191–200 of 201 posts
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Lots of the best (by a number of standards) poetry ever written is deeply political.
red-rag and pink-flag blackshirt and brown strut-mince and stink-rag have all come to town
Also, cummings would struggle to be published in today's literary world, since he leaned to the right and was an ardent anti-communist (which began after visiting the Soviet Union in the early 30s).
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Yes? I've just read the article. It's a collection of crypto-fascist dog whistles about race; it barely merits being called an opinion. (It is an example of why the academic personnel pool needs the thorough cleaning it's currently getting.) Anyone who declined to associate with the author would be right to do so. There aren't many people who don't understand what this kind of article is really about. The Chicago Rev…
I'd submit that someone with the name of Aaron Kunin is unlikely to be a fascist. From the essay: "Last year when I proposed to teach a seminar in which the syllabus would include essays by Ralph Ellison, two of my colleagues wrote to the Curriculum Committee, as well as to the dean and the president of the college, objecting that it would be “literary blackface” for me to study Ellison." Here we have professors talk…
The whole point of Invisible Man is that Ellison doesn't want to be reduced to a dehumanized representative of some collective. He is a person in his own right.
If you're an activist, the kind of thinking represented by Ellison is actively counterproductive. It's old-school Liberal stuff -- "outdated". It interferes with building the proper Consciousness.
Hence the objection to someone, and in particular a "white" person, working to advance Ellison without enough criticism. Instead you need someone who can "properly contextualize" Ellison, which is to say, to treat him with a little surface respect, but ultimately to make clear to readers that his work is somehow misguided. Nobody will go so far as to say "Uncle Tom" or "counter-revolutionary", but that's the subtext.
I wouldn't call this "talking like children", because the people are highly-educated adults and they understand exactly what they are doing.
This is the paradox of tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Each of Chicago Review's two choices (to publish, or not to publish) will generate disapproval. My personal view is that deplatforming intolerance is ok -- that the Chicago Review are right to deplatform intolerance. Was Kunin's article intolerant and who decides? I have no idea, an uninformed opinion at best.
People advocating "deplatforming intolerance", a.k.a. applying censorship, should ponder this quote.
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It didn't just ask about censoring specific words or terms, or staying polite. It asked about censoring beliefs . Say someone who is very much in favor of legal abortion stays silent as one of their co-workers goes on about how abortion should be banned, for fear of offending said co-worker. Is the fact that this person held back from sharing their beliefs an example of inclusivity? I'd say that this is not only fals…
You're prioritizing inclusivity of beliefs over inclusivity of speakers.
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I look forward to the day that we can't use reheated arguments from last century about current events. It doesn't help that people who want to destroy our ability to think use Orwell as a manual - hate speech might as well be something he coined in 1984 for all the emotion and lack of logic behind it, that it's law today will be judged harshly by future generations.
History never repeats quite the same way. There are some low-hanging parallels to 1984, but if we limit ourselves to that frame of reference we miss a large range of elements that might prove to be enormously important. There's stuff like hate speech regulations and all that but there's also a million things going on elsewhere, and any patterns only seem obvious many years later in retrospect, if they ever become so.…
That is something Cicero would understand, let alone someone with a working brain from 1984. Of course one need to have a working brain first, something very few manage in any time.
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Lots of the best (by a number of standards) poetry ever written is deeply political.
Lots of art is political. But what makes art good has nothing to do with its politics.
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If your poetry is political, you're doing it wrong
THE HEART of the rulers is sick, and the high-priest covers his head: For this is the song of the quick that is heard in the ears of the dead. The poor and the halt and the blind are keen and mighty and fleet: Like the noise of the blowing of wind is the sound of the noise of their feet. The wind has the sound of a laugh in the clamour of days and of deeds: The priests are scattered like chaff, and the rulers broken…
Violets are blue
Political poetry is dumb
TS Eliot disliked Swinburne and so should you"
me, 2021
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If your poetry is political, you're doing it wrong
> If your poetry is political, you're doing it wrong Seriously? All you citizens of Boston, don't you think it's a scandal how the people have to pay and pay Fight the fare increase, vote for George O'Brien and get Charlie off the M.T.A.!
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If your poetry is political, you're doing it wrong
I was unaware there is One True Way™ to do poetry. It's like any other art: sometimes it's just a aesthetically pleasing series of words (or musical notes, or colours, or shapes) with no real deeper meaning, or just because it's funny. And other times it's something aesthetically pleasing intended to provoke thought about some aspect of life such as love, the nature of humanity, or something else – some of these migh…
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THE HEART of the rulers is sick, and the high-priest covers his head: For this is the song of the quick that is heard in the ears of the dead. The poor and the halt and the blind are keen and mighty and fleet: Like the noise of the blowing of wind is the sound of the noise of their feet. The wind has the sound of a laugh in the clamour of days and of deeds: The priests are scattered like chaff, and the rulers broken…
"Roses are red Violets are blue Political poetry is dumb TS Eliot disliked Swinburne and so should you" me, 2021
Not all of Swinburne's poetry is so explicitly political as that poem. And some of his poems are better than others. But I don't see any correlation between how good (in my opinion) some of poem of his is and how explicitly political it is.
I dislike TS Eliot. I'd much rather read Swinburne than TS Eliot.