December 2008

Darkness at High Noon

By in jests japes jokes jollies, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

How fitting that the Great Purge should begin with Comrade Bushkov, the man who hung the “Grand Re-Opening! Under New Management!” signs out in front of former Soviet gulags. The system will eat itself!

The divisions taking hold among Republicans are becoming more severe as the party prepares to accuse its outgoing president of embracing “socialism.”

…At its meeting next month, the Republican National Committee is set to vote on a resolution formally opposing the bailouts, accusing Bush of helping nationalize the banks and taking “another dangerous step closer toward socialism,” the Washington Times reports Tuesday.

Dove That Ventured Outside

By in poetry No Comments

I forget exactly how this became a little tradition of mine, but I always like to read this poem by Rilke every New Year’s Eve. Maybe it’s the theme of change over time that appeals to me at this reflective time of year. Translation by Stephen Mitchell:

Dove that ventured outside, flying far from the dovecote:
housed and protected again, one with the day, the night,
knows what serenity is, for she has felt her wings
pass through all distance and fear in the course of her wanderings.

The doves that remained at home, never exposed to loss,
innocent and secure, cannot know tenderness;
only the won-back heart can ever be satisfied: free,
through all it has given up, to rejoice in its mastery.

Being arches itself over the vast abyss.
Ah, the ball that we dared, that we hurled into infinite space,
doesn’t it fill our hands differently upon its return:
heavier by the weight of where it has been.

********************
Taube, die draußen blieb, außer dem Taubenschlag,
wieder in Kreis und Haus, einig der Nacht, dem Tag,
weiß sie die Heimlichkeit, wenn sich der Einbezug
fremdester Schrecken schmiegt in den gefühlten Flug.

Unter den Tauben, die allergeschonteste,
niemals gefährdetste, kennt nicht die Zärtlichkeit;
wiedererholtes Herz ist das bewohnteste:
freier durch Widerruf freut sich die Fähigkeit.

Über dem Nirgendssein spannt sich das Überall.
Ach der geworfene, ach der gewagte Ball,
füllt er die Hände nicht anders mit Wiederkehr:
rein um sein Heimgewicht ist er mehr.

In Praise of Polyhymnia

By in music No Comments

I know, it’s a pretentious post title, but I didn’t want to call it something generic like “Best Albums of 2008”. I’m just jazzing it up a little. That’s how I roll.

At any rate, I was going to aim for the usual ten or so, but I realized that I really didn’t hear ten great albums released this year. Many of the ones I was eagerly anticipating turned out to be uninspired (Dandy Warhols, Earth to the Dandy Warhols), uneven (TV on the Radio, Dear Science), or just plain bad (Primal Scream, Beautiful Future). So I’ll just list what occurs to me, and maybe throw in some other notable discs that weren’t actually released this year, but I played the hell out of anyway.

Beck, Modern Guilt

I was overjoyed to finally hear of the release date for this back in the summer, but that was quickly tempered by fear: how could this possibly follow the sublime one-two punch of Guero and The Information? I utterly worship those records; should I just steel myself to accept that chances are he’ll never be that good again and just enjoy whatever moments he can still offer? Well, I’m happy to report that I don’t have to cross that bridge for a while yet. The biggest disappointment for me was the album’s brevity, barely more than a half-hour long, while on the plus side, songs like “Profanity Prayers” and “Soul of a Man” are as good as anything he’s ever recorded, and several others aren’t too shabby either. The worst of Beck is still better than the best of many other artists.

Favorite songs: Profanity Prayers, Soul of a Man, Volcano, Replica

The Vines, Melodia

The pop sensibilities and psychedelica of the Beatles mixed with the bipolar punk of Nirvana, sometimes in the same song. Their first disc, Highly Evolved, cast a shadow that the subsequent three haven’t quite escaped from, but Craig Nicholls still writes great songs within those boundaries.

