There is no such thing in nature as a sweet orange. They were developed about 2500 years ago by the Chinese through cultivation. The word orange is from Arabic, naranji. Arabs were the traders who brought the orange to the west. Now there is a disease eating the oranges in the groves of Florida. The disease is from China.
Orange trees suck a lot of moisture out of the ground and apparently dessicated the Middle East as a result of their cultivation.
Oranges are lovely things. They are apparently related quite closely to many other citrus fruits. There are an amazing number of varieties now. In addition to the blood orange, there are any number of other varieties. My grocery store usually just has the regular kind.
We sometimes get pommelos. They are huge, and inside the leathery cover is almost a half inch of fluffy white stuff. I guess it keeps the insects out, like insulation? The pommelo tastes like a grapefruit but is the size of a small beachball.
Kenneth Clark said the aesthetic moment lasts about as long as the mist that rises from a peeled orange.
In addition to oranges, I also enjoy kumquats, watermelons (they are messy), tangelos, apples, lemons, limes, kiwis, blueberries, strawberries and blackberries. I love lemonade. Fruits are rather expensive but if you shop carefully and look for sales, there is usually at least one fruit that is affordable. Some claim that fruits have been ruined by agrobusiness. It's quite burdensome to pick them. This is one of the main reasons for illegal immigration. We need cheap labor to harvest fruits. It's backbreaking to pluck strawberries for instance. Plus they have to use a lot of pesticides to keep the bugs off.
Some say that almost 4% of our society are illegal immigrants. They're driving me buggy, but they are also an important source of labor. These are mainly Mexican Americans, but you also get El Salvadorans, and Hondurans, and some others. Our prison population is now almost 30% illegals. With the families that come to pick fruits, you also have gangs pouring over the border. MS-13 is an El Salvadoran gang. They have almost 10,000 members in Los Angeles alone, and they kill blacks to push them out of their neighborhoods to take over. The face of illegal immigration for the left is the face of a starving Mexican child. For the right it is the face of MS-13. I'm reading a book by Father Bascio, a Catholic priest who doesn't like illegal immigration because he thinks it's immoral. Bascio just died, but his book has legs and is being widely read and reviewed in the conservative press. The Immorality of Illegal Immigration (Author House, 2009), was reviewed in a conservative journal from England called Quarterly Review. This sentence from one review is by Edwin Dyga:
"The volume was filled with examples and case studies illustrating the negative impact of illegal cross-border traffic to the domestic economy, the retarding effect current government policies have on the development of the Third World, the growth of local crime rates, the unsustainability of current welfare systems and the real victims of these trends: the native citizens of the United States, the immigrants themselves and the countries from which they emigrate."
Quarterly Review, Autumn 2012, p. 9.
My poem "Reading Adam Smith at Halloween," appears at the end of this journal along with a poem by Catherine Savage Brosman, who taught French at Tulane for a generation (she's now retired and is on a cruise to Antarctica among other places with her husband). Ours are the only two poems. Hers is about a horrible politician from New York who is the president of Rice University. She disliked him. Mine is about the horror and delight of Halloween, and how the norms are consciously abrogated so that anyone can be anything so long as it's ugly but not painful. The aesthetics and the economics of Halloween are treated from a Smithian viewpoint.
I think a poem should be like a fruit. It should have a neat casing, and inside should be something delicious: ideas, and images, that explode on the tongue, and awaken the heart.
But poets should work these up themselves, not relying on others. The traffic in poetry should try to get back out into the mainstream journals. I suspect big journals, perhaps even citrus journals, and pet journals, and daily newspapers, might be ready to accept poems again, so long as they are not too abstruse. Poems should be strange and yet assert norms. We've lived too long without these fruits in the daily papers. But poets have to learn to write for America again, as the movies are for America. They must assert norms, but also allow for those who gently challenge the norms. Poems must be American, even if we find the images all over the world. We need new fruits all the time. New tastes. People are hungry for poems.
