In Aristotle's Poetics, he argues that:
"Character is that which reveals moral purpose, showing what kinds of things a man chooses or avoids" (13).
Furthermore, Aristotle argues that a theme that is "morally hurtful," is to be avoided (58).
But this doesn't necessarily mean that we can't, for instance, "represent degraded women," (59), because "all action is not to be condemned -- any more than all dancing -- but only that of bad performers" (59). I think this means that merely moral objections are not sufficient to can a performance. The work can be aesthetically excellent even if it is representing bad activities such as lewd dancing.
Finally, he argues that good art is that which appeals to the "better sort of audience" (58).
That audience is better on moral terms, or more accustomed to thinking about what constitutes better art?
Or is it not both?
Curtis Faville keeps tweaking me for backing morally substantive art at the expense of aesthetics.
The two have always been intertwined since art is a kind of philosophy at least in Aristotle, if not in Plato. For Plato art is agit-prop for a Spartan state.
Or in Stalinism, art is social realist agit-prop for a Marxist state.
Surrealism wasn't agit-prop, but mined the forbidden aspects of the unconscious in order to create voluptuous emotion in order to create "convulsive beauty" (final page of Breton's novel, Nadja).
Lutheran Surrealism argues for a voluptuous emotion and "convulsive beauty" that is guided by a Lutheran sense of propriety. We argue furthermore that this is one of the delights of Marianne Moore, who is canonical in our terms, as she does not display the "depravity of character" (58) that ruins the verses of Allen Ginsberg (especially in the later poems, where his character is rotten clear through).
All quotes are from Aristotle's Poetics, Dover Thrift Edition, 1997.
Friday, September 25, 2009
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Well, Curtis is wrong.
And the backing of morally empty art for years has eroded the position of the arts in the common mind.
It has, of course, increased the sale of aesthetically empty but morally pleasing art.
Just like, oh everything, when we make it OR we fsck it all to Hell.
It's AND. The work has to be moral and aesthetic.
Of course, that's hard to do, and so a lot of people pooh pooh it in order to be lazy.
We should be allowed to shoot them.
How is Plath's work moral? Just out of curiosity.
I never thought her work had any significant moral sense.
She just kind of beefs about men in general and esp. about her dad. That just strikes me as lazy.
It's like when the Nazis went on and on about the Jews. Or when Ahmadinajad does.
I'm going to pull this from the "No Swan" discussion then:
Plath references men in her two most famous poems, "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus." I don't think she does this in any way a-morally or inconsistent with the canon (indeed, the diction of both poems owes a great deal to Eliot).
Most of Plath's work can be divided into two camps -- the "precious" -- like "You're" and the universal -- like "Wintering" (or "Blackberrying). Very few of her poems are of the Daddy/Lazarus type (in fact, I think those are about the only two -- maybe "Mad Girl's Love Song," too?).
The morality in Plath's poems is almost always an awe of the power of creation -- the inherent life in all things.
When you talk about her work in the following terms:
"She just kind of beefs about men in general and esp. about her dad. That just strikes me as lazy."
You yourself are being lazy as the vast majority of her work doesn't involve men at all.
Let me take a break from sermon writing and try to find all of her poems in one searchable place.
I'll be Bach.
Plath mentions "father" in the following poems:
Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest
Electra on Azalea Path*
Full Fathom Five*
The Colossus
The Disquieting Muses
Three Women+
"daddy" in
Daddy*+
"husband" in
Face Lift
Lesbos
Three Women+
Tulips
"man" in
A Life
Among the Narcissi
Berck-Plage
By Candlelight
Cut
Daddy*+
Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest
Electra on Azalea Path*
Face Lift
Faun
Full Fathom Five*
Mary's Song
Never Try to Trick Me with a Kiss+ (sorta)
Sleep in the Mojave Desert
Snakecharmer
Spinster+ (kinda)
Stings
Strumpet Song
The Bee Meeting
The Bull of Bendylaw
The Swarm
Three Women+
Two Campers in Cloud Country
"men" in
Getting There
Goatsucker
Lady Lazarus+ (sorta)
Lesbos
Mad Girl's Love Song+ (sorta)
Night Shift
Sleep in the Mojave Desert
The Dead
The Queen's Complaint
Three Women+
Two Views of a Cadaver Room
Wintering
*is a poem in which a biological father (though not Plath's -- she's not the narrator of her poetry) is prominent -- note that most of them are literary/mythological fathers.
