A poem criticizing The Tablet, UK’s Catholic newspaper of record: For the people at The Tablet Life seems very tough. They publish, publish, publish, But no one buys their stuff. On tables, shelves, old, yellowing Unsold, the copies lie. “What can be done to save our jobs? What is there left to try?” More more more at The Left Footer’s blog. [...]
PURITANS AND ROMANTICS: Religion was reduced by the Puritans “to mere morality,” the Puritan imagination was “thoroughly moralized,” said H.B. Parkes and H.W. Schneider respectively, both of them quoted by Yvor Winters in his 1930 book Maule’s Curse. The “highly stimulated” Puritan, said Winters, was “no longer guided by the flexible and sensitive ethical scholarship of the Roman tradition.” [...]
At Dominican U in RF last night, Robert Hanning from Columbia U. on confession in the middle ages. Title led me to expect a socio-cultural explication but he was about close reading of Bocaccio and Chaucer. I found the former heavy-handed in his slashing attack on church practice, producing cartoon characters — opera boffo? — none [...]
Advice to a young poet: Let the poet who has been not too long ago born make very sure of this, that no one cares to hear, in strained iambics, that he feels sprightly in spring, is uncomfortable when his sexual desires are ungratified, and that he has read about human brotherhood in last year’s [...]
The morning read has two parts, I must add to yesterday’s Breakfast Challenge, pre– and at-breakfast. There’s coffee in both, but one is pre-walk, the other after it. Difference is, at the 2nd you take in heavier food requiring digestion, at the 1st lighter that is not so demanding on internal excretions. At the 1st, [...]
Selected Poems of Ezra Pound (New Directions PB, 1957) has my attention. Can’t wholly explain my fascination, but it’s so much about diction. His language is it. His intellect and interpretation of things.
