The Pain of Poetry

Posted on August 20, 2020 by JMN
“The Kiss,” 16×20 in. oil on canvas (JMN 2020)

My correspondent in life of the mind states my state of mind neatly and plainly in the matter of phosphorescent gargoyle exhalations swaddled in effulgent gossamer — I mean to say prosody.

Now I remember why I, and doubtless others give up on poetry. I made the mistake of thinking, “I’ll Google free verse”. Then I follow countless links as words/concepts appear that I’m not sure of – metre, foot, stressed, unstressed. I get lost, I get befuddled, I get distressed, I lose the will to go further. Maybe it is wise for some of us to avoid prosody and experience poetry solely through poetry.

Why not crunch free verse with a montage of Wiki-pedantry?

Free verse… is not considered to be completely free… The only freedom cadenced verse obtains is a limited freedom… Free verse contains… the poetic line, which may vary freely… No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job… Free verse may be written as very beautiful prose… Verse cannot be free in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principles… The free verse that is really verse… is, in its peculiar fashion, the antithesis of free… Pattern and discipline is to be found in good free verse… Technically, free verse has been described as spaced prose…

Also technically, free verse came from “vers libre,” which is French for “free verse.”

The unit of vers libre is not the foot, the number of the syllables, the quantity, or the line. The unit is the strophe, which may be the whole poem, or only a part. Each strophe is a complete circle. Vers libre is… based upon cadence that allows the lines to flow as they will when read aloud by an intelligent reader.”

Unintelligent readers need not apply.

As for the strophe, the “unit” of vers libre, ancient Greece is more instructive. In dramas, the chorus walked first to the left, then to the right, then stood still. The leftward walk was the strophe.

(c) 2020 JMN

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‘Kind of Enough’

Posted on August 19, 2020 by JMN
Mr. Kinori chalks patterns onto fabric. Credit… Jason Henry for The New York Times.

If most of what [Evan] Kinori makes costs a lot (shirts start at $285; pants at $365; and jackets at $525), it is in part because they are produced in such limited quantities… “My design ethos is basically geared toward people not buying stuff all the time,” Mr. Kinori said.

In his 20s and armed, if that is the word, with a liberal arts education with specialties in philosophy and French, he decided to enroll in the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, a local school with a heavy emphasis on the trades… Careful, deliberate, free of ostentation, handmade… [Kinori’s clothes] are cut from patterns he devises himself and sewn with French seams on single-needle machines… When he works, he thinks less about the demands of the industrial fashion machine than a desire to create durable objects.

Credit… Jason Henry for The New York Times.

“I love clothes, I love making clothes, I love presenting clothes,” Mr. Kinori said… “Intuition is my home place 100 percent. Building up a story and a spirit with an object is what I’m after. I don’t know that there is much more to it. That’s kind of enough.”

(Guy Trebay, “Want to Make It Big in Fashion? Think Small,” NYTimes, 8-19-10)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Finicky Finger-Wag

Posted on August 18, 2020 by JMN
Jose Altuve has struggled at the plate this season. Credit… David J. Phillip/Associated Press.

Until then, many are relishing in his struggles and those of his team: The Astros, who reached the World Series last season, were 12-10 and battling for second place in the American League West just over a third of the way through the season.

Let’s make that either “relishing his struggles” or “reveling in his struggles.” These two semi-rhyming verbs are not switch hitters.

(David Waldstein, “Even in a Pandemic, Everyone Still Hates the Astros,” NYTimes, 8-18-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Tweet Storm Testicle Taint

Posted on August 18, 2020 by JMN
Tom Jones.

Spanish leftist leader Pablo Iglesias praised U.S. television writer David Simon’s latest series “The Plot Against America” on Twitter, saying the series showed that fascism was never far away.

Iglesias’s tweet provoked “a flurry of responses in praise of and attacking Spain’s own fascist regime under Francisco Franco.”

Simon, who had no idea who Iglesias is, noticed his name being mentioned “in hundreds of subsequent posts, as Twitter users traded insults in Spanish and Catalan.”

He retweeted Iglesias’s message with the comment: “So, if my poor Spanish holds, this fellow liked the bent of a miniseries and tagged me. And so now into a second day, my Twitter feed is full of Francoists and Catalunyans screaming at each other in languages not my own. Well okay. It’s 1937 again. Fuck the fascists. No pasaran.”

Simon received a complimentary message “Olé tus cojones” (Hooray for your balls!) which he misunderstood to mean “Your balls stink” — the Spanish verb “to smell” is “oler.”

Simon responded “by insulting the sender’s mother until someone explained that olé isn’t related to oler, the verb to smell.”

“Okay, so I’ve wasted the entire morning insulting the mothers and rhetorical paucity of Spanish fascists and Francoists on Twitter,” Simon eventually concluded. “But I have learned that ‘smell your balls’ is actually a compliment. So it’s a bit of a break-even.”

(Stephen Burgen, “Wire creator David Simon causes stink in Spanish Twitter translation balls-up,” theguardian.com, 8-12-20)

My chief takeaway from this scoop of Twitter poop is:

In the end, what part of “olé isn’t related to oler, the verb to smell” did David Simon fail to understand?

(c) 2020 JMN

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‘A Difference That Adds Up’

Posted on August 16, 2020 by JMN
The artist Luchita Hurtado with some of her work in 2018. Her work spanned Surrealism, Mexican muralism, feminism and environmentalism. Credit… Laure Joliet.

