A Blog Post by Larayb Abrar
Many professors in my college English classes ask their students to “define poetry.” What is it, really, if not sentences separated by line breaks on a page? Often, they receive answers like, “it’s beauty”, “it’s heightened language”, “it’s a distillation of feeling – but like in an intuitively unobvious way.” But there are many occasions when I find poetry off the page. Sometimes something as simple as watching people coincidentally walk across a park to the same rhythm of a particular song playing in my headphones gets me thinking of the clockwork nature of the world, of how the disparate puzzle pieces ultimately click. I see it in the way smoke lightly dances and twirls off a cigarette on a warm summer day. Or in the way the blinding red and orange lights of a car become soft pastel hues when reflected onto puddles. It’s moments like these when I see art created right in front of me.
A year ago, I visited the Musée Picasso in Paris. Its collection comprises several works and archives that document not only the masterpieces of Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, but also his personal life and creative process. At the time I visited, a special exhibition called “Olga Picasso” which ran from March 21, 2016 to September 3, 2017, detailing the life of Picasso’s first wife, Olga Khokhlova, was on display. While Picasso is mostly known for his work on Cubist and Surrealist artwork, it was during this time period that he delved into portraiture depicting an often pensive and thoughtful Olga. Juxtaposed with Olga’s portraits were excerpts of letters sent to her and photographs she had kept of herself with her family. The exhibition as a whole spanned through 14 rooms over two floors, each room laced with its own complex representations of trauma, joy, family life and melancholy.
Olga Khokhlova was a Russian ballet dancer who met Picasso while on tour. In many of Picasso’s works, she is depicted in an established and static manner, likely due to the severe depression she was undergoing due to the economic crisis in Russia and food shortages her family was suffering. The exhibition started off by focusing on the life Olga left behind. The initial images we see are not Olga, Pablo’s happy wife, but rather the opposite. She is seen reading, or staring off into space, passive. She is an empty woman, afflicted by the pain of her migration, her inability to return home, her helplessness in the face of this crisis. As I reflected on 20th century paintings in light of today’s refugee crisis, the images struck a chord; Olga’s experiences became something I could live through vicariously. The poetry emerged completely off the page and hit me harder than anything words could muster. What’s notable here is Picasso’s perceptiveness in depicting Olga’s story, his empathy in unfolding her narrative so subtly and yet so precisely. It was a beautiful, pithy distillation of emotion.
A year after my visit to the Musée Picasso, in my last, dwindling days in New York City, exhausted from a full day of packing and scrambling to buy things last minute, I lay down on my bed, facing the window. It was a little after sunset and the Manhattan buildings against the sky looked exactly like something out of Picasso’s blue period. The buildings several shades of dark blue, their edges blurred against a slightly paler blue sky. Right in that moment I saw the puzzle pieces clicking, the circularity, life mimicking art, the artsy final shot straight out of a Woody Allen movie as my time in New York drew to a close.
Of course, not everyone experiences these moments, and not everyone can. Sometimes events are just random and it’s difficult to find any meaning in them at all. But while it may be easy to concentrate on the big event, the front page splash, or the major headline, it can be equally rewarding to notice the small peculiarities in the random. The French writer Georges Perec compiled a small, roughly 40-page document titled, “An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris” in which he writes down his observations of place Saint-Sulpice over the course of three days. Most of this text is written in bullet points, with many repetitions. He writes about the busses passing by, what color they are, and the direction they go in, he makes note of the pigeons around the central plaza, he notices when the pigeons have flown away, he writes down characteristics of the people walking past him, and even takes note of the words written on a woman’s handbag. It’s not as though Perec has taken these individual instances and delved very deeply into them, but rather the stringing together of these seemingly random occurrences produces a text which at once reveals the eerie, melancholic yet touching narrative of this area and exposes the repetitive nature of everyday life.
Perec’s focus on the small, mundane, daily on-goings of place Saint-Sulpice can be generalized to any place in the city. They may seem meaningless, seeing as hardly any of his observations connect with one another; there is no full circle magic Woody Allen moment happening here. And yet, he creates poetry specifically by focusing on the ordinary experiences of everyday life. While I still don’t know how to define poetry, maybe one way of seeing it is as something that does indeed transcend the page, and something we can find in an image, an encounter or in a speech. The poetic is all around us; we just need to stop looking so hard for it.
Larayb Abrar is a junior at NYU Abu Dhabi majoring in literature and creative writing. She contributes often to her independent college newspaper, The Gazelle. Her academic interests lie in post-colonial and gender studies. She has performed spoken word poetry at several venues in Abu Dhabi and occasionally dabbles in stand-up comedy.