Why John Wilmot’s Dirty Poems Are Actually Good ?

John Wilmot

John Wilmot was an English poet and a wit of King Charles II's court. Andrew Marvell described him as "the best English satirist" and he is generally considered to be the most considerable poet and the most learned among the Restoration wits. He married an heiress, Elizabeth Malet, and his mistresses included the actress Elizabeth Barry. His poetry, much of it censored during the Victorian era, began a revival from the 1920s onwards, with notable champions including Graham Greene. : Being Poet


“The Maidenhead”

Have you not in a chimney seen
A sullen faggot wet and green,
How coyly it receives the heat,
And at both ends does fume and sweat?

So fares it with the harmless maid
When first upon her back she’s laid;
But the well-experienced dame,
Cracks and rejoices in the flame.

Rochester is a favourite of A-level students because he writes about sex and uses rude words. That in itself would not make him an accomplished poet. Sex is not an obscure subject and there are lots of words which rhyme with ‘prick’. But there are good reasons to read Rochester. One is that he had a knack for creating effects which we have come to associate with literary authenticity and originality.

The invention of what we recognise today as a modern poetic voice is impossible to pin down. Ask a hundred literary historians who invented modern literature and you’ll get a hundred answers ranging from Homer to whoever wins this year’s Booker prize. One of the qualities that keeps bringing us back to the same works is that they let each age find what they’re looking for in them. But even if it would be pointless to call Rochester the first modern voice in English poetry, he’s a practitioner of what has become an important artistic technique – claiming authenticity by being deliberately shocking.

‘The Maidenhead’ begins unremarkably (setting aside the title, which may not always have circulated with the poem when it was new). In fact it starts like the type of poetry popular at the start of the seventeenth century (fifty years before Rochester was born). The first stanza is reminiscent of the metaphysical poetry of writers like John Donne. Some sort of conceit is being introduced. A familiar object is described – a damp bundle of wood in a fire which steams as it dries in the flames. This is introduced through a question which draws attention to certain aspects of it. The faggot is described as ‘wet and green’, as coy and sweating.

Metaphysical poetry delights in verbal gymnastics. Conceptual summersaults yoke together apparently disparate things. The display of dexterity is itself entertaining and familiar experiences are made less familiar. Used to this kind of poetry, we can see that Rochester is setting us up for some sort of punch-line. The carefully chosen qualities the first stanza focused on are going to be applied to something completely different.

But, although we’re ready for it, Rochester still manages to surprise us. He does so through his usual technique of adopting a pose of shocking frankness. Many metaphysical poems are about the same things as Rochester’s poems (Donne’s ‘Love’s Progress’ deals with oral sex). But Rochester is original in being so explicit. Part of the point of Donne’s poem is that you have to work out what it’s about. There’s no need for that with Rochester. In ‘The Maidenhead’, obscene content outruns the reader’s imagination as Rochester springs the answer to his riddle on us before we could even begin to work it out.

Rochester does this time and time again. His poems make it perfectly clear exactly what he’s talking about and he’s always more than happy to call a dildo a dildo. In every case the explicitness of Rochester’s poems creates a sense that he is talking honestly to us. Their conspicuous refusal to use euphemism, or to avoid subject matter generally recognised as obscene, implies an unwillingness to abide by convention or to repress instinct.

Since Rochester’s day transgression, shock, and authenticity have become an important measure of what we expect from new works of art. Most people who think of themselves as serious about culture would say that they expect to be challenged, to hear truth spoken, to see something which breaks convention when they go to the theatre or pick up a new novel or visit Tate Modern. Some artists might ignore some of those expectations, but few can get away with dismissing them all (you can’t discuss Quentin Tarantino in terms of authenticity, but he certainly sets out to shock).

Is this still a grown-up way to approach artistic creation after four hundred years? Better ask the A-level class.

(Austen Saunders for spectator.co.uk)

Happy Birthday Juan Gris !

Juan Gris

Today is the 125th birthday of a Spanish painter and sculptor Juan Gris (March 23, 1887 – May 11, 1927), who lived and worked in France most of his life. His works, which are closely connected to the emergence of an innovative artistic genre—Cubism—are among the movement's most distinctive. Presenting a short note on his life and work : Being Poet

Juan Gris born in Madrid. Gris studied mechanical drawing at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas in Madrid from 1902 to 1904, during which time he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905 he studied painting with the academic artist José Maria Carbonero. In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and in 1915 was painted by his friend, Amedeo Modigliani. In Paris, Gris followed the lead of another friend and fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. His portrait of Picasso in 1912 is a significant early Cubist painting done by a painter other than Picasso or Georges Braque. (Although he regarded Picasso as a teacher, Gertrude Stein acknowledged that Gris "was the one person that Picasso would have willingly wiped off the map.")

Although he submitted darkly humorous illustrations to journals such as Le Rire, L'assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, and Le Cri de Paris, Gris began to paint seriously in 1910. By 1912 he had developed a personal Cubist style. At first Gris painted in the analytic style of Cubism, but after 1913 he began his conversion to synthetic Cubism, of which he became a steadfast interpreter, with extensive use of papier collé. Unlike Picasso and Braque, whose Cubist works were monochromatic, Gris painted with bright harmonious colors in daring, novel combinations in the manner of his friend Matisse.

