On being sentimental (Of Being Quiet, part something-or-other)

Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world (click link for details).

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Because of the growth of entropy, we have a very different epistemic access to the past than to the future. In retrodicting the past, we have recourse to “memories” and “records,” which we can take as mostly-reliable indicators of events that actually happened. But when it comes to the future, the best we can do is extrapolate, without nearly the reliability that we have in reconstructing the past... -- via 3 Quarks Daily

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Even for the one — before all for the one — for whom the encounter with the poem belongs to the quotidian and self-evident, this encounter has to begin with the darkness of the self-evident, [that which] makes every encounter with a stranger strange.: “Camarado, this is no book, who touches this, touches a human.”

Only from this touch — which is not a “making contact” — comes the way to intimacy. Aisthesis is not enough here, man is more than his sensorium. It is a question of conversation, as it is a question of language: (noesis does not suffice; it is a question of the angle of inclination under which one came together; it is a question of fate, as is the case with every real encounter, of the Here and Now, this place and this hour. -- Paul Celan, via Pierre Joris

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Our reaction against the sentimentality embodied in Victorian and post-Victorian writing was so resolute writers came to believe that the further from sentimentality we got, the truer the art. That was a mistake. -- Richard Hugo

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Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. -- G. K. Chesterton

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It is therefore plain that the culture of transgression achieves nothing save the loss that it revels in: the loss of beauty as a value and a goal. But why is beauty a value? It is an ancient view that truth, goodness, and beauty cannot, in the end, conflict. Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction. That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens, and it is a message that we need to listen to.

To mount a full riposte to the habit of desecration, we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized. This is no easy task. If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time—I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and Olivier Messiaen, of poets like Derek Walcott and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail that characterizes their craft. In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.

One response is to look for beauty in its other and more everyday forms—the beauty of settled streets and cheerful faces, of natural objects and genial landscapes. It is possible to throw dirt on these things, too, and it is the mark of a second-rate artist to take such a path to our attention—the via negativa of desecration. But it is also possible to return to ordinary things in the spirit of Wallace Stevens and Samuel Barber—to show that we are at home with them and that they magnify and vindicate our life. Such is the overgrown path that the early modernists once cleared for us—the via positiva of beauty. There is no reason yet to think that we must abandon it. -- Roger Scruton on "Beauty"

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FINE PRINT RE ASISTHESIS (Via Preceptaustin):

Cf. Philippians 1:9 in the New Testament:
kai touto proseuchomai, hina e agape humon eti mallon kai mallon perisseue en epignosei kai pase aisthesei
(And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and in all judgment)

aisthesis from aisthánomai = to apprehend by the senses, to perceive and in NT speaks primarily of spiritual perception; our English = aesthetic; the root verb is aio = to perceive) refers to the capacity to understand referring not so much to an intellectual acuteness but to a moral sensitiveness. It thus speaks of moral perception, insight, and the practical application of knowledge--the deep knowledge Paul had already mentioned. Aisthesis therefore is more of an immediate knowledge than that arrived at by reasoning. It describes the capacity to perceive clearly and hence to understand the real nature of something. It is the capacity to discern and therefore understand what is not readily comprehensible. It refers to a moral action of recognizing distinctions and making a decision about behavior.

It is interesting to note that the meaning of aisthesis is almost the opposite of the English word “aesthetic” which is derived from the Greek word. Aesthetic speaks of one who is appreciative of, responsive to, or zealous about the beautiful. It has largely to do with personal taste and preference. Paul calls believers to put aside personal tastes and preferences and to focus instead on achieving mature insight and understanding.

The English dictionary states that discernment is the power to see what is not evident to the average mind and stresses accuracy as in reading character or motives.

On totality, the lyric voice, and the death of M.J.

