I’ve been a registered Democrat for 36 years, but this is the year I will change to Independent. I simply no longer want to be associated with the mendacious, ignorant, self-involved, politically incoherent, power drunk, third-rate clowns who run the party. Take a look: Here, Congressional Democrats have decided to fund the opposition — not just any old opposition but the real hard-right wacko abstinence-only opposition. Really, you have to read it to believe it. And then there is putative Democrat Joseph Lieberman, who apparently gets to call himself a Democrat when it is convenient, but under other circumstances is an Independent. You could put a bad wig on a turnip & it could go on Face the Nation & make more sense that Joseph Lieberman, the senator from Self Regard, who now thinks the US ought to Bomb Iran. The turnip would be better looking, too. (See Max Sawicky’s inimitable run-down of the details & implications of Democratic “leadership” at TPM Cafe.)
Monthly Archives: June 2007
Weather Radar
As a kid, I was fascinated by the weather & read about fronts & air pressure & the rest. I got my mother to buy me a cheap barometer. Now, with a couple of mouse clicks, I have better information about the weather than meteorologists had only a couple of decades ago. It has been hot here today, with thunderstorms predicted. Amazingly, I have been able to watch on my computer screen as a line of storms gathered strength west of Lake Ontario this morning & then moved steadily east. My window is open & I can just now hear the first rumbles of thunder.
Paul Klee’s Diaries
When I was 17 I had only just discovered modern painting. I had a book of Paul Klee’s paintings that I would pour over & over. It is hard for me to describe the sense of wonder I felt looking at these images. I was also looking at other 20th century painters & reading Modernist poetry, but that little book of Klee reproductions moved me in ways I still find mysterious. For some reason, I was just now thinking of my discovery of Klee’s Diaries. This was the 1960s, long before internet book searches, so the fact that I discovered the diaries is nothing short of amazing. I haven’t though about the book in years & I no longer have the copy I bought in high school, though I see from a quick search that it’s still in print. What I remember most fondly is the way Klee collected lists of interesting rhymes for possible poems. His paintings, thinking about it now, give evidence of Klee’s having also collected bits of the visual field for use in paintings. What I like about this — what moves me about it — is the empiricism of the project. The love of the physical bits & pieces. That is what my poetry has been about, at bottom, that ephemeral, impossible connection between the word & the thing. This has a lot to do with my defense of sincerity in the last couple of posts &on the Poetryetc discussion list.
Sincerity & Sentimentality
There is a discussion going on at Poetryetc regarding the role of sincerity in poetry, which some have equated with the use of the “lyric I.” God knows there are abuses of sincerity scattered over the poetic landscape like junked cars photographed exquisitely in black & white, but the rejection of sincerity is a stance, not a principle of composition. What’s more, a little cross-cultural comparison reveals that it is a stance that represents only a narrow slice of what is out there. Milosz is sincere; most contemporary Vietnamese poetry (to take an example I am familiar with) is sincere, if by sincere you mean a direct statement of the poet’s thoughts & feelings. Without sincerity, poetry becomes mere literary hijinks. Sincerity can easily slide over into sentimentality, which is always a fault in art. Once in Hanoi I was riding in a taxi with a friend when the driver turned up the volume on a song that had just come on the radio. My friend asked,”What do you think of the song? It’s very popular right now.” My Vietnamese was limited, but after listening for a moment, I replied, “It sounds very sentimental.” “Yes,” she said. “Sentimental. That’s why we’ll never be a powerful country.” [Slightly edited for clarity.]
Two Kinds of Poetry
Inspired by Jonathan Mayhew’s naming of a pair of poetic fallacies, I’d like to propose a kind of Klein Bottle paradox of the “lyric I.” In current poetic culture it is fashionable to eschew the first person as gauche & “sincere” in a sense where to be sincere is to be stupid &/or dishonest. Well, at least not hip. There is also, alas, a School of Sincerity in which the personal anecdote is related as sacred text. These two approaches to poetry stand glaring at each other like a couple of studs across a bar or — an example I’m more familiar with — a couple of terrier bitches staring each other down across the width of a kitchen. I take Oscar Wilde & Samuel Beckett to be profoundly sincere artists. They meant every word they wrote, often through the artifice of pretending that they didn’t. Too often, the rejection of sincerity is itself an insincere pose, a stance taken out of fear of committing oneself to a position. As if one could step outside the self (or selves). As if that would be a good thing. At the same time, an indulgence of sincerity — imposing the facts of one’s experience on the poem because they are your experiences — is not really a pose so much as a failure of self-consciousness. I would put these two faults, part aesthetic, part ethical, under the heading of sentimentality.