The Godliness of Plums: Simple Poems, Found Art, and Defamiliarization

Love! Death! Heroism! Now that I've got your attention, let's consider simpler things, like, say, Ben Jonson's (1572-1637) poem Inviting a Friend to Supper. If a poet is to speak on life, then it would logically follow that life itself was the poet's muse – and at that, the "simplicity" of life being truly complex at second glance, if the poet is humble enough to take a stab at it. It's easier to speak of gods and battles, tragedies and infinite passions; and yet why are these works (take, say, the works of the Neoclassical and Romantic movements) considered sublime for poetry as a craft? Why is "human nature" (if the basis for all poetic language and the reasons for writing it) glorified, and life itself to trivial to be spoken about? More importantly, what do grand-scale, epic-like poems say for audiences who enjoy them, and or why is magic in the "real world" better than the "real world" alone? Either it's a cultural depression (respectively) or a feeling that all ideals have been lost. Or, and a more cynical note, a cultural disillusionment and a disinterest in living up the realities of existence and the materiality of life itself (sorry, folks, we are still born and do die).

Why the nostalgia? What have we lost? This isn't to say romantic poems are bad; rather, what is so wrong with the beauty of (simple) words in themselves? Does the subject matter, well, matter? Poems of the everyday aren't even granted respect; people lash out at them with "well, I could’ve done that" comments when the fact is, they didn't. And the problem is that the reader, the audience, whatever, has so much power in determining the "meaningfulness" of the poem/art work – people often think they're opinions can stand for universals, when there aren't any real universals, and their opinions are anything but. Simple poems like Jonson's beg the ugly question – what makes a poem a poem? What gives a poem its very quality as a creative/expressive craft (or art made up of words) in which it can take on a multitude of forms, subject matters, materials, and meanings, and yet remain identifiable as "poetry"? I will try and tackle this question, but poetically it's impossible, and there may not even be a clear answer.

Art, like poetry, is both dependent on certain rules as it is defined by its unruliness – that is, ability to take on so many shapes and sizes, forms and patterns, tones and images. Yet, there we dive into murky waters once we start asking what makes one piece of art more worthy of fame than the other, or why a specific piece might make it to the gallery and another will not. So while there is no clear-cut answer to what makes an art object an object of art (objet d'arte, in French, which I thought I'd mention, because it sounds more artsy), not every object can make its way into a gallery, just as every poem I write won't make it into an anthology or literary magazine. So the question of the day is, what is the "essence" of an art object (or poem) that gives it its artistic quality? Or is there no essence, and that it's all dependent on perception?

Let's consider found art (or, in French, l'arte d'objet trouvé) – art made of common objects not "normally" considered art (simply functional). Marcel Duchamp's Fountain piece causes much riot in the whole debate on what art "is", and yet functions rhetorically in questioning that which we, as viewers (and not artists) think is art, and why our opinion makes a difference. It even asked itself, in a way, what gave it an "artistic quality", and so parodied the entire concept of "art" as a whole. I initially asked myself why I couldn't take my kitchen faucet and bring it to the AGO and say, "hey, here's my art." Then I realized, if I brought it to the gallery, at what point in the journey would the faucet have become an artist object, rather than just a faucet? The thing itself wouldn't have changed; so how to its function become a vehicle for artistic purpose? Well, the point is this: Duchamp was an artist first and weird fountain dude second – he didn't become an artist after the fact. And for all of you out there who think he isn't an artist, well, consider this: HE was the first to take the object of the fountain, and put it out of its context to call it art, and YOU didn't; in that moment, he expressed his artist-self because he thought beyond the art object, so to speak. In other words, you're not the artist, you weren't a determining factor in the meaning of the object, and so your opinion on the artistic quality of the object is immaterial. Plus, you didn't have the guts and/or wit to do it. That might sound a bit harsh, but it isn't so much of a rant as it is a sad contemplation: we're a culture of radical unoriginality, yet we're so quick to judge what is/isn't true when the truth itself remains highly out of our grasp, we're so quick to judge while our own responses and artistic creations have really already been said and done.

Back to our original question, though, what is Duchamp effectively saying in terms of the "essence" of art? If an art object doesn't become meaningful in terms of subject matter alone, and the viewer's opinion isn't everything, then what constitutes the essence? Perhaps it's not about the object, but about the positioning of the object; similarly, perhaps it isn't about the opinion of the viewer, but their perception. Changing the context by which we see certain things as familiar (in the artistic + poetic sense as well) means that the art changes without taking on any new physical characteristics. That's the "magic" of perception, I'd say; there is no other paranormal force.