It is strikingly odd that our commodified culture brings the arts to the edge of effacement just as certain aspects of postmodernism would deliver them to an ending. The maw of it, either effacement or ending, startles one or another of us into an extraordinary attention - because it leaves everybody outside the creation of meaning. Oh, so alone and, at the same time, massified. -- Robin Blaser

The ordinary is always the subject of quest and the object of an inquest. -- Stanley Cavell

Those who rule are today legitimized by manufactured "popularity," while the aspirations of the majority of the wold are temporarily smothered by manipulated consumerist fears and promises. It is here that advertising achieves its political, as distinct from economic, purpose: politics have become management. -- John Berger

We witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one. -- Michel de Certeau

The numbers do not want art. That was a primary value of their invention. -- Robin Blaser

The current culture had best take some care with its down-at-the-heel sense of elitism, lest it lose the ability to think through the vast effort of human consciousness to find meaning here and about. I listen to our governments whine that they do not know how to manage global capitalism, all the while joining the gobble of that reality... For my part, I do not understand how it is possible to come to terms with democracy and the government of it, while teaching Lordship, Mastery, and Love that sacrifices mortality for someplace else, a Totality that forgives us. The cost of these Totalities - of Christianism, of Marxisms, of Capitalism - are on the public record - forgiving themselves again and again for the terror of this century. I reject the apocalyptics of modernism and postmodernism - these are borrowed from Daniel and Revelation, religious under their skins. Our language has other work to do... I founder in the bitterness of Western metaphysics. I have chosen a poetic practice of entangling discourses, including the running about of my lyric voice. -- Robin Blaser

The Present State of Poetry (Another Installment of... Of Being Quiet!)

In an essay titled "The Present State of Poetry," Delmore Schwartz recalled: "In 1936 I heard Wallace Stevens read his poetry at Harvard: it was the first time Stevens had ever read his poetry in public, and this first reading was at once an indescribable ordeal and a precious event to Stevens.... Before and after reading each poem [he] spoke of the nature of poetry... he said, among other things, that the least sound counts, the least sound and the least syllable. He illustrated this observation by telling of how he had awakened after midnight the week before and heard the sounds made by a cat walking delicately and carefully on the crusted snow outside his house."

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[Re Stevens's "The River of Rivers in Connecticut"] This unnamed river of rivers may also serve as a trope for Thoreau's Concord River once called Musketaquid or Meadow. On its banks, local Connecticut place names, Haddam and Farmington, gathered into steeples on their village commons, glisten and sway.

River of peace and quietness. River of battlefield ghosts - this great original river before - is where poetry flows into prayer.

-- Susan Howe, from "Choir answers to Choir: Notes on Jonathan Edwards and Wallace Stevens" in Chicago Review 54:4

(Speaking of Stevens, Al Filreis praises Eleanor Cook's terrific A Field Guide to Wallace Stevens on his blog. Eleanor was a delight to work with when I was at Literary Imagination.)

Pictured: Stevens' quiet house in Connecticut

A charming expression of near-hegemonic power

Click here ... and here ...

and here ... and here ...

Stanzas in Meditation

Here, to meditate upon, is John Ashbery, writing in the July 1957 issue of Poetry, from a review of a recently-published edition of Gertrude Stein's Stanzas in Meditation:

There is certainly plenty of monotony in the 150-page title poem which forms the first half of this volume, but it is the fertile kind, which generates excitement as water monotonously flowing over a dam generates electrical power. These austere "stanzas" are made up almost entirely of colorless connecting words such as "where," "which," "these," "of," "not," "have," "about," and so on, though now and then Miss Stein throws in an orange, a lilac, or an Albert to remind us that it really is the world, our world, that she has been talking about. The result is like certain monochrome de Kooning paintings in which isolated strokes of color take on a deliciousness they never could have had out of context, or a piece of music by Webern in which a single note on the celesta suddenly irrigates a whole desert of dry, scratchy sounds in the strings... Like people, Miss Stein's lines are comforting or annoying or brilliant or tedious. Like people, they sometimes make no sense and sometimes make perfect sense; or they stop short in the middle of a sentence and wander away, leaving us alone for a while in the physical world, that collection of thoughts, flowers, weather, and proper names. And just as with people, there is no real escape from them... Sometimes the story has the logic of a dream... while at other times it becomes startlingly clear for a moment, as though a change in the wind had suddenly enabled us to hear a conversation that was taking place some distance away... The poem is a hymn to possibility; a celebration of the fact that the world exists, that things can happen.

