POETRY PICNIC WK 5 : Object (The thing form / Objectivism / Imagism etc)

My friends, I am Shashi and the host for the fifth week of creativity and enjoyment at The Gooseberry Garden for Poetry Picnic WK 5.

Last week's poetry picnic was a GREAT one where the Jingle Poetry Community anniversary has had a great response.. and we at the poetry picnic are happy about the response that You give us. Thank you very much.

This week is going to be very interesting too as we are going to touch upon an interesting form, ‘Object’ where you look deeply into the thing that you are going to write about and write what comes to your mind.

But before that let me tell you what we are going to do next week...

We are going to talk about Mythology next week and your interpretations. We have across our ages, culture, tribes and religions are full of mythology, interesting percepts and thoughts... and that is what we are going to touch upon next week. Dig into your resources, around you, within your family, your culture,  and you may find an array of resources and thoughts and stories that I am sure interest you to write about it. So go ahead take one of those threads and mint a new verse and take us to an amazing journey of your culture, thoughts and perspective.

Now coming back to our topic this week ....

POETRY PICNIC WK 5 : Object (The thing form / Objectivism / Imagism etc)

A focussed worker in one of the factory I visited in Europe recently

When Rilke, joined Rodin (the great sculptor) as his secretary, he taught him the value of objective observation, and under this influence Rilke dramatically transformed his poetic style from the subjective and sometimes incantatory language of his earlier work into something quite new in European literature. The result was the New Poems, famous for the "thing-poems" (or OBJECT POEMS) expressing Rilke's rejuvenated artistic vision. The poems of the New Poems and New Poems: The Other Part are highly wrought, using language and poetic form as a shaped and shaping material; to this extent the poems are often said to be "things" in themselves. So that is what we are going to do in this week. Write about what you see, what you perceive after seeing .. write thing poems.. relate with the object that you see.

As Buddha said in this discourse at one point of time...

“Bhikshu’s look deeply at this bowl and you can see the entire universe. This bowl contains the entire universe. This is only one thing this bowl is empty of and that is separate individual self” – Buddha

The basic tenets of Objectivist poetics as defined by Louis Zukofsky were to treat the poem as an object, and to emphasise sincerity, intelligence, and the poet's ability to look clearly at the world.

So friends, I want you to look deeply into what you are seeing and writing about and let us know that the flower exists not because of its own self, but because there are seers, who see the beauty of the existence.

Here are some examples starting with Rilke’s most famous poetry on the OBJECT form

The story about this poetry is that on Rodin’s advise, he went to observe the caged panther for straight 9 hours and he wrote this poem that is now the paradigm of poetic Object Form.

THE PANTHER
____________

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly--. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone

_____________

Rainer Maria Rilke

4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926
Curtsy Wikipedia: Read more here

The below is extract the first part of a six-page section from what was to become an 800-page poem, which takes as its subject a set of road works in the street outside Zukofsky’s New York home:

"A"-7 by Louis Zukofsky
_______________________________

Horses: who will do it? out of manes? Words

Will do it, out of manes, out of airs, but

They have no manes, so there are no airs, birds

Of words, from me to them no singing gut.

For they have no eyes, for their legs are wood,

For their stomachs are logs with print on them;

Blood red, red lamps hang from necks or where could

Be necks, two legs stand A, four together M.

"Street Closed" is what print says on their stomachs;

That cuts out everybody but the diggers;

You're cut out, and she's cut out, and the jiggers

Are cut out. No! we can't have such nor bucks

As won't, tho they're not here, pass thru a hoop

Strayed on a manhole — me? Am on a stoop.
_________________
Louis Zukofsky

(23 January 1904 – 12 May 1978)

He was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.

To read and know more about Object Form please click here...

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Add your entry via InLinkz below by clicking on the blue button, and leave a comment in case it is your first time! It would be great if you could link back to us on your blog.

Weekly poetry collection starts on Sunday, 8pm (CDT), and will stay open till Thursday, 8pm (CDT), 96 hours for you to share your poetry with us...

Please share your poetry, comment below and read some very talented artists and have fun!

______

Shashi            
ॐ नमः शिवाय
Om Namah Shivaya