+a poem in which a husband is prominent
I hardly think that less than a dozen poems out of more than 170 counts as an obsession. Far more of the above poems are about children than about fathers and husbands.
Dear Palmer:
I wouldn't mind tasking you to substantiate just how I'm "wrong."
Are you willing to defend Dante, or Milton, or Hopkins, on purely content grounds? You mean to say that we can't measure the value or talent of these writers on grounds other than content?
I question that.
Great writers can convince us through the power of their arguments, or the fullness of their characterizations, even when we may not like the implication of what is being said (or proven). It may indeed be that writers (Milton may be one) fail in their aims and end up convincing us of the opposite of what they intend. Is Satan the hero of Paradise Lost?
No writers are "morally empty," G.M., but morality eventually becomes relative, over time--that is, relative to the fashion and context of its time. We may think Burroughs and Ginsberg and Schuyler and Wieners are morally "corrupt" but even in their corruption, they're demonstrably better writers than most of their contemporaries. You can, of course, set out to "prove" that all art that promulgates a different set of values than your own, is bankrupt or degraded or dissolute (choose your own adjective).
We know that Plath is a great writer, in those terrible few weeks before she took her life, when she entered a sort of psychological "fugue state" in which infernal images rushed into her imagination, and she wrote with white heat. It isn't necessary that we accept the fatalistic implication of her poems (her inspiration) to appreciate the power with which she writes.
It becomes a phenomenon in and of itself--beyond morality, beyond measure.
Kirby:
Curtis Faville keeps tweaking me for backing morally substantive art at the expense of aesthetics.
Me:
the backing of morally empty art for years has eroded the position of the arts in the common mind.
. . .
The work has to be moral and aesthetic.
Of course, that's hard to do, and so a lot of people pooh pooh it in order to be lazy.
You:
Are you willing to defend Dante, or Milton, or Hopkins, on purely content grounds? You mean to say that we can't measure the value or talent of these writers on grounds other than content?
I question that.
. . .
No writers are "morally empty,"
I think one of us is having a reading comprehension problem.
The work has to both come from a moral and aesthetic standpoint.
When I say "moral" I mean "civilization-building." Apart from what presentists would have us believe, "civilization-building" morals have been in existence without major revision since at least the first millennium BC.
Art that works against such morals will always appeal to a certain (degenerate -- think about what the word means) group.
Unfortunately, that group of degenerates has gotten a hold of the art-blessing communities in America over the last 80 years or so -- and so we have art (especially poetry, but no art is immune) that is "morally empty" (and I and JADL would argue aesthetically empty as well but. . .) -- and even if it is aesthetically pleasing, it's only half an art.
Is Satan the hero of Paradise Lost?
I'm assuming you haven't read Paradise Lost? Or you haven't read the follow-up? Satan talks a great game -- because he's Satan. Don't really know how Milton can make the end any clearer:
Some natural tears they dropped, but wiped them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
There place of rest, and Providence there guide:
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
That is, Adam and Eve, saved by the intercession of Jesus (book 11 lines 20 -- 45), can look forward to their new lives (which had nearly been destroyed by Satan). Jesus is the "hero" of Paradise Lost, not Satan.
Satan may be more "interesting" but I think that's the point of well-written villains.
And about Plath, even most of the Ariel poems are not comprised of "infernal images." Moreover, her own construction of Ariel as a book showed that she was interested in rebirth, not death.
I may have discounted Plath too easily. I don't like "sad" poets, either. Her work seems depressing to me. Ooky.
I also don't like UP poets.
Like Kenneth Koch. That seems depressing, too, to me.
I like poets who aren't really proselytizing in terms of whether to approach life through an emotional imbalance of some kind. I prefer poets to be balanced, and to have a sense of humor, when it's appropriate, and to be sad, when it's appropriate, but to otherwise focus on the real world, and to detail it for us!
I love these poems by a French poet named Henry J.-M. Levet which appeared at the turn of the last century. I managed to translate them and get them into a big Australian journal called Jacket.
