Picasso's Poetry Poem by Paul Hartal

Picasso's Poetry

Rating: 4.5


"And where the young girls roam
The grindstones whet their whistles",
wrote Picasso in one of his poems.

Arguably the most influential painter
of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso,
was not only an innovative visual artist
but also an absorbing poet.
He was surrounded by a group of
avant-garde writers and poets,
among them such luminaries as Max Jacob,
Andre Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire,
Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein.

In 1959 Picasso published,
in a run of 263 copies,
"The Burial of the Count of Orgaz"
a collection of poems named
after a painting by El Greco.

Picasso was a wordsmith
of enmeshed verse, of embroiled language
in a torrent of words that burst forth
with astonishing liberty.

But in contrast to the musicality and cadence
of many poems, Picasso's oeuvre was visual.

"Who said jealousy is green?
It is fuming red",
he wrote in one of his pieces.

His lines can be simple
and engagingly witty, like:
"i don't have the time
to wait for dawn."

With his savagely flung wordscapes
Picasso demolishes traditional form.

Yet his work, similarly to his paintings,
is often fraught with surrealist imagery,
like the failing painter
who ‘shaved his wife's fur coat'.

Often, it is also impenetrable,
populated by whimsical things,
Including "fingernail fish"
and "armless menus (stop)
pink cathedral fingers (stop) ".

However, Picasso wrote also lyric lines:
"Maybe you are my survival…
The glory of the sun scatters in waste,
For you are not there to reflect it."

In the 1940s he produced
two puzzlingly weird surrealist plays,
"Le Desir attrape par la queue"
(The Desire Caught by the Tail)
and "Les Quatre Petites Filles"
(The Four Little Girls) .
Plotless and nonlinear,
these stream-of-consciousness works
appear suggesting that the human condition
is a farcical tragedy.

Picasso identified art with poetry.
He said, "Everything that you find in poems
you can also find in my paintings.
Poetry is the most important thing in painting".

He also said that long after his death
he would be recognized as a poet
and encyclopedias would write:
‘Pablo Ruiz Picasso (1881-1973) —Spanish poet
who dabbled in painting.'

Monday, September 29, 2014
Topic(s) of this poem: poetry
COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Mike Barrett 20 October 2014

Bravo - well done, guess I'd better read up on Picasso!

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