What are some reasons why we read poetry? Why turn to a poem over a novel, a play, a philosophical treatise? In this essay I want to suggest that we turn to poetry out of a fundamental desire to answer the question, How should one live? By making this claim, I am attempting to wonder about poetry’s relationship to the ethical, broadly conceived here as partaking in the four distinctions of ethical criticism as laid out by Wayne Booth in his book The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction and then paraphrased and articulated by Martha Nussbaum in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Those distinctions are 1.) Asking of a literary work, as Nussbaum writes, “What relationship does my engagement with it have to my general aim to live well?” 2.) “What sense of life is expressed in this work as a whole?” 3.) As there are [...]
Andrew Field
How to Write a Poem The day hath too much red in it— death licking her chops over the salty carcasses of abandoned ideas. But this week, I fell in love. It came over the hill hungry & surprising. And I will take the mysteriousness out of my best poem to appease apple pickers, students, mothers and all of Ohio. Finally, the poem is what you want it to be: a rose of splendor; a lover in an abandoned room marking time with a lover’s laughter. __________________________________________________ Mike Hackney is the author of five books, a grant recipient from the Ohio Arts Council and Ohio Arts Commission, and founder of the Almeda Street Poetry Group. Share this: Related Posts Poem of the Week: DéLana R.A. Dameron Poem of the Week: Josh Lefkowitz Poem of the Week: Dorothea Lasky Poem of the Week: Luke Johnson Poem of the Week: Don Mee [...]
Light Pollution, Match.com Potlatch No man is an island. Some men are on islands. Some men are on two. Odysseus flicked his phone awake began to type: “Penelope, my darling, I —” Calypso came into the room. Phone disappears into pocket, on silent. Whisper I to you: “Come on the drift of the moon. The light flies from our windows and our streets to space It hits tiny bits of dust, bounces back aground, hits your eyes; hits my eyes.” Or eyes stare at the dull impeded glow of the skies. Penelope marries a suitor. Odysseus moves in with Calypso. Nausicaa sits on the beach; the stars they are shining she thinks and looks up and counts them. Twenty-eight. Twenty-eight points of light, she thinks, how’s that for a metaphor? It’s her twenty eighth birthday, and Odysseus has messaged her. A million pixels of light in her eyes, a picture [...]
Horsetails The cirrus above were horsetails running from the smoke stacks as we latched flaps and buckled coats, holding out for incredible thunderings, standing long as the mud of the dirty Susquehanna where girls lose virginity to four wheel drives and lift kits. We go on working despite our Sunday ghosts and rotisserie traditions. Here mothers use food stamps for cigarettes and children learn to talk to rabbits or fall asleep to infomercials. Parades drum on to resemble community but the trailer parks know better, sharing lovers and thirty packs, having yard sales for angry fixes while school boys are mauled in saw mills and two keg bars. ______________________________________________ Zach Fishel‘s second chapbook, Thorn Bushes and Fishhooks, will appear from NightBallet Press this fall. His poetry has twice been nominated for the Pushcart, and at present he teaches environmentalism in New England.
Characters: Wallace Stevens Marianne Moore Elizabeth Bishop W.H. Auden James Merril Robert Lowell Introduction Lowell: Why are we here? Can someone tell me this, please? Auden: A little testy, aren’t we? Lowell: Testy? Of course. I was not planning on being summoned from the grave today, and in fact had plans this afternoon with my dead first wife. Bishop: Do you mean Jean? Lowell: Yes, I mean Jean. We were going to visit Boston, MA, so that I might once again visit the stomping grounds on which I bullied my classmates and earned the nickname “Cal.” Bishop: Short for “Caligula.” And you’re proud of this? Auden: Proud? He’s positively beaming, the old bully. Stevens: Bully indeed. I agree with Mr. Lowell, this is a most wretched occasion for being summoned. The malady of the quotidian? I meant to say the malady of the long dead. Merrill: An elegant turn of [...]
