2009
Struga Poetry Evenings
This topic seduces: just as a beautiful woman, it seduces with swift comparison. Poetry and music: two different matters, or on the contrary, a relation of phenomenon and essence, a diluted distillate and an extract? Relation between a mother and a daughter, or twins born by the god of aesthetics, Eros?
There were periods throughout the history of literature when music and poetry as arts came so close to one another, that no important differentiation was made. The case was that music was regularly given privileged position: it was the number 1 semiotic ideal, the perfect form, art without semiotic noise in the channel. Literature, especially poetry, has on occasions (one of the latest examples is symbolism) yearned to transform itself into pure form, pure music. Music, within this aesthetics of “ranking” the arts, was to the ear what light is to the eye: a first rank sensation. Poetry, on the other hand, was an attempt on music (is there an attempt on light?), an attempt with other means, in another medium (imperfect words instead of incorporeal notes). In this sense, in the sense of its longing towards a different medium, poetry has always sustained its vital, youthful intermediality.
The important literary-historic, grandiose monuments of this yearning to be something different, to be music, include, among other, the marble monument to one of the most narcissistic poetry forms – the sonnet. What elegance is the sonnet, what sonorous narcissism, what marble sound cathedral, with splendid elements – what a cry for music, what a syntax of cry!
And it is not only the sonnet, whose very name stems from the Latin-Italian word “suono”, meaning “ring”, and is therefore linked to the idea of the church bell and the sacral, and through it with the Divine! And it is not only these rhymes, so many times commented on, classified, numbered, statistically processed in rhyme dictionaries! The history of poetry is full of filigree efforts to sonorously grind the verse, not sacrificing the meaning in the process; it is a heroic, Sisyphus-like effort to create music which talks, since usually music (in a semiotic and semantic sense) is said to be mute! To transform sounds into words, phonemes to become sentences, and all of them simply be notes, musical phrases, parallel guided
There were periods throughout the history of literature when music and poetry as arts came so close to one another, that no important differentiation was made. The case was that music was regularly given privileged position: it was the number 1 semiotic ideal, the perfect form, art without semiotic noise in the channel. Literature, especially poetry, has on occasions (one of the latest examples is symbolism) yearned to transform itself into pure form, pure music. Music, within this aesthetics of “ranking” the arts, was to the ear what light is to the eye: a first rank sensation. Poetry, on the other hand, was an attempt on music (is there an attempt on light?), an attempt with other means, in another medium (imperfect words instead of incorporeal notes). In this sense, in the sense of its longing towards a different medium, poetry has always sustained its vital, youthful intermediality.
The important literary-historic, grandiose monuments of this yearning to be something different, to be music, include, among other, the marble monument to one of the most narcissistic poetry forms – the sonnet. What elegance is the sonnet, what sonorous narcissism, what marble sound cathedral, with splendid elements – what a cry for music, what a syntax of cry!
And it is not only the sonnet, whose very name stems from the Latin-Italian word “suono”, meaning “ring”, and is therefore linked to the idea of the church bell and the sacral, and through it with the Divine! And it is not only these rhymes, so many times commented on, classified, numbered, statistically processed in rhyme dictionaries! The history of poetry is full of filigree efforts to sonorously grind the verse, not sacrificing the meaning in the process; it is a heroic, Sisyphus-like effort to create music which talks, since usually music (in a semiotic and semantic sense) is said to be mute! To transform sounds into words, phonemes to become sentences, and all of them simply be notes, musical phrases, parallel guided