He only ever published 11 mature poems. It's his entire oeuvre.
They're here:
http://www.jacketmagazine.com/18/levet.html
Morning Song
BY SYLVIA PLATH
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
I like it. Do you think the suicide colors the work, and is itself immoral, and thus, invalidates the work to any degree?
I can't believe she'd leave her children without a mother!
It's hard for me not to think about that when I read the poems, and to feel angry at her.
Well if it helps, Hughes's second wife also killed herself (and her children).
I don't think the suicide colors the work at all. I don't think of Dr. Faustus any differently because Marlowe was a spy who got stabbed in a bar.
Even with a creep like Ginsberg, I discount his work not on his sexual behavior but on the fact that most of it is overblown claptrap.
It also may help to think that the suicide was "accidental" -- that is, she thought the nanny would arrive and save her.
Either way, just try reading the poems for the poems.
No, I can't do that. I also can't read Faustus without thinking of poor crazy Marlowe.
I think the work must be read in the light of the life.
The drama of expecting the help to save one is ever more gross. It's kind of aristocratic to think that the maid should bail you out.
Now I hate her even more.
I think the work must be read in the light of the life.
So you're a Marxist.
Does that mean you hate Mozart's work as well?
Seriously, Kirby. What the fuck.
Music doesn't hav ethe same kind of meaning as lit, but sure.
Actually Marxists do NOT think the life matters at all, only the class, gender, and race of the writer.
I think the whole life matters.
Everything is a kind of autobiography, whether we wish it to be or not.
Kirby—
Let me go back to the title of your piece, "Does Poetry Require a MORAL Dimension?", and tentatively suggest that you've got it backwards.
Let's start with your favorite whipping boy for dissolute poets and poetry, Allen Ginsberg. I hypothesize that his internal moral calculus ran along the following lines:
(1) ordinary people living ordinary lives cannot create art of extraordinary merit.
(2) Therefore, if I want to create art of extraordinary merit, it means that I must not live an ordinary life. Indeed, the more extraordinary my life, the greater my capacity for creating art of extraordinary merit.
(3) I'm not brave enough to live a life of extraordinary bravery, I'm not smart enough to live a life of extraordinary intellectual vigor, and I'm not rich enough to live a life of extraordinary privilege, but what I can do is live a live that radically violates the conventions of my society, and live a life of extraordinary moral rebellion and dissolution.
(4) This foundation of extraordinary moral rebellion and dissolution will both inspire, and ultimately, be justified, by the extraordinary art I will produce. Art is a higher morality.
Reducing this argument to a simple, Ginsbergian, contra-Olsonian thesis, we have,
Poetry requires an immoral dimension.
Phrasing things this way enables us to free ourself from an obligation to defend morality in poetry, and empowers us to directly attack immorality in poetry, and in the life of the poet.
Kirby would certainly note that Marianne Moore is a counterexample to thesis (1) above, falsifying the Ginsbergian argument at its foundation. I'm sure that other counterexamples will come to mind.
Having done so, the Ginsbergian edifice falls: his immorality is not an artistic necessity, but a life-denying choice; and the immorality in his art, far from justifying the immorality in his life, is actually a further debit to his life's account .
I just can not imagine
what you religious right-wing morons
do
with Thms Merton, Frank Samperi, Laozi,
what the hell do you piss-ants know about
Sylvia Plath and her
'trip"?
y'all live in this damn fantasy about your take on som invented, contrived happenstance that is pure hoak-um-poke-um!
etc
Ed,
Is that supposed to contribute?
Stu,
That's an interesting (and potentially damning) way of looking at things.
Kirby,
What else do you think "individuality" is? Moreover, do you refuse to read the Pearl poems or Beowulf or any Homer because we don't know anything about the authors?
poetry is what you make of it
j
Stu, that's a wonderfully clear exposition of my primitively stated thesis.
Yes, I think Ginsberg's illogic went precisely in that manner, and that Moore, indeed, had it right.
GM, I think we can more or less read backward from a work into a life, and that I do think that Homer knew a lot about morality and morals, even if he didn't yet know the one true God.
It's ok and even fine to read people from other traditions, and to read all kinds of other things, for any variety of reasons.
It's ok to read Ginsberg to grasp his bizarre logic.
