I’m not going to link to an essay in The Atlantic on why poetry matters because, well, it’s not really about poetry. (Fine. Here it is.) It’s about identity and how poets are exploring it “in new ways” (whatever that means) and how technology is helping them “engage” their yuge audience. Anyway, the entire piece is a mess, but I will say this: If people are reading a poem primarily because of its politics, how does that make poetry matter? It matters because it is the vehicle for something else? I suppose that may be “mattering,” but only in a very narrow sense—like a helmet matters because it protects my head. You know why poetry should matter? Because poets are writing good poems. Why should people read poetry? Because they like it. Should poetry change people? Maybe, though it often doesn’t. It should, however, remind people that not everything in life is about power and fame. And it should occasionally show people that thinking about seemingly unimportant things for no reason is part of what makes us human.
Instead, read Jay Nordlinger on the problem with our preoccupation with relevance: “That’s the buzzword of the day, ‘relevant.’ I think it’s one of the great nonsense words of our time. What does it mean? The Bach B Minor Mass is great. Is it relevant? I don’t know. It’s great. Is greatness relevant? Relevant to what? I think art can be liked and loved and appreciated. It instructs us and consoles us and thrills us and lifts us up. But this mania, this fashion, this fad for relevance is bizarre. It’s a perversion of art. I think it goes hand in hand with attempts to politicize art.”
In other news: Langston Hughes was born in 1901, not 1902, a Kansas poet has discovered.
In Slovakia, a woman has been arrested for playing a four-minute clip from Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata on repeat for 16 years. She had “played the music for years to drown out a neighbor’s loud barking dog, and had simply continued doing it.”
V.S. Naipaul has died. Revisit Algis Valiunas’s essay on his life and work and Joseph Bottum’s review of the authorized biography.
The late Donald Hall on aging and writing less: “Striving to pay the mortgage in the late seventies and eighties, some years I published four books. Now it takes me a month to finish seven hundred words.”
Brian T. Allen reviews Antonio Canova’s Washington sculpture: “Canova’s George Washington at the Frick Collection is the zenith of the museum’s signature exhibition style. It’s small, fewer than 20 objects. It’s focused. It examines the creation of Antonio Canova’s full-length sculpture of George Washington in Roman costume from 1821. It was Canova’s (1757–1822) sole American commission and among his most famous subjects. It’s perfectly presented, with superb scholarship and a gorgeous design. It also finesses a difficult truth with elegance. The sculpture, unveiled to acclaim, was destroyed in a fire in 1836. Its life-size plaster cast, Canova’s final preparatory object, remains, as do Canova’s drawings and modellos.”
Jon McNaughton, painter of populist rage: “Not all of McNaughton’s paintings are political; he sells prints of warm, kitschy scenes in the style of Thomas Kinkade; earnest depictions of biblical vignettes; and pictures of Mormon temples. (McNaughton is himself a Mormon.) But it’s his political and patriotism-themed paintings that have brought him the most notoriety—and presumably income. They are occasionally likened, by both admirers and critics, to the paintings of Norman Rockwell, but the comparison demeans and mischaracterizes Rockwell, whose paintings capture a supple human expressiveness entirely absent from the stiff, flat, uninteresting faces McNaughton paints. Moreover, Rockwell’s work—from his sentimental illustrations to his political paintings—reveals a deep affection for America, while McNaughton’s reliance on heavy-handed symbolism reveals a grim determination to behold his country not as it is but as it is characterized in alarmist right-wing broadcasting.”
Fred Siegel on the big life of a small journal: “Describing the vibrant intellectual life of New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Anatole Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage is one of my favorite books. ‘Alienated from alienation,’ Broyard was fascinated by the lively parties where people debated so intensely that ‘we didn’t know where books ended and we began.’ Recently, I had the good fortune to attend such a gathering: a celebration held in honor of the 50th anniversary of Telos, the lively, unpredictable highbrow magazine founded in 1968 by Paul Piccone, then a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Buffalo. Piccone died in 2004, but Telos, unsubsidized by any university and unwilling to bend to any ideology, has continued as an independent journal under the talented tutelage of his widow, Mary, and the current editor, Russell Berman.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Claremont Review of Books, Mark Bauerlein takes stock of David Horowitz’s thirty years of writing and activism and argues that, however abrasive his style, he has proven to be particularly prescient:
“For many years, David Horowitz was deemed unseemly by establishment conservative intellectuals, editors, and journalists. He’s too blunt and confrontational, they worried. One heard that he had changed his politics for the better, but the style was still Berkeley, 1966. In 2003 when he initiated his Academic Bill of Rights campaign (recorded in Volume VIII), Republicans held the presidency and both houses of Congress, and they might get three openings on the Supreme Court. Why stir up trouble on campus, where everyone despises us? He published Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes in 1999, and mounted a war on the reparations movement soon after, inserting editorials in newspapers listing reasons why African Americans were lucky to live in the United States, not in Africa. This was just the kind of racial controversy Republican politicians wanted to avoid. Didn’t Horowitz know that race issues are a loser for conservatives?
“Yes, Horowitz struck people in 2003—including those on the Right—as an exaggerator and dramatizer. Oh, they acknowledged, a few wild leftists may be found in academic ‘studies’ departments and advocacy organizations such as BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) and ACT UP, a gay advocacy group popular in the ’90s, but they have no impact on the country at large. We’ve got a Texas Christian in the White House!
Fifteen years later, everything looks different…Summer 2018 makes the Horowitz of 20 or 30 years ago look all-too-prescient.”
Photo: Solovetsky Monastery
Poem: Aaron Poochigian, “Last Friday Night”
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