Commenting on consumerism, Ms. Garner came up with a host of flagrantly unnecessary gadgets and accessories, including “Tongue-Texting,” pencil on paper. Credit… Courtesy of the artist, Matthew Brown and STARS.
“I tried to set an example that nobody else can follow.”
(Pippa Garner)
A one-off slogan printed on her T-shirt series called “Shirtstorm” was “These Are My Remains.”
(Will Heinrich, “Pippa Garner, Conceptual Artist With a Satirical Streak, Dies at 82,” New York Times, 1-7-25)
Que la lumière soit. Et la lumière fut. Que haya luz. Y hubo luz. Let there be light. And there was light. (Photo by JMN).
Bret Stephens, conservative columnist for the New York Times, Jew raised in Mexico, fluent Spanish speaker, quotes (from memory) a poem called “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins at the end of The Conversation with Gail Collins.
In my reading I rarely seek out Hopkins any more, but when he’s put before me I’m seduced again by his jazzy prosody. The poesy theurge channeled by the English Jesuit induces contemplative frenzy in the susceptible. Am I one?
Take rhyme (please! — ha-ha!): In current verse I almost always find recurring end rhyme to be deafening and deadening as far as lifting poetry from the trenches is concerned. English is a consonantal, assonant tongue with dirty vowels and minimal morphological inflection. The language isn’t built for long stretches of ding-donging from a daft belfry. Hopkins, however, can make daft sexy. It’s to be noted from the start that all the poem’s rhymes are made from common, monosyllabic words.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. […]
Messiahs are anointed (oiled) beings (Spanish untado. Arabic masīḥ, meaning wiped, clean, smooth, besides anointed.) Shining shaken from foil, betokening the flaming out of a light source, cuts the mustard as a bit of derring do in the way of simile. Enjambment takes the pressure off the incestuous rhyme of oil with foil, landing the beat on a strongly voiced adjective at a pausal juncture: Crushed. Boom! Stress that would fall on “oil” is shunted to the next line. Line 3, the one with ooze, is a solitary hexameter.
Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
“Then now” — conjunction next to adverb: The feisty collocation manages to connote epochal habituation, an unending history of not reckoning with the Boss, not following His Rules. Hopkins triples down on the rod-trod pairing — more kissing cousin coupling! Far from shifting stress off the rhyme, he compels attention to it with tolling repetition, conveying again the feel of endless traipsing and trampling, wallowing in waywardness. Everyone has strayed, does stray, will stray. There follows a rampage of rhyme and half-rhyme alloyed with alliteration.
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent;
And for all that, Mother Earth, at least, is thriving, evergreen, never-changing. Ha-ha! The showy sequence is admirably legible, thanks in part to the kindness of punctuation. Behold this phrase without its strategic comma: “nor can foot feel being shod.”
On top of lucidity, Hopkins excels at one of the things I admire most: syntactic compression. He expels the rank man-breath from verbiage, like air burped from Tupperware. There’s a taut, tight tension in one phrase of the following line which is borderline manic. Can you spot it?
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
It’s in the locative adverbial phrase “deep down things.” Eliding the preposition “in” (or “within” or “inside”…) after “down” falls just shy of redlining comprehension, in keeping with how Hopkins buffs phrasing to the bare bone.
The poem ends on pious fustian exercised exclamatorily over a black-brown-brinkish-brooding-breasty thing with ah! bright wings. It has shot its fox before reaching the Holy Ghost — a fall from grace poetically, except for one trope: the world is bent. God yes — double, like the pitiable creatures in a Salvadoran hoosegow. The last word is the poet’s, blessèdly.
And though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs — Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
I do solitary battle with poetry. Yes, battle. I challenge the poem, it challenges me. Me and the poem, the two of us in mental combat.
From the former Gulf of Mexico To the shores of Zuiderzee, I have pondered verses bad and good In the air, on land and sea. (To the tune of The Marines’ Hymn)
Kidding. It’s a tussle, but I’m on poetry’s side. Also the Marines’s. Semper Fi.
