Colourful Reality

Colourful Reality

by akgiacoman

Colourful Reality

It's All About Perception

Abstract

"A London Full of Colour" is a project that aims to portray a different reality of the daily life of London citizens. By picturing different scenarios in their reality comparing them to the reality that I choose for each one of them, the audience will be able to admire the beauty and uniqueness of the city from a different perspective. I have gone to international poetry competitions and taken painting and photography courses before arriving to college. This project will combine my favorite forms of expression through art and hopefully brighten the days of the viewers. The main message I wish to convey is that every single one of us chooses the reality they want to live in, meaning that the same place could be seen as a prison for our souls or a wonderland for our imagination. The goal of this Milestone, however, is to connect the emotions displayed in the pictures and the colors of the paintings in a creative way empathizing with the people walking by the site as a daily routine. Each one of the sets of paintings and pictures will be accompanied by a short story, poem or reflection.

Introduction

It is in the beauty of a great writing where a person's real emotions are free to be exposed. And what makes a great writing so great? I would say that the ability of a writer to appeal to the readers' emotions precisely. In writing there is no such thing as truth, each writer is free to create their own reality as dark or as colorful a they wish to do so. Though it is true that life experiences and situations shape a person's way of viewing life, each individual has the power to define his or her own reality and a way to do so is through literature. In this Milestone, the work of different poets is presented, as well as information about the writer's background and the path that lead to their accomplishments. The writers are chosen for their relevance as well as for the topics they cover in their poems, related to people's emotions, to symbolism, sociopolitical perspectives and to weather. Poetry has been a tool for many of these writers to use not only as a form of expression through art but also to raise awareness about their concerns. For the deliverable of this Milestone, a poem of each author presented in the background is chosen and interpreted by me. Poetry is for everyone and its power is beyond most people's imaginations, which is why, also as part of the deliverable, poems of my own will accompany each set of picture and painting done in the Milestones Colourless London and Adding Pigment that will encompass the same topics covered by the poets in the background.

Section 1: Background

Mathew Arnold

Mathew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was born on December 24, 1822 in Laleham, Middlesex, England, died on April 15, 1888 in Liverpool and was buried at All Saints church, Laleham with his young children. He was an English Victorian poet and literary and social critic, noted especially for his classical attacks on the contemporary tastes and manners of the “Barbarians” (the aristocracy), the “Philistines” (the commercial middle class), and the “Populace.” Arnold’s classification of English society into Barbarians (with their high spirit, serenity, and distinguished manners and their inaccessibility to ideas), Philistines (the stronghold of religious nonconformity, with plenty of energy and morality but insufficient “sweetness and light”), and Populace (still raw and blind) is well known. Arnold saw in the Philistines the key to the whole position; they were now the most influential section of society; their strength was the nation’s strength, their crudeness its crudeness: Educate and humanize the Philistines, therefore. Arnold saw in the idea of “the State,” and not in any one class of society, the true organ and repository of the nation’s collective “best self.” The way he sympathizes with the people and their socioeconomic situation is best expressed through his poetry, and more specifically in the poem "West London", analyzed at the bottom of this section.

Mr. Arnold began his career as a poet, winning early recognition as a student at the Rugby School where his father, Thomas Arnold, had earned national acclaim as a strict and innovative headmaster. Arnold also studied at Balliol College, Oxford University. In 1844, after completing his undergraduate degree at Oxford, he returned to Rugby as a teacher of classics. Only a quarter of his productive life was given to writing poetry, but many of the same values, attitudes, and feelings that are expressed in his poems achieve a fuller or more balanced formulation in his prose. Through his writing he fulfilled his self-imposed task of enlightening the social consciousness of England as he called for a new epic poetry: "a poetry that would address the moral needs of his readers, to animate and ennoble them”. Arnold’s arguments, for a renewed religious faith and an adoption of classical aesthetics and morals, are particularly representative of mainstream Victorian intellectual concerns. His approach to these issues, however, established criticism as an art form, and has influenced almost every major English critic since. He was a man of great character and strong moral values that he worked to promote to his readers. In the first publication of poems under his own name in 1853, he included an extensive preface explaining why he had left out his famous piece "Empedocles". He claimed that it was a dramatic poem “in which the suffering finds no vent in action,” in which there is “everything to be endured, nothing to be done.” This preface foreshadows his later criticism in its insistence upon the classic virtues of unity, impersonality, universality, and architectonic power and upon the value of the classical masterpieces as models for “an age of spiritual discomfort”—an age “wanting in moral grandeur.”