Favorite Songs: A Girl I Knew, A.S. 3, Orange Amber

Tribe After Tribe, M.O.A.B.

African acid rock. That’s how Robbi Robb described their music way back when, and I guess it suits as well as any label can. I couldn’t possibly detail all the ways he and his band have influenced me. I bought their record Love Under Will on June 14th, 1994. I still remember the date because…well, because it was one of those life-altering events that make it impossible to forget where you were and what was going on. It was so heavy, but in a percussive way, not like the wall-of-guitar sound I was used to hearing from metal bands. The lyrics were abstractly poetic without being completely impenetrable. I spent months listening to it every single day, and always seemed to find something new in one of the songs. It changed not only the way I wrote music and poetry myself, but the way I thought about and understood music, for that matter. The only other two records I could name that had a comparable effect were Metallica’s …And Justice For All and Type O Negative’s October Rust.

A decade and a half later, they’re thankfully still at it, even though I had to buy the album through his website thanks to a lack of distribution – isn’t that always the way of it? In a just world, this band would be a household name.

Favorite song: Burning Bush

Econoline Crush, Ignite

Last I had heard, their criminally overlooked 2001 album Brand New History was their swan song, but I heard of this one shortly after it had been released (late last year, technically). Picked up right where they left off, they did. I’ve always loved that Trevor Hurst’s voice sounds like Ian Astbury of The Cult mixed with…new wave influence, maybe? Something ’80s, I just can’t quite place it. Sharp, punchy alternative rock with a little electronic feel added in. Bonus fun fact: a friend of mine saw these guys in a club many years ago, and the local paper had screwed up the time and date of the gig. Combined with their invisibility on most music fans’ radar, this led to no one being there for the show but the aforementioned friend of mine. Rather than go back to the van or motel to sulk, they decided to treat it as a rehearsal and played their entire set while he watched, then hung out and shot the breeze with him for a while afterwards. Super cool guys.

Favorite songs: Get Out of the Way, The Love You Feel

King’s X, XV

The legendarily underappreciated Texas trio, King’s X. Almost every rock musician knows and reveres them, but that’s never translated into record sales. They’ve got it all except mainstream success. Other friends of mine have gotten to open for them and share the stage for a couple songs, even, and once again, great guys. Fifteen releases later, they show no signs of letting up, and thank goodness for that.

Favorite songs: Go Tell Somebody, I Just Want to Live

Ladytron, Velocifero

European electro-pop. I didn’t like it at first listen, but then it grew on me. Another one of those where the expectations are so high, it’s almost a sure thing that you’ll be initially let down, and that was the case here. I still don’t think it’s their best overall, but the song “Versus” would be good enough to cancel out ten more shitty songs.

Favorite songs: Versus, Ghosts

Best New Old Band of the Year: Folk Implosion

How the hell did I miss these guys back in the late ’90s? I heard the song “Natural One” on the radio one day this past summer, recognized it, thought, “Hey, I like that song, I should find out who it is and look them up,” and so I did. Nothing extraordinary, just great alternative rock with Lou Barlow’s subdued, almost insecure voice tucked away inside it somewhere.

Honorable Mentions:

Sigur Rós, Með Suð í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust

Takk..and Ágætis Byrjun will always be the gold standard for me when it comes to these guys, but while this may not be on the same level, it’s still Sigur Rós. ‘Nuff said.

Favorite song: Inní mér syngur vitleysyngur

The Fratellis, Here We Stand

Good ol’ raucous rock ‘n’ roll. Not quite as good as Costello Music to me, but still fun, and that’s all that matters here.

