The planet is bursting with verse. A reader of poetry has to be arbitrary to stay afloat. In this post I’ve done something impudent, which is to apply strikeout formatting to text which I think would have been better omitted. My emendations aren’t knowledge-signaling; they’re just a symptom of constructive engagement with interesting texts. I’m sure I didn’t invent this thought — a poet must have said it: Starting a poem is (relatively) easy; ending it is the trick. Music is between the rests; poetry between the silences.
The folio feature of Poetry, December 2024, is titled “The Chorus These Poems Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” I was braced for a “Latinx” experience. What I found is a sequence of high-performing poems that evade x-ing. I long to take more than piecemeal account of such feats, but see my above remark about the planet.
“Carnivore,” by Rigoberto González, has an italicized preamble referencing multiple sclerosis. The poem calls on the moose for a familiar emblem of sturdiness, but falls back on the gazelle: […] I’m supposed to be / upright and sturdy as a moose. / Better yet, a gazelle. I / used to walk so gracefully, / so elegantly in that animal / me. […] The speaker is prey to a wasting illness, but what’s central in the poem is loneliness over lost love: How my antelope nose soothed my buck’s / neck before he stotted away, / stomping out my heart […]. The poem’s conclusion is disarmingly specific:
He chewed it off just like
I’m gnawing at the dead
gazelle of me. At night I detect
thumping. Heartbeat or
hoofbeat, I can’t say. It creeps
further away, memory of
a man who once loved me,
hungering for the whole of me.
Oh I used to be more edible
than this. And so mealy.
“Searching,” by Jordan Pérez, instantiates a vegetable garden at the end of its productive life. The drama is captured perfectly by the tomatoes: […] The tomatoes, / believing they were near death, rushed to birth / fruit, and the very production took / the last life from them. The poem pivots on a query somewhat misaligned along a “body” semantic: Can you show me a body that is itself / whole? The ensuing turtle anecdote picks the poem up and carries it to a soulful ending:
[…] I think daily about the spotted turtle,who I found trapped under the boardwalk[,]and carried back to the water, only to later
read that, if she’s moved too far, will spend
the rest of her life searching for her eggs.How is it possible to define yourself by waiting
for someone you have never met?
“As Capitalism Gasps for Breath I Watch the Knicks Game,” by Yesenia Montilla, is a snappy fan paean to the New York Knicks basketball franchise: […] The ruckus of these players, the desire they / have to come in first. They rebound & strip like stickup / kids. […] The poem also reflects wryly on the anomaly captured in its title: […] Don’t get it twisted, capitalism is dying // & yet here I am rooting for boys bred to burn out their bodies / to make billionaires more billions. […]
Here are the poem’s last 3 couplets:
What happens to the heart of a city when its people survive
on air; that space between the flick of the wrist & the swish
of a three-point buzzer beater? We fight for a win to fill
the ache of losing: Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Ayiti. We take
what we can, celebrate small victories until we win everything
we thought we never could—
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
A Little Knowledge (I Refer to Mine) Is Dangerous (and Fun)
Reiterating at the outset: The “little knowledge” I mention in my title is my own!
Novelist-Poet-Thinker-Dauntless-Traveler Gary Gautier recently touched in his blog on an engrossing philosophical quandary, mentioning an idea expressed by Immanuel Kant:
The idea that we have no access to objective reality but only our subjective models to work with is Kant 101.
Gary cites David Hume:
Hume had already emphasized that we have no access to the objective world…
The comments Gary develops in his post stem from his reading of the abstract of an article about Stephen Hawking’s abandonment of “belief in the ability of science to describe reality in favor of a model-dependent account of truth.” [The cited language is the abstract’s].
Gary takes what could be a scary notion and expands it in a positive direction in succinct, resounding terms:
… Because we share… common subjective strategies of organizing reality, we can communicate meaningfully… Science still gives… valuable, usable insights about our shared interpretation of reality… All the things we value are still valuable…
I haven’t read any of the great works of philosophy (Wittengenstein’s Tractatus lost me on page 2. Fools rush in!), but I’m most receptive to Gary’s raising of the topic and to his handling of it. It feels right and necessary to engage with such matters, especially in a time of civic mourning when the life of the mind reasserts its primacy.
I like to reflect on two slants to the concept of lack of access to objective reality which dawned on me.
One slant is the implication that simply stating that we can’t get to it concedes that an objective (or “transcendent”?) reality exists; it’s locked away from us for assorted reasons. This seems to lead most readily in a theological direction; the Quran, for example, strongly affirms faith-driven submission to “the Hidden.”
A second slant could imply that saying we’ve no access to objective reality is a way of saying that there is none; that, stated crudely, it’s possible we invent our world(s) in our minds — but let’s keep examining what we think we see as objectively as we can (it implies). (I heard in a BBC4 podcast that Dr. Johnson said to Boswell concerning claims that Hume’s idea was irrefutable, “I refute it thus!” and proceeded to slam his walking stick down on something lying in his path until it — the stick or the thing — shattered.)
I make no claim for the intellectual rigor of either of these “slants” as I’ve stated them, but I do find it extremely fruitful to think as deeply as I can, in an embracing frame of mind, about both approaches. One slant foments inquiry that presupposes a Creator, the other slant favors inquiry that doesn’t. Both are enriching. Down the line they may converge, led there in centuries to come by the progeny of Hawking. The long view must be taken, and the long view is in short supply in our moment.
The opportunities which both slants open up to creative thought have occupied reflective humans since our recorded origins. No models built over millenia of cogitation are disposable, be it said. Nihil humanum mihi alienum est. But let’s have no more analogs to crucifixion and burning at the stake. That behavior doesn’t help anyone think. Never has. Never will.
(c) 2024 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved