Aesthetics

Why I Hate “The Arts”

Perhaps it is the ends of art I hate–the way it is “valued” rather than integrated into the dynamic of being alive.

Tagged as: Adam Fitzgerald, Ben Pease, Mark Strand, Monk Books, Paterson Poetry Marathon, Phillip Levine, the arts

If Plato came back today and saw the workshop, craft obsessed nature of poetics, he’d give his approval, but not for reasons poets might like: Plato would approve because the stupidity of inspiration has been removed from the writing of poems.

Tagged as: craft, daimon, didactic sonnet, ground set apart, inspiration, inspired, Levertov, lizard brain, MFA, muse, Plato, poems, poet, poetic amusement, Poetry and Poetics, po’biz, ray hammond, republic, Robert Bly, stupere, stupidity, templum, workshop

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The Four Functions and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

by Joe Weil Academia

As Kafka said: “The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens; doubtless this is so, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of crows.”

Tagged as: agnostic, alienation, Andrew Marvel, Anthony Hecht, arbitrary power, Baudelaire, Bovarysme, Carl Jung, Carl Sandburg, cubist, dadaism, dadaist, detachment, Dickens, dislogistic, dogma, Dover Beach, Dover Bitch, ENFP, Flaubert, free spirited, George Santyanna, God, imagist, insanity, INTJ, INTP, ironic, Kafka, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, language, Laudatory, Lewis Carol, Macbeth, Meyers Brigs, Michelangelo, modernism, Molinowski, Molly Bloom, neurasthenia, nihilism, Non-conformist, Objectivist, Panopticon, Perceivers, Poe, Poetry and Poetics, Positivism, postmodernity, Pound, Pre-modern, Rimbaud, Romanticism, sociopathy, Surrealist, symbolist, Symbolists, T.S. Eliot, The Carpenter, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, The Walrus, To A Coy Mistress, unconscious, Vachel Lindsey, Wallace Stevens

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Sentimentality vs. Feeling

by Joe Weil Aesthetics

True feeling has the force of grace; sentimentality has the stench of morals. The word “should” and “must” cling to its fat cherubic legs. Half comprised of self regard, and the other half a mixture of cliche, the sentimental is close to the feigned regard of the funeral director: appropriate, and grave, but with one eye on the itemized bill.

Tagged as: Chekov, feeling, Lipa, Madame Bovary, Nabokov, Russian Literature, sentimentality, The Gully, The Ravine, The Sound of Music, Tolstoy

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Poem of the Week: Wallace Stevens

by Joe Weil Aesthetics

[Large Red Man Reading]

Tagged as: Joe Weil, Large Red Man Reading, Matisse, obvious, Our Town, Poeisis, Rilke, Thorton Wilder, Wallace Stevens

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How Tu Fu Works

by Micah Towery Aesthetics

We perceive a break between images and feeling. But perhaps this break is artificial. We acknowledge that images can evoke feelings, perhaps that there is an “objective correlative” that can reliably evoke feelings. But perhaps what is being suggested here is that the category break is weaker than we think. The image (object) is already interpreted: “values are the way we see things.”

Tagged as: 100 Chinese Poems, Classics revisited, Ezra Pound, hermeneutic circle, hermeneutics, Imagism, interpretation, montage, Sunset, Translation, Tu Fu

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Bob Kaufman’s Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness

by Brooks Lampe Aesthetics

Paradoxically, the Beats depicted themselves and the society they were rejecting in surreal imagery. America, in their estimation is a surrealist circus, full of absurdities.

Tagged as: Allen Ginsberg, Beat, Bob Kaufman, Gregory Corso, howl, hysterical catalog, repetition, Solitudes, surrealism, Surrealist, Walt Whitman

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Gatekeepers of Literary Greatness: On Piety

by Joe Weil Aesthetics

In the full complexity of human constructs piety is the rhetoric of conflicting and supposedly coherent values.

Tagged as: conflicting values, larkin, Mary Oliver, new age, piety, Rhetoric, Shakespeare, the act, Wild Geese, William Carlos Williams

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Gatekeepers of Literary Greatness: Some Definitions and a Parable about Chickens

by Joe Weil Academia

The chickens are purifying their system, purging it of corruption. Meanwhile, the chickens who willfully refuse to answer the bell are seen as impious, as negative, as renegades.

Tagged as: Burke, chickens, gatekeepers, Joe Weil, Literary Greatness, Renegades, value

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Aesthete and Propagandist: An Interview with Gene Tanta

by Brooks Lampe Aesthetics

It’s getting later than it’s ever been and the sonnet is nearly over: do you know where your closure is?

Tagged as: aesthetics, authority, charles simic, Gene Tanta, grand narratives, leonard cohen, modernism, propaganda, Romania, surrealism, Unusual Woods

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On Gene Tanta’s “Critical Introduction to Unusual Woods.”

by Brooks Lampe Academia

Even though both the form and content of Gene Tanta’s work are particular to his Romanian-immigrant experience, he insists that his poetry is accessible to everyone. His poetry, he says, exists both as aesthetic objects and political propaganda. This is absolutely true about all poetry, not just his own. Inevitably, literary criticism will come to see that literature is always both.

Tagged as: aesthetics, american immigrant experience, Bloom, book of poems, collective memories, collective unconscious, contemporary poetry, cultural memory, Deep Image, Eliot, ESL, ESL poetry, Harold Bloom, image poetry, Imagism, immigrant, jungian, Marxism, modern poetry, reader-response, Romania, romanians, second language poetry, Simic, surrealism, Tanta, theory

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Trying to do something important: a couple of thoughts on ambition in a work of art

by Daniel Silliman Aesthetics

Melville worries that his ambition will fail, that his picture of the whale will “remain unpainted at the last.” He is always aware he’s always on the verge of the whole thing breaking down, but the ambition is there. Beating underneath. It acts as the will to will it onward, the drive to make it work, a promise to try to do something great, the stakes that are high enough to make it worth while even if the whole thing fails.

Ambition, all by itself, makes the work a thing of value.

Tagged as: "A", ambition, important works, Louis Zukofsy, Melville, Moby-Dick, Sufjan Stevens, Whitman

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Aesthetics

Why I Hate “The Arts”

Didactic Sonnet

The Four Functions and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Sentimentality vs. Feeling

Poem of the Week: Wallace Stevens

How Tu Fu Works

Bob Kaufman’s Solitudes Crowded With Loneliness

Gatekeepers of Literary Greatness: On Piety

Gatekeepers of Literary Greatness: Some Definitions and a Parable about Chickens

Aesthete and Propagandist: An Interview with Gene Tanta

On Gene Tanta’s “Critical Introduction to Unusual Woods.”

Trying to do something important: a couple of thoughts on ambition in a work of art

POEM OF THE WEEK

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