a feathered Legend

The Swan of Tuonela -- by Sibelius

"Imaginary Conversations" by poet Jen Pezzo

Jen's new book of poems has been released by Poet's Haven Press.


There's a complex sensibility living in these poems: Cheshire smiles, spirit states, and erotic whispers.

As writer Mary Turzillo says: "And exciting collection for romantics and cynics alike."

order "Imaginary Conversations"

ANNUNCIATION - András Jeles (1984)

Hungarian filmmaker András Jeles made this film. The excerpt above projects a strangeness. I watch it and then ask myself: how is it that we human beings are not perpetually stunned to discover ourselves as minds in time and space, as spiritual substance amid phenomena, as unique experiencers of desire and event?

what a poem can do and mean

How could I not post this poem by Emily Dickinson?



There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.

I guess 60 changes a guy

I recently experienced my 20 x 3 birthday. And it seems my perspective or attitude on some things is shifting, modifying.


Here's an article about George Steiner:

"George Steiner, Last of the Europeans"


I have these books by Steiner and enjoyed reading them over the years:

And this book of essays about Steiner:

So.......what is it that changed with me?

I still admire Steiner's writings. He's an impressive literary and culture critic. My general assessment: Steiner is an advocate for high culture as a kind of divine immanence. Art, music, and literature (especially literature) are bridges between the phenomenal and the possible transcendent. The Holocaust, for him as for me, is a thing of great temporal wounding -- time itself and its speaking through language have been permanently altered, made equivocal and dark. (Those who continue blathering out their postmodern novels and ego-saturated poems are oddly oblivious to how dimensions of being have been distorted by the industrial slaughter of Jews.)

For quite a while, I was sympathetic to Steiner's basic form of sensibility. There's probably a bunch of my essayic ramblings on this blog that echo Steiner's thought. For me, high culture was a weave of meaning that I thought could be discerned in the world. Made life worth living.

But...it's all beginning to go strange on me. Steiner's mandarin intellection, his brilliant observance of literary associations and allusions, his hypnotically elegant writing style -- all these are maybe only apparent and not actual excavations and examples of deep meaning.

How has human life as such been elevated and made more humane by high culture? At this moment, I can't think of an answer. And Steiner's diffuse, balletic incantations have, so far as I know, conjured no god from the silence behind language or from the absence behind appearance.

I'm afraid that George Steiner (me, too) writes a lot of merely elegiac, effusive stuff. A wreathing of serious-sounding words around a metaphysical void. It strikes me now that Steiner's writing is perhaps more language-as-musical-affect than language-as-semantical-effect.


I guess 60 changes a guy.

a strange thing happened to me...

...while reading this article:

"After the Revolution" 


This article is a review of the book What Ever Happened To Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici.


I was reading along because I like Modernist stuff. I was not prepared for the effect this article had on me -- a kind of spiritual dissociation occurred in my head. I began to wonder about what was so cosmically at stake for Josipovici. What might be percolating beneath his strident manifestoing? Why is he so obsessive? I began to suspect an existential myopia behind his fealty to one form of artistic/literary consciousness and his annoyance at another.

Yes, Modernist stuff is totally swell stuff. But even a return to Modernist sensibility in our literature and the other fine arts is not going to soften our mortality nor uncover essential meaning in an absurd universe. Since there are no answers in Modernism or anything else, why get your underwear in such conniptious wrinklage?

It. Don't. Mean. That. Much.

Billions of human beings currently breathing on Earth could not care less about the virtues of experimental, expressive literature in contrast to old-timey (and now new-timey) realist, narrative literature. If a lot of authors now are writing books you don't like, so what? I'll punch your Chagrined Sophisticate card so you can move on with your life.

Now, I'm okay with casual discussions about art and literature -- the various qualities and whatnot. Give me a bottle of red wine, and I'll be verbose, maybe even enthusiastic. But while reading this review, I began to wonder if Josipovici had gone off the deep end, and maybe needed to retire to a cabin in the woods somewhere to calm himself down.

Bursting into heretofore unseen or unwritten planes of expression is, when you look at it calmly, not going to alter our basic situation. For a while, it can make us feel stimulated and profound, yes. But it's not going to usher in a new world or persuade a god to appear. So why get stressed out over it?

And for what it's worth: having read War and Peace three times for the sheer historical, psychological, metaphysical, and (yes) narrative sweep of the thing, I would not displace it in the aesthetic canon with a necessarily Modernist book. Both things -- tradition and revolution -- can exist as poised equals. And neither thing is going to crack the riddle of Being.

a Wallace Stevens poem

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour


Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough. 

Wallace Stevens