45 comments:
It would be horrible if no one commented on this blog post, since it's one of your most revealing. It's a revelation!
Silliman's whole agenda was based on the idea that all art should be political, that it should express immediate political concerns. He believes that art which ignores present political reality--as the poet or artist perceives it--is abrogating an essential responsibility--is an "irrelevant" writer.
The poets we read from other epochs transcended their immediate social and political milieus. We don't read Basho or Pope or Homer or Tennyson or Cavalcanti or Robert Lowell because we want to learn about their politics, or about the world they lived in. We read them because their words and insights reach across time, across periods of history, to express things that transcend the ephemeral.
What I like about Jack Gilbert is that his work just ignores the world as it was. He wrote as a timeless soul, speaking across the centuries. I can read George Oppen and I don't care one whit for his leftist politics--he's just a wonderful writer.
Writers can be completely irrelevant and still be wonderful.
Kirby, you've been writing doggerel, a form of cheap propaganda which requires no inspiration except the facile prestidigitation of word play. You do this at the behest of your opinions. Your dull axes. Your gripes. Your fears.
But these things are temporary. These things pass away. They are dust. Dust that floats in the air, which you can see on still hot days when sunlight passes through a room. Constellations of dust. Just circling and sifting and settling.
You need to think outside the present-day box of immediate concerns. Be less practical. Laugh like Basho at the jiggling water in a cistern. Laugh at the moon. Howl. Bay at life's absurdity.
What else can we do?
Identity politics needs to come up with some new angles to expand the victim class. Poems that extol an idyllic childhood, for instance, could be read as a symptom of the Happy Valley Syndrome and a clear marker for a diagnosis of Idyllic Childhood Disorder when it manifests in early adulthood. There have to be drugs that can be used to treat this malady.
Why I Am Not a Painter
by Frank O'Hara
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
Curtis, are you in favor of this blog post, or are you not? I couldn't understand your opening sentences. Were they an attack, or not?
A lot of my work in poetry and the arts has something to do with trying to get poetry back on to the rails from which LANGUAGE derailed it.
But it's not just language it's Marxists generally.
I think they succeeded partially because of the way in which they martialled an ethical program against the art for art's sake people. And you have to admit that ethics is a big part of poetry. Aristotle said it was in the Poetics.
It isn't a one for one correspondence. Medea by Euripides reveals a mangy character out of hell who kills her own kids in order to spite her philandering husband. She then flies off over the roofs of Corinth in a chariot given to her by Helios, god of the sun.
It's weird and wonderful.
But I think it's also moral insofar as we see ugly behavior and may realize we don't want to go down such a road for any reason.
Marxists have spent decades now trying to run down mainline churches and wreck them by any means necessary. In the USSR Stalin would imprison painters and poets for the sole cause of being Christian.
But the churches are the only institutions that held against the vicious secularists. They held against Stalin and they held against Hitler and they are holding against Obama.
You said dust flies away. So does minor pleasure.
What remains? Not politics, not art, not blogs.
God remains. Forever.
I think we agree that Ron is both very influential and very demonic. He doesn't mean to be, but he has had a tremendous influence. Some of this is for the good. He has read a lot of he and his gang have thrown down a gauntlet to poets: either be useful to the country, or perish.
It's fascinating to me that no one reads them, and yet they have had this enormous influence. I mean, no one but no one knows them as most Americans know Frost.
Frost spoke out of a regular American experience and spoke directly to Americans.
I think we need to do that. But I think we can do better than Frost.
Not maybe in terms of his magical writing, but in terms of offering a lead back toward the religious realm, the source of all beauty, from ancient Greece up until our own time.
GM, how nice that you quoted O'Hara's poem. It was in the back of my mind as I wrote this piece. I am also thinking of color scales and those neat color sheets that you can find in painting shops.
Palmer:
This O'Hara poem is exactly what I thought about when I first saw Kirby's oranges and poems.