So, let's get defamiliarized.

The school and literary theory of Russian Formalism in 1920s Russia was headed by Victor Shklovsky (1893 – 1984), who was both the founder of the OPOJAZ society (Society for the Study of Poetic Language) and the founder of the term defamiliarization that will serve us plentifully well in our scholarly pursuits. Shklovsky, in his 1917 essay "Art As Technique", says the following:

"Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects "unfamiliar," to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."

"The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important."

By taking our habitual perception of objects and having them radically defamiliarized, the line between life + art becomes highly imperceptible. Which begs the further question – are they separate or the same? Can a "functional" object still have an artistic "purpose"? I am still working through these questions. Maybe the "vision" isn't simply of the artist's alone, or viewer's alone, but both which must necessarily co-exist – and I mean that in the simplest way possible – it is the artist who manifests his/her vision into a work that is revered by audiences who appreciate the work but the artist first and foremost, and it is the audience's response that gives life not to the object itself but to the artist's permanence. Thus, and in praise of the Russian Formalists, the object means little, while experimentations with our boundaries of knowledge/thought lead us to develop a radically new and ever-changing artistic "eye". And I think we all have the potential for this "eye" of sorts; many of us don't use it. And so the eye isn't responsible only for looking out into the world, but for exercising itself, looking at things from more than one dimension, re-contextualizing objects, places, people…in a more simple (and thus fitting) wording, it's important to consider the different ways in which the same things look/function/speak. The only reason art is eternal is because it's always changing, not because it stays the same; and while the working/reworking of our sentiments towards art may not seem to be available to us (how can I see things differently without making things up as I go along?), the point is that we tried. Hell, we might even want to try looking at Duchamp's urinal and considering that perhaps it's a political piece, and not something to piss on. Maybe art is going down the drain, because we don't look beyond the rubix cube that makes up the "center" or "essence" of art – a center/essence that doesn't truly exist. Art brings new visions to old values, and has the power to show the "same old" through infinitely new lenses through time. "The only constant is change" says a favourite author of mine, and so is this "essence" – the essence of art that is but the projection of the creative eye that looks in all directions at once, the projection of the viewer's eye that can appreciate the object on the same number of different levels, though all those levels may not be readily available, and take some (gasp!) deep thought. In essence, meaning is relational and personal, but does not necessarily exist for us or is dependent on whether we like it or not. In fact, everything I've said on art/poetry may be a load of bollocks; but I am trying (present-tense key here) to look at the issues in different ways and in considering different things. Poetry is too broad a subject to talk about it in universals.

And there is no better a time to introduce to you a fellow poet of my liking who worked in particulars instead – William Carlos Williams (1883 –1963) and his piece This Is Just to Say, that honestly blew me away. I read it about two years ago, and have never been able to look at plums the same way since. Why? Because the poem took "the mundane" and made it radically new. And how, you ask? Because he decided to, because there wasn't any reason not to. Possibly, even, because poetic imagery comes alive through the poet before anything, and the viewer is able to rework their perspective (even for a moment) and consider that the words of the poem, the way the words are formed and work together, the image projected and the simplicity of speech – all these devices work together in a subject matter that is described oh-so poetically, while in itself is hardly poetic at all. Still puzzled? Consider W.C.W.'s friend and fellow renowned poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) – you know, the famous American modernist poet who said, "make it new" and suddenly the whole of the Western world seemed to stop in its tracks and go, "yeah…that's basically art." And, well, yeah; that's basically art. While I won't give Pound all the credit for "defining" the underlying "essence" of art that makes up its art-ness, I will give him a posthumous high-five: for to rid of the deadening effect of the everyday, and to rid of the fact that our experiences and expectations play a role in determining our reactions, we must be open to the artist or poet to estrange us from that which we are familiar. We must seek to challenge our expectations in such as a way as to see the same things anew, for nothing is truly meaningless, and nothing is truly fixed. I mean, you have to admit – a guy who can make plums poetic? That's talent. Seriously. No knights or gods required. And what's more? It's memorable, grand on its own accord, and anything but trivial. Think you can write a sonnet about your iPod? Go ahead: I dare you, I dare you to make my day and make me see them in a new light, because I'm still not sure I want to cave in and buy one. *winks*