Finding Poetry in “Olga Picasso” – and Almost Everywhere Else

Posted on September 25, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

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 20^th 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.

Taking the Words Off the Page

Posted on August 28, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post by Larayb Abrar

I recently went to a semi-final poetry slam at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe that featured a line-up of three very talented poets. As their performances brought their word-play, rhymes and rhythms to life, I thought about the effects of saying a poem out loud, as opposed to directly reading it on the page. As a spoken word performer myself, I wonder: what does it actually mean to take the words off a page and manifest them in front of so many onlookers? What changes?

What comes to mind first is Aristotle’s rhetoric triangle that puts the text/context, audience, and writer in relation with one another. Traditionally, while the writer provides credibility to the text, they are often removed or at a distance from the audience’s engagement with a text. Moreover, while the writer’s influence may affect the audience, the audience cannot do much to influence the writer. Similarly, in the conventional understanding of the triangle, the text is a stand-still, frozen object. To perform a poem modifies this triangle, giving it a more circular nature.

As a poet gets on stage and not only recites their poem but acts it out, coupling it with hand gestures, voice inflections and changing rhythms, the writer and the text become almost inseparable. Simultaneously, audience members react to each line coming from the poet’s mouth by snapping their fingers, laughing, cheering or nodding along. This energy goes right back to the poet, affecting their delivery of the poem and even sometimes the content of the poem (text) itself. This morphing of the rhetoric triangle into a feedback loop isn’t only more engaging, but as 20^th century philosopher J. L. Austin would put it, it can also act as a gateway to seeing spoken word performances as “speech-acts”.

In describing language as a speech-act, Austin asserts that speech doesn’t only describe things in evaluative (true/false) terms, but that the utterance itself can create truth: it can make things happen. It stirs feelings, emotions, and reactions, much like a poem does. When the poet is on stage, even if they’re revealing something personal, they’re still creating a persona: they’re performing a role. Spoken word poetry is then similar to the way that the theatrical stage has potential to create a contested or imagined space, push social boundaries, and expose an audience to that performed reality.

To give a more concrete example of performativity allowing for social boundaries to stretch, in the 1960s a series of performative interventions took place right on the street. These performances were referred to as “happenings,” which is exactly what they were. The actors involved with these “happenings” performed out-of-context, often absurd material lacking any kind of plot, such as walking with boxes on their feet or emptying a suspended bucket of milk over their head. The point of these performances was indeed to push the social boundaries of what was considered acceptable. Doing it on the street, right in the public eye, allowed for these absurdities to be a part of everyday life.

In Blythe Baird’s 2016 spoken word poem “Pocket-Sized Feminism” performed on Button Poetry, she confesses, “Once, a man behind me on an escalator / shoved his hand up my skirt / from behind, and no one around me / said anything. / So I didn’t say anything, / because I didn’t want to make a scene.” Hearing Baird say this as opposed to reading it on a page suddenly makes it real. Not only do we get to witness her pain, but through her performance she is able to retroactively correct her error of not speaking out before. The performativity here normalizes this discussion of violation and, in real time, gives Baird the space to speak out that she previously did not have.

The interaction between poet and audience not only normalizes the speech, but also incites other actions, whether they be as small as a laugh or as drawn out as a blog post. So whether a poet is slamming about the current political landscape, illness, or even their beloved, it takes all of the emotion and perspective and truly puts the content out there. Performing gives the poet a direct, intense connection to the audience and an opportunity to create reality as they speak.

Rap: The New Lyric Poetry

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Reuben Gelley Newman

A Blog Post By Larayb Abrar

Editor’s Note: Starting today, we’ll feature a weekly blog post by one of our college interns on their experiences with poetry. Enjoy! — Reuben Gelley Newman, Intern and Blog Editor

When mining for poetic inspiration, I often turn to rap artists like Cardi B, Jay-Z or Kendrick Lamar. On the surface, their music might seem just like something to fuel a night of partying or to blast out your car on a midnight drive. We don’t think of Cardi B, with her flamboyant bright yellow fur coat and flaunting of her “red bottom” shoes, as belonging on the pedestal of “Great Literature.”

