When observing the assigned works for today, I find myself utterly at a loss to make a particularly insightful comment on any one particular piece, as such, I will attempt to make some sense of both the Apollinaire poems and the Stieglitz magazine in this post.

When reading the Apollinaire poetry, I detect an attempt to negotiate whether or not art which comments on something horrific, in this case WWI, can or should be considered "beautiful", as is traditionally the goal of art. I detect this most in the poem "It's Raining." This poem, when viewed from a distance, strikes the viewer as looking kind of cute. The letters here being arranged to appear like falling rain in a poem about rain seems almost like something a child might make. However, when one takes the time to read the poem, the reader discovers a hounting description of a vaguely ominous approaching storm. This trend continues in his poem, "Thunder's Palace", which describes a barracks dug in a WWI trench as having a sort of primitive beauty, something I can't help but feel is meant to be ironic by Apollinaire. I believe that by  combining these generally pleasing images with haunting words and descriptions, Apollinaire means to communicate the disconnect one would have felt when going from home, where one would hear talk of glorious war, only to find the horrors of WWI on the battlefield.

I find the Stieglitz magazine to be the much harder text to decipher. Here, I find myself greeted with pictures that like like anything from a spark plug to, what appears to be the blue prints for some sort of rube goldberg machine, accompanied with descriptions such as "to me this is the holiest of holies." As for the meaning behind these, I find myself utterly perplexed. When considering the obsession which had surrounded machinery in the years prior to the first World War, I feel as though these images mean to communicate just how ridiculous it is to view machinery with such veneration.