Maureen N McLane‘s Songs of A Season is one intriguing poem I had come across recently. What took me first about this poem is its form. It changes and morphs as the poem progresses. It revokes all your presumptions of what should be. It forces you to stay alert cause you might miss something if you don’t. It also manages to entertain you with its playfulness. All of that is only scratching the surface. I hope you will give it a run through. Here I included three of my favor stanzas, which represents only a small portion of the whole poem.
SONGS OF A SEASON
by Maureen N. McLanefor here or to go—
a glass mug, a paper cup—
life is fast, art slow…
two stars equally bright
at morning and evening
doubling the source
of day’s beauty…
let’s cast off from the dock
and break out the bock
set sail for Split Rock
Posted by Traci on October 25, 2008 at 8:38 PM
“life is fast, art slow” – I love this. I don’t know if it’s totally true yet, but I’m inclined to agree with it. How art, both the creation of it and the consumption of it, forces you to stop for a moment, reorient yourself, take things in, etc. Maybe that’s what art is. The focusing principle.
Posted by Vinhnigan on October 27, 2008 at 12:37 PM
The focusing principle. I like how you put it Traci. I agree that art is as such that it urges us to stop and ponder. It is an agent to inspire us to feel and to think for the moment. “life is fast, art slow” – life moves on through time and space with or without us. Art however requires our participation. It matters not we are the creator or the observer. It slows us down and draws us to its details regardless. It let us be mesmerized and or be challenged. Art can also be viewed as our essence where life is our being. It frames our existence and preserves it for the next generation to be examined when our being failed. The focusing principle once again when we want our life to be viewed as art. As much as we want, not every details of our life will be recorded but only those special and memorable moments will be. Art then is the faculty of preserving those memories and relaying them to the observers.
Posted by Traci on October 27, 2008 at 10:56 PM
I like the idea that “art requires our participation.” I think that’s true. And I think that kind of life that “moves through time and space [...] without us” is what a lot of people would term “merely existing.” And the thought I’m riffing on right now is related to your thought: More than creating art for the next generation, how can we participate in life like it IS art? Is that something we should do? Or does that slow things down too much? How would it improve our lives if we were to interact with the universe like that?
Posted by Vinhnigan on October 28, 2008 at 12:29 AM
Before I post my answers, I will throw this one in for thought as well.
“Art is not discredited if we realise that it is based on and partly consists of ordinary human jumble, incoherence, accident, and sex. (Sex, though it produces great thought-forms, is fundamentally jumble: not even roulette so much as mish-mash).”
—from Existentialists and Mystics by Iris Murdoch
Posted by Traci on October 28, 2008 at 8:39 AM
Haha, that’s awesome. I think that fits in. If art is primarily a focusing principle, then it makes sense that it wouldn’t be vastly different from life itself, in all its jumble.