In 1857, assisted by the vote of his godfather (and predecessor) John Keble, Arnold was elected to the Oxford chair of poetry, which he held for 10 years. It was characteristic of him that he revolutionized this professorship. The keynote was struck in his inaugural lecture: “On the Modern Element in Literature,” “modern” being taken to mean not merely “contemporary” (for Greece was “modern”), but the spirit that, contemplating the vast and complex spectacle of life, craves for moral and intellectual “deliverance.” For his many apportions Mr. Arnold has been considered one of the most influential writers of his time and he is the only person to have two memorials in Westminster Abbey. A bust by Alfred Bruce-Joy was unveiled by Lord Coleridge on 31 October 1891 in the south west tower chapel, where his father's bust was also placed. His name is inscribed on the bust. It was moved to its present position on the window ledge in Poets' Corner in 1967. The second memorial was unveiled on 28 February 1989 and consists of a mural tablet of Lepine limestone and green Westmorland slate with a motif of gilded flames, designed by Donald Buttress. The reason for the second memorial was possibly that the bust was not easy to see. The inscription reads: "Remember Matthew Arnold 1822-1888 Poet and Critic. Let but the light appear and thy transfigured walls be touch'd with flame". The quotation is taken from Arnold's memorial poem to A.P.Stanley, Dean of Westminster.

Harry Baker

Harry Baker

Poetry Slam Champion Harry Baker has gone on the represent the UK in Europe and won Haiku Deathmatches in the USA.

Richard Aldington

Richard Aldington

Edward Godfree Aldington was born at Portsmouth, Hampshire, England, on July 8, 1892. At an early age, he moved with his mother, Jesse May, and father, middle-class lawer Albert Edward Aldington, to Dover. There he grew up with his sister Margery and attended preparatory schools, after which he studied for four years at Dover College. It was at Dover, also, that he began collecting butterflies--an occasional hobby that he would stay with for most of his life. When he was sixteen, the family moved inland to Harrow, and then to Teddington, where young Richard enrolled in University College, however, he did not much enjoy the academic standards there. This was probably due to his having gotten used to the informal, eclectic education he provided himself in his father's excellent library, and studying with his older friend Dudley Grey who was a classical scholar and world traveler. In any case, due to a sudden financial loss suffered by his father, he did not complete his education at University College because he was forced to withdraw. In later years, even though he tried to make it seem that he did not care much about the degree he never got, Aldington was often defensive about that subject. For a while, Aldington was supporting himself with odd jobs, mainly as an assistant to a newspaper sportswriter, however, he decided to devote more of his time to writing and sometimes selling his poetry. He was soon invited by Brigit Patmore to a party where he met such members of London's literary avant-garde as Ford Madox Ford (actually Ford Madox Hueffer, at that time), Harold Monro, W. B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound. After befriending Aldington, Pound soon introduced him to his American friend, H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). Aldington and H.D. were quickly attracted to each other and found that they had much in common. With a little financial help from his parents, Aldington was able to go to Paris for a few months in 1912 and fell in love with the city.

Aldington and H.D. were married on October 18, 1913. H.D. and Pound had been romantically involved before she married Aldington, and her attraction to Pound may not have entirely disappeared after the marriage. Their marriage was a reasonably happy one for a short while, but came upon particularly hard times after their first and only child was stillborn on May 21, 1915. This event had a marked effect on H.D.'s writing and mental well-being, and was no doubt a key factor in the couple's decision in 1919 to live apart from one another. They lived separately for many years, and finalized their divorce on June 22, 1938. They became close again in their later years. Two years into the Great War, on June 24, 1916, Aldington and his friend, Carl Fallas left for military service. They were stationed at Dorsetshire until December, when they had completed their training and were sent to France. The two and a half years that Aldington spent in active duty during WWI was to become perhaps the greatest single influence on his writing for the decades to follow. Aldington composed two volumes of poetry during his active service, Images of War and Images of Desire, but perhaps the most powerful of the poems to come out of his war experience were those that dealt with the difficult years of recovery, Exile and Other Poems, published in 1923. At the end of the war his marriage collapsed and he struggled to re-establish his literary career. In 1929 he published his best-selling novel, Death of a Hero, a grimly realistic portrayal of his war experience and a savage attack on those he saw as having been responsible for the war. Its success allowed him to leave England and he never again made it his home, living mainly in France, and, during the Second World War, in the United States. A collection of short stories about the war, Roads to Glory, appeared in 1930. Aldington wrote a further seven novels and continued to write poetry until 1937, but became better known as a critic, translator and biographer. His biographies of D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas and particularly of T.E. Lawrence in 1954, made him a controversial figure. His memoirs, entitled Life for Life’s Sake, appeared in 1941. He died in France in 1962, after a triumphant visit to the Soviet Union, where his novels were highly regarded. He left one daughter, Catherine, the child of his second marriage, who died in 2010.

