HBO special
The bait put out to poets, the unacknowledged legislators of the world, is politics, but the people now in power are people who like to hear themselves talk, and most poets I know are shy and don't even like to go to poetry readings or read their poems in public.
Reading Joseph Brodsky's essay on Mandelstam last night, I underlined this passage:"...even without knowing a single line by Mandelstam...you know he is indeed a great poet... because of the quantity and energy of the evil directed against him."
I so want to be on the offensive, to be positive. I suppose what I mean to say by using the word positive is that I am feeilng a great need to stay alert.
The temptation is to think we've created a world we no longer want to live in. If