The worst way to defeat a social or cultural ill is to declare war on it. The U.S. declares war on problems it can’t or won’t solve.
The worst way to foster a social or cultural good is to declare a recurring calendar date for it. Doing so acknowledges a thing to be perennially moribund.
So this April is the 25th anniversary of National Poetry Month. Margaret Renkl writes:
Many Americans… feel they can get along just fine without poetry. But tragedy… can change their minds about that… The poets are forever telling us to look for this kind of peace, to stuff ourselves with sweetness, to fill ourselves up with loveliness.
(Margaret Renkl, “Thank God for the Poets,” NYTimes, 5-5-21)
Bless her heart, she means well, as we say in the South. I’m sure you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing when National Poetry Month was declared. I don’t.
Poetry is a curious hubbub kicked up by a tiny few, noticed if at all by a tiny few more. Oblivion is guaranteed, and have a nice minute. Poetry’s for that. “I am not resigned,” says Edna St. Vincent Millay from the grave. Good luck with that, Ms. Millay. This world will flame out by and by. Poetry’s for that.
I simply can’t express, other than with petulance, what a downer to the impulse towards poetry a pious paean to it such as Ms. Renkl’s well-intentioned one can be.
My conviction and hope is that, if poetry lands a blow at all, it’s as much to fuck me up in my complacent brine and set me back on my heels as to nurse me through my godawful present or penultimate moments. There’s no way anyone under the age of ancient will bother to look at it if it’s in order merely to gorge on putative gobs of goodness.
Amanda Gorman’s Inaugural poem did what it had to do, which was to put a scrappy, uplifting vibe on a happy occasion. Ms. Gorman, after all, intends to run for president. The launch will stand her in good stead failing some reversal of fortune. I hope to have a chance to vote for her. The last president-poet we had was Lincoln. Perhaps we could use another. Will my grandkids revere “The Hill We Climb” like I revere the Gettysburg Address? Doubt springs eternal.
But back to National Poetry Month: don’t forget to thank the Devil for it.
(c) 2021 JMN
EthicalDative 
Be Paint
… [Clement] Greenberg’s organizing idea was surprisingly simple: modern painting, having ceased to be illustrative, ought to be decorative. Once all the old jobs of painting—portraying the bank president, showing off the manor house, imagining the big battle—had been turned over to photography and the movies, what was left to painting was what painting still did well, and that was to be paint.
(Adam Gopnik, “Helen Frankenthaler and the Messy Art of Life,” http://www.newyorker.com, 4-12-21)
I’m as susceptible as the next person to sweeping statements that seem to capture the essence of a thing or a moment. I’m not versed nearly enough in art crit lit to slot pronouncements informedly into the historical flow of it. It’s likely that the trope of letting paint be paint is quaint now, set aside for something in the vein of performance art, or re-entry into a militant mode of depictivism, or who knows?
What snagged me in the quotation was the adjective “decorative” and the premise that certain “old jobs” of painting were considered to have been relinquished to other media. Interesting. Is that still held to be the case about painting?
By way of postscript: It perplexes me that an article such as this in The New Yorker isn’t illustrated by a single one of Frankenthaler’s paintings. Also, when I returned to the link I had saved initially, the article was re-titled “Fluid Dynamics.”
(c) 2021 JMN