Without genius, literary language stales quickly, and resists revival, even upon the sacred grounds of gender, ethnicity, skin pigmentation, sexual orientation, and all the other criteria that dominate our media, including their sub-branch, our campuses. —Harold Bloom, Genius
Greetings from the far left coast where it felt a bit like autumn this week. We even got a little of that Portland drizzle.
I enjoyed a visit with a favorite poet first read when I was eighteen after finding Gregory Corso's The Golden Dot: Last Poems 1997–2000 during some bookstore browsing at Powell's on my birthday two weeks ago. That led to Gregory Corso and the Belief in Poetry published earlier this week. As often happens I come away thinking of additional themes and slants that might have enriched the piece, but it ran on long enough as it was. I hope readers find it of interest.
I find comparable pleasure rereading Harold Bloom's Genius. Yesterday I came to the chapter on Walt Whitman where Bloom writes that "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" was Whitman's greatest poem, "the last expression of his full genius and of Emersonian power." He goes on to say,
Whitman was only forty-six, but his remaining twenty-seven years represented a long waning of his poetry, parallel to Wordsworth's forty-three years of decline after 1807. Whitman's true life as a poet comprised only the decade 1855–1865, even as Wordsworth enjoyed only the Great Decade, 1797–1807. Wordsworth iced over; Whitman, I suggest, was devastated by the Civil War…Whitman, heroic wound-dresser and unpaid male nurse in the hospitals of Washington, D.C., burned out in devoted service to sick and maimed soldiers, Union and Confederate, black and white, living and dying. There is no comparable figure of such authentic compassionate heroism in our literary culture.
Bloom is of the opinion, with which I have no quarrel, that Whitman and Emily Dickinson are America's two greatest poets.
I confess that I am weary of writing about politics and current affairs. I cannot always summon the righteous indignation the times demand when my mood trends overwhelmingly toward despair. Nevetheless, I persist.
This week's sentencing of Proud Boy Joe Biggs to seventeen years in prison and his fellow insurrectionist Zachary Rehl to fifteen years for conspiring to derail the peaceful transfer of power was a positive development that predictably met with unhinged calls from Republicans to support January 6 prisoners. The federal judge who sentenced Biggs is a Trump appointee. “That day broke our tradition of peacefully transferring power, said U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly as he delivered his sentence. “The mob brought an entire branch of government to heel.” Kelly applied a "terrorism" enhancement to the sentence on these grounds: "While blowing up a building in some city somewhere is a very bad act, the nature of the constitutional moment we were in that day is something that is so sensitive that it deserves a significant sentence." (Kyle Cheney, Proud Boys who led march to Capitol get two of the lengthiest sentences since Jan. 6 attack, Politico, August 31, 2023)
Reports on Ukraine's summer offensive are on the whole not encouraging as progress against heavily fortified Russian positions remains incremental. Support for Urkaine is declining, and not just among the House blockhead caucus. There are reports that officials, nameless as is customary, within the Biden administration are frustrated by Ukraine's approach and convinced the conflict will end in stalemate (Dalibor Rohac, Biden’s Destiny Is Linked to Ukraine’s, The Bulwark, August 31, 2023).
On the other hand, Will Vernon at BBC News reports from Moscow that things are not so great in Mother Russia either. Moscow is subject to near-daily drone attacks. The military is anxious.
"The Russian military understand they are in a serious fix. They have lost territory… morale is not very high at all," a Russian military analyst, who wishes to remain anonymous due to fears of repercussions, tells the BBC.
"They're not prepared for modern warfare. Losses are high."
Is the president told the truth about the real situation on the battlefield, I ask? Of course not, he says. "The lying happens on the entire chain of command. As information goes up it becomes increasingly distorted."
The analyst tells me Russian officers in Ukraine, in the face of Kyiv's counteroffensive, are "nervous" because "they're just hanging on."
It is not just the military: "The overall feeling I get in Moscow is one of a general state of nervousness." There is neither enthusiasm for the war nor substantial opposition. "Among most, there is indifference, resignation or meek acceptance."
The mood is not much different in the Kremlin."Officials in the Presidential Administration are either repressed, or depressed. They've worked there for so many years they don't know anything else. They're pessimistic about the future, but they just go with the flow. There's no other choice," the source says. He tells me people are afraid to speak: "There is no opposition to Putin in the Kremlin" (Nerves and patriotism in Moscow after 18 months of war, August 30, 2023).
New at Portable Bohemia Substack:
What Does It Mean? (a poem), August 17, 2023. Sometime back in the 1980s, after reading some of my poems, my friend Sue asked, “But what it does it mean?”…read more>>
The Center Delusion: Reflections and Deflections; and, Debate Season Opens, August 22, 2023. No Labels and the Center Delusion was intended as a polemic directed at the No Labels project and its appropriation of a fanciful center as raison d'être…read more>>
Opening Night of Debate Season, August 26, 2023. After reflection and some back and forth at the Portable Bohemia editorial desk, I declined to watch Wednesday’s Republican debate live because…read more>>
Gregory Corso and the Belief in Poetry, August 30, 2023. On my seventy-first birthday I treated myself to some bookstore browsing at Powell’s City of Books. There on an upper shelf in the poetry section The Golden Dot: Last Poems 1997–2000 by Gregory Corso (1930–2001) caught my eye. Rumor of the book’s forthcoming publication…read more>>
Keep the faith.
Stand with Ukraine.
yr obdt svt
