Apollinaire’s poem, Il Pleut or Its Raining, is interesting to me in that I love how he is able to mesh two arts into one. It mocks the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words, especially when the picture is made of these words. But what I am really interested in is the fact that the images/paragraph is originally in French and then mirrored by its English counterpart. Besides the fact that he is French, I can’t really see any reason why he would go to the trouble to write the poem in his native tongue, then go back and translate the exact same thing into English. The only guess I have is that he didn’t want to lose the intensity of his emotions in the work, so he carefully worded it in English to match the passion.

The poem itself is a very dark piece-although I feel like it’s more whiny. It reminds me so much of Albert Camus’s works, dark and filled with nothing but self-pity. In short—depressing!

Stieglitz’s dada magazine reminds me of industrial innovation of the time. Everything depicted in the pictures, were commodities of the time. However, I can only guess three out to the five pictures. I see a camera on page1, a bustier sewing machine (p. 5), and an upside down headlight (p. 6). I do not know the significance of these pieces, and though they look avant garde, their meaning is allusive in my eyes.