Favorite songs: Mistress Mabel, Jesus Stole My Baby

VAST, BangBandSixxx

Jon Crosby leaves behind his folk-traveling minstrel experiments for a return to the industrial/electronic rock that he started with. Favorite song: Lift Me Up

Eisbrecher, Sünde

German tanz-metal, slightly – and I mean slightly – less skull-crushing than, say, Rammstein. Favorite songs: Kuss, This is Deutsch

The Black Crowes, Warpaint

The roots-rocking, rabble-rousing brothers Robinson finally got back together and put out something new, hilariously taking a bite out of Maxim in the process. Once again, this doesn’t compare for me to their best work (Amorica and Three Snakes and One Charm), but I still enjoy it and think the Crowes deserve better than to be constantly slagged off as Stones/Faces ripoffs. Favorite songs: Oh Josephine, Locust Street

The Oceanic Whisper

By in art, books, foolosophy, music, nietzsche, poetry, socmed, solitude No Comments

The more we think about all that has been and will be, the paler grows that which is. If we live with the dead and die with them in their death, what are our ‘neighbors’ to us then? We grow more solitary, and we do so because the whole flood of humanity is surging around us. The fire within us, which is for all that is human, grows brighter and brighter – and that is why we gaze upon that which immediately surrounds us as though it had grown more shadowy and we had grown more indifferent to it. But the coldness of our glance gives offense!

Behavior that is excited, noisy, inconsistent, nervous constitutes the antithesis of great passion: the latter, dwelling within like a dark fire and there assembling all that is hot and ardent, leaves a man looking outwardly cold and indifferent and impresses upon his features a certain impassivity. Such men are, to be sure, occasionally capable of neighbor love – but it is a kind different from that of the sociable and anxious to please: it is a gentle, reflective, relaxed friendliness; it is though they were gazing out of the windows of their castle, which is their fortress and for that reason also their prison – to gaze into what is strange and free, into what is different, does them so much good!

— Nietzsche

But the really reckless were fetched by an older, colder voice, the oceanic whisper: “I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing. That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; there are only the various envies, all of them sad.”

— W.H. Auden

Cool article. My favorite part:

“Solitude is a healthy way of being alone with oneself. One engages in an inner dialogue,” Dumm says. “One of the things that our culture really tries to discourage is thinking, reflection, seriousness. I think that we have to have more confidence in our ability to be thoughtful people. We spend an enormous amount of time worrying about ourselves, but not an awful lot of time caring for ourselves. Caring for ourselves means thinking very seriously and carefully about the conditions under which we’re living our lives, and how others are living theirs, and taking instruction from the way that others have lived their lives.”

The part I would take issue with:

While technology has given us all sorts of novel ways to connect and stay in touch — from Facebook to texting to Twitter — Cacioppo contends that such digital communications are great if they facilitate and enhance face-to-face interactions, but they can increase feelings of loneliness if they are a substitution for in-person interaction. He compares online communication as a balm to loneliness to eating celery when you’re hungry; it’s food, but it’s not going to fill you up like a nutritious meal.

I’ve always been a solitary person, content to spend hours or even days alone with only superficial social contact, and I’ve never considered it a problem. Others have, as I’ve been accused of being everything from rude to mute to mentally retarded for my tendency to speak very little to strangers or mild acquaintances, and then only when spoken to. I have very little ability or patience for meaningless small talk, and wish other people didn’t feel the need to drown out the sound of the wind whistling through their heads by jabbering about nothing in particular. I am definitely one of those who most often feels “lonely” in a crowd or a social gathering where I don’t really have time or freedom to be alone with my thoughts. I don’t know whether it’s a question of being overly cerebral or intellectual (not in the “good lord, I sure am a genius” sense, but in the sense of being analytical and dispassionate) or perhaps some genetic factors, but it is as close to being an essential part of my being as I think a person can have. Personally, the Internet (and especially the blogs) has been a godsend for a social misfit like me. I suppose I would be considered by Cacioppo to be one of those who use it as a substitute for face-to-face interaction, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I’ve found just as much, if not even more intellectual stimulation and interesting characters online in the last several years than I have in the previous few decades of real life. I feel just as much affection for Roy Edroso, Scott & S.Z. Heywood J. and IOZ as people I encounter in the course of a day; maybe in a different way, but no less meaningful. I wouldn’t claim that I “know” people I interact with on the blogs in the same way that I would in person, but who cares? This sort of medium allows you to distill the most interesting parts of what people are all about, their better essence, without the dross that makes up much of their lives. I don’t “know” the artists whose work I treasure either, but my life is no less enriched just because I haven’t seen them sitting around in their underwear scratching themselves. In fact, that might lessen the effect they’ve had on me, might diminish some of the magic. I don’t doubt that for most people, they need to regularly see a smiling face or feel a warm body near theirs to feel well-adjusted, but I’ll take passionate written exchanges of ideas over up-close-and-personal yammering about the weather any day and feel completely satisfied.

