a hundred, two hundred years ago, he says, were essentially mausoleums: institutions that presented artifacts and totems of the past as facts, as headstones of what was in a context that made it very easy to see them, to digest them.
As the 20th-century started winding down, Gopnik says, this role mutated into the one our generation is probably more familiar with. For those of us who are young enough to have tender memories of the Bug Room at the Provincial Museum, the museum's role was that of the educator. The audio tape. The walking tour. The informative interpretive brochure telling you what you should know about these Greek marbles, and why.
Today though, the role of the museum is changing again. From a place to learn, it's changing into a place to have a discussion, to argue, to teach and be taught. Gopnik says that's the process that places like the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto are part of now, transforming themselves into places where it's not just okay to talk, your talking is actually part of the experience of the museum. You are part of the exhibit. That sounds a little bit creepy, actually.
Gopnik says it's partly because our museums are becoming places to engage with artifacts, sculptures, and memorabilia as a way of interpreting, discussing, and dismembering ourselves. What he calls the Mindful Museum is less of a monologue and more of a conversation. Instead of walking through a curator's 'clandestine bid for power' by being forced to interpret objects from their perspective, he says the 21st-century's museums are going to draw you into the discussion. But, you know, probably shush you if you go on for too long. You get the idea.
This is how poetry should be taught. This is how poetry should be loved.
Who cares what Harold Bloom thought about anything? To frame different ways to approach poetry, great, let's spend five minutes talking about his opinion on Elizabeth Bishop. But it's the rest of the day spent tearing her poems apart, gushing over them with your friend, whispering them to your lover, that count.
Poetry means nothing before it leaves the shelf.
Another interesting thing Adam Gopnik brought up is the what an amazing tool chronology is for telling a story. It's immediate, it's universal, it's easy to understand. Things start at one place and end in another, and you can interpret what happens in between because we think in terms of time. It made me wonder what the arc of this blog has been so far. Where do you guys think the story is going?
More to the point, what can I do to bring you into the discussion?
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
A thought
it is difficult
to get the news
from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack
of what is found
there
to get the news
from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack
of what is found
there
-william carlos williams
Labels: poetry
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
aside
A blog about books, ideas, Canada (or lack thereof) and more. We've got more RPMs than a Latin American history DVD.
Previous Posts
Archive
- May 2006
- June 2006
- July 2006
- August 2006
- September 2006
- October 2006
- November 2006
- December 2006
- January 2007
- February 2007
- August 2007
- September 2007
- October 2007
- November 2007
- December 2007
- February 2008
- March 2008
- April 2008
- May 2008
- June 2008
- July 2008
- August 2008
- September 2008
- December 2008
- February 2009
- July 2009
- May 2012
Links
- Money Undressed
- Seth's Blog
- 中外对话|China Dialogue
- mental volumes with vasyL
- How to Save the World
- daveberta
- Ugandan Insomniac
- This American Life
- Life as a Vole
- Kate Beaton comics
