Reviews and News:
Have you ever been to a slam poetry reading? If so, you’ll appreciate this explanation from Vice on why they can be so annoying. It’s “slam voice”—that “affected vocal delivery” that uses “mournful tone, stilted, Shatneresque pacing, and long crescendos.”
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Some poets die early, some poets don’t. Who cares? A poet’s death is not necessarily any more interesting than other events in his life.
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The ideas of the late British philosopher Adam Smith are regularly misunderstood and wrongly explained—most notably his argument about the “invisible hand” of the market. What did he really mean?
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How did Claude Monet become so popular?
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Why Istanbul loves cats: “Under the Ottoman Empire, the pious cared for cats through local charitable foundations, or vakif; by contrast, cats were often feared and vilified in medieval European cities.”
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Edgar Allan Poe, hatchet man: “During Poe’s lifetime, he was just as well known for curation and criticism as he was for his short stories. From 1835 to 1846 alone, Poe worked as an editor for four different magazines. This kept him financially afloat—just barely. It also provided him a platform from which to gut his inferiors (Poe was popularly known as ‘The Tomahawk Man’) and applaud those he admired. And it was through his fiction and criticism both that Poe intended to change American publishing; as he wrote in a letter to his older brother, ‘If I fully succeed in my purposes I will not fail to produce some lasting effect upon the growing literature of the country.'”
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Essay of the Day:
Cy Twombly’s use of texts in his paintings is a quintessential “postmodern” move. Does it matter? Marjorie Perloff on this and other questions in her review of Mary Jacobus’s Reading Cy Twombly in The Times Literary Supplement:
“The eminent literary critic Mary Jacobus is one of those who think the writing does matter. And not just writing but the appropriation of lines and whole passages of poetry, reproduced in Twombly’s faint, purposely gauche and childish handwriting, is, Jacobus believes, central to the artist’s work. Jacobus has had access to Twombly’s personal library, left after his death in 2011 in his house at Gaeta on the Tyrrhenian coast south of Rome. His collection of poetry ranges from Sappho, Theocritus, Ovid Virgil, Horace and Catullus, to Edmund Spenser and John Keats, and especially to such Modernists as Ezra Pound, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fernando Pessoa, and the Greek poets C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis. Not only do these poets supply Twombly with titles and captions for many paintings, but ‘entire lines and passages of poetry . . . are part of his distinctive aesthetic’. Accordingly, deciphering Twombly’s graphic practice becomes a way of understanding his work ‘as the repository of a humanistic, holistic, and timeless form of engagement with cultural memory’. Twombly ‘defamiliarizes poetic quotation by splicing and remixing, adopting his own phrase-driven lineation – in short, treating poetry as a kind of “readymade”‘.
“Ready-made is an odd phrase here because the Duchampian ready-made – an ordinary indifferent object endowed with meaning by unexpected placement, context, juxtaposition and framing – is the very opposite of the carefully distilled poetic passage, the telling line, revelatory of the painter-poet’s psyche. Indeed, Jacobus’s learned, exacting and highly impressive study of individual poetic quotations and allusions goes a long way in explaining what these semi-abstract paintings are really all about.”
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Photo: Patagonia
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Poem: Aaron Belz, “Pride and Prej”