Oranges and sardines. Peculiar combination. Like pickles and ice-cream.
Oranges are an example of domesticated flora. Now that we're playing with genetic strains, we'll probably be conjuring up all kinds of weird fruit hybrids. They'll be putting pig's feet genes onto rubber tree DNA strands.
Maybe someday they'll actually be able to manufacture Spidermen and human flies. Put'em together and what do you get? Frankenstein!
There's a lot of potential mischief in genetic engineering. Now that the science is "out there" people will begin tinkering secretly with it.
The Russians always seemed fascinated with weird experiments. The Germans too. Techno-wizards. Or techno-maniacs.
Probably our own government is busily playing around with genetically engineered bio-weapons in some underground laboratory in Virginia or Utah. Maybe that Turrell guy in Arizona is just a cover for a big secret lab out in the desert.
Are oranges good enough, or can they be made better? Seedless would be nice, but then how could they reproduce? Thinner-skinned, maybe, but the bugs would love that.
Maybe we can breed houseflies into extinction. Then how would we deal with the dead carcasses, without the maggots to feast on them?
Maybe we could re-design the American Eagle--to be, say three times its normal size, with wing-spans of 15 feet.
Real monsters. Big enough to eat sheep and hogs.
But mankind will certainly fuck up the planet long before any of these speculative developments can come to fruition.
I'm not holding my breath.
Craig, it may that one way to defeat the identity politics groups is to expand the victimization to 100%. At present it is 99%. We need to shoehorn the remaining 1% into the victimization category. At that point the reverse discrimination will have no where left to batten.
Kirby:
You're a classic passive-aggressive personality.
I try to meet you half-way, and you push me away.
Then I attack you, and you offer the olive branch.
Hard to know what to make of you.
The Language Poets got ORGANIZED. They formed tightly-knit little groups in San Francisco and New York. They published their own periodicals. They published each other. They promoted each others' works. They wrote long trenchant essays explaining how their work was different, and superior, and the next best thing. Now they've turned to the work of legacy. Watten's Grand Piano (10 volumes of self-serving nostalgia and back-slapping), to consolidate their holdings, in opposition to the established canon. Bernstein and Silliman are the point men. Very shrewd, very smart guys.
A lot of the poetry that Silliman praised on his blog meant nothing to me. He'd praise the work of a friend, like Armantrout (whose work really IS very good), right beside work which made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Kirb:
You have the religion issue all backwards.
Marxists may have disliked the church, but the Soviet Union made peach with the Russian Orthodoxy. They've been in bed together for 75 years.
The Catholic Church, not to speak of the German Protestants, did nothing to stop the Nazis. The present Pope is stepping down, apparently in response to protests within his own organization about the abuses tolerated by the church hierarchy.
Cardinals and bishops are dropping like flies.
There's a difference between the Marxist idea--now well over a hundred years old--of demonizing the church, and a realistic skepticism regarding the "teachings" and body of knowledge that's obviously primitive, false and bigoted. People who are agnostics aren't necessarily communists. This is one of your blind spots, or black holes.
Someone attacks your religion, and you immediately see red as in Red. But I'm militantly anti-communist, and I'm an agnostic too. That's a perfectly compatible mix.
The thing about Frost is that he managed to create a poetry that was at once profound and usefully ambiguous, while still being accessible.
But accessibility and profundity don't necessarily go hand in hand. Billy Collins is accessible, but puerile and condescending. Frost is never condescending, though he occasionally can be smug.
This idea that all art should be accessible to the "masses" is actually a kind of socialist idea, Kirby. I doubt JADL would agree with you about it. I think the audience for poetry is usually quite limited. Not many people will appreciate Zukofsky, or even Berrigan's Sonnets. But Zukofsky's A and the Sonnets are true works of genius. Does the fact that the "man on the street" can't appreciate them make them irrelevant, or "bad" art?
