HJN, Abstract, watercolor
I hope I don’t wear you out with my musings. Poetry is there when you need it. It seems to rise to the occasion when nothing else will do. It concentrates the mind and the emotions, like scripture.
Poets get a bad rap, partly of their own doing. Poems come across as puzzles too often: What’s he or she really saying? Why not just talk plainly?
I think our notion that poets have their heads in the clouds or up their asses comes from the 19th-century Romantics.
Ferlinghetti is an eminence among our modern poets. He has pushed back against complexity in poetry. He and Cummings and Bukowski are credited with being “gateway” poets who tempt folks into poetry because their verse is “easy” to grasp.
Poets sprout from various crevices and lurk among us. One I follow wrote not long ago that “poetry is easier to write than to read.”
Nowadays poetry is mostly read by other poets, and by duffers like me. Poetry seems to me similar to mathematics, though — useless yes, essential yes. I’ve often heard people say something like “I’ve never used algebra after having to study it in high school.” It’s beside the point. “Useless” abstract studies wire our brains in positive ways.
Auden wrote in his elegy to Yeats, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Toward the end he falls into strict cadence: “Earth, receive an honored guest. William Yeats is laid to rest… With your unconstraining voice… Still persuade us to rejoice…. In the prison of his days… Teach the free man how to praise.”
Rejoice and praise. It packs an emotional wallop that I can’t quite put a finger on, what with the rhythm and rhyme and all. It reminds me of the force that “Taps” has when played on a bugle at a grave. Makes me bawl. I guess that’s why poetry hangs around, at least for now.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]
EthicalDative 
Notes on Hell
Arturo, JMN.
Flight has been prominent in my life. Not the aerial kind but the fleeing kind.
I vaguely recall that Sartre’s play “Huis Clos” (No Exit) ends with several people enclosed in a room condemned for all eternity to talk at and past each other with no escape. Sartre concludes, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” Hell is other people.
My personal take on the matter is that maybe Hell is not others but oneself. How would that go in French? “L’enfer, c’est soi-même”?
As a newly minted scholar in an abstruse field I landed an assistant professorship at the University of State-Somewhere, a hyphenated campus of a good school.
In year two I realized my destiny there was to teach basic language classes to students majoring in other disciplines. I should’ve gotten a masters in applied linguistics to do that, I told myself, not a doctorate in fuzzy studies
In year five I pitched translation as a new offering to ground my discipline in something practical. It was a hail Mary, and brutally swatted down in my annual performance review.
My tenured superiors had noticed by then that my student evaluations, glowing at first, were now in the toilet. I knew I was doomed. I gave notice, to spare them and me my firing, and limped lame-duckedly through year six while they searched for my replacement. I fled the scene but took myself with me.
In the last stage of my academic unraveling I convinced a good person to join me in having another go at marriage, the second one for both her and myself. What could go wrong?
In marital year three I wasn’t overtly suicidal but may have exhibited a symptom: I started throwing away my personal effects. I destroyed the typewritten original copy of my dissertation. I carted all my books to the curb to be picked up by the garbage truck. (My wife asked me if I really wanted to do that, and prevailed on me to bring them back inside.)
An insidious voice in my head whispered that I was lightening my load for the moment when I’d find an exit again. As it happened, that moment was still several years away.
[Copyright (c) 2018 James Mansfield Nichols. All rights reserved.]