Comments on Montage
(For refs see Eisenstein's FILM FORM)
I.
Using the concept of cinematic montage as a poetic mechanics, it is possible to infer the following as suggested techniques:
1. Basic reconstruction of the event or action in montage fragments: both single words and more complex word / combination / images.
2. Final reconstruction by means of the collision of images and the conflict of their different and separate elements.
3. Determination of the basic images by "free accumulation of associative matter" (SE). That is, a controlled (edited) complex of ideas, words, images: none of which is particularly related to another, except in that COLLISION is possible, thereby producing montage and the intellectual whole of the poem.
Chines ideograms are formed from 2 or more "purely depictive hieroglyphs" (SE).
"A very important aspect of the poetic form was the way in which words were constructed by setting two separate images side by side, which together suggested a third." And "In spite of the concreteness of the individual images, the total effect of the poetry is extremely abstract, removed from the particular accidents of time and place." Nicholson in FIREFLY IN THE NIGHT: A Study of Ancient Mexican Poetry and Symbolism.
II.
Assuming that the poet is concerned with reconstructing (Kelly says "transforming" - there is a distinction) an event, personality, graphic image, aural experience or any combination of these, he will "verbalize that consciousness (as distinct from his original experience of it) ... offer pictures to represent thoughts." (Ciardi).
The poet must obviously exercise the same control over the images that a film editor does over separate lengths of film, composing a sequence or scene. He must edit: select what comes automatically or sub-consciously in reference to the subject at hand and arrange it in some hyper-conscious order. (The pure automatic poetry of the Surrealists is generally unacceptable as true creativity. The advantage to it, and to any cultivated sense of the automatic, is the vivid, startling imagery which often may result: but without adequate controls?
If the poetic reconstruction is made with fragments from consciousness (indeed, sub-consciousness) and the fragments combined into a montage, the montage will gain complexity with each new "sequence" in collision with the last and the next, and the poem will be one purely of images. (Kelly makes somewhat the same point).
The poem resulting from this construction can be narrative or descriptive in form, or can be ONLY a montage, one highly complex whole, as free from considerations of time and space as its images are.
III.
Direct verbalization of words and images evoked by the experience provoking the poem does not preclude CONTROL. Assuming the innate control when the poem is initially set down, the first revision controls the image material by line-construction, punctuation, etc.
Delineation and Structure of Lines: the line is a complex image, not a single one. It can exist also as a single image, but that image must bounce off the preceding image (line) dynamically.
Punctuation: or the lack of it, plus the separation of lines into verses gives the poem certain linguistic properties and heightens the image material. The poet's personal language characteristics should dictate not only the shape of the line-image but the tone (texture) of the punctuation.
Technical Devices: alliteration, assonance, consonance, rime etc used as taste and intuition dictate.
Other Controls: intuition will offer better choices of words, simple images, will point out the necessity to expand or condense. It is the final governing control.
IV.
Kelly says "transformation" and I use the word "reconstruction" in much the same context. I believe that transformation is the RESULT of the poem, obvious to the reader, but not the only consideration of the poet with his material.
That which caused the poem is fragmented in the mind into images. The fragments are reconstructed by means of a montage, thus effecting the transformaton.
1. Cause ("inspiration" event etc)
2. Fragmentation (over a period of time)
3. Reconstruction (with image-fragments)
4. Revision (of 1st draft and succeeding drafts)
5. Finished poem - new experience - transformation - new reality
Page(s) 7-8
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