{"id":156,"date":"2010-11-19T18:47:13","date_gmt":"2010-11-19T23:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/?p=156"},"modified":"2010-11-19T20:29:03","modified_gmt":"2010-11-20T01:29:03","slug":"mark-doty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/2010\/156\/poems\/mark-doty\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Doty &#8211; Theory of Beauty"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Theory of Beauty<br \/>\n(Third Avenue)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Thirty-seven clocks in five tiers.<\/p>\n<p>Sunset, end of a mild afternoon<br \/>\nthe hand of winter&#8217;s never quite let go of.<\/p>\n<p>Mantel, cuckoo,<br \/>\nrusticated, ormulu, glass-domed, moving brass balls and chimes,<br \/>\nporcelain, French clocks with bronze figures,<br \/>\nthirty-seven, ranged in the shop window,<br \/>\nnot especially attractive,<\/p>\n<p>none fine, none precious,<br \/>\neven to my taste individually desirable,<br \/>\nbut studying them, then turning away<\/p>\n<p>to the last warmly tinted but almost heatless sunlight,<br \/>\nthe buildings ahead in silhouette, and then<br \/>\nthe urge to turn back to the stepped rows<\/p>\n<p>and suddenly the pre-eminently important thing<br \/>\nis their fulfilment of the category <em>clock<\/em>,<\/p>\n<p>the remarkable divergence of means<br \/>\nof occupying that name, honouring the terms<br \/>\nand intent of it but nonetheless<\/p>\n<p>presenting an extraordinarily various<br \/>\nset of faces to the avenue, in the warm light<br \/>\nof the shop. Then I or you, whoever&#8217;s<\/p>\n<p>doing the looking, understands<br \/>\nthat this is the city&#8217;s particular signature,<\/p>\n<p>the range of possibilities within any single set,<br \/>\nand what is pleasing is not the individual clock<\/p>\n<p>(goofy or kitsch, in their frostings and columns,<br \/>\nscrollworks and gildings) but the distance<br \/>\nbetween it and its name,<\/p>\n<p>the degree to which it belongs and at the same time<br \/>\npushes towards the edges of difference<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 a perception that makes the window a spectacle,<br \/>\nthirty-seven branching aspects of a single notion,<\/p>\n<p>almost absurdly divergent<br \/>\nin their essentially useless variety.<\/p>\n<p>And when you turn away again, there on the sidewalk<br \/>\nis a perfect instance of the category <em>sink<\/em>,<\/p>\n<p>in this case kitchen, a double stainless model<br \/>\n\u2013 discarded from an apartment or restaurant \u2013<br \/>\nbattered around the drain, humbled at its edges,<\/p>\n<p>rim a little crumpled, but the interior<br \/>\nshining from the lifetime of scouring that&#8217;s made<\/p>\n<p>this singular instance of the uncountable<br \/>\nmanifestations of its category<br \/>\nin all the five boroughs, and beauty<\/p>\n<p>resides not within individual objects but<br \/>\nin the nearly unimaginable richness of their relation.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Theory of Beauty (Third Avenue) Thirty-seven clocks in five tiers. Sunset, end of a mild afternoon the hand of winter&#8217;s never quite let go of. Mantel, cuckoo, rusticated, ormulu, glass-domed, moving brass balls and chimes, porcelain, French clocks with bronze figures, thirty-seven, ranged in the shop window, not especially attractive, none fine, none precious, even <a href='http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/2010\/156\/poems\/mark-doty\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems","category-4-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":221,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions\/221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/kuny.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}