A Short Peak at Surrealism
Recently, I have been (thankfully) working on new material. Along with that, I have been spending a lot of time organizing my goals for the poetry lectures I will be giving in Greece within the upcoming weeks. I want my selections to exemplify a bulk of the greatest poetry about Greece, by Greeks, Greek-Americans, and Greek enthusiasts. From the very beginning of my research there were specific poets I wished to include: H.D., Olga Broumas, Tryfon Tolides, Eleni Sikelianos, and Odysseus Elytis.
I have learned more about my poetry from the writings Elytis, than from anyone else. If you are interested in Surrealism, and you want to be a better poet, then you should go to Amazon right now and order Open Papers, translated by Olga Broumas and T Begley. One part reads:
I think this quote in particular truly proves Elytis as a revolutionary, not just for the sake of poetry, but for Greece. He fights dread regarding war and chaos through creation. The poet to Elytis is spiritual. One is in a precious state of mind, body, and soul. What I find most interesting is how he describes poetry as an "apex," because this also says something about the abilities of the poet. To reach the "apex," to write the type of poetry Elytis means, poets require a psychic sensibility, an inner intuitive reasoning. Not only that, but poets must be sensitive in all aspects we know. For example, if one is walking in sunlight on a gorgeous day, they'd feel the light enter their fingertips, experience a sense of calm move from their shoulders, down to their heels, etc. In a sense, Elytis suggests we become Hedonists. Poets are to explore pleasure and ethics, the tactile and the moral. The Greek civilization undertood, since the earliest teachings of philosophers, even before Plato, about the realms of existence. It's the most basic of all questions mankind has struggled to answer, "What is life?" Elytis is calling for a type of investigative poetics on the functioning of humanity. No aspect is left out, even if they are not able to be proven...(I cannot prove I have a soul, or that there is an omnipotent God, but my faith gives me power. Poetry requires this type of faith.)
I have also learned from Elytis's essays, that he was an advocate of automatic writing. But, his poems are so carefully composed, so SUPER conscious of his surrounding world. And this is not just in the physical realm, i.e. the personalities and faces, the landscape of Greece, the sounds and tastes he experiences in travel, but the emotional as well. He digs deep into the surface of images, and does not just expose a symbol, he examines its arms and legs, he dissects it until he finds the "core" of the thing. This is where Surrealism is at work in Elytis. It's the moment when the physical and the symbolic meet synchronously in another conscious, intelligent mind.
Poets.org has always been a good and easy resource for me. So I looked up "Surrealism" and it provided a quote from Andre Brenton's Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism) (1924):
While most of the great Surrealist poetry is attributed to the French (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire), I was most moved when I read what Elytis had to say about it, especially in how it helped revolutionize the growth of Greek poetry, since that is my main interest It's the images that a attract me, not so much the philosophy/psychologies about the unconscious mind. For me, things like automatic writing work as a prompt, rather than a methodology for poetry. I wish I could just sit down and transcribe every thought to paper, but I'm too patient and rational. I debate what word to write down, what comes next. It's as if my thought process is completely controlled and rationalized before it even becomes a thought. So how can I change that, how can I record the thought in the moment it is thought, and not rationalized?
Denise Levertov's essay Note on Organic Form makes much more sense to me. I feel comfortable describing my process as "organic" rather than "automatic." But what is the difference really between the two?
While I am in Greece I intend to really think about these questions, because while I am drawn to the methods of Surrealism and Organic Form, I think there is something to be discovered in the middle of the two. The last time I was in Greece I was completely overcome by inspiration. The product, as Elytis mentions in the quote above, was all the dead goats. During that time I was overcome by emotion regarding my familial situations. I was raised to the peak of the mountain, literally by the geographical location of our village Korifi (meaning "summit"), and through the composition of poetry that dared to discover what had been unexplained for me. Here is an early poem from Elytis, that I wrote a response poem to, but you'll have to wait until I return to the US to read my poem:
I have learned more about my poetry from the writings Elytis, than from anyone else. If you are interested in Surrealism, and you want to be a better poet, then you should go to Amazon right now and order Open Papers, translated by Olga Broumas and T Begley. One part reads:
Poetry should express the apex, should constitute a kind of pioneering outpost in the unexplored area of life, should precede other arts in the depiction of sensitivity. It should be the word and sword intervening in the spirit, so that matter, docile, can follow. Creation, especially poetic, is above all a result.