Richard Aldington was prominent in several literary capacities; most notably as a founding poet of the Imagist movement and as a novelist who conveyed the horror of World War I through his written works. He was also a prolific critic, translator, and essayist. Though he considered his novels to be his most important works, he received much critical attention for his biographies of such contemporaries as Lawrence of Arabia and D.H. Lawrence. Aldington began his literary career in London as a part-time sports journalist after leaving college and quickly became part of an influential circle of British writers. Terry Comito writes in Dictionary of Literary Biography that Aldington “had a gift for evoking with considerable fluency large, uncomplicated emotions that readers have often found easy to share, and his champions frequently cite Aldington's verse in order to argue that contemporary poetry need not be obscurely intellectual.”. Which is why many other critics "forgive" Aldington's pessimism and the negativity of his work. This because though Aldington may not be as well known today as some of his contemporaries, his writings remain a good example of the thoughts and style of his generation.

Don Paterson

Don Paterson

Don Paterson was born in 1963 in Dundee, Scotland. He moved to London in 1984 at the age of 16 to work as a jazz musician and joined a band. He found success with the jazz-folk ensemble Lammas, but was captivated by poetry upon encountering the poet Tony Harrison. Generally speaking, Paterson’s strong ear for rhythm and understanding of the ‘sense in sound’ (the subject of his recent and controversial essay in Poetry Review) are partly attributable to his background in music: as a professional musician he has toured with the jazz-folk ensemble for many years. As a self-taught poet, Paterson spent a year reading the publications of Coleridge, Paul Muldoon, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley, before he began to write and publish his own works. He has a quite peculiar way of looking at his own profession, as in an interview with the journalist JP O'Malley, he asked Paterson if it was true he felt uncomfortable saying he was a poet, to what he answered; "I think that's true with most poets. I know only one or two who are comfortable with that. It's mainly because it's not a job of any kind. It's just something weirdly synaesthetic thing you do with words, and is probably symptomatic of a broader pathology. I think poetry is more of a diagnosis than a calling.". Paterson is technically insightful, and writes with a violent and wicked imagination. His language makes use of both the vernacular and the formal, and disowns the idea of a poet having a singular voice. In his work, he pays really close attention to the words he chooses for each line of the poem, in the same interview previously mentioned, he also commented on this topic saying that "Ted Hughes used to talk about this: he said he knew a poem was finished when every word was listening to every other word. I think there is a kind of a harmonic level, as well as a melodic level about the way the words work in poetry. They work through their connotations as much as their denotations, the things they imply, and their whole history as words. You're talking about a machine of words, that's maybe constructed at a level of interrelation that's higher than the prose equivalent. I do tend to think about it as a musical analogy: there is harmonic depth, which gives multiple, layered, vertical meaning to the thing, as well as the melody of sense on the top. It comes about through what happens to words when you let them draw senses from each other, not just the frame the poet or subject imposes.".

His exemplary work has been widely acknowledged as he has received a great number of awards. In 1993, he published his collection "Nil Nil", which won the Forward prize for best first collection and in the same year he returned to Scotland as Writer in Residence at the University of Dundee. He was included on the list of 20 poets chosen for the Poetry Society’s ‘New Generation Poets’ promotion in 1994, and in 1997 he became poetry editor at Picador Macmillan, a position he still holds. Later in his career, Paterson joined the London publisher Picador as poetry editor and has also taught creative writing at University of St. Andrews and Dundee University. He continues to perform as a jazz guitarist and lives in Scotland. God’s Gift to Women (1997) won both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and Landing Light (2003) won the Whitbread Poetry Award and an unprecedented second T.S. Eliot Prize. Christina Patterson, reviewing Landing Light for the Independent, praised Paterson as “one of the few poets writing today whose work combines postmodern playfulness with a sense of yearning for the transcendental.” Paterson’s poem “A Private Bottling” won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition. He has won an Eric Gregory Award, three Book Awards from the Scottish Arts Council, and a Creative Scotland Award. The Poetry Society named Paterson one of the New Generation Poets and as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the English Association. For his service to literature, he was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2008 and received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2010. He is also the only poet to have won the T.S. Eliot Prize twice. In addition to this, he won the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Poetry Collection of the Year for his poem Rain, which is analyzed below. This poem was included in Best Scottish Poems 2009. Best Scottish Poems is an online publication, consisting of 20 poems chosen by a different editor each year, with comments by the editor and poets. It provides a personal overview of a year of Scottish poetry. The editor in 2009 was Andrew Greig and his comment was; "Don Paterson is so good that, by-passing envy or despair, I just go straight to pleasure and joy that anything can be so good, so right. How can he write serious and profound, demanding and scarifying poetry in rhyming couplets? How can he pull the rug out from under us and the poem yet again? Formal virtuosity apart, the poem is earned. There is nothing he confronts us with that he has not already accused himself of – cleverness and heartlessness included. The whole collection is magnificent.".