It's true that no one "reads" Watten's Progress, or Coolidge's The Maintains. Who reads Joyce's Ulysses, for that matter? It's possible to create a magnificent work of art without ever reaching that imaginary "public" you're always dreaming about.
The "common man"--there ain't no such thing.
Curtis, where was this olive branch? I didn't see it. All you said was that if I agreed to see things your way there would be peace.
Peace?
You're wrong about the Lutherans of Hitler's day (check out Bonhoeffer), wrong about the Eastern Orthodox (of which Solzhenitsyn was one), and wrong about Basho (I am not sure why, but I insist irregardless that you're wrong).
We do have one place in the Venn where we overlap: suspicion of the validity of LANGUAGE and their triumph, and this is where and why our alliance came to be.
I am not a socialist, I am a capitalist, so I can't really see adopting a union mentality and fighting across that front. I think alliances have to be natural. That's why I probably never make any.
I can do this with conservative Lutherans but there aren't any apparently that are also in the arts. And if there were, I suppose I would find some reason to find them problematic.
I still have no idea what you mean when you say I am passive-aggressive.
Why the passive part?
I enjoy disagreements especially if we can keep them on an entirely disinterested basis. I don't see any reason for agreement. I can't understand the utility of it.
Except within the church itself. There, I think we need to close ranks against the mayhem of the left, and sing in unison.
I wonder who's going to be the next Pope. I kind of liked this one.
Popes mean nothing to me.
I see our "relationship" as a failure of communication. We see eye to eye on a number of things, but part company in other areas.
You tend to be very rigid and dogmatic about what you believe. Your certainty is a badge of honor. It's really military--or militant.
Religion and I have nothing in common, and never will.
I think we can agree to cooperate on social and political tasks, assuming we can find common ground about what's best to do.
Obviously, there are many miles to go before we sleep.
Don't get too friendly, though. You might be attacked from behind.
For instance, I think taxes are too high, but I'm uncertain about just what benefits I'd be willing to forego in the interests of thrift.
Should I give up my Medicare, my Social Security, my tax exclusions?
Should we not have public schools? National Guard? Roads and bridges? Farm price supports?
What would you give up?
I'd give up on these foreign wars, which bring us nothing but death and grief and the hatred of other peoples.
I think all the czars could go. I think Obamacare could go. I think protectionism against products made in China should help reinvigorate our shoe industry. I also thinl we should ban Vietnamese goods. We can safely frack I think. Cutting 5% from.entitlements seems safe. Fast tracking terrorists to the chair would help. That wouldd include domestic killers. Mexican products should be banned.
I do think that everyone who comes here and with whom I dialogue are in some sense allies. I've never declared Silliman or Bernstein as enemies, as you haven't either. They are very intelligent and drove us through contemporary French philosophy among other issues. Poets needed to take on these things, and to take on religious faiths of all kinds, too, and faiths of irreligion such as the burgeoning hedonism of the youth element.
Some of that has even penetrated the church. The molesters who've penetrated the Catholic hierarchy and which has caused considerable blight within that rose of an institution. And the false knights of faith who've obliterated the ELCA's mission, and rewritten St. Paul, and ex'd out various passages throughout the Bible and the green hymnal. Meanwhile, we've had artists who've helped us too: Cranach and Durer, in particular, and now there are some new ones such as Fujimoto, and even to a degree the late and secretive Warhol, and of course Rouault. The year is a dizzying tally of collisions and culture clashes. I'm not running exactly a jihad here. More of an intervention: we exist too, is all I'm saying. Jesus Christ exists too. Some people think it's rude to mention this. That it's impolite. I'm not so sure that it is but to other people that is always.
Always. I didn't finish the sentence. I didn't know how to do it. I'm tired. Let us celebrate the orange. Let us celebrate the color orange, and all its interventions within the ecumenical menu.
Color, as Charles Olson said, is a very mysterious, very interesting thing.
What is purple to the Catholic church?
Silliman once told me I had a terrific color sense in my poetry. Especially the primaries.