In 1924, he first designed ballet sets and costumes for Sergei Diaghilev and the famous Ballets Russes. Gris articulated most of his aesthetic theories during 1924 and 1925. He delivered his definitive lecture, Des possibilites de la peinture, at the Sorbonne in 1924. Major Gris exhibitions took place at the Galerie Simon in Paris and the Galerie Flechtheim in Berlin in 1923, and at the Galerie Flechtheim in Dusseldorf in 1925. He died in Boulogne-sur-Seine (Paris) in the spring of 1927 at the age of forty, leaving a wife, Josette, and a son, Georges. Before 2005, a Gris painting sold for more than USD69 million.

(Source : www.juangris.org) 

Happy birthday Henry Miller !

Henry Valentine Miller

Today is the birthday of an American novelist and painter Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980). He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer (1934), Black Spring (1936), and Tropic of Capricorn (1939). He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis. Presenting a note by his daughter Valentine : being poet

Dad lived in France, Greece, NYC, Beverly Glen, Big Sur & Pacific Palisades. He was a prolific writer, disciplined & driven to create. Painting watercolors was his way to relax, he didn’t consider himself an ‘artist’ but loved to paint. He made thousands of paintings, gave most of them away. He also learned how to etch & make silk screens. Nuns from The Immaculate Heart School came to the house in LA & taught him how to make the silk screens.

Dad balanced the cerebral with the physical. He loved riding bicycles, he would ride out to Coney Island and he raced in the Velodrome. He was still riding in his 70’s in the Palisades. He was a great walker, walking all over New York and the wonderful arrondisements of Paris. In Big Sur he would trek down the road to get the mail & groceries, hauling it back up the hill. My brother & I would run to his studio in the afternoons, Dad was always happy to take us up in the hills for long walks. Sometimes he told us stories, one I recall about a little rich girl who lived in the city, a fantasy which fascinated us, being country kids.

I only knew my Dad for 35 years, the last third of his life. But am so fortunate to have the legacy he created. In my home I am surrounded by his wonderful paintings, they are a pleasure to look at. His books are an endless source of knowledge and enjoyment in self discovery. One can open to any page & find some phrase or passage that rings true. Even his book titles are inspiring, he definitely had a way with words - “Stand Still Like The Hummingbird”, “The Devil in Paradise”, “Remember to Remember”, “The Wisdom of the Heart”, “The Air Conditioned Nightmare”, “The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder”.

Dinner conversations were always lively. There was a constant stream of friends and fans, also the women who would come to the Ocampo house & prepare special meals for Dad. I liked it when just the two of us could talk, Dad would recommend the latest authors he was reading, or writers he thought I might like. His taste in literature was eclectic, from obscure Marie Corelli to Knut Hamsun, Hermann Hesse to H Rider Haggard. He gave me the Modern Library collection of authors whom he admired, Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Carson McCuller… He loved Walt Whitman, Nostradamus, M Proust, Rimbaud, Balzac, Stendahl… He had a great memory & could pull favorite passages out of the air. His “Books in my Life” is a good read & source of novels & authors. My admiration, respect and love for my father grows as the years go by.

(sorce : henrymiller.info)

Happy Birthday Friedensreich Hundertwasser !

Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Today is the birthday of the eccentric and playfully self-advertising Viennese artist known as Friedensreich Hundertwasser was born as Friedrich Stowasser on 15 December 1928. He did not assume his nom d'artiste until 1949 ("sto" meaning "one hundred" in Slavic languages and "Wasser" meaning "water"). Even in adolescence Stowasser brought home reports from school attesting to his "exceptional feeling for colour and form". After taking the examinations qualifying for university entrance, Hundertwasser spent three months at the Viennese Art Academy studying under Professor Robin Christian Andersen. Hundertwasser was, however, more indebted to the work of Egon Schiele and Walter Kampmann, which he saw at their exhibitions, than to the brief period of academic instruction.  

Hundertwasser travelled extensively in Italy, where he met René Brô, whom he accompanied to Paris. Hundertwasser had thought of continuing formal training at the École des Beaux-Arts but spent only one day at that institution. Instead he found the numerous and adventurous trips he took to Morocco, Tunisia, Nepal, Tokyo and Siberia inspirational for the path he intended to follow. Taking Viennese Jugendstil as his point of departure, Hundertwasser developed an abstract, decorative, two-dimensional and vibrantly colourful, utterly distinctive style distinguished by ornamental spiral and labyrinth forms, circles, meanders and biomorphic shapes. 

During the 1960s Friedensreich Hundertwasser was extremely successful, with a 1962 retrospective in the Austrian pavilion at the Venice Biennale and a 1964 retrospective mounted by the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover. In addition, the first comprehensive catalogue of his œuvre was published. Active in the ecological movement, Hundertwasser was committed to making life liveable in a humane environment that was close to nature. He furthered his aims by issuing manifestos and making provocative public appearances, for instance giving a speech in the nude (1968) in Vienna. Between 1968 and 1972 Hundertwasser rehauled the old sailing vessel "San Giuseppe "' at docks in the Venice lagoon, rechristened it "Regentag" ["Rainy Day"], and going to see in it several times.

So versatile and prolific was Hundertwasser that he also designed coins and stamps for Austria, Senegal and the UN from the 1970s. Moreover, Hunderwasser was the first European artist to have work carved by Japanese master carvers. In 1981 Hundertwasser was appointed head of the master classes for painting at the Viennese Art Academy. The famous Hundertwasser House in Vienna, begun in 1983, attests to Hunderwasser's skill as an architect. The year before he died, Hundertwasser was working on a catalogue raisonné of his works and presented the Uelzen Station architectural project. Friedensreich Hundertwasser died on a cruise ship off New Zealand in 2000.

(source : hundertwasser-friedensreich.com)