Paterson’s work is notable for its traditional formal and technical elements, specifically an adherence to rhyme and regular metre. But this use of conventional form, which in other poets tends to move towards resolution or closure, acts rather as a counterpoint to unsettling subject-matter, ambivalent narrative personae, black humour and a scouring of illusions. While Paterson's subject-matter is downbeat, about error, failure and impotence (with as much self-deprecation as deprecation of others), formally its trajectory is controlled, dynamic and achieved. As Ben Wilkinson summed up in the British Council’s Writers Directory: ‘a sharp, witty and distinctive poetic voice, Paterson’s formal dexterity and dedication to poetic tradition are combined with contemporary postmodernist elements, producing poems of cutting-edge relevance, but also of intense, MacNeiceian lyrical beauty.’ His poems display an ambition in their scope and tonal range matched by the breadth of their concerns. Voices call home from the blackout and the airlock, the bar and the séance, the coalshed, the battlefield, the voting booth, the ringroad, the forest and the sea. Behind them all lies the standing wave of human consciousness, the "sound that fades up from the hiss, like a glass some random downdraught had set ringing, now full of its only note, its lonely call, drawing on its song to keep it singing".

Brenda Shaughnessy

Brenda Shaughnessy

Section 2: Deliverable

West London

By Mathew Arnold

Crouch'd on the pavement close by Belgrave Square
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Pass'd opposite; she touch'd her girl, who hied
Across, and begg'd and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.
She turns from that cold succour, which attneds
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.

Interpretation

The speaker of the poem sits in Belgrave Square and looks at a poor tramp loitering with her baby and young daughter, all dressed in rags. Then, as some men from the working class pass by, the tramp sends the little girl to beg and she successfully brings back some money. However, as rich men pass by they make no effort to beg. Then the speaker explains how he realizes that the tramp will only beg from the working class who will understand and sympathize with her situation and the rich are "aliens" that would show no empathy for her plight. In this short poem, Matthew Arnold criticizes society's lack of response to poverty. He lived in a period of modernization and was able to see the gap between social classes broaden as people became "aliens" for each other and all the empathic community that once existed was deteriorating. It is also important to note the way he writes his sentences emphasizing the social class as the subject in lines such as "A tramp I saw" and "The rich she had let pass" putting "The tramp" and "The rich" as subjects. In the same way, the title "West London" accentuates this idea for that is considered to be a very wealthy side of the city. He uses this fact to accentuate the fact that poverty remains present despite the wealth of high class neighborhoods like West London. Finally, by the end of the poem, he leaves the readers with his desire for a change and an attempt of a wake up call. As he refers to the poor girl as the "unknown little" and to the rich as the "unknowing great" he shows how unconscious people have become and how he hopes for a better future.

Paper People

By Harry Baker

I like people.
I’d like some paper people.
They’d be purple paper people. Maybe pop-up purple paper people.
Proper pop-up purple paper people.
“How do you prop up pop-up purple paper people?”
I hear you cry. Well I …
I’d probably prop up proper pop-up purple paper people
With a proper pop-up purple people paperclip,
But I’d pre-prepare appropriate adhesives as alternatives,
A cheeky pack of Blu Tack just in case the paper slipped.

Because I could build a pop-up metropolis.
But I wouldn’t wanna deal with all the paper people politics.
Paper politicians with their paper-thin policies,
Broken promises without appropriate apologies.

There’d be a little paper me. And a little paper you.
And we could watch paper TV and it would all be pay-per-view.
We’d see the poppy paper rappers rap about their paper package
Or watch paper people carriers get stuck in paper traffic on the A4. Paper.

There’d be a paper princess Kate but we’d all stare at paper Pippa,
And then we’d all live in fear of killer Jack the Paper-Ripper,
Because the paper propaganda propagates the people’s prejudices,
Papers printing pictures of the photogenic terrorists.