Your gift, Kirby, is elaboration. You see several things at once--or from different angles.
You haven't put this together with your literal ability to create art (i.e., poems). You're still stuck back in 1914. Modernism hasn't happened for you yet. Or it did, but then you decided to go back. Be retro. Embrace discarded ideology.
I used to think I belonged--culturally speaking--in the Edwardian Age. But if I were, I wouldn't have my teeth, and I'd have a big wart on my foot, and I'd be de-classed because I was born poor. Science and the liberalization of social class have redeemed me from obscurity and ill health.
How do you see Durer as a moral force for good?
purple violet burgundy etc. represent particularly noble notions...christians remember their essential nobility during lent and advent...martyrdom is red...sanctity is white. ordinary time is green and earth tones...mary is blue...luther is colorless...sort of black and grey...durer added realism and formal style to everyday affairs...he utilized roman lettering and numbering in the manner of romans of antiquity...his woodcuts betray an unusual attention to detail like eyes and other facial features...he took his time
Durer worked with Luther. He was the most important artist to illustrate the Bible. He also illustrated Luther's sermons. Cranach was the other important artist to work with Luther.
I think what you don't see Curtis is that modernism was crushed by the Marxists. With secularization came Marxism. It came as a steamroller and flattened everything and everyone.
Obama is a steamroller. He's trying to flatten the churches, too.
Stu is a nice man, and he believes that Obama is a Christian. Many do. Watch what he does, not what he says.
Historically there were TWO holdouts against Marxism and they ended up together in the gulags and the Stalags. Maybe there were even three.
Jews, christians, and avant-garde artists.
My proposal in this blog is that these three groups unite to defeat Marxism.
So far after eight years of blogging I still haven't made this understood. I don't know why nobody ever hears this.
It's also the basis of my books on Corso and Codrescu which elaborate this thesis at length. But no one reads those books.
Modernism meant secularism for most.
I'm not in 1920.
I'm in 1520.
how would life be different if luther had had a computer
bloggeral
I'll be visiting the Civil War Museum in Kenosha about a month from now. I tried to visit the museum six years ago when my mother-in-law could still drive and the museum was at Carthage College in Waukesha, a much shorter drive, but the museum had already been closed in preparation for the move to Kenosha. Expanding and improving the museum for the sesquicentennial meant finding a site with more room to accommodate more visitors. The new museum is also within easy walking distance of the First Congregational Church which is now a historic landmark that we'll visit on the same excursion. The church was designed and built in 1874 by the great great great grandfather of my third cousin in Tampa.
My great grandfather, his younger sister and his older brother, along with their mother, were almost poster children for those made orphans and widows by the war. The older son's daughter married the son of a captain who had organized a company in Ohio. Their grandson married a great granddaughter of the architect and builder of Kenosha's First Congregational Church. Her Christian names were the same as my widowed Prussian immigrant great great grandmother's. These were people for whom words from Lincoln's Second Inaugural were taken as holy writ.
I'm reposting this after taking out some typos. Typos on the Kindle are difficult if not impossible for me to even see much less erase:
In terms of Durer -- what Jh said. Some photons are more Lutheran than others. Black and white represent the truth so they are of course Lutheran. Parts of the calendar year all the photons work together to give us the correct spirit. From Christmas to Easter everything is black and white. Then at Easter you get blasts of pink. Gay photons (gay in the old sense): Only cardinals are red throughout much of the winter. I'm not sure that they're gay, but then Some cardinals must be more gay than others. Photoñs know their business. They're busy representin'. Silver and gold gold gold moonlight and gold purple and beiges. Let's do more with the beiges.
I've thought about this for a while, and haven't mentioned it, because A) we don't talk about Ron a ton, and B) it's a bit non-pc.
But...
Once I learned that Ron had Aspbergers, everything made sense (I've worked with a fair number of Aspy teens...)
