The Washington Review of Books is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.
N.B.:
The regular salon discussions organized by the WRB and Liberties Journal will have a session in Manhattan this month, on the evening of July 13. The topic for discussion will be “Can nonbelievers pray?” This conversation will be graciously hosted by
. Space is limited; if you would like to attend, please email Chris for more information.Back on the home front: the next monthly D.C. Salon, on the same topic, will take place the following weekend, on the evening of July 20. Again, if you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In our sister publication in the City of Angels, Jenny Boyar on Natalie Merchant and Ophelia:
In Merchant’s song, the hackneyed phrase “life is sweet” gets lyrically rendered into a message of encouragement to counter the repetitive, defeatist circumstances that would lead any cynic to question life’s sweetness. The song, with its reverberating chorus of “Life is sweet,” breathes life into the otherwise worn-out phrase and, in so doing, returns meaning to life itself.
In Hamlet, “life is sweet” is exactly the kind of platitude that would come from Ophelia’s father Polonius, who speaks the wise but ad-nauseatingly quoted words “This above all: to thine own self be true” to her brother just before his ill-fated departure for university—and just as the meaning of the words arguably, destructively, evades every character in the tragic play. In such a context, Ophelia’s nonsensical lyrical ramblings, where meaning is eroded by tragedy into a pure expression of grief, might hold the most truth. But I want to imagine a world where Ophelia’s songs can hold, even impart, equal amounts of unencumbered joy. I want to imagine “Life Is Sweet” as exactly the kind of song that could come from Ophelia in such a world. I want, finally, to imagine a world where she is not singing alone.
[Cf. The Band’s more male-focused treatment of the subject. —Steve]
In The Nation, Sasha Frere-Jones on a half-century of the Poetry Project:
For the second marathon, in 1975, Smith performed a piece called “Parade,” which you can hear on an album called Sugar, Alcohol, & Meat (an album that features John Ashbery, William S. Burroughs, and John Giorno on the cover). The performance is mesmerizing: Smith switches between sound effects, recitation, and singing, talking about eating crows and pulling out her eyes and teeth like a stand-up comic dissociating. “In the street, the people, they’re livin’ it up! There’s a ticker tape parade!” she declares, sounding more like Art Carney than Frank O’Hara. The first person to play the album for me was Lucy Sante, who saw several of Smith’s early shows. “It’s a spectacular performance,” she told me, “and it’s also a rare artifact of what Patti’s act was like before she formed the Patti Smith Group. She would slide into song form then, here and there, but it alternated with poetry, comedy, asides to the audience—everything sounded as if it was made up on the spot, and no two performances were quite alike.”
In Poetry, Sandra Simonds on Bill Knott:
It is a fool’s errand to attempt to isolate Knott’s poetry from his antics. He invited this connection from the beginning of his career and continued to cultivate it until all aspects of his poetry, from its production to its distribution, became extensions of his artistic practice. Like the Surrealists he admired, Knott loved to toy with readers. Homages (2005) begins with a few pages of conventional praiseworthy blurbs followed by a list of hilarious anti-blurbs: “[Bill Knott is] malignant”—Calvin Bedient; “Bill Knott’s poems are . . . rhetorical fluff . . . and fake” —Ron Loewinsohn; “[Bill Knott is] incompetent”—Alicia Ostriker; “Bill Knott should be beaten with a flail”—Tomaž Šalamun,” and on and on.
[I was confirmed in my decision to go with today’s opening joke by reading this. —Steve]
[Behind the paywall: Julia on poetic digression, Steve on the legacy of Romanticism in twentieth-century poetry, Yiddish, Long Island, Lincoln, berries, soccer, various additional items on poetry, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Washington Review of Books to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.