A little paper me. And a little paper you.
And in a pop-up population people’s problems pop up too.
There’d be a pompous paper parliament who remained out of touch,
And who ignored the people’s protests about all the paper cuts,
Then the peaceful paper protests would get blown to paper pieces,
By the confetti cannons manned by pre-emptive police.

And yes there’d still be paper money, so there’d still be paper greed,
And the paper piggy bankers pocketing more than they need,
Purchasing the potpourri to pepper their paper properties,
Others live in poverty and ain’t acknowledged properly.
A proper poor economy where so many are proper poor,
But while their needs are ignored the money goes to big wars.

Origami armies unfold plans for paper planes
And we remain imprisoned in our own paper chains,
But the greater shame is that it always seems to stay the same,
What changes is who’s in power choosing how to lay the blame,
They’re naming names, forgetting these are names of people,
Because in the end it all comes down to people.

I like people.
‘Cause even when the situation’s dire,
It is only ever people who are able to inspire,
And on paper, it’s hard to see how we all cope.
But in the bottom of Pandora’s box there’s still hope,
And I still hope ’cause I believe in people.

People like my grandparents.
Who every single day since I was born, have taken time out of their morning to pray for me.
That’s 7892 days straight of someone checking I’m okay, and that’s amazing.
People like my aunt who puts on plays with prisoners.
People who are capable of genuine forgiveness.
People like the persecuted Palestinians.

People who go out of their way to make your life better, and expect nothing in return.
You see, people have potential to be powerful.
Just because the people in power tend to pretend to be victims
We don’t need to succumb to that system.
And a paper population is no different.
There’s a little paper me. And a little paper you.
And in a pop-up population people’s problems pop up too,
But even if the whole world fell apart then we’d still make it through.
Because we’re people.

Childhood III

I hate that town;
I hate the town I lived in when I was little;
I hate to think of it.
There wre always clouds, smoke, rain
In that dingly little valley.
It rained; it always rained.
I think I never saw the sun until I was nine --
And then it was too late;
Everything's too late after the first seven years.

The long street we lived in
Was duller than a drain
And nearly as dingy.
There were the big College
And the pseudo-Gothic town-hall.
There were the sordid provincial shops --
The grocer's, and the shops for women,
The shop where I bought transfers,
And the piano and gramaphone shop
Where I used to stand
Staring at the huge shiny pianos and at the pictures
Of a white dog looking into a gramaphone.

How dull and greasy and grey and sordid it was!
On wet days -- it was always wet --
I used to kneel on a chair
And look at it from the window.

The dirty yellow trams
Dragged noisily along
With a clatter of wheels and bells
And a humming of wires overhead.
They threw up the filthy rain-water from the hollow lines
And then the water ran back
Full of brownish foam bubbles.

There was nothing else to see --
It was all so dull --
Except a few grey legs under shiny black umbrellas
Running along the grey shiny pavements;
Sometimes there was a waggon
Whose horses made a strange loud hollow sound
With their hoofs
Through the silent rain.

And there was a grey museum
Full of dead birds and dead insects and dead animals
And a few relics of the Romans -- dead also.
There was a sea-front,
A long asphalt walk with a bleak road beside it,
Three piers, a row of houses,
And a salt dirty smell from the little harbour.

I was like a moth --
Like one of those grey Emperor moths
Which flutter through the vines at Capri.
And that damned little town was my match-box,
Against whose sides I beat and beat
Until my wings were torn and faded, and dingy
As that damned little town.

Rain

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

Project for a Fainting

Oh, yes, the rain is sorry. Unfemale, of course, the rain is
with her painted face still plain and with such pixel you’d never see

it in the pure freckling, the lacquer of her. The world
is lighter with her recklessness, a handkerchief so wet it is clear.

To you. My withered place, this frumpy home (nearer
to the body than to evening) miserable beloved. I lie tender

and devout with insomnia, perfect on the center pillow past
midnight, sick with the thought of another year

of waking, solved and happy, it has never been this way! Believe
strangers who say the end is close for what could be closer?

You are my stranger and see how we have closed. On both ends.
Night wets me all night, blind, carried.

And watermarks. The plough of the rough on the slick,
love, a tendency toward fever. To break. To soil.

Would I dance with you? Both forever and rather die.
It would be like dying, yes. Yes I would.

I have loved the slaking of your forgetters, your indifferent
hands on my loosening. Through a thousand panes of glass

not all transparent, and the temperature.
I felt that. What you say is not less than that.

Conclusion

In this section, provide a summary or recap of your work, as well as potential areas of further inquiry (for yourself, future students, or other researchers).