His story about how he got into the New Yorker by imitating an emotionally evocative poem by Eliot...
The long lists of names he writes in all of his blog posts.
The way he once dismissively called the act of 'identifying emotionally with a character' as 'pre-reading.'
How, when confronted with Townes Van Zandt's simple, beautiful 'If I needed you,' he focused on the use of the word 'for,' and not on the simple beauty of the message -- simply and beautifully expressed -- that love is about going to be with someone in their times of pain.
Now, this isn't a condemnation - Learning about, say, Kirby's youth as a kid who was so-smart-he-seemed-stupid and thus became an outcast, seems like a pretty significant factor in understanding who he is.
Brett:
Who in god's name are you talking about?
This isn't Ron Silliman, because he's never had a poem in The New Yorker--at least under his own name.
And, "Aspbergers"?--is this a joke, or what?
Brett:
Here is what Silliman wrote in his blog post of September 21st, 2011:
"I have never written about Asperger’s, which I didn’t even know much about until one of my sons was diagnosed & it became clear just how many of his symptoms were my own. I certainly have never thought of myself as disabled, let alone uttered the phrase: I have autism. And I don’t want my readers to look at my tendency to count sentences, or to build a work around something like the Fibonacci number series, as a symptom. It’s true that I grew up with something I might have identified as Weird Kid Syndrome, hardly a unique condition, but from my perspective being a kid in the lone family of divorce in my grade, coming as a result from the poorest home in my school district & being raised in part by a psychotic matriarch had more to do with the choices I’ve made as an adult & as an artist. If you were to ask me about a disability, I’d be more inclined to respond in terms of the pieces of plastic inserted into the middle of each eye, the result of cataract surgery in my 40s."
I can report to you with confidence that Silliman doesn't have Asberger's, despite the probability that one of his sons does. He isn't autistic. To suggest that he might be, is a way I suppose to lend credence to his sympathy for disability as a distinct literary trope.
In my view, the idea that accepting or denying the fact of one's limitations is somehow a controlling factor in the minutiae of one's poetics is a very complex area, and oughtn't to be confused with the external political or social conditions which affect it.
In the work of Eigner, for instance, it both is and is not an important issue. I tried in a couple of my own blog posts to lay out the parameters of such considerations. An investigation of how limitation affects perception and creativity awaits further study. There are no simple answers.
without limitation there is no art
and artist is one who rcognizes limitation and discerns the best way to deal with it and then if persistence holds forth oftentimes will transcend the limit
artists have to draw a line somewhere
Does Eigner ever sanction benefits for the disabled or write agitprop for them?
did eigner vote for hubert humphrey
Cathedrals push the envelope.
You're right about the New Yorker - I misremembered, probably for dramatic effect, the publication that the poem I was talking about had gotten into.
It was the Triquarterly, and a few other publications.
But you're wrong about everything else:-)
Silliman has come out and said 'I have Aspergers.'
like:" As somebody who has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism..."
That's from the same post you mentioned.
I guess I'm trusting Silliman over you on this one when discussing Silliman's own condition.
Whether or not being Aspie is talked about directly in his poetry, it definitely affects Silliman's style, and worldview.
Not necessarily in a negative way.
But it explains - or at least describes - a lot about his blog and his poetry.
I like Brett's view on Ron here. It helps me likr Ron's poems better.
I wish I had more strength in the math science area. In addition to taking the arts back we also need the sciences and math back. Johannes Kepler and Tycho Brahe were.both devout Lutherans. Kepler was troubled when in Joshua it was said that the sun stood still. Mpst good science of the last five hundred years was Christian in inspiration. Math too. When Christianity left sciences and arts they began to crumble into weird stuff like Mengele's experiments.
Brett & Kirby:
No, no, no.
Silliman's formal approach to technique has nothing to do with any mental condition. His early poetry was simply lyrical like Robert Kelly or Robert Duncan.
His ideas about writing come from post-Modern music--i.e., Steve Reich, Philip Glass, etc.
