The beauty of inequality

From an Orthodox Christian blog.

John Ashbery

For those readers that are interested, here is Helen Vendler's review of John Ashbery's latest collection, Planisphere.

Via The Provincial Emails.

The Tonight Show

Sarah Palin meets William Shatner.

Review in Poetry

In the latest issue of Poetry magazine, I value Christina Pugh's notice about Marilyn Hacker's and Heather McHugh's latest books, not merely because we have the art of poetry sagely and sanely considered, and not merely because the reviewer considers the work of two very different poets with equal ease and aplomb -- but because of this paragraph, a withholding of praise in an otherwise laudatory summation :

At times, though, Hacker’s cosmopolitanism has adversely affected her formal choices. Like so many others these days, she has fallen under the spell of the ghazal, and the book contains too many of them. This Persian form has become the multicultural flavor of the month for many poets who are formally-minded, and it’s a very tough nut to crack in English. Hacker is no more immune to this linguistic weakness than anyone else, as shown in lines like the following: “I might wish, like any citizen to celebrate my country/but millions have reason to fear and hate my country.” In short, there are some poems here that read like outtakes from Poets Against the War (“the war goes on and on and on and on”).

30th anniversary

McNamara's Blog reminds us of the anniversary of the death of Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen; the occasion falls today.

Eminem faking it

Now, I like the talentless Mr Mathers about as much as I like the bubonic plague. But this is ridiculous. Apparently, gay activists are criticizing the rapper's use of the phrase "fake it" to describe some gay pop stars. You see, "fake it" sounds an awful lot like an anti-gay slur.

Is there any way we can banish both Mathers and these insane activists to Antarctica for the rest of their lives?

Dream of a bibliophile

Dreamt of acquiring books at low or no cost by Adrienne Rich, Charles Baudelaire, and St Bernard of Clairvaux as translated by Thomas Merton. Now that's a motley crew!

Quotation : Mary Oliver

If God exists he isn't just butter and good luck.

Mary Oliver, from "At the River Clarion," in Evidence (Beacon Press, 2009), p. 51

From The Cloud of Unknowing

Anyone who desires to regain the purity of heart lost through sin and to win that personal wholeness beyond all pain must patiently struggle in the contemplative work and endure its toil whether he has been a habitual sinner or not. Both sinners and innocents will suffer in this work although obviously sinners will feel the suffering more. And yet it often happens that some who have been hardened, habitual sinners arrive at the perfection of this work sooner than those who have never sinned grievously. God is truly wonderful in lavishing his grace on anyone he chooses; the world stands bewildered before love like this.

And I believe that Doomsday will actually be glorious, for the goodness of God will shine clearly in all his gifts of grace. Some who are now despised and held in contempt (and who are even perhaps inveterate sinners) shall on that day reign in splendor with his saints. And perhaps some of those who have never sinned grievously and who to all appearances are pious people, venerated as gods by other men, shall find themselves in misery among the damned.

My point is that in this life no man may judge another as good or evil simply on the evidence of his deeds. The deeds themselves are another matter. These we may judge as good or evil, but not the person.

via Magnificat, November 2009, pp. 332-3, meditation for Tuesday the 24th

Bizarre news story

Man sleeps with dead wife. For five years.

Another country heard from (times three)

Three of the four Massachusetts Democrats in contention for the US Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Edward Kennedy sound off about the controversy involving Kennedy's son Patrick and his bishop.

Why don't they just shut up?

Quotation : Marianne Moore

Sympathizing with an experiment, we yet need not venerate the result.

The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (Penguin, 1987), p. 586

Eelworks

A poem by Seamus Heaney.

Via Steven Riddle's excellent blog A Momentary Taste of Being.

Dialogue on a bus

(By "girl" be it understood to mean "young college-age woman")

Girl #1: So what's your ethnicity?

Girl #2: I'm Brazilian.

Girl #1: Brazilian! I knew you were either Greek or Brazilian the first time I saw you. You're so pretty.

Girl #2: Thank you! And I knew you were Asian the first time I saw you!

The IHOP coffee incident, September 1997

You told a funny story
(Hilarious, not gory)
And it was mandatory
    To spew my coffee-quaff.
To Heather I say "Brava!"
Volcanoes belching lava
Can't beat my burst of java
    That time you made me lauff.

Quotation

A lot of people take the term free verse literally, with the result that there is more bad free verse written today than one can easily shake a stick at. Most of it hopes to recommend itself by deploying vaguely surrealistic images in unmetered colloquial idiom to urge acceptable opinions: that sex is a fine thing, that accurate perception is better than dull, that youth is probably a nicer condition than age, that there is more to things than their appearances; as well as that Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were war criminals, that the C.I.A. is a menace, that corporations are corrupt, that contemporary history seems "entropic," and that women get a dirty deal. All very true and welcome. Yet what is lamentably missing is the art that makes poems re-readable once we have fathomed what they "say."

Paul Fussell, Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, revised edition (New York: Random House, 1979), p. 88