“When evening comes, I return to my home, and I go into my study; and on the threshold, I take off my everyday clothes, which are covered with mud and mire, and I put on regal and curial robes; and dressed in a more appropriate manner I enter into the ancient court, of ancient men and am welcomed by them kindly, and there I taste the food that alone is mine, and for which I was born and there I am not ashamed to speak to them, to ask them the reasons for their actions, and they, in their humanity, answer me; and for four hours I feel no boredom, I dismiss every affliction, I no longer fear poverty nor do I tremble at the thought of death; I become completely part of them.”

— Machiavelli

Speaking of art…I’ve been single for the last few years, and long ago passed the grace period where people left you alone out of respect for a recently failed long-term relationship. Now I get hints from everyone from my mom to my friends, who ask if I’m dating again, who was that girl they saw me talking to, don’t I get lonely around this time of year, and so on. It’s a shame that thanks to centuries of moping Romantics, the epigones of Young Werther disingenuously turning all the best reasons for being a lone wolf into hackneyed clichés, nothing I could say won’t sound like sour grapes or desperate posing or overcompensating. But the truth is, I realized some time ago that music is what makes me happier than anything on earth, with literature a close second. The most transcendent moments I’ve ever experienced have been in the grip of a song or a beautiful passage in a book. I know what it’s like to be in romantic love, of course, and I’ve had moments in a relationship where I felt very happy and content, but still, that sublime sense of dissolving in something much bigger than my tiny ego, of almost existing temporarily somewhere beyond space and time – that belongs to art. Perhaps for all the pleasure Nietzsche has given me with his grandiose, bombastic literary style and quirky insights into the nooks and crannies of life that make me laugh at the discovery of things I never would have thought of on my own, I’m moving more towards a Schopenhauerish view of life, to escape the horrors of the world via the contemplation of art. (I haven’t thrown any talkative old ladies down a flight of stairs yet, but there’s still plenty of time for that.)

So, yes – I might be the only person bounded in the nutshell of my house on Christmas Day, but as long as I have a rack full of CDs and shelves full of books, I will count myself a king of infinite space.

Honestly, Abe?

By in old dixie No Comments

The broader point of Digby’s post is fine with me, but when it comes to “anti-Lincoln cranks”, allow me to put forth an alternative view: I think Lincoln was one of the worst presidents for not letting the South secede in the first place. Seriously, why do we venerate the guy? He made clear many times that he only cared about keeping the union together, he had views of blacks that would make Strom Thurmond applaud, he freed the slaves as a tactical manuever, not a moral one, and thanks to that stupid fucking move of keeping the southern states in the union by force, we’re still cursed a century and a half later with recalcitrant, angry, anti-intellectual rednecks who insist on voting their prejudices and bitter resentments. If he had let them go, they would have eventually noticed their northern neighbors enjoying luxuries like basic literacy, shoes and toilet paper and come crawling back begging to rejoin.

There Must Be Some Mythunderstanding

By in atheism, religion No Comments

Hey, I’d be fine with letting our own snake-handlers have their religion in public schools as long as we could have an alternative like this. Of course, religious instruction in an academic sense has never been the name of the game, just the opportunity to preach to a captive audience while preening and making a spectacle of themselves, despite some fairly clear instructions to the contrary.