It's ok to read Tarot deck instructions so as to discover its logic, too.
Or to read Plath, to watch her slow rhythmic descent into Hell.
You can read anything you want to read, but as for me, I think it's ok to keep a handrail in Luther, so I can get back up out of the Hell of the others.
I'm torn between several positions regarding poetry.
1. It is adiaphora. This is an obscure category within Lutheran thought (not first put forward by Luther himself but by other theologians shortly after his death). It means things not related to salvation. I would include in this card playing, dancing, and poets like Sylvia Plath and Ginsberg. That is, it's ok to READ them, but to commit suicide or to rape children, is of course, different, and falls into the category of major sin.
The phrase goes, "In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity."
Some claim it goes back to Augustine. I don't know.
2. I'm also tempted to recall another Lutheran, Nicolaus von Amsdorf. I am a kind of Amsdorfian with regard to good works. Amsdorf felt that good works were not only not to be done, but that they were harmful to salvation. He thought it incited the pride of the do-gooder, and that pride would therefore block a congregant from attaining the after life.
Art to some extent is adiaphora, and doesn't matter. To the degree that it increases the pride of the congregant, and seduces him or her away from finer things, it's probably a block to salvation.
3. I am also tempted to think along the lines of Melancthon and others that the Humanities are crucial in terms of discussion among a society. It's important to discuss things like poetry, and since it's adiaphoristic, we have LIBERTY. And we can afford to be charitable, where we can be.
But unlike Ginsberg, I don't think that poetry REQUIRES an immoral person (Blake's famous adage that one must ride roughly over the bones of the dead in order to know beauty -- but I would reject that, for sure!).
There are many confusions within poetry and fine arts, and the role of morality in them is one of the most confusing.
There is the morality of the work, and the morality of the one who made it. They're not always intertwined in a tangible way, though.
Roman Polanski's recent capture shows that very good artists can however be quite wicked people!
the notion of adiaphora related in the 16th ventury applied to liturgicla practice
the stoics mostly thought it in terms of not giving a shit about anything
thomas aquinas articualted it and refined it
and i think stated first the concept as a guide for liturgical issues
practice of worship etc
in matters of doctrine
unity
in matters of aesthetics
conversation
in matters common to all
charity
wendell berry would argue i believe that our sense of stewardship with words is as essential as our sense of stewardship with the land with nature
aristotle seems to me by the fact of his insitence on the certainty of reality to have more of a link to an ethos wherein morality or a moral imperative in language could be argued
plato is too fishy
too caught up in the idea thing
which would suggest that every effort to make a poem is insufficient but you should keep trying even if it gets ugly
it's not the marxists it's the platonists who are causing all the problems
off with their tunics
and then their heads
just an idea
j
So this Amsdorf fellow. What did he propose we do instead?
What gave him more authority than Jesus?
I suppose you can be Amsdorfian or Christian but I don't think the two share much area in a Venn diagram.
Funny, funny, JH!
I don't know what you're saying, GM. I think only Jesus could be good. He himself says that.
Amsdorf agrees. I'm however the last of the Amsdorfians, and therefore probably the only one going to heaven.
That Platonism has had a long and respectable place in the history of literary and art criticism should give pause to anyone claiming Plato as an enemy of artistic production (in the dialogues Plato's Socrates often approvingly invokes Homer and the other poets).
Also, that art has an inextricable moral dimension has been ably defended by Iris Murdoch in a number of works, and especially in the opening chapters of "Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals" and in the earlier "The Sublime and the Good" ("Art and morals are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love…. Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality”). That is not to suggest there isn't bad music or poetry produced by vulgar degenerates like Ginsberg, though those who find some good lines or poems in his writings can be invited gingerly to pick through the slag and take the gold out of Egypt.
That Dante's cosmology assumes a Ptolemaic model is of no consequence whatever to his moral vision (nor is it to Milton's adoption of it, though he quite well knew the Copernican model had replaced it). Ancients such as Aristotle and Horace rightly recognised the dual functions of literature "aut prodesse . . . aut delectare" ("to teach . . . and to delight").
One wishes that this were all so simple, that what one believed about right and wrong would logically be expressed in the best works of art and literature.
Alas, that's never been the case.
