I gather the polls are almost closed, so I'll close, too.
Rosey and Timmy, this has been a most enjoyable party. I loved not knowing at first who wrote the sonnets (then I started to
really want to know).
Shortly after I posted "Art" in the workshop, Reginald Shepherd posted this over at the Harriet blog (here's the link and an excerpt):
http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/...a_short_n.html
Quote:
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Politics, history, biography all inform and sometimes even deform art (style can be seen in one sense as the scar history leaves on art, what Adorno calls a hardening against the pressure of suffering), but they enter into art as artistic materials, and are transformed within it. And art speaks back to these things; it is not merely subject to them. To treat art as a social or economic or historical epiphenomenon is to strip it of its identity as art, and of its liberatory potential. This is why I am an adherent of what Adorno calls immanent critique.
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So I asked Reginald if he'd read "Art" and he hadn't, and he wrote his post a year before I wrote Art. So that quenched my qualms about the scar.
Thanks, John Whitworth, for easing my anxiety about "circumstance." I do feel like I read the Chesterton quote years ago - it sounds familiar - but it certainly wasn't in my mind when I wrote Art.
G/W - I wonder if you'd read about subjectivity in The Writer's Almanac? Because I believe the day before you posted here, the Almanac had that very quote about subjectivity. I'm so glad you felt the emotional impact.
Alex - Yes, this
was exactly how it was - this really happened. Art was clutching a bible like a drowning man and trying to be brave. Thank you for such kind words.
Tim - Yeah, you guys were very tough on me. Luckily, I still think you're a sweetie, sort of.
Anne - think of Satan's claw as a gun, and as the opposite of the Word.
Nemo - thanks, dollface.
Peter - enjoyed the Hien.
Thanks, Janet, Paulie.
G/W - not at all too obvious to mention. thanks.
Carol - nope.
Thanks Cathy, Marybeth, Alan.
Rose - Listen, don't we often find our friends by loving their poems first? So you shouldn't feel guilty about picking poems by your friends.
Can't wait till next year! This has been a fascinating lesson in taste and judgment, not to mention a great party.