O Tempora, O Mores!

By in ohferfucksake, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

This must be some of that post-partisan comity I’ve heard so much about. Ah, it’s nice to see that Sensible Liberals and voices of right-wing reason like the New York Post (headline: Bush Dodges Crazy Iraqi’s Flying Shoes) can come together to sing along with Eric Cartman: Respect mah authoritah, you ungrateful wogs! When we want to hear what you think, we’ll waterboard it out of you!

(My only complaint is that dogs are noble animals, and in no way deserve to be slandered by having George W. Bush named as one of them.)

If it were just one of the dimmer lights at Pandagon, I wouldn’t think too much of it, but I was really amazed to see how many people, bloggers and commenters alike, had a similar reaction as I checked out what several other liberal blogs made of this. Here you have a feeble, impotent expression of rage, of no real threat to anyone, but that didn’t stop people from hyperventilating over the fact that dear lord, one of those barbaric mud-people actually threw something at an elected official of the United States government! (Quick! Back to the safety of the gated community! Where’s those nuclear launch codes?) What if had been a stick of dynamite cleverly disguised to look like a shoe, huh?! What if someone does that to Obama one day, what then?!

(Well, if he actually makes good on all his bellicose threats towards Iran, I’d say flying shoes would be the least of what he would deserve. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.) But all kidding aside, I guess that good old American Exceptionalism runs deep, even in liberals. Hey, if there were any justice in the world, hundreds of our officials would be lined up at the Hague for their war crimes trials, but that’s no reason to get all huffy about it! Don’t you know we’re the indispensable nation?

Seriously, what the fuck do you expect Iraqis to do, send a scathing letter to the editor? Post a vlog on YouTube calling Bush names? It’s fucking obscene for people like this to cluck their tongues disapprovingly at people who have been forced to live through a hell they could never imagine. In fact, just try to do that, you cosseted motherfuckers. Imagine being that weak and powerless. Imagine standing a dozen yards from the smirking monster who had invaded your country using the most risible, transparent lies as a fig leaf, who had sent one entire quarter of your population into exile or an early grave, and ask yourself what you would do. What would you do, you fucking cowards? Stand in line, raise your hand and voice strong reservations about his actions, possibly even ask for an apology?

If Americans had any guts, they’d be pelting this bastard with garbage and rotten fruit any time he stuck his head out in public. Thank goodness not everyone in the world is that meek, frightened and whipped.

Do You Feel Epistemological? Well? Do Ya, Punk?

By in foolosophy, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Grampa Simpson Clint “Steely Gaze of Intellectual Incuriosity” Eastwood says the unexamined life was damn well good enough for the old-timers, so it oughta be good enough for you wisenheimers, and stay outta my yard, you goddamn kids…

Tough guy Clint Eastwood believes America is getting soft around the middle – and the iconic Oscar winner thinks he knows when the problem began.

“Maybe when people started asking about the meaning of life,” Eastwood, 78, growls in the January issue of Esquire.

The actor/director recalls the deeper questions were rarely posed during his Depression-era California childhood – and says that wasn’t a bad thing.

“People barely got by,” Eastwood recounts. “People were tougher then.”

Yeah, living hand-to-mouth and never knowing whether you were going to have food, let alone a job next week will do that to you. Still, I imagine living one of John Calvin’s wet dreams is one of those things that looks a little more bracing, invigorating, and character-building in hindsight; in real time, not so much. As Aristotle himself said* in Nicomachean Ethics, “Fuck you, you cranky old coot.”

*not really.

Simplify, Sim–

By in art, foolosophy, technology, work No Comments

Am I the only one who finds that ironically amusing? Unnecessary repetition in a phrase being used to symbolize the need to strip away superfluous ornamentation and clutter? Perhaps Thoreau was just a student at the School of Redundancy School.