Is the best expression of a man his valor in hand-to-hand combat? Is a woman's best expression her being good in bed and having healthy children?
You posit that a degenerate life produces degenerate art. But we have James Merrill and John Ashbery and Walt Whitman and Thom Gunn and Robert Duncan and Adrienne Rich and Richard Howard and Frank O'Hara and Edward Albee and James Schuyler and Elizabeth Bishop and May Swenson and Muriel Rukeyser and Thornton Wilder and on and on and on and on and on. Gay and Lesbian artists whose styles and modes of approach are as varied and various as the spectrum of taste itself.
This variety doesn't substantiate any claims of mediocrity or moral decay, in fact it demonstrates a probable congruence of talent and radical will. It isn't the conformists and toadies who produce great art, in the main, it's those who challenge convention and accepted wisdom and make new inroads and discoveries. It may well be that an adventurous spirit is almost a precondition of artistic innovation.
And it may well be that pursuing a life of quotidian regimentation is a hindrance to a fully engaged artistic life. Those who are not so engaged--on whatever level--are unlikely to produce works that live. The specific issues that engage them, however, change over time.
This does not mean that one advocates "degeneration" as a principle of life. Or that those who wish to engage life creatively must of necessity, or out of artistic ambition, pursue a "different" way of life. Only that great artists and writers DO address the important issues of their time, with the full knowledge of the ephemeral nature of all transitory commitment.
Both Ariel and Howl cause us to question our attitudes about what art and literature are. They stretch the limits of what is permissible, what is expected. Like all works which challenge limits, they aren't perfect. But both are filled with passion, both embrace life (or even mock death) with skill and inspiration. What they tell us isn't merely pretty or satisfying or comforting. They aren't morally uplifting in the naive sense. I find Ariel terrifying and hypnotic, and ultimately it convinces me of the power of literature, of the art of making. Howl exhausts and dismays me, but though I do not share all of its viewpoints or dispositions, I still find it to be an uplifting experience; Ginsberg expands and extends the Whitmanic line, applies it to new kinds of feeling and mood (jazz, for instance).
In a sense, I feel no need to defend these assertions against your pathetic indignation. For me they are self-evident. But each generation must rediscover truths and lessons anew. And mediocrity always rises, but seldom to the top.
There will always be someone to tell us the Billy Collinses are better than the Sylvia Plaths, because they "uplift" and "cheer" us, instead of causing consternation and doubt. But our instincts tell us that mediocrity is not a goal in itself. Art can't be measured along an ethical bell-curve in which all god's chillun are welcomed aboard the ark.
I will personally beat the hell out of anyone stupid enough to say Billy Collins is better than Sylvia Plath, just to be sure they can no longer use their fingers to type or their mouths to speak.
And I am a pacifist.
while reluctant to give myself over to amsdorfian certitudes i have often thought there's just far too much by way of printed material far too much by way of people claimign literary credibility far too many people presuming to erect their own little altars of immortality
poetry does not merely present itself as an art form for anyone wishing to say something about an observation or an experience
it must also probe those areas of cognition which are almost inexpressible
the lutherans made it far too easy to publish and
now what
everyone is their own publishing house now
just slap it up on the blog on the myspace on the youtube
does any of it make a difference or provide anything as it once did
how can poetry either instruct or delight when we live in a word/image aaturated culture
babble and visual pollution all about
more and more i am of the opinion that poetry is only meaningful if it is composed in a state of desperation
the lead of the only pencil is almost gone
one last piece of paper
alll i have to write on is this wall
prison
nut house
desolate street
i am dying
those kinds of states
seem to evoke a possibility of truth
and beauty
in words
everyting else is simply ornamentation
every day i sit in church
waiting for god to show me his backside
like he did moses
hmnh
long wait
j
That somehow the artistic or literary calling should suggest the artist or writer must have chosen a life of antinomian degeneracy like Rimbaud (or Ginsberg) did is a post-Romantic, post-modernist myth of the naive and adolescent Shelleyian variety.
Rimbaud produced his timeless poems as a rebellious youth, though when later pursuing a career as a colonial trader he wrote in response to being reminded of his poetic fame by a friend: "merde pour la poesie." Yet for every degenerate literary or artistic vagabond like Rimbaud, one can easily find respectable bourgeois figures like Flaubert, Degas, and the Platonist Mallarme ("Tout le monde existe pour aboutir a un livre") as counters.