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Thomas Bernhard, on translation, stupidity, & publishers:

... a translation is a different book. It has nothing to do with the original at all. It's a book by the person who translated it. I write in the German language. You get sent a copy of these books and either you like them or you don't. If they have awful covers then they're just annoying. And you flip through and that's it. It has nothing in common with your own work, apart from the weirdly different title. Right? Because translation is impossible. A piece of music is played the same the world over, using the written notes, but a book would always have to be played in German, in my case. With my orchestra!

Urbanity is a quality you have to possess from within. It has nothing to do with the exterior. No. Nothing but stupid notions. But humanity has only ever existed in stupid notions, there's no helping it. There's no cure for stupidity. That's a fact.

What is that, a publisher? I could put the question to you: What is a publisher (Verleger)? A bedside rug (Bettvorleger), there's no doubt what that is. But a publisher, without the bed, that's harder to answer. Someone who misplaces (verlegen) things, a muddled person, who misplaces things and can't find them anymore. That's the definition of a publisher, someone who misplaces things. A publisher, he misplaces things and manuscripts which he accepts and then he can't find them anymore. Either because he no longer likes them or because he's muddled, either way they're gone. Misplaced. For all eternity. All the publishers I know are like that. None of them is so great as not to be the kind who misplaces things. Who publishes something and then it's either ruined or impossible to find.

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Ray Bradbury, on the internet:

The Internet is a big distraction. Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet." It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.

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Chris Hamilton-Emery, on publishing poetry:

It was not the emergence of a single global poetry community, but the sewing together of highly disparate often communities, each with their own commitment to a discrete part of our list, whether that be short stories, or the US avant-garde, or British mainstream writing or indigenous writing, the JustOneBook campaign is about breadth: breadth of publishing, the diversity of our editorial vision (good books and no camps), eclecticism, and the aggregation of these vital areas of writing all of which has led to a broad, uncannily broad, reception.

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Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey, in their introduction to Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans:

Every new reading requires a break from the established disciplinary modes, a break from regnant pecking orders, and a breakthrough.

The line's for real

I'm blogging at Harriet today! A bit of summer fun...

The whole hog, and nothing but the hog

The authors transfer all intellectual copyright of the following into the mind of Don Share:

In society
I speak politely
but on my blog
I go whole hog
and talk wildly.




-- Stephen Sturgeon & Philip Nikolayev

And I eat men like air.

Dear Don,

Wonder if you've seen this piece from the current New York Times Book Review, about the 232-page book Mark Helprin wrote partly as a response to abusive website comment field people.

It's a strange article, as is the podcast discussion its author has about it, linked on the review page. It makes the common sense statement that the kind of speech that happens in website comment fields is not worth engaging, and goes on to say that Helprin himself has caught some of the comment field delirium in taking the time to write and publish an entire book that refutes empty and anonymous spite. This connects back to my last e-mail to you on this subject, how the conditions of the internet medium change the rules of communication. The comments against Helprin that prompted his book numbered in the hundreds of thousands. It bothers me that we should expect someone to ignore with a high mind such a volume of hostility (hostility that doesn't vanish like a shallow spoken insult but accumulates quickly and stays around to be read), and that the power, or, more appropriately here, influence of speech can be written off as harmless and ignorable.

I agree that writing books as responses to website dummy speak is probably vain, but what's a good way to handle it? I dunno. I'd like to start with the recognition that free speech is a civil right because of its power, and that it is disingenuous to regard a source of power as if it did not have the potential to harm.

yrs

Stephen Sturgeon, Editor
Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics

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Pictured: A "visual letter" from Kim Addonizio in response to Joel Brouwer's Poetry magazine review of William Logan's Our Savage Art. The caption of the photo is "And I eat men like air." Reproduced by permission of the author.

