Portfilio Opportunity #4 & Notes on 2/18: Image, Metaphor, and Symbol

from Calligrammes, Guillaume Apollinaire

 Notes on 2/18: Image, Metaphor, and Symbol

     Theoretical concepts -- philosophical, poetic, psychoanalytic, what-have-you --  are tricky when their application and fundamental mores are in constant flux. Theorists and philosophers struggle with understanding the most basic element -- the element "a priori" -- of the Being of things (theoretical and actual) for...well...most never cease to struggle. This is complicated even more when considering tropes and figurative uses of language in poetry and vision in film. Still, we're coming close. Or, at least, close enough that we can attach some of the theoretical ideas that we are accumulating and see them in their various iterations, in practice.

What do we have so far?

Image:
- A fundamental, basic unit in a poem, like a sentence is to prose, a building to a city, a city to civics.
- That which names the lynchpin between speech and thought (or, as it applies to film, vision and thought) in their dissolution into the perception of language (or vision) within the reader (or viewer) and the poet’s (or filmmaker's) consciousness.
- An entry into a “private space.” The space which is foreign to the reader and might elicit a familiar “strangeness,” but inextricably familiar and personal to the poet.
- John Locke: “...the mind [is] a Camera Obscura or ‘dark room’ into which ideas are admitted through sensory apertures [that reinforce]...this picture of...an interior space filled with representations.”

Diagram of a Camera Obscura

- Does not have a particular polarity. Can reference and transcend projected reality. Can be literal and figurative. Can project conscious intent and unconscious motivation.
- What constitutes an Image in practice varies from work to work. Thus, defining what an Image is in a particular context is imperative to any exegesis.

Symbol:
- Can be referenced as a variety of imagery, a part of an Image.
- Marks a relationship between signifier and signified.
- “...a kind of figurative language in which what is shown means, by virtue of some sort of resemblance, suggestion, or association, something more or something else.” - PEPP
- A traditional symbol gathers significance over time (See: Red octagon = stop via international recognition of uniform traffic signage; loss of hair = loss of fortitude via Samson story).
- "New" symbols (like those posited by the Surrealists) have an implicated but non-specified meaning (See: Poisson Soluble or "barbered arbor").

Metaphor:
- Can be referenced as a variety of imagery, a part of an Image.
- In a discussion of poetry -- where poetry is “that which cannot be paraphrased” -- metaphor is a mode of resistance (resistance to paraphrase). Importantly, resistance, here, is a matter of natural happenstance. It is not the resistance that you feel when getting out of bed in the morning because work is a drag, no. It's akin to how a tree resists shadow, growing into light.
- When the Image is at odds with its context, we gravitate toward meaning, latching on to bits and pieces that we see are relevant to us, building blocks collected for understanding. These blocks, at times, transcend the meaning-of-things, belonging to the figurative. A metaphor is a bringing forth of Being (the root, meta-, denoting a change of condition or position), an attempt to reconcile the literal and the figurative, the tangible with the intangible, the world of the mind and the world of the body.
- A metaphor does not have to symbolize. (See: Reverdy, That Memory: "The waves laughed as they died / Everything continues / No one knows where time will stop / Or Night" -- these lines do not mean anything else other than what they denote; their meaning, their Being is brought forth into the clearing of the poem through the language alone, not by association with anything else).

Portfolio Opportunity #4:

Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet of immense influence to the Surrealists, has an interesting take on symbol, evidenced by his calligrammes (or, simply, shaped poems). In Heart Crown and Mirror, there is a small, heart shape placed in the upper left hand corner, the outline of which says, "My Heart like an inverted flame." Clever, eh? For Apollinaire, in order to project symbolic meaning, he extends the symbolism into the visual, the concrete. The words symbolize the visual which symbolize the words. Then these symbols are paired with others within the field of the poem to create an Image.

So:
Although we didn't get time to go over any of Apollinaire's calligrammes or poems, I want to give you a chance to respond to them and, because they are really fun, try your hand at one. 

Write a poem, inspired by an Apollinaire calligramme in which the central Image is made up of visual symbols or concrete verse. Then, write a 2-4 page response to your poem in which you detail your interpretation of what constitutes Apollinaire's iteration of Image and how you believe that you've incorporated this idea into the creation of your own calligramme.

 Due: Friday, 3/11