And maybe she shouldn’t be on said pedestal. Often, the best art comes from breaking the rules of tradition. If Cardi B were to publish her lyrics in a small chapbook, I can guarantee that she wouldn’t fully realize her persona of a woman who doesn’t take shit from anyone and isn’t afraid to push aside those who get in her way. Being a rap artist, like being a spoken word poet, allows the artist to create a persona and find new and unconventional methods of performance while busting some amazing rhymes. How often do we witness performances of strong no-nonsense women on TV, media, or even in real life? While Jessica Jones is a strong contender, characters like her are few. What about strong, no-nonsense women of color? Hardly ever. Similarly, Jay-Z and Kendrick take on the personas of hustlers who came from modest beginnings. Performances like theirs, which challenge the ways we understand femininity, poverty and power, are essential to creating new “normals” and thereby making great art.

This isn’t to suggest that rap music is all about the performance. While performance is a big chunk of it, the elements that give me poetic inspiration also include the musicality, the flow, and the aggressive, active subversion woven into rap music. To take two lines from the chorus of Cardi B’s 2017 single, “Bodak Yellow”: “I don’t dance now/I make money moves/Say I don’t gotta dance/I make money move.”These lines allude to her past as an exotic dancer at a strip club in order to make ends meet while she got a college education and paid the bills at home. In just these two lines she critiques the prevalence of sexual commodification in society, subverting the idea of a strip club as a place of male prowess and re-appropriating it as a place where she, the active agent, made “money move.” She cleverly structures the song to fold over itself with the repeating words, and these lines’ succinctness rival the lines of any traditional poet.

Kendrick Lamar accomplishes a similar feat in many of his songs, such as “How Much a Dollar Cost?” from his 2015 album “To Pimp a Butterfly.” In this song, he tells the story of his run-in with a homeless man at a gas station in South Africa who asks him for a dollar. The speaker refuses to give it to him because he thinks this man is a crack addict. After establishing the context of this narrative, Kendrick continues his monologue, in perfect rhythm and slant rhyme: “If I could throw a bat at him, it’d be aimin’ at his neck/I never understood someone beggin’ for goods/Askin’ for handouts, takin’ it if they could/And this particular person just had it down pat/Starin’ at me for the longest until he finally asked/”Have you ever opened up Exodus 14?/A humble man is all that we ever need/Tell me how much a dollar cost.” Tell me all this—including the biblical allusion at the end—isn’t enough to challenge the place of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues on most high school English syllabi.

Rap music and its musicians have created a subversive and creative culture of their own by penetrating the mainstream without becoming part of the “establishment.” Of course, Kendrick’s recent Pulitzer Prize win in April could change the way rap is currently perceived. While it is too soon to say, I can imagine rap music becoming a literary tradition similar to that of the sonnet.

Prior to informal poems becoming a serious subject of study, epics by the likes of Dante and Virgil dominated much of academic discourse. One of the first departures from this long-form style was by Francis Petrarch in the Middle Ages. Petrarch was a contemporary of Dante and Boccaccio. He was also heavily influenced by Virgil. Much of Petrarch’s work was based on that of ancient scholars and their poetry. However, Petrarch’s most famous work, the Rime Sparse, is a collection of 366 songs and sonnets, written in the vernacular. Through this fragmented piece, Petrarch attempted to tackle deep, introspective questions of identity, spirituality, and worldliness. This shift in form, in turn, allowed for poets all across Europe to explore humanist and confessional narratives previously untapped in the traditional epics.

Today, the sonnet is considered foundational to our understanding of modern poetry. But poetic traditions evolve, and the next step in the evolution may very well be rap or hip-hop. Both those genres retain the importance of rhyme and rhythm seen in the sonnet and many rap artists use the platform not only for textual expression of the personal or confessional but also for the physical performance of these narratives. Rap music could very well be considered new-age lyric poetry.