I think this quote in particular truly proves Elytis as a revolutionary, not just for the sake of poetry, but for Greece. He fights dread regarding war and chaos through creation. The poet to Elytis is spiritual. One is in a precious state of mind, body, and soul. What I find most interesting is how he describes poetry as an "apex," because this also says something about the abilities of the poet. To reach the "apex," to write the type of poetry Elytis means, poets require a psychic sensibility, an inner intuitive reasoning. Not only that, but poets must be sensitive in all aspects we know. For example, if one is walking in sunlight on a gorgeous day, they'd feel the light enter their fingertips, experience a sense of calm move from their shoulders, down to their heels, etc. In a sense, Elytis suggests we become Hedonists. Poets are to explore pleasure and ethics, the tactile and the moral. The Greek civilization undertood, since the earliest teachings of philosophers, even before Plato, about the realms of existence. It's the most basic of all questions mankind has struggled to answer, "What is life?" Elytis is calling for a type of investigative poetics on the functioning of humanity. No aspect is left out, even if they are not able to be proven...(I cannot prove I have a soul, or that there is an omnipotent God, but my faith gives me power. Poetry requires this type of faith.)
I have also learned from Elytis's essays, that he was an advocate of automatic writing. But, his poems are so carefully composed, so SUPER conscious of his surrounding world. And this is not just in the physical realm, i.e. the personalities and faces, the landscape of Greece, the sounds and tastes he experiences in travel, but the emotional as well. He digs deep into the surface of images, and does not just expose a symbol, he examines its arms and legs, he dissects it until he finds the "core" of the thing. This is where Surrealism is at work in Elytis. It's the moment when the physical and the symbolic meet synchronously in another conscious, intelligent mind.
Poets.org has always been a good and easy resource for me. So I looked up "Surrealism" and it provided a quote from Andre Brenton's Le Manifeste du Surréalisme (Manifesto of Surrealism) (1924):
SURREALISM, noun, masc., Pure psychic automatism by which it is intended to express, either verbally or in writing, the true function of thought. Thought dictated in the absence of all control exerted by reason, and outside all aesthetic or moral preoccupations.
ENCYCL. Philos. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of association heretofore neglected, in the omnipotence of the dream, and in the disinterested play of thought. It leads to the permanent destruction of all other psychic mechanisms and to its substitution for them in the solution of the principal problems of life.
While most of the great Surrealist poetry is attributed to the French (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Apollinaire), I was most moved when I read what Elytis had to say about it, especially in how it helped revolutionize the growth of Greek poetry, since that is my main interest It's the images that a attract me, not so much the philosophy/psychologies about the unconscious mind. For me, things like automatic writing work as a prompt, rather than a methodology for poetry. I wish I could just sit down and transcribe every thought to paper, but I'm too patient and rational. I debate what word to write down, what comes next. It's as if my thought process is completely controlled and rationalized before it even becomes a thought. So how can I change that, how can I record the thought in the moment it is thought, and not rationalized?
Denise Levertov's essay Note on Organic Form makes much more sense to me. I feel comfortable describing my process as "organic" rather than "automatic." But what is the difference really between the two?
While I am in Greece I intend to really think about these questions, because while I am drawn to the methods of Surrealism and Organic Form, I think there is something to be discovered in the middle of the two. The last time I was in Greece I was completely overcome by inspiration. The product, as Elytis mentions in the quote above, was all the dead goats. During that time I was overcome by emotion regarding my familial situations. I was raised to the peak of the mountain, literally by the geographical location of our village Korifi (meaning "summit"), and through the composition of poetry that dared to discover what had been unexplained for me. Here is an early poem from Elytis, that I wrote a response poem to, but you'll have to wait until I return to the US to read my poem:
MARINA OF THE ROCKS
by Odysseus elytis
You have a taste of tempest on your lips—But where did you wander
All day long in the hard reverie of stone and sea?
An eagle-bearing wind stripped the hills
Stripped your longing to the bone
And the pupils of your eyes received the message of chimera
Spotting memory with foam!
Where is the familiar slope of short September
On the red earth where you played, looking down
At the broad rows of the other girls
The corners where your friends left armfuls of rosemary.
But where did you wander
All night long in the hard reverie of stone and sea?
I told you to count in the naked water its luminous days
On your back to rejoice in the dawn of things
Or again to wander on yellow plains
With a clover of light on you breast, iambic heroine.
You have a taste of tempest on your lips
And a dress red as blood
Deep in the gold of summer
And the perfume of hyacinths—But where did you wander
Descending toward the shores, the pebbled bays?
There was cold salty seaweed there
But deeper a human feeling that bled
And you opened your arms in astonishment naming it
Climbing lightly to the clearness of the depths
Where your own starfish shone.
Listen. Speech is the prudence of the aged
And time is a passionate sculptor of men
And the sun stands over it, a beast of hope
And you, closer to it, embrace a love
With a bitter taste of tempest on your lips.
It is not for you, blue to the bone, to think of another summer,
For the rivers to change their bed
And take you back to their mother
For you to kiss other cherry trees
Or ride on the northwest wind.
Propped on the rocks, without yesterday or tomorrow,
Facing the dangers of the rocks with a hurricane hairstyle
You will say farewell to the riddle that is yours.
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