To pursue the above example further with respect to English literature in, say, the 19th c., who would claim as examples of the connexion between artistic excellence and antinomian degeneracy for (as one might be tempted to with Byron--my favourite Romantic poet--alas, Shelley, or Blake--a minor artist compared to the excellent painter and art critic, Sir Joshua Reynolds)--whatever the instances of failures in their personal lives--say, Wordsworth (I'm reminded of his many excellent poems, including his fine sonnets to capital punishment), Keats, Coleridge, the Brownings, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell, George Eliot, Hopkins, Trollope, and the like?
Curtis gives us this list of writers who are on his list of immortals:
"James Merrill and John Ashbery and Walt Whitman and Thom Gunn and Robert Duncan and Adrienne Rich and Richard Howard and Frank O'Hara and Edward Albee and James Schuyler and Elizabeth Bishop and May Swenson and Muriel Rukeyser and Thornton Wilder and on and on and on and on and on"
I admit that I've read most of these and can't stand any of them, with the exception of Frank O'Hara, who was a lot of fun when I was in my teens.
I can't stand Sylvia Plath. I like to read Billy Collins.
I also prefer P.G. Wodehouse to Marcel Proust.
I think Wodehouse has a more profound vision. Ditto for Collins re Plath.
I liked Albee's The Goat, but mostly as a sign of how far our culture has fallen.
the whole canon ought to be resurrected on Amsdorfian/Wodehousian terms.
Leave it to Psmith! (The P is silent, as in ptarmigan.)
?
Okay, if Amsdork is right, and "good works" are stumbling blocks, then what the hell was the point of Jesus telling us anything?
The entire NT should be John 3:16 then.
And really? Collins a more profound vision than Plath?
Apart from the fact that I have to kick your ass if ever we should meet IRL now (as promised), you do realize that Collins is an unrepentant, womanizing ass, correct?
I think what I object to in the Plath oeuvre is the lack of a sense of humor. I find it difficult to take seriously any writer who isn't funny.
To some extent, this is a problem that I extend to the entire Bible!
I do however like Luther, and am a Lutheran, partially on account of the humor!
I also prefer Billy to Sylvia because I take humor very seriously, and find that suicide isn't all that it's cracked up to be, humor wise.
Albee has some fine moments in his play The Goat, but I think ultimately he wants me to take his play seriously, which I can't, I think because it's not meant to be funny.
One of Amsdorf's great qualities is the humor.
I find humor lacking in people like Mother Theresa.
I'm again not sure about Larry Eigner. Some of his work is humorous, but I'm not certain that it's intended to be.
I dislike for instance Robert Duncan's work, on account of its seeming inability to take itself lightly.
Only lightness has any heaviness. Heaviness, on the other hand, is invariably too light for my taste.
Does poetry require a humorous dimension might be another question.
And the answer would have to be yes, yes, and no, because the humor has to be about something serious to be very funny. This is what Kenneth Koch forgot.
He's like laughing gas.
He's a nut, and is therefore quite boring. O'Hara is much funnier, because of the "proximity to pain" (the phrase belongs to Charles Altieri).
I can't take Jesus seriously unless I see him as joking. Then, he makes sense when he tells the guy in order to be perfect he could give all his stuff away.
No serious joker ever leaves his audience happy, but leaves them feeling on the point of tears.
word is that mother theresa was always cracking jokes to the almost insufferable irritation of her sisters
probably really bad jokes
she once gave the last ruppees away that wouold have been used for the evening meal
the sisters were horrified
they'd been working so hard
they all fasted that night
the next day a check for a million US dollars came in the mail
the sisters had alots of rice then
ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
j
"Daddy" is funny.
Kirby:
Charlie Altieri? I never studied with Charlie, but he's a pretty funny guy (I knew him because his MS-afflicted wife, Joanne, was my neighbour, and I once helped evict her live-in caregiver along with her paramour and his squawking parrot)--Charlie liked to steal her favourite ice cream and eat it out of the carton in front of her. Sounded like a Brooklyn thug, he did. Great guy, that.