Anyway! I recently had an email correspondence with a former teacher in which she apologized a couple times for her “verbosity” – in this case, writing about three or four good-sized paragraphs per email. It wouldn’t have even been two pages of a book if printed out. I thought, what a shame it is that anyone should feel bad about expecting you to take a whopping several minutes of your day to read something they felt was important enough to share with you. It reminded me of something Susan Jacoby wrote:

E-mail, often cited as the savior of written communication and as a worthy successor to obsolete snail mail, has delivered the coup de grâce to the traditional letter.

…I know this because of the haste and inattentiveness with which my close friends and I approach the reading and writing of our own e-mail today. Neither I, nor anyone I know, turns to e-mail with anything like the sense of anticipation and pleasure that used to accompany my opening of the mailbox. How could we?

…When I receive an e-mail from someone dear to me, I am happy. But the contents usually amount to, “Hi, I was thinking about you when I read this article the other day,” followed by a link. And I answer in the same nondiscursive way. When I first went online, I was excited about e-mail because I thought it would replace the long letters I used to send and receive, but I soon found that lengthy e-mails elicited very brief responses – even when the person was someone who liked me or loved me. So I started replying in kind.

There undoubtedly are a few people who save their e-mail correspondence with good friends and who write e-mails as interesting as the letters many of us used to write during the snail-mail era. For the most part, though, e-mail as a medium really is the message – and the message is short.

I’ve always been one to put a lot of time and effort into my own emails, occasionally saying (and only partially joking) that I aim for them to be events. And I greatly prefer them to handwritten letters – my handwriting is terrible, for one thing, but also for the ability to easily choose aesthetic touches like color, font size and style, and especially for the ability to add hyperlinks, something that I think adds much more depth to an email that wouldn’t be possible in a traditional letter, unless you wanted to have endless footnotes and parenthetical asides, which I’ve always felt makes for a distracting reading experience. I have no problem with the medium at all; it’s just a question of how much effort you care to put into it. The majority of people I write to usually send back terse three-or-four line responses if they bother to respond at all, so I understand Jacoby’s frustration here, but it’s not a question of a monitor versus a piece of paper, or a keyboard versus a pen. My co-blogger Arthur and I have written some incredibly ostentatious emails just for the fun of writing and crafting them. The future may belong to the small mammals texting each other in their retarded lol-speak, but it’s still possible to be a big, plodding thesaurus-saurus and enjoy it. Just make the effort.

S.O.S. texted from a cell phone.
Please tell me I’m not the only one
that thinks we’re taking ourselves too seriously.
Just a little too enamored with inflated self-purpose.

Constant entertainment for our restless minds.
Constant stimulation for epic appetites.

Don’t lose touch.
— Against Me!

Of course, that raises the question of why no one ever makes the effort. Jacoby blames the “culture of distraction”, and I partially agree – the fun ‘n’ games aspect of our wired world certainly places a lot more demand on the attention of people with ever-shortening spans. Who wants to sit at the computer for forty-five minutes concentrating on communicating with one person when you could be instant-messaging several others rapid-fire while watching TV and listening to music in the background?

But the culture of work is where I would mostly look. She looks back fondly on her correspondence with her then-fiancé in the ’60s and is skeptical of the thought of a similar correspondence being possible today through email, but other, more important changes than the means by which we write to each other have occurred since then as well. It’s a cliché, but unfortunately no less true, that people are too busy working all the time to pay (with wages that have been stagnant since the early ’70s) for all the stuff they never have time to enjoy because they’re too busy working, and on and on in an Ourobouran frenzy. One of the greatest philosophers ever, Bill Watterson, noted this in a strip featuring Calvin’s dad, where he groused about how modern technology had only made people expect everything to get done instantaneously, and said that if we wanted more leisure time, we’d invent machines to do things less efficiently. With all the “labor-saving devices” we’ve invented in the last half-century or so, why are we all working longer hours for less money than ever before?