Poets talk...

Just back from the 40th annual Poetry International Festival in Rotterdam, where I was lucky to have interviewed Dunya Mikhail and Vera Pavlova for the Poets Talk series; audio to be available, I hope, soon! And I'll blog about the Festival shortly over on Harriet when I get over the jet lag. Meanwhile, thanks to my extremely generous hosts who put on a superb festival this anniversary year! Click on the pic for festival info.

Engaged...

The fragment, which has ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building.

Hoagland, Hirschfield, Beeder, Simic, Cairns, Beasley, Poch, Hodgen, Levine, Dlugos, Mlinko, Boss, Bottoms, Cotler, Lehnert, Eybers, Sheffield, Leithauser, Hicok, McFadden, Sarah, Merwin, Labbe, Clare, Marchant, Allen, Greenbaum, Goldbarth

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Flarf and Conceptual Poetry , a special section edited and introduced by Kenneth Goldsmith (whose words title this blogpost) featuring: Jordan Davis, Mel Nichols, Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Nada Gordon, Drew Gardner, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Robert Fitterman, Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, Vanessa Place, and poetry comix ("Am I Emo?") by Gary Sullivan...

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Poets We've Known: Donald Revell on Robert Creeley; Rebekah Bloyd on Miroslav Holub; John Koethe on Ashbery, O'Hara, Koch and others; Katha Pollitt on Elizabeth Bishop; and Conor O'Callaghan on Michael Hartnett...

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The notorious Clive James on Dunstan Thompson; Daisy Fried on John Milton and the nipple Nazi of Northampton...

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I Belonged to Yvor Winters ("I am one of the best-known poets and critics now living, and I have a pretty high reputation for this kind of teaching. I have taught a great many exceptionally brilliant students. I am also an Airedale fancier. In my capacity as a teacher, I correspond, I suppose, to a professional handler at a dog show... I find myself charmed by the intelligent young, just as I am charmed by beautiful puppies.")

-- July/August issue of Poetry

Landscape Semiotics pre-eminently pre-eminently: pre-eminently abasing Harriet the Blog pre-eminently

We delay the high-mindedness to fixed comments that deter putrescent interaction or peculiar attacks.

PoetryFoundation.org welcomes comments that buttress colloquy and butter up an jamboree community on the purlieus. Repeated outrage of this exposition discretion resolution in restricted application of the purlieus.

The quelling just the same from time to time a as for oneself comments on a purlieus, his or her opine be required to be approved around the purlieus moderators. Please note: We be missing comments to encompass a disambiguate identify and email be in sympathy with fixed. Subsequent comments discretion cycle up dawn on on the purlieus automatically. By submitting a opine, you despair the Poetry Foundation the high-mindedness to around it.

(Click here to read the full entry on the blog marriage poemsmarvel)

Pictured: One of the purlieus.

The new thing?

The inability to understand the modern project of being in the world turns into a cultural forgetting. Some years ago, during one of my lectures on modernism - Picasso's Les demoiselles d'Avingnon large on the wall behind me - a hand went up. The student asked, "Sir, did you make this up?" After puzzled moment, I burst into laughter. The student replied, "Well, you're talking about things seventy years old. Why haven't I ever heard of them?" This, it turned out, was no dumbbell, nor was he a country bumpkin. His resentment was real and thoughtful. A victim of educational effacement. But, then, one whispers, his parents, his teachers, the system that tutors him, none of them could fill the emptiness. Charges of elitism become silly and dangerous under such cultural circumstances.

... A civilization devoted to production and consumption and a tradition that is in ruins, partly forgotten or in sentiment alone come together in a shapelessness difficult to fathom.

-- Robin Blaser

(The "new thing"? People don't even know what the old thing was...)

Iliad of Broken Sentences

THE SOFAS, FOGS, AND CINEMAS
by Rosemary Tonks

I have lived it , and lived it,
My nervous, luxury civilization,
My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.

…Their idea of literature is hopeless.
Make them drink their own poetry!
Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.

It’s quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and he
Gets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in here
And digs himself into the sofa.
He stays there up to two hours in the hole – and talks
-- Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything
It’s……damnably depressing.
(That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burning
In the little dish…And when he calls out: "Ha!"
Madness! – you no longer possess your own furniture.)

On my bad days (and I’m being broken
At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and he
Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,
Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw….

I grow coarser: and more modern (I, who am driven mad
By my ideas; who go nowhere;
Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)
All right. I admit everything, everything!

Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)
He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone’s ill
At the last minute; and they specially fly in
A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano. He wants to help her
With her arias. Old goat! Blasphemer!
He wants to help her with her arias!

No, I…go to the cinema,
I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum,
…the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,
The screen is spread out like a thundercloud – that bangs
And splashes you with acid…or lies derelict, with lighted waters in it,
And in the silence, drips and crackles – taciturn, luxurious.
…The drugged and battered Philistines
Are all around you in the auditorium…

And he…is somewhere else, in his dead bedroom clothes,
He wants to make me think his thoughts
And they will be enormous, dull – (just the sort
To keep away from).
…when I see that cigarillo, when I see it…smoking
And he wants to face the international situation…
Lunatic rages! Blackness! Suffocation!

-- All this sitting about in cafés to calm down
Simply wears me out. And their idea of literature!
The idiotic cut of stanzas; the novels, full up, gross.

I have lived it, and I know too much.
My café-nerves are breaking me
With black, exhausting information.

Not quite a dead horse

Not much love for the Field Guide, I guess.

If it didn't do much for you, how 'bout this dead horse, instead? Visit Harriet, where I've posted a comment called "I Hate Poetry... Reviews?"

Moiling

There are strange things done in the midnight sun / By the men who moil for gold as the poet once said. "Moil" - one of my favorite words, seldom used. Except:

...socio-economic reality, profound as it is, is not all of reality. At the risk of appearing impertinent, I mean to extend this limitation of the reality claims to the whole range of humanistic studies - sociologism, anthopologism, and psychologism - which tend to become closures of our thought of reality: for example, the utilitarian claim, along with its historical development in socialism, that reality, physical and cultural, is entirely determined by the social; or, for example, going the other way around, the apparent psychological defence of the individual, which defines the real by way of a self that becomes ahistorical, like the traditional soul, but otherless - and "therapeutically triumphant." This version of humanism collapses into itself, wordless, leaves the large number of people who define it moiling... The disaster and danger of such total claims to reality, in which the complex discourses of a world and their relation to one another disappear in the hegemony of one of them, spread far and wide in modernity... [T]yranny - we have come to know it well in this century - results from an improper use of the discourse of social reality, unmeasured by other discourses of the real, in which wholeness is claimed, or, rather, imposed, and social reality is consequently dehumanized... [What we need is] a vocabulary to correct the hegemony of the social... -- Robin Blaser

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Cicero says: In what concerns my association with men and things, I refuse to be coerced even by truth, even by beauty. -- Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

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Linh Dinh, in the NY Times blog:

Once, I washed windows after appearing at a community college as a guest poet. It would have been a hoot had one of the admiring students saw me vigorously wiping water before it could freeze on the window pane. “Yo, isn’t that the poet who came to our class yesterday?!”

There are pluses to being close to those who could help you.

Confronted by a torrent of bad news from our capsized economy, many people anticipate at least the kind of unrest that has already broken out in many countries, but we are so docile, really. Some people I know speak of heading for the hills and stocking up on canned food, potable water, guns and slugs — the bunker mentality. But instead of fleeing one another, like we’ve already done for half a century or so, shouldn’t we figure out how to be closer in every sense?

Pictured: Mother Europe Cares for Her Colonies by László Moholy-Nagy