I took a contemporary poetry course from him which I thought was completely excellent. He was from Brooklyn, I think, and his voice had the same high squeaky intensity as Gregory Corso's voice.
I didn't know about him stealing the ice cream.
I once heard her in the hallways of Padelford say to a friend of hers, "Now he's interested in ethics! Can you believe that Charlie would ever get interested in ethics?"
Apparently he had dumped her for a cute communist at Berkeley.
I love Altieri's books, esp. Enlarging the Temple.
I had a lot of brilliant profs at U. of Washington:
Mona Modiano, Steven Shaviro, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Marc Froment-Meurice, Hazard Adams, to name but a few.
Altieri was right up there with them, and he had a tendency to say things that seem to stick in my head forever. His mind was possibly the best one there. That's what Shaviro used to say, at least.
I didn't think so at the time, but now I realize that many of the things he said to me just stuck there, and form permanent reference points.
At any rate, nobody really knows the inner quality of any relationship and what really has happened, esp. if you've mostly heard it through one party's mind, esp. at the point of juncture.
As a prof, Altieri had tremendous firepower. Stalin's katyuska rockets come to mind -- the ones that Zhukov used to pound the German general (Paulsen?) at Stalingrad, after he had encircled his units.
Altieri said once that the reason that Kafka was so great is that everybody feels that they have no access to justice, and so he has a universal quality.
I think I will never forget that.
He was one of the only profs that ever stood up to the feminists. He even told a young feminist in the poetry class that she was totally banal in her reading of some Irish poet.
He also told me that I was completely banal on some topic or another. I loved it! He was right!
Kirby:
I didn't list those writers because I thought they were great; I listed them because they're widely recognized as important poets, and their several styles don't adhere to any single movement or mode.
You want to criticize "all" Gay poetry because Gay-ness is bad bad bad. I'd wager that you've enjoyed lots of art and literature by Gay people which you didn't even realize was Gay.
This business of condemning poetry because it's written by the wrong people is just silly. That's why I mentioned all those names. You can have a problem with Ginsberg mentioning pederasty, but objecting to a poem by Merrill, about, say, Istanbul, because it's a "Gay" poem, is nonsense.
There's nothing wrong with taking a contrary position with respect to Gay rights, or the advocacy for Gay rights in literature, but the connection breaks down if you try to condemn literature on political or religious grounds. I may dislike Rumi because he's a Muslim, but that doesn't make the work bad by definition. I may find Catholicism a bunch of nonsense, but that doesn't make Dante a bad poet. Don't you see?
Curtis, you are generalizing too widely, and you missed my POINT. I like COMIC writers.
I like Ronald Firbank, for instance, who was gay. I like Oscar Wilde. I like Gertrude Stein, especially when she's funny and/or charming.
Don't be a popinjay.
I'm still not sure if people understand WHY I like to pop the aura of sanctity around Ginsberg. It's because he was a leftist, and leftists use him as an example of sane sanctitude.
He was a rat, though, if you look closely enough.
I think everyone's a rat.
The term is "completely depraved" in the Protestant nomenclature.
Some try to escape this designation through good works!
Self-serving, say I.
More evidence of rattiness!
And so many fell in with the Pied Piper's notion of HOPE. Ha.
but now we are starting to see (everybody is starting to see) that the Big O is a rat, and squirrelly to boot, and in bed with ACORN.
The best that people can do is to follow the law.
This is why comic literature is superior to pious literature.
Comic literature shows the rattiness in people, and how they try to hide it, better.
That's part of why I prefer Billy collins to S. Plath.
Plath puts herself on a pedestal, and then lashed out at others.
Collins is a comic author. He has no illusions about his being better than other people.
I like gay authors who reveal the rattiness of people (comic). I've read Ronald Firbank's book, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, at least 50 times. My copy is black from reading it. I just find it delightful!
I think we should watch out for anybody who uses high-flown rhetoric. They're rats from the ground up.
Kirby,
You're misreading Plath again. But I don't expect you to stop. I'm just going to call you out when you do it.
But I think I see a problem in your understanding of good works, here:
I think everyone's a rat.
The term is "completely depraved" in the Protestant nomenclature.
Some try to escape this designation through good works!
Self-serving, say I.