His breakthrough work, Ketjak, is a meditation on a form of part singing from Balinese culture.
It might be fun or useful to think of Silliman's writing as a symptom of some disease, but that's just gratuitous appropriation.
Ask Ron point-blank, if you want confirmation.
I don't care if Kirby "likes" this idea or not. It's just a fantasy.
Kirby:
Please don't try to make a debate about this. It's completely unwarranted.
Curtis, I will cede this to you, but I still enjoyed Brett's idea. I never saw Ron as having a serious mental condition of any kind. I met him in Philadelphia at the MLA. We only shook hands briefly but it seemed to me he was completely in control of his faculties. He looked right at me and smiled and had a nice look about him. There wasn't anything wrong with him. Asperger's people can't look at you and when they talk they are erratic and have their own language. This is what Brett is aiming at. He's also trying to claim that I myself suffer from some kind of condition having to do with growing up weird. I enjoyed the mythologizing is all. Brett is trying to find a source to Ron and my problems.
Ron inherited the mantle of the poetic left, and there was at that time a huge push toward language. It was even called "the linguistic turn." It came out of Wittgenstein, but found an echo among certain proponents of postmodernism and Marxism (Lacan was a Maoist postmodernist, for instance).
Brett wasn't around for that episode, and most people never studied that whole period. Language had serious forerunners in the Romanian tradition with the Lettrists. The idea of breaking up language in order to break up western civilization was considered to be a sound strategy.
The churches have suffered similar inroads. The idea that if you redescribed Christ as having a female side and then erased all the gendered pronouns you'd have a more inclusive church penetrated the ELCA to the point that the church itself was fragmented and they have lost over half of their funding as they've courted the splinter groups, while the main group has simply departed.
This is the problem for the Democrats. They go so far in terms of courting splinter groups that they are vulnerable to no longer offering anything to America itself.
Against this, I posit the return of traditional Protestantism, and a return to nativism. Not in the interest of excluding all the new splinter groups, but in the interest of reclaiming what made America work in the first place: work ethic, solid families, fair reporting, taking problems seriously and discussing them, destroying free radicals in the name of health, and of course living as if we are under God.
God matters.
Obama just does a mindless dance and gets his comrades all fired up. But he also demonizes his opponents. He has to be careful. Woodward could be his Solzhenitsyn.
what madea america work int he first place?
hmn
let's try systematic destruction of the predecesors
let's try gold greed
let's try wanton approptiation of land for selfish gain
let's think about the monopolists
let's consider the warped protestant ideology of manifest destiny
the experiment is young
but already showing signs of demolishing itself due to widespread ignorance
tyranny is often freedom with a wry smile
manage the masses with pharmeceuticals
and bad tv
jh
But there are more Indians now than ever before.
We were very generous!
So much land set aside for parks!
Dark clowns in the Vatican tried to stop the spread of happiness and said happiness is hierarchical. Puritans said no the meek shall be first!
The secret hierarchies of the hippies! Some were higher than others at Woodstock. The Indians practiced genocide and didn't use soap! Witches of all genders road brooms but didn't regard speed limits as pertaining to them the original UFOs. UNIDENTIFIED FLORID OBJECTIVISTS.
Obama's wry smile makes my Tv fill with static and halts Mormon progress toward business oh the lyricism of widgets and wondrous prophets from sea to shining See.
Jh you harbor many reservations.
Kirby:
I think you have it wrong again.
"The idea of breaking up language in order to break up western civilization was considered to be a sound strategy. "
Actually, if you read Bernstein's essays, they make the point that the "referent"--that is, the function of language (words) to denote (stand for) actual things and events in the real world is one with the tyranny of the old power centers, which hold that words must continue to mean only what they're defined to mean by the power structure, and not the meanings that individual (free) creative thinkers and artists may give them. If you drop the syntactic tyranny, the denotative tyranny, you open the door to nonsense and new kinds of language--which is what they wanted to allow.