No one in my acquaintance likes it. That’s OK. It’s not a social medium. Poetry doesn’t need an “audience,” a circle, a claque of cognoscenti. Poetry needs a reader. I’m that man. This farflung outpost is my station. I will defend poetry here. Something Poetry editor Adrian Matejka writes in the latest issue gladdens me:
“Miscommunication” has the Latin root “communicare,” which can mean either “common” or “shared,” and in poetry, I imagine “shared” speaks to everyone involved — both poet and reader offering their understandings and confusions in equal value.” (Poetry, May 2025)
A professional’s acknowledgment of the reader’s portion of credit and blame in making poetry happen is sweet. A poem’s signal, after all, is a vagrant wave until it meets a receiver. By the way, there’s report of a formidable poetry power in the world with which to rub shoulders and deal squarely — I speak of China.
Since the time of the Shijing (Book of Songs), which dates back to the Zhou Dynasty (c. 1046-256 BCE), poetry has served not only as an artistic form but also as a vehicle for moral guidance, emotional expression, political commentary, religious teaching, and personal reflection. It has permeated both elite and popular culture, shaping every aspect of Chinese life. (Chun Yu, “A Circle Comes Together,” Poetry, April 2025)
Let’s set our children to learning Mandarin sooner rather than later. They’ll fare better artistically, morally, emotionally, politically, religiously and personally.
Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie. (Georges Seurat, “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte — 1884,” via the Helen Birch Bartlett Memorial Collection/The Art Institute of Chicago). [New York Times caption and illustration]
“But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices — the choice to date and love and marry and procreate, the choice to fight for particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews, the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology but trying every day, in every setting, to make ourselves its master.”
Here are excerpts from the article by Ross Douthat, conservative Catholic opinion writer for the New York Times.
Some of these choices will be especially difficult for liberals, since they will often smack of chauvinism and fanaticism and reaction. Family lines will survive only because of a clear preference for one’s own kith and kin as opposed to just some general affection for humanity. Important art forms will survive only because of a frank elitism, an insistence on distinction, a contempt for mediocrity. [… My bolding.]
Douthat’s phrase “as opposed to just some general affection for humanity” is dissonant to my ear. I would rather it read, “… in addition to general affection for humanity.” Also, is it settled wisdom that “insistence on distinction” and “contempt for mediocrity” shall forever be deemed to appertain to an “elite” and not to the generality of humankind?
“[Being pulled back into the virtual, the performative, the fundamentally unreal] is one temptation I’m very familiar with, as someone whose professional life is a mostly digital existence, where together with others who share my concerns I am perpetually talking, talking, talking … when the necessary thing is to go out into reality and do.”
Have the child. Practice the religion. Found the school. Support the local theater, the museum, the opera or concert hall, even if you can see it all on YouTube. Pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument. Learn the language — even if there’s an app for it. Learn to drive, even if you think soon Waymo or Tesla will drive for you. Put up headstones, don’t just burn your dead. Sit with the child, open the book, and read. […]
(Ross Douthat, “Come With Me if You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction,” New York Times, 4-19-25)
“Outcast” (1974) was one of many images of Richard M. Nixon that Mr. Holland created for The Times. Credit… Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. [New York Times caption and illustration]
The larger, more established studios, he later recalled, did not take to his eccentric work, responding with blank stares and, in one instance, suggesting religious counseling.
My title is illustrator Brad Holland’s comment in turning down an assignment offered by Playboy in 1967. The magazine hired him anyway, and he worked there for a quarter century.
“In conventional professional terms, everything I said and did during those three days was wrong,” Mr. Holland wrote on his blog in 2018. “But God bless Art Paul [Playboy’s art director], I had done them with the right guy. I had stumbled up the stairs in the dark, and when the lights came on, there I was.”
When Time magazine declared the Ayatollah Khomeini “Man of the Year” in January 1980, it was Mr. Holland’s stern portrait that glared from the cover. Credit… Brad Holland/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. [New York Times caption and illustration]
Holland’s remark later in life about stumbling up the stairs in the dark stayed with me. It reminds me of the reliable saying, “When you reach your destination, there you are.”