We don't do good works because they make us good. We don't even do good works because they are good.
We do good works because Jesus told us to. We are specifically instructed neither to take pride or earthly rewards for such work.
But we are still told to work.
Preferably in secret.
Definitely without fanfare.
Dante is hardly to be spoken of as a "good" or "bad" poet--he is simply "Il Poeta." Those who delude themselves that he's a "bad" one--e allora, "non ragiam' di lor, ma guarda e passa" ("don't let's reason with them, but look, and pass").
I'm not sure what "gay" literature is anyway. If it means, as Curtis suggests ("I'd wager that you've enjoyed lots of art and literature by Gay people which you didn't even realize was Gay") literature written by homosexuals like Proust (who is, actually, not unskilled at humour, though not really a humourist), then I’d say the my evaluation of work’s quality tout court would be the deciding factor. But if “gay” literature means literature primarily “about” homosexuality or that celebrates or promotes it, then I haven’t met with any such yet that would compel either my interest or sacrifice of my valuable reading time—certainly not Ginsberg, except to show me by contrast how vastly superior are the modern “greats” (from Keats and Hugo through Yeats, Valery, and Ungaretti) to Ginsberg’s sort of pulpy adolescent stuff.
So much of modernity is afraid of work.
Afraid of working at relationships.
Afraid of working at art.
Afraid of working at all.
Little grasshoppers, waiting to be frozen in the winter.
I can accept goodworks in secret and without fanfare, for sure.
That's the only way they're supposed to be done. Anything else is Pharisee-ism.
I think I made my point about Gayness versus literary product.
Michelangelo was almost certainly a homosexual, but nearly everyone admires his work(s). The fact that its content is not overtly "homosexual" (whatever that means--i.e., direct representation ?) allows people to keep those aspects discretely separate.
Ginsberg's work is pretty nearly all non-sexual in orientation. There are a couple of pederastic poems ("Fuck me Master!") which are pretty awful, but in the main he's talking about peace and love and youth and rebelliousness and democracy, not about men fucking.
Plath's work seems to be a sort of reflexive double-dare--how wound-up she could make herself with suicidal self-taunting, like people who stand on ledges to seduce others into trying to convince them of how valuable their lives are, and how lovable they are, etc. I.e., "convince me!" --i.e., a classic passive-aggressive maneuver. A selfish demand for attention and affection. In Plath's case, it seems to have been an attempt to get Ted to pay attention to her, instead of philandering. Her exaggerated dependency on a strong, faithful male figure was her biggest problem. Perfectionists will often equate total fidelity with a total demand, expressed as total trust or total mistrust: That kind of extreme longing is then expressed as an aesthetic ultimatum.
Did Ginsberg wish to validate or excuse his pederasty in his poetry? I don't think so. I do think that he felt that to specifically avoid it, or compartmentalize his intelligence, into permitted/not permitted, private/public, and love/sex, was unhealthy on principle. I'm sure he regretted whatever backlash this caused among his audience. The primary emotion in his work is affection, not lust or vicarious attraction.
"I think we should watch out for anybody who uses high-flown rhetoric."
Be careful!
Moore is a VERY rhetorical writer.
Moore is balanced. She has a kind of heartland, Missouri thing, with dogs and cats, and men with cigars.
Her rhetoric also appears at least to me to be lit with a trace of humor.
Have you read Ginsberg's last book of poems, Curtis, entitled Fame and Death?
Read that one, then reread Howl. He celebrates pederasty at least twice in Howl itself, and says that he committed it.
No one appears to have noticed this except me.
There are other good things in his work, but people look the other way, as they do with Obama (Milli Vanilli) simply because they are rotten with hope for a secular Messiah.
I disagree.
I don't think people want to gloss over anything in Ginsberg. Well, maybe a few saggy old Beat refugees from the 1960's...
You just have to take the good with the bad in Ginsberg. The same is true with Kerouac. Heaven forbid anyone think Kerouac is some great "stylistic" genius! It's lots of fun, and occasionally fascinating, but rarely controlled the way, for instance, Moore is.
She considers every word. She must have been a weasel inside dictionaries and encyclopedias! Her poems are like speeches. The best speeches anyone has ever written. Better than the Gettysburg Address. They make my hair stand on end!
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