On the way to Iowa...

I'm on the way to Iowa for a friend's wedding before I return for my last days of Denver.  My dad is driving the Plymouth Voyager and I'm sitting on the side where the sun glares through the window, a slow roast to my death like an ant underneath the microscope.  But morale is high.  My dad's window keeps inching down its post despite his inventive use of a doorstopper, wedged just so, so the breeze feels nice, however loud it howls.  We got to talking about Romanticism, so now in the silent aftermath, I've taken some time to reflect:

Today has been a good day to get back into romanticism.  On the drive to Iowa, the conversation between my dad and I eventually shifted to my summer class.  There's nothing like being forced to articulate the importance of a literary period to familiarize a person with her areas of weakness.  But it felt good to try to verbally flesh out the social, political, and economic climate of the period.

A few questions or thoughts:

Great art seems to either be reactionary or anticipatory to the zeitgeist of the time.  It must also, however, have a sense of timelessness.  It must be connected to universal concerns across time and space.  There must be some sort of push or pull against society.  It must be sensory.  How can an artist move an audience? What does it mean to be moved?  It means there is an engagement of the senses.  Voluntarily or more often involuntary, the observer experiences a shift in feeling/awareness/perception due to the experience of something sensory.  There is an interaction, then.  The piece of art is created as a sensory object and triggers a sensory experience for the viewer.  So, experiencing great art, then, is both an interaction and a look in the mirror, a paralleling of emotion even if the emotions experienced or evoked are disparate.

I read this last part to my dad to get a sense of how it sounded and he said it gave him a headache.  How fitting!

Coffee table Blake...

 

Oops...

Oops I almost forgot to register for this class!!

But I've done it.

There's no turning back now.

Distraction...

Today's Romanticism distraction.  Not too shabby.

University of Iowa's Massive Open Online Course...

Speaking of poetry, I signed up and must remember June 28th-August 9th.

University of Iowa Launches Creative Writing MOOC Series

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Brain storm rant nonsense...

I've been trying to find connections between myself and my time and that of the Romantics, but this is more just a rant about the now:

I'm a little bit sad at the moment because I'm worried about great art.  People seem to care less and less about poetry because they aren't taught to value such a thing.  Whereas poetry in the Romantics' time seemed to be cherished.  Those poets were writing for people aside from the elite and the impact of their writing seemed to be explosive.  When a poet today publishes, there is nary a whimper.  When was the last time I heard about a poet making waves?  Never in my life, that's when.  Poetry's reputation is just bad.  Poetry is the nerdy kid at school.  Poetry has no cool factor, no swagger.  Poetry is aligned with that which is difficult.  A strain.  Too much thinking.  "I don't get it."  "It's too hard."  OR, my favorite, "I could easily write that myself, how simplistic."  WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

And while some of my writer buds say that it doesn't matter: "we're not writing for that audience anyway"...I just look at them and shake me head.  That kind of thinking makes no sense at all.  Who else would we be writing for?  Do I really want to write for some pretentious asshole who thinks Joyce is God in heaven?  Absolutely never in my life will I write for that guy because heaven forbid, I am a part of that audience.  However many books I read, however many degrees I accumulate, I will never align myself with the elitist academia freaks who purportedly value all that is truth but dismiss the audience right in front of their faces who scream the truth every day, all day.

I guess I just want to know if it is even possible to change the world with poetry anymore.  Does a poet just have to be good enough?  Does he just have to write about the right thing?  Strike the right chord?  And how does one get poetry to the masses when NO ONE is reading that stuff anymore?  Will poetry ever be valued again?  How can poetry evolve to appeal to an audience other than the people whom I hate with all of me? 
ALL OF ME ALL OF ME ALL OF ME.

Tidbits from Wu...

Duncan Wu and I had a thunderous falling out the past couple days, but we're back in cahoots since this morning.  He's not so bad when there's coffee, pillows, and sunshine involved.

--"International conflict, the threat of invasion by Napoleon, social and political discontent--the writers in this book lived with these things, and were shaped by them" (xxxiv).
--"important development: the rise of the media" (xxxiv).
--"bulletins were now available to the poor and illiterate...Groups of men would club together and buy a single copy, which would be read aloud" (xxxv).
--"Not only were these writers shaped by their historical moment--they shaped it" (xxxvii).
--Rise of media also meant a "new-found appetite for scandal" and the rise of celebrity (Byron being the most notable.)  (xxxvii)
--Importance of theater
--Extreme poverty and lack of education
--Instability of the monarchy
--George III deemed banana-boat crazy in 1811 and had a lot more control than the monarch today.  (Without his consent, laws could not be passed)
--Power hungry son, go figure.
--"They were products of their time in believing in a more just world than that in which they lived" (xxxviii).
--The belief was, "if philosophy could generate revolution, so too could poetry" (xxxviii). POETRY!
--"It is not just their capacity for optimism that distinguished them, but the kind of belief to which they clung.  Where earlier generations looked to an afterlife, the Romantics tended to reject formalized religion" (xxxix).
--Church of England had a great deal of political power.
--"Instead, they thought they could create, through their writing, a promised land in which property was of no consequence and people would live in harmony.  It lay neither in the distant future nor in the abstract; to them it was attainable, imminently, in the here and now" (xxxix).  They would love my yoga classes.
--Redemption through self-realization.  --"Redemptive potential of the mind" (xxxix).
--"Frustration with the restrictions of our earthly state permeates [Byron's] poetry, compelling him to aspire to a level of existence beyond the merely human" (xli).  So, like Eliot's graph?
--Byronic hero archetype--something I should know.  Hmm.  I might like Byron based on pg. xli: "He seeks to understand the random and the everyday in all its meaningless variety.  He studies human behavior, marvels at the follies and foibles of his characters, and addresses his reader in disarmingly familiar style, as if he were speaking from an armchair holding a glass of hock."  Hock is booze?  Hock a loogie?  Glass of loogie?
--Revolution as apocalypse=Blake 
--And then he goes into the obligatory section on Women.  Congratulations, Wu.  Gender equality, good job.