He worked constantly on his own ideas, which he said sprang from his unconscious, or from characters he saw on the street, or from some philosophical concept he was trying to puzzle through.
(Penelope Green, “Brad Holland, Subversive Artist Who Reinvented American Illustration, Dies at 81,” New York Times, 4-13-25)
If the unitary executive wants to go all binary, then Him and Her it is. God knows, She has had her problems, starting with the Adam’s rib hack. Did Maker say, Oops, shall I just take a bone from Him and put a Her at His disposal?
It’s taken until January, 2025, to relieve Her of afterthought status. She’s a fully enfranchised second sex as of… wait for it… now!
If the unitary executive wants to go all binary, then let there be Us. What’s nuclear is that We are made in God’s image. The data are from Genesis, and it’s a superpositive predicament in which ourselves We find. The Boson-Maker is the ultimate multi-state Being. The Supreme Particle rocks deity-grade simultaneity: Nor One nor Zero but Both; nor White nor Black, but Gray; nor Him nor Her, but They. We walk in Their likeness, so confessing in our most self-aware, sustaining Me discoveries.
A-busting out in song — Ta Ra! — We the People go:
We inhabit in our mortal rind Plus-one psychic moral states In optimal examples of our kind.
When I call her sister, I am sisterly to her, To me she is a brother.
Cross-commingled woman-man Is how we roll; exemplars of an amplitude Greater than our single span;
A bond which knits, not sunders; Repels buzzing poseurs, gnats, Stinging theocrats, boy wonders.
Beloved proud sister, citizen, patriot, cat lady. (Pencil on paper, April seventh, two thousand twenty-five, Common Era)
I asked azurea20 if I could post an English reading of her poem “Cuerpo” on EthicalDative, and she said yes. Below is the original Spanish text of her lyric published on her website, La Bancarrota del Circo, followed by my rendition, which I hope does no violence to the original. My thanks to azurea20 for her kind permission.
CUERPO Cuerpo, arsenal de miedos, al sur del alma. Mudanza de un mundo disperso en su propia extrañeza. Borrador de alfabetos, naufragio que la espesura traga sin atragantarse. Cuerpo, ¿dónde fuiste a buscar tu lugar? Y – qué – dirá ese – dios, cansado – de – ser – dios. Y tú, cansado de ser cuerpo.
BODY Body, arsenal of fears south of the soul. Mutation of a world scattered in its own estrangement. Eraser of alphabets, shipwreck which the breakers gargle without gagging. Body, where did you go looking for your place? And what will that tired-of-being-god god say. And you, tired of being body.
Note Azurea20’s poem says this: shipwreck which the thickness swallows [traga] without choking [atragantarse] I made a perilous decision: To substitute an obvious water analog for “thickness” in order to approximate the alliterative play of “tragar” with “atragantarse” adroitly exploited in the Spanish. I’ve violated a standing oath not to take liberties in translating which smack of showboating. To be honest, my solution makes me uneasy. Can wreckage wallowing off a rocky coastline survive scrutiny as the sea “gargling” wrack? Were I to do a revision, I would as soon stay faithful to the strong model of the original. Sackcloth poised for donning.
EthicalDative 
Which of These Dialogs Features a So-and-So?
Dramatis Personae: Niamh, a lass. Oisín, a lad.
Niamh: Have you had supper?
Oisín: So I ate before leaving the house.
Oisín: What was Waterloo?
Niamh: So Wellington defeated Napoleon there.
Niamh: How many capitals has Mongolia?
Oisín: So I’m aware of only one.
Oisín: Which jumper favors me?
Niamh: So I’m partial to the the puce one.
Niamh: Was that thunder?
Oisín: So I’m thinking it was. We’re due rain.
Oisín: Where were you born?
Niamh: So a small town in West Northumberland.
Niamh: What’s the question?
Oisín: So the meaning of life?
Oisín: So which of these dialogs features a so-and-so?
Niamh: So which one doesn’t?
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved