The Best American Poetry

The Secret of Secrets [by Sir Henry Taylor]

From Sir Henry Taylor, "On Secrecy" (1836:

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A secret may be sometimes best kept by keeping the secret of its being a secret.

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I believe Poe was paying attention. Borges, too. -- DL

Quote of the Day: Walt Frazier

(JOSHUA C. CRUEY, ORLANDO SENTINEL)

"The diminutive [Jameer] Nelson is a Lilliputian among Gullivers."
                               -- Walt Frazier (NY Knicks vs. Orlando Magic 1/5/2013)

-- sdh

Quote of the day: Four New Potatoes by Joe Weil

("The Potato Eaters" Vincent Van Gogh, 1885)

I remember boiling 4 "new Potatoes (those are the small ones others call salt potatoes) making myself a small sauce pan of melted butter with pepper, and eating the potatoes whole and scewered on my swiss army blade as I read Williams' Selected poems. I was 18 years old, and the only one awake in the house at three in the morning. It is one of the happiest memories of my life. Maybe it was the linoleum which was torn just under my seat. I scratched an itch on my bare foot with it. Maybe it was the flourescent light. It could have been Williams' poems, too, but I know, know beyond all doubt that, without those 4 potatoes, no happiness would have been as possible.

                        -- Joe Weil

Walter LaFeber on the Chicago Cubs

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Anyone can have a bad century.

-- Walter LaFeber

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The eminent historian Walter LaFeber -- author of The American Age: U. S. Foreign Policy At Home and Abroad, from 1750 to the Present, as well as the more recent Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (Norton) -- turns out to be a diehard Cubs' fan, the experience of which has to have a chastening effect on the mind and heart. The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History (1997) won the Bancroft Prize in American History.

The line reminded me of a remark made by Marv Levy, coach of the Buffalo Bills, the team that was always the bridesmaid, never the bride, to use that most curious of all sportscaster's cliches. The Bills would get to the Superbowl and lose it -- not a bad fate, all in all, when you conside the history of teams that have been to the Superbowl once in forty-three years. One week Levy was asked whether the following Sunday's game was "do or die." No, Levy said firmly, putting things in perspective. "D-Day was do or die," he said. Sunday against the Packers or Giants was just another game.

--- DL

Happy birthday, Glen Hartley (with regards from Thornton Wilder)

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We’re all People, before we’re anything else. People, even before we’re artists. The role of being a Person is sufficient to have lived and died for.

-- Thornton Wilder

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The Drapes of Wrath [from Susan Sontag's Journals]

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Lizzie [Hardwick]: "Well, it's curtains for him, or, as my students would say, drapes."

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from entry for 11/ 2 / 79 NYC

Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964-1980
(NY: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2012)

Midrash

Effort is its own reward. We are here to do, and through doing to learn; and through learning to know; and through knowing to experience wonder; and through wonder to attain wisdom; and through wisdom to find simplicity; and through simplicity to give attention; and through attention to see what needs to be done. 

Pirkei Avot  V:27

-- sdh

My Quote for the Day -- from Susan Sontag

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All political language is alienated. Political language as such is the enemy. (Joseph [Brodsky's] posiiton).

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-- Susan Sontag, entry for 12/ 6 / 77, in As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks 1964-1980 (ed. David Rieff, FSG, 2012)

Sontag's journals are extraordinary. It is irresistible to quote from them. as I plan to do in the weeks to come. She had a fabulous mind and was as brave in her self-encounters as she was voracious in approaching a world of intellectual stimulation. Thank you, David Rieff, for this significant accomplishment. -- DL

Is the Avant-Garde Dead? What say ye, Camille?

Is it time to admit that avant-garde is a phenomenon of the 19h and 20th century? Camille Paglia think so:
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It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
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Moreover,
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Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

Thus we live in a strange and contradictory culture, where the most talented college students are ideologically indoctrinated with contempt for the economic system that made their freedom, comforts and privileges possible. In the realm of arts and letters, religion is dismissed as reactionary and unhip. The spiritual language even of major abstract artists like Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko is ignored or suppressed.
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I quote from Camille Paglia's essay "How Capitalism Can Save Art" in the Wall Street Journal, October 6-7, 2012, p. C3.

It may also be "high time" to retire that impoverished term post-modernist, that sad token of belatedness, which has lost any of the descriptive power it may once have had, -- DL

What Made Freud Think of That? [by David Lehman]

A definitive example of the spontaneous aphorism:
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One is irresistibly reminded of an incident in the French Chamber when capital punishment was being debated. A member had been passionately supporting its abolition and his speech was being received with tumultuous applause, when a voice from the hall called out: 'Que messieurs les assassins commencent!' [Let the murderers make the first move.]

-- Freud.Civilization and Its Discontents
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OK, everyone. In the course of writing, Civilization and Its Discontents, what argument or quotation "irresistibly reminded" Freud of this incident?

I wonder whether others will concur when I say that Civilization and Its Discontents is one of the most irresistible titles of the twentieth century. -- DL