Photo by Carolyn Baskis No Use Crying I don’t know who decided that idiom. You wanna cry, cry. What, are we all so wealthy that we can afford to pour milk over granite tabletops and not think about the cost of such behaviors? Do we own and operate dairy farms? No, we don’t – not most of us. Sucks. So go ahead, let fall your tears (or an apropos typo: let fall your fears) and cry, weep, howl, shriek, rage until you are at last sponge-ready and eager to clean and begin anew. But you know what else you could do? Go get some juice. Spill that, too, in arcing droplets that ape the sun. Add an asparagus spear, a broccoli floret, a Brussels sprout; arrange accordingly. Look at this interesting composition you made! All textured and nuanced – and to think that it started from a mild milk tragedy. [...]
I. How can we define the philosophy of pragmatism? What is the relationship between the philosophy of pragmatism and the poetics of John Ashbery? Is there one? Ken McClelland cites Cornel West’s citation of C.I. Lewis as “being one of the best characterizations of pragmatism ever formulated” (Opening Truth 12). Lewis writes, Pragmatism could be characterized as the doctrine that all problems are at bottom problems of conduct, that all judgments are, implicitly, judgments of value, and that, as there can be ultimately no valid distinction of theoretical and practical, so there can be no final separation of questions of truth of any kind from questions of the justifiable ends of action. (qtd. in McClelland 12) McClelland goes on to comment that, “with the words, ‘the justifiable ends of action’ in mind, we clearly see that pragmatism’s philosophical impulse is inextricably tied to temporal consequences, with the idea that the [...]
1. What makes a work of art satisfying? What is the difference between a poem we call mawkish, or overly sentimental, and a poem that carries the right amount of sentimentality and wit? How do we judge or evaluate these questions of taste? Aside from all the contentious feelings that immediately crop up when considering questions of taste – questions of taste are elitist, say, or only matters relevant to a leisured bourgeoisie – how do we evaluate a work of art? What criteria do we invoke? Is there such criteria? Charles Wegner writes, “Fundamentally, human beings are capable of aesthetic satisfaction because they are intelligent, imaginative, active, and percipient beings, not because they are educated, ‘cultured,’ leisured, or ‘artistic.’ If we can at least hesitantly agree with this proposition, then we might ask, What is it about a poem, a work of art, or a piece of music, that [...]
There are certain (uncertain) propositions that every poet must eventually encounter, if only to embrace or abandon. They are not propositions so much as ways of being, lifestyles; and, like the way one walks, or talks, or just stands in the rain, they are ineluctably intimate parts of ourselves, hence not propositions so much as self-images. What kind of poet do you want to be (I imagine a Bellovian unctuous trickster asking)? What kind of poet are you? “Oh, she’s an angry poet,” they say, or, “The woman is far too sentimental for my tastes.” These are cursory judgments, but some kind of truths are lodged in even the most mawkish and unhelpful of sentiments. So let’s begin at the beginning. A poem is a stance, a temperament, a philosophy, an ontologically practical, (if impractical), modus operandi. A vision – not necessarily metaphysical, but a way of looking at things [...]
1. So what are some other major facets of Ashbery’s relationship to American pragmatism? How would we characterize pragmatism, and in what ways does Ashbery’s work suggest our characterization? Does Ashbery ever explicitly mention James, Dewey, or Rorty? (I know of only one place currently where Rorty mentions Ashbery; it is in his introduction to Essays on Heidegger and Others, where he writes, “I have given up on the attempt to find something common to Michal Graves’s buildings, Pynchon and Rushdie’s novels, Ashbery’s poems, various sorts of popular music, and the writings of Heidegger and Derrida.” (Rorty, 1) Ashbery does explicitly mention James, in a poem called, appropriately, “My Philosophy of Life.” The passage in question reads, But then you remember something William James wrote in some book of his you never read–it was fine, it had the fineness, the powder of life dusted over it, by chance, of course, [...]
This entry is part of a series, Ashbery and Pragmatist Poetics» Introduction: Why the Lyric Essay? 1. I want to start with a problem: an overwhelming, close to paralyzing sense that an essay about John Ashbery’s poetry is like a representational critique of a cubist painting. The two (essay and poetry) just feel ill-fitting, strange bedfellows, as though a parent (the essayist), out of the desire to understand her son (the poet), gave him a lesson in thermodynamics. Ashbery can be theromodynamically complex, yet such a lesson would seem to miss the point, not to mention the fun. New forms of interpretation are needed to come close to an approximation to what Ashbery is doing. 2. So how do we approach him? One day I made a list of various things that go into an Ashbery poem. I’d just read Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion,” and, inspired, I decided [...]