WHEN IS ART WORTH A DAMN?

Our criteria for art must be both subjective and objective.

As some great critic whose name I forget said, we don't spend the time to analyze something we don't admire.

First of all, I think, our admiration cannot come from what we tell ourselves. The power of the work must somehow come from the work itself.

I know it is fashionable these days for art critics and curators to tell us that limp, lazy, good-for-nothing art is somehow powerful and hip just because they say it is.

But I don't agree. If art is bad, it's bad. Period. that goes for music and sculpture and painting and writing and dance and any other art form.

Just because someone says it's art, that doesn't make it art.

So let's pick out some examples of good art and bad art and see if we can figure out why the good stuff is good, and why the bad stuff is bad.

First, let's compare two poems:

Gacela of Unforeseen Love - Federico Garcia Lorca
[trans. W S Merwin]

 

No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
No one knew that you tormented
a hummingbird of love between your teeth.

 

A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep
in the moonlit plaza of your forehead,
while through four nights I embraced
your waist, enemy of the snow.

 

Between plaster and jasmines, your glance
was a pale branch of seeds.
I sought in my heart to give you
the ivory letters that say always,

always, always: garden of my agony,
your body elusive always,
the blood of your veins in my mouth,
your mouth already lightless for my death.

Now let's take a look at "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer:

TREES 

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,	5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.	10
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,	5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.	10
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

I admire one of these poems greatly, and I despise the other one. Can you figure out which is which and why?

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca