“Study,” gesso, acrylic and colored marker on cardboard, 9 x 5-3/4 in. (JMN, 2024).
Rooky move: I responded to the first page of Meghan O’Rourke’s essay “On Ambivalence: To Be, but to Be How?” (Poetry, June 2024) before I had finished reading it. I caught the wave generated for me by her allusions to parataxis and epistemology (terms I don’t control) and surfed it in my post titled “Raise Your Hand If You Know What ‘Paratactic’ Means.”
I had deleted the following sentence from my draft of that post: “Poetry helps me come to terms with not needing to know.” At the time, it seemed to oversay what I’d already implied. Further along in O’Rourke’s essay, however, she mentions Keats’s “negative capability,” which Keats describes as
… when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason —.
Yes! I thought. That’s what I meant by coming to terms with not needing to know! Picture the thrill of my imagining having retroactively foreshadowed Keats!
O’Rourke writes this:
Great artists allow for uncertainty and ambivalence… Shakespeare was Shakespeare, Keats argues, because of the way his plays staged, and enacted, a variety of irreconcilable points of view. This, rather than poetry that has “a palpable design upon us” [Keats’s phrase] is what true art is.
Keats’s phrases keep being terrific. (Who knew!) A text which has “a palpable design upon” the reader stalks one with a pre-owned frisson it wants to evangelize, rather than casting upon the waters keen verbs and auxiliaries that may spirit one to an illumination precisely at one’s own coordinates.
I live in Texas and devote much of my time to easel painting on an amateur basis. I stream a lot of music, mostly jazz, throughout the day. I like to read and memorize poetry.
EthicalDative 
Raise Your Hand If You’re Up for a ‘Variety of Irreconcilable Points of View’
Rooky move: I responded to the first page of Meghan O’Rourke’s essay “On Ambivalence: To Be, but to Be How?” (Poetry, June 2024) before I had finished reading it. I caught the wave generated for me by her allusions to parataxis and epistemology (terms I don’t control) and surfed it in my post titled “Raise Your Hand If You Know What ‘Paratactic’ Means.”
I had deleted the following sentence from my draft of that post: “Poetry helps me come to terms with not needing to know.” At the time, it seemed to oversay what I’d already implied. Further along in O’Rourke’s essay, however, she mentions Keats’s “negative capability,” which Keats describes as
… when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason —.
Yes! I thought. That’s what I meant by coming to terms with not needing to know! Picture the thrill of my imagining having retroactively foreshadowed Keats!
O’Rourke writes this:
Great artists allow for uncertainty and ambivalence… Shakespeare was Shakespeare, Keats argues, because of the way his plays staged, and enacted, a variety of irreconcilable points of view. This, rather than poetry that has “a palpable design upon us” [Keats’s phrase] is what true art is.
Keats’s phrases keep being terrific. (Who knew!) A text which has “a palpable design upon” the reader stalks one with a pre-owned frisson it wants to evangelize, rather than casting upon the waters keen verbs and auxiliaries that may spirit one to an illumination precisely at one’s own coordinates.
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
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About JMN
I live in Texas and devote much of my time to easel painting on an amateur basis. I stream a lot of music, mostly jazz, throughout the day. I like to read and memorize poetry.