Quote from H. L. Mencken:
Poetry can never be concocted by any purely intellectual process. It has nothing to do with the intellect: it is, in fact, a violent and irreconcilable enemy of the intellect. Its purpose is not to establish facts, but to evade or deny them. What it essays to do is to make life more bearable in an intolerable world by concealing and obliterating all the harsher realities. Its message is that all will be well tomorrow, or, at the latest, next Tuesday: that the grave is not cold and damp but steam-heated and lined with roses; that a girl is not a viviparous mammal, full of pathogenic organisms and enlightened self-interest, but an angel with bobbed wings and a heart of gold.I have a feeling that most photography attempts to do what Mencken wrote about poetry. In his opinion, poetry was much below prose as an art form. (A bit surprising as Mencken was a great lover of music.)
Is there any prose in photography, or is it all just poetry, that is: lying about the realities of life. Is the situation in photography like it is with poetry: it you try to include intellect in the process, art dies.
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4 comments:
Go or Chess? Definitely Go :)
To answer your question is not so easy though. It's more poetry than prose, but it can have elements of both. I'd say the analogy does not work for me. I think there is much less overlap than one would think. Or more, depends on the way you look at it :)
Ok, I re-read your post and found out that you are looking at a very narrow and biased definition of poetry here.
H. L. Mencken? I just looked him up in Wikipedia. I'm not sure I like the anti-semite part, but then, someone like him will certainly have been quoted out of context or literally when he meant it satirically. Hard to tell. How on earth did you come up with that guy? I swear, I never heard of him :)
Actually, Mencken is still well known as an essayist, included in many collections of non-fiction. He re-invented (or perhaps invented) polemical writing in English.
He titled collections of his writings "Prejudices", which I guess illustrates that he liked to stir up thing. I haven't noticed any anti-semite things in his writings, but indeed he has criticized almost everyone, especially Americans. (I think he even managed to make a dig at Finland/Finnish.)
I think there are only three people who mostly escaped the pointed end of his pen: Beethoven, Schubert and Joseph Conrad. An elistist of the highest caliber... (Or so he liked to pretend.)
In any case, I found him to be a writer with whom it is nice to disagree with, and his technique in writing is astonishing.
In fact, he reminds me of a certain photographer with whom I find myself disagreeing every once in a while.
Hehe, seems like I need to at least put him on my waiting list. The problem is, that I am still digging slowly through Goldhagen's "Executioners", and that since we came back from our Poland tour. This was mid-September. Ouch!
But even if I bought him now, my shelves are full of books that I bought sometime and that queue for being read. A lot of good books, I might say. Sigh!
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