Ketjak and Progress and The Maintains and Stanzas for Iris Leszak are all examples of this, freed from the tyranny of the signifier, and from the jail of grammar.
This is a gross simplification, of course. There are many ways of interpreting what the non-syntactic and non-referential kind of composition means, what it derives from, where (and by whom) it originated, etc.
Watten makes the argument that it was the generation which resisted the Vietnam War which led to "the turn to language." (Whatever that turn meant, he says it was both an artistic and political process (intertwined)).
Hence Language Poets are able to compare themselves to the artistic milieus of, for instance, Russian art in the 1920's, or resistant social movements of the 1930's.
In my view, that's all nonsense. The Language Poets weren't a distinct enough group, politically, to be subsumed into any kind of coherent movement. That's all retroactive "legacy" work.
I do, however, agree about the political nature of the literary Right, which has tried to control art since America's artistic break with Europe in the early 20th Century. The Eastern power centers have resisted the "turn to language" movement from the beginning, and continue to dominate the academy, the press, and the prize system. But inroads have been made.
In a practical sense, you seem unengaged with this struggle, Kirby, which is partly why you have such a hazy grasp of its meaning and purpose.
there are not more indians
there are more metis
and that's the mystery
it's metissage
or nothing
lincoln was sort of concerned about human rights but more concerned with some divine right notion of the republic that's why he was a republican
he signed off on the largest mass execution in american history
language is means of transcendence
it is always breaking up
language minded poetasters evoke this
nothing meaningful has been written since francis thompsons' the hound of heaven
inscape sprung rhythm
onomatpoeia
that's all there is
it's the only aesthetic
meaning transcends us
we're but single bloodcells
in the throbbing current of a long human need to give voice to the heart that knows a mystery but cannot say
everything else is nice wall hanging
banality is food we've agreed to prepare
sound and fury
republicans fail us by insisting on the divine right of CEOs
democrats deceive us by presuming to know what the human needs are
they create cases for rights that are merely imagined out of the warped imagination of a drunkard
women now own and operate the democratic party
their houses are filthy
i have many reservations about patriotic language
reading history and literature from the perspective of indigenous folks can only lend itself to a lived dismay
we are here by default
the intentions have nearly killed us
universal human rights is a catholic notion
only one institution is capable of preserving the fullness of that concept
genuflections at the cross the blood stained cross
and kiss the floor
it's the only way
jh:
"democrats deceive us by presuming to know what the human needs are"
Try going without food for a few days, or living homeless, or in a prison with the resident sodomites for a while, and all this "human need" will become much clearer to you.
Do I detect, as well, an undercurrent of misogyny?
Sorry if I don't kiss your feet, or the floor (not too hygienic).
We're not just blood cells. We're living, breathing, complex organisms.
Get used to it.
I haven't read much of Bernstein's work. I like what you've said here actually. I like the idea of freeing words from their dictionary definition. Where does he write about this?
I think every group imagines someone else is holding the power in poetry because I think poetry is powerless.
I thought the jh post here is his finest ever. Very powerful closing lines. I hope the next Pope is not a closet anti Papist who seeks to destrou the Catholic church from within. Luther never meant to splinter. A mighty fortress is our God.
The Catholics are holding the fortress together in many ways. We need the towering strength of a sharp pope. Absolute power can corrupt and many lesser vessels have hurt kids with this power. But the church still holds. God bless them and pass the gravy as in Thanksgiving.
Many Indians have converted. Not just here but throughout India.
We need a new poetry contest. I propose form and content as the topic.
The last Pope was Alexander.
He translated Homer into heroic couplets.
Never understood why couplets were heroic. Kind of monotonous if you ask me.
ghazal couplets are not heroic
but singable
the main thing after all
misogynist!? ME!?
i am aghast
even at the suggestion
why why
women are supreme in all things
as long as they keep house
pope alexander the dwarf
now this is getting real
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