In 2019, the Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London hosted the first international retrospective of Ms. Hurtado’s art, “I Live I Die I Will Be Reborn.” Reviewing it in The Guardian, Adrian Searle wrote, “Vitality, tenderness, spookiness, intimacy, gawkiness, sexiness, subtlety, anger, jazzy abstractions, totemic figures, near monochromes, word paintings and the acutely observed come one after the other.”

Untitled, oil on canvas, 1969. Credit… Luchita Hurtado/Hauser & Wirth; photo by Jeff McLane.

“When I think about my painting and the political and the planet,” she told the artist Andrea Bowers in a 2019 interview, “it’s about the hope that it’s not too late and that people can still get together and in whatever small way make a difference that adds up.”

(Karen Rosenberg, “Luchita Hurtado, Artist Who Became a Sensation in Her 90s, Dies at 99,” NYTimes, 8-14-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Mother Power

Posted on August 15, 2020 by JMN
A page from Lyndon Johnson’s senior year college yearbook. Credit… Corbis, via Getty Images.

The “club” of Sarah Vowell’s title is clarified in the subtitle of this article: “They’re the graduates of public universities, and they’ve stepped into the void of presidential leadership.”

President Lyndon Johnson was a graduate of Southwest Texas State College in San Marcos, now named Texas State University. He signed the Higher Education Act of 1965 there, landmark legislation which “provided colleges funds for teachers, equipment and libraries, and offered needy students Pell grants, loans and jobs in the work-study program.”

“This is a proud moment in my life,” Mr. Johnson said that day. “I am proud to have a part in the beginning that this bill provides, because here a great deal began for me some 38 years ago on this campus… I worked at a dozen different jobs, from sweeping the floors to selling real silk socks. Sometimes I wondered what the next day would bring that could exceed the hardship of the day before. But with all of that, I was one of the lucky ones — and I knew it even then.” He urged the students and faculty before him, “You should carry the memory and the meaning of this moment with you throughout your life.”

(Sarah Vowell, “Joe Biden and the Great Leaders of 2020 Are Part of a Club,” NYTimes, 8-13-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Extreme Centrality. Yeah

Posted on August 14, 2020 by JMN

Credit… Mason Trinca for The New York Times.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said he occupied the “extreme right-wing edge of the left-wing movement.” If that’s good enough for Isaiah Berlin, it’s good enough for me.

(David Brooks, “This Is Where I Stand,” NYTimes, 8-13-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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About the Stag

Posted on August 10, 2020 by JMN
“Holding On,” 24×36 in. oil on canvas (JMN 2020)

The poem is “Entire Known World So Far” by Carl Phillips (Poetry, July/August 2020).

I share thoughts about my readings with a correspondent who returned the following in email:

The part of the poem you copied out – where it talks of the wind, I had pictures in my mind of clouds with faces of puffed out cheeks blowing a ship along, as to be found in children’s books, but nothing, no nothing, came to mind with stags at the helm. I did like the sudden zoom-in to a dog’s underpaw though. I can see why poetry bewilders so many people and puts them off from engaging with it. It is not clear what is expected of the reader, there is a great anxiety of not getting it and being stupid, but also distrust at being thought stupid. Also laziness and an unwillingness to engage with things we don’t know what they are immediately. It is amazing how poetry has continued with all this against it! If you discover more about the stag, let me know.

Here is the part of the poem I copied out:

What’s meant to be wind emerges from what’s / presumably a god’s mouth, as if people / thought that way, once, as I have read they did, / though I have never believed it. Yes, / the stag inexplicably there on a raft / at sea, how the light catches in the runneled / fur of a dog’s underpaw as he steers / across dream; yes, the gods and their / signs if you want everywhere — // but the wind is the wind.

My correspondent says succinctly what I create pretentious language to skirt — that most of the poems I am reading in Poetry (the magazine) lose me in varying degrees — leave me feeling fallen flat, left out, perplexed, unfulfilled.

I only know to keep letting it happen and to question how and why poets do this, then to distill my baffled gleanings in evasive blog posts along the way.

The poem says other things and ends with this:

But the world is not like a human body. // Or the dark that, just past twilight, overtakes a canyon. // Or the shiver of sleigh bells on the collar / of an invisible donkey scratching itself / in the dark, / in the cold of it — // donkey bells…

The ending ellipsis is the poem’s, not mine. I’ve discovered nothing more about the stag, by the way.

(c) 2020 JMN

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Not Enough Old White Men

Posted on August 10, 2020 by JMN
A line of people in June seeking help in Kentucky with their unemployment claims. Credit… Bryan Woolston/Reuters.

… The working-class emphasis is the only way out of the demographic doom loop. If the party sticks with its old white high school-educated base, it will die. They just aren’t making enough old white men. To have any shot of surviving as a major party, the G.O.P. has to build a cross-racial alliance among working-class whites, working-class Hispanics and some working-class Blacks.

(David Brooks, “Where Do Republicans Go from Here?” NYTimes, 8-7-20)

(c) 2020 JMN

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Welcome, Bone-Breaker

Posted on August 8, 2020 by JMN

The first bearded vulture born among the crags of Spain’s Picos de Europa mountains in 75 years has left the watchful gaze of her parents and taken to the sky.

The chick, named Bienvenida (Welcome), was born in March to Deva, a 10-year-old female, and and Casanova, a 13-year-old male.
…
The bird is known in Spanish as the quebrantahuesos, or bone-breaker, because of the way it drops bones from a great height so they shatter and yield their marrow.

(Sam Jones, “Rare bearded vulture chick born in Picos de Europa flies the nest,” theguardian.com, 8-6-20)

“Rare” because the bird has been hunted to near extinction, as men will do.

(c) 2020 JMN

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