hard and soft

Hard nouns are images, soft nouns are abstractions.

awaken the words

Miss Stein is bringing back life to our language by what appears, at first, to be an anarchic process. First she breaks down the predestined groups of words, their sleepy family habits; then she rebrightens them, examines their texture, and builds them into new and vital shapes.

—Edith Sitwell, Poetry and Criticism (Hogarth Essays No.11, Hogarth Press, 1925)

worth breath

Say something worth breath.

—Yusef Komunyakaa, from “Safe Subjects,” Copacetic (Wesleyan U. Press, 1984)

==
I love the raw lyricism of the blues. Its mystery and conciseness. I admire and cherish how the blues singer attempts to avoid abstraction; he makes me remember that balance and rhythm keep our lives almost whole. The essence of mood is also important here. Mood becomes a directive; it becomes the bridge that connects us to who we are philosophically and poetically. Emotional texture is drawn from the aesthetics of insinuation and nuance. But to do this well the poet must have a sense of history

—Yusef Komunyakaa, from “Forces that Move the Spirit: Duende and Blues,” commentary accompanying the poem “Safe Subjects,” in What Will Suffice: Contemporary Poets on the Art of Poetry (Gibbs-Smith, 1999), edited by Christopher Buckley and Christopher Merrill.

unprejudiced observation

[Bϋchner] believed that the poet must strive to imitate reality, instead of improving upon and thereby distorting it, as do idealistic poets, who create mere puppets devoid of life. The individual, no matter how insignificant or unattractive, must take precedence over philosophical abstractions.
[…]
Bϋchner’s concept of beauty appears to be based upon unaffected sincerity among human beings and upon a Goethean perception of nature as an endless metamorphosis of forms and images that art can never fully capture nor transmit. Unprejudiced observation, he insists, leaves one open to an infinity of sensory impressions and human truths.

—Georg Bϋchner, “Bϋchner on Aesthetics,” Woyzeck and other Writings (Suhrkamp/Insel Publishers, 1982), edited by Henry J. Schmidt

image machine

Perhaps the ascendance of the camera pushed painting to explore abstraction.

not a hill or a tree

Objective painting is not good painting unless it is good in the abstract sense. A hill or a tree cannot make a good painting just because it is a hill or a tree. It is lines and colors put together so that they say something. For me that is the very basis of painting. The abstraction is the most the definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint.

—Georgia O’Keeffe, 1977


[Quote encountered today at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM.]

carpet paradigm

We can see the farthest development of Glasgow painting in the work of Edward Hornel, George Henry and David Gauld around 1889-90…In these canvases a fine line was trodden between decoration and narrative, and between a deep pictorial space and the shallow colour field. As one German critic noted, these works ‘approach the border where painting ends and the Persian carpet begins.

[….] we are concerned with a greater degree of abstraction and with the growing autonomy of pictorial elements and decorative motifs. This principle of convergence has been called the ‘carpet paradigm’. By the mid-1880s, for a painting to be likened to a carpet or tapestry was, in Post-Impressionist circles, a singular point of praise.

—David Brett, C. R. Mackintosh, The Poetics of Workmanship (Harvard Univ. Press, 1992)

critique of abstractions

Poetry as 'the critique of abstractions'. (after A.N. Whitehead)

threadbare cloth

A poem of abstractions is a threadbare cloth.