I would just suggest that it’s because few people take a reflective view on life, work and leisure. They never figure out a way to make time for those things, like good conversation and time to relax (not merely collapsing in a vegetative, catatonic state or an alcoholic stupor, but actually relaxing), and by the time they start to wonder how it could be done, they’ve probably got themselves stuck on the hamster wheel of working just a little longer to get a little extra money…only to realize that what was once just a temporary extra effort quickly becomes a required norm, especially once everyone else starts doing it too. Maybe Max Weber was on to something, and we’ve just thoughtlessly inherited a tradition of slaving away beyond all practical need to prevent idle hands from doing the devil’s work, or in the hopes of receiving some slight reassurance by means of material blessings that an insanely hateful, fickle God favored us for a trip to paradise. Maybe we just need to develop a stronger concept of art for art’s own sake in our notoriously practical, no-nonsense business-oriented culture, to do certain things just because they’re inherently fun and valuable, not as means to an end that never comes.

BASHO’S POND: Aphorisms on Poetry and Poets

By in aphorisms, books, language No Comments

Poetry, Eros of Absence.—The sixth sense is the sense of loss. The ab-sense.
*
Advice to a Bad Poet.—Try to write a bad poem. You may write a good one by mistake.
*
Poetry humiliates ideas: it runs them to earth.
*
Poetry is what is gained in mistranslation.
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The Oyster.—Give me one small imperfection and I will build a perfect world around it.
*
Taming the Theorizing Impulse.—Apollo has a frenzy all his own.
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Don’t let your intellect make you stupid.
*
Poets take nothing for granted. This is their gift.
*
Look at the world as it performs itself on the time-lapse film of your imagination and growth and decay are suddenly sudden. The corpse of a deer is hyperactive with a zoo of living things feeding on fruitful rot. As the flower grows it exfoliates so quickly you can see it turning inside out. Finally the death appears, that which was innermost and most germane; now it is like ripeness from the seed.
*
A poet is a topological magician who turns things inside out to demonstrate their true properties; before our very eyes they bare the life and death inside them as a single thing.
*
Poets are closer to Heaven than the rest of us and also closer to the ground. Sacred and a bit silly. Monkey gods…
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Poet: More godlike and more monkey than the rest of us. (Stevens: a touch of the peasant).
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The poet: a kind of god. A kind of dog.
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Animals walk on all fours. Poets walk on all metaphors.
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Language: the clew and the labyrinth.
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The paths that thread this wilderness of words are made of words.
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Theseus, look down at the thread you are holding: fiber within fiber, it too is a labyrinth.
*
Piranesi.—The labyrinth has no hope, it is lost, it has given up on itself. What you are threading is the structure of despair.
*
The anti-taxonomy that is poetry picks apart dense categories, like balls of thread, into the separate filaments of their exceptions: oddities, hybrids, border phenomena, the hapax legemenon, the lusus naturae. These threads are then reassembled in Borges’ Emperor’s Catalogue.
*
Words bead at the mouth of the world like the fat dew of the honeysuckle.
*
Analyzing great poets is like shining a flashlight into a Klieg light. They illuminate us almost infinitely more than vice-versa.
*
Wilde Reading Dante in Prison.—When he looked down at the paper, his eyes, whose powers of resolution suffering had greatly magnified, saw not the lines but that which lay under and between the lines: an intricate cross-weave of fibers resembling worms, or rope.
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Wilde’s sin was to live in the world as if it was his private Eden.
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Pose was Wilde’s repose.
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Because Wilde refused to take anything solemnly we assume he took nothing seriously. This is a mistake.
*
There is a certain kind of poetry, full of a desperate cleverness, a plangent sophistication of philosophical abstractions, a snarky academic hipness, and dark intimations of Foucaultian knowingness, that can only be called “grad studenty.”
*
The plop of the frog in Basho’s pond: the splash the poet makes. The sound of one hand clapping: the poet’s fame.
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Entertainers amuse, poets bemuse.
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Poetry is the most beautiful vampire that has ever known me.
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Once you have run through the totality of rhymes for a word you seem to have exhausted the totality of the world (insofar as it has no totality).
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A poem is an actor narrating the story of itself. It must deliver its lines flawlessly or we will not suspend our disbelief in it.
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In poetry, a poised complexity of tone is one of the last signs of mastery. Just as in learning a foreign language one masters intonation last of all.
