On Sequence and Visual Art
1 Comment Published by Jess P November 9th, 2006 in Group 2, Jess, Poetic SequenceI’ve been doing some more thinking about poetic sequences and corresponding visual art. The two main sequences I was going to look at were Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, and Williams’ Pictures from Breughel. I was comparing them, and at first I felt that Blake’s sequence was stronger because his poems could stand alone, without the corresponding artwork, and only grew more interesting when one viewed the plates along with the text: the art acted like part of the sequence itself, serving to futher the poetry’s meaning. Williams’, on the other hand, does not function very well as a sequence without the art to which it is referring, and I originally saw this as a serious downfall, especially since there was no mention of the paintings anywhere, not even in a footnote. But then I realized that because Williams did not publish his work with replicas of the paintings I had to go elsewhere to view them, and in the process learned a great deal more than I had anticipated. I don’t know if that was his intention, but the fact that through his poetry I was led to a completely different genre of art is an important one. Williams gave new meaning to Breughel’s paintings through his words, and through his words I found Breughel as a painter.
As a side note, I would just like to mention that I seriously like the title “Pictures from Breughel:” because they are so descriptive, the poems are like textual pictures, and the sequence is literally about pictures (duh). My first thought, before I knew that he was an artist, was that Breughel was a place and the poems were little pictures from that place. I still kind of like to think that, even though now I know better. Any other ideas about this? Or an argument for Blake? I feel like I slighted him.
I really enjoyed the Williams sequence without having seen the corresponding paintings. Though I haven’t gone back to it yet, I do want to revisit the sequence with the paintings but I’m actually really glad that I read the sequence first without having them there. I feel the same way about this as I do about reading a novel before seeing a movie about it. Though it’s definitely different since the poems are written about preexisting art, I think the effect might be the same because I still want to envision what the writer is creating with language before having a definite visual representation in front of me to tell me what I should see. At the same time, I think I will get equally as much out of taking a second look with the corresponding art. In concern with whether or not it functions effectively as a sequence on its own without the art, I perhaps have a different opinion than others but I think it does. Even without having seen Brueghel’s work, I loved the idea of the sequence. I’ve been pretty into photography at different points so the idea of linking pictures that can perhaps be seen as a sequence themselves by language which is also linked is really interesting to me.