Louise Gluck – Nostos

 Poems
Nov 202010
 

There was an apple tree in the yard —
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts —
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Hobson’s Choice

 Orts
Nov 202010
 

A choice without an alternative; the thing offered or nothing. The origin of the term Hobson’s choice is said to be in the name of one Thomas Hobson (ca. 1544-1631), at Cambridge, England, who kept a livery stable and required every customer to take either the horse nearest the stable door or none at all. In 1914 Henry Ford offered customers of the Model T a famous Hobson’s choice, making it available in “any color so long as it is black.”

Fagan’s defense revolves around his insistence that he faced a Hobson’s choice and had to act.
–Laura Parker, “Discovery of daughters never followed by reunion,” USA Today, May 11, 1999

They’re faced with a Hobson’s choice: Make the plunge . . . or face a terrifying alternative — gradual extinction.
–Heather Green, “The Great Yuletide Shakeout,” Business Week, November 1, 1999

Charles Simic. “The Metaphysician in the Dark.”

 Orts
Nov 202010
 

Adam Kirsch. “The radical strangeness of Being.” TLS review 2004.03.05

“Simic finds in Heidegger the inspiration for a distinctively late-twentieth century poetic, one that understands art in terms of preservation and caretaking, not creation and transformation. Such a stand is a reaction against the heedless assertiveness of artistic and political modernism. The artist who wants to transform perception, in this view, is akin to the dictator who wants to transform reality; both are examples of unleashed will-to-power. To avoid such hubris, the Heideggerian postmodernist dedicates himself to Being, to the intricate contingency of what is: the individual life, the powerfully present object, the fleeting instant.”

“The problem with secular mysticism is that it constantly threatens to become merely praise of the ordinary – or still worse, a bourgeois appreciation of life’s little pleasures.”

Pablo Picasso – Libro Vero

 Orts
Nov 202010
 

By amusing myself with all these games, with all these absurdities, with all these puzzles, rebuses, and arabesques, I became famous, and that very quickly. And fame for a painter means sales, gains, fortunes, riches. And today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone with myself I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, and Goya were great painters; I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and has exhausted as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the cupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful than may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere. Libro Vero, 1952.

Seamus Heaney – Mint

 Poems
Nov 202010
 

It looked like a clump of small dusty nettles
Growing wild at the gable of the house
Beyond where we dumped our refuse and old bottles:
Unverdant ever, almost beneath notice.

But, to be fair, it also spelled promise
And newness in the back yard of our life
As if something callow yet tenacious
Sauntered in green alleys and grew rife.

The snip of scissor blades, the light of Sunday
Mornings when the mint was cut and loved:
My last things will be first things slipping from me.
Yet let all things go free that have survived.

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we’d failed them by our disregard.