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We are too hip to want to write a “classic” anymore. We only want to write something that will have an influence and be remembered. In other words, a classic.
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If you are willing to spend hours, or perhaps days, or perhaps years, worrying over the arrangement of three words, or the choice between two words, or the choice between one word and no words at all, then perhaps you will become a writer.
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Some of us are authors only in order to be readers. No one is writing the books we want to read, so we write them ourselves.
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A poem should end a little abruptly, a little sooner than it should. This frees its profoundest reverberations. A too-neat closure would merely trap them inside the poem. You wouldn’t feel them in your bones.
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A poem should stop just short of where you expect. If the poem were a car, you would be thrown slightly forward in your seat. You would suddenly feel the forces at work, their weight and speed and power. You would feel shocked—pleasantly shocked.
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Poetry teaches you what you are. Not in a pedantic way, more like the rope around Villon’s neck: It will teach my neck the weight of my ass.
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All poetry is experimental poetry.
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Poetry offers the naked poverty of everything but its excess.
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A great poem seen through the prism of a mediocre imagination looks impossibly awkward, like a whale in a swimming pool.
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Sometimes the part of you that only wants to write meets the part of the world that only wants to be written. Poetry is a kind of dating service for words and things.
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Writing is the art of writing down precisely what you did not know you meant until you wrote it down.
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Revising constantly is like playing a game of chess in which you get to take every move over and over again until your opponent finally resigns. At this rate, monkeys would defeat Grand Masters. (Perhaps the same monkeys who wrote the works of Shakespeare?)
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Poets are intellect’s ombudsmen.
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Poet’s Skepticism.—Sure it works, but does it look good on paper?
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The poet’s syllogism: I think, therefore iamb.
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The poet, that symbol-minded fellow.
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Dryden and Pope discovered the grandeur of stupidity.
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Blake, a brilliant mystic, hated the intellectually sophisticated with a sophisticated passion.
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Poe: three-quarter poet.
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Is it still possible to celebrate our American days through the sunlight of Whitman’s profane Ordinaries?
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Frost hid behind the mask of having no mask.
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It has been said that in America you are either a saint or a stranger. Stevens disguised himself as one of the saints, the better to survive among them as a stranger.
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Stevens.—Every poem is a last look at the ducks.
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The more puzzled and puzzling Ashbery’s poems appear to us, the more we believe in their authenticity. A kind of confidence game in reverse.
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The frightening fecundity of Neruda’s early work: each line contains several poems, each word several lines of poetry.
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Neruda as Walt Whitman as Magic Realist.—A torrent of surreal metaphors, each one born pregnant with other metaphors, all pushing for an explosive birth, in a war of extravagances—and here and there in the storm of these dreams, he is sitting in the barber’s chair, dropping off his clothes at the dry cleaner’s…
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Rimbaud.—I is not only another, I is several others, including me, myself, and I forget the other. This causes a systematic derangement of the census.
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A way with words? Away with words!
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I own the copyright to my poems, not their meaning.
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Beware doctrine, beware theories. The poem knows better than you do what the poem is about. It does not take orders from the Ministry of Meaning.
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There is meanness in expecting everything to mean. And a kind of mediocrity.
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The power of poetry is not that it gives us metaphors but that it gives us metaphors that turn out not to be.
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The silences in a poem say more than what is said.
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The poet makes words out of the absence of words.
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The mockingbird’s cadenza has no beginning and reaches past its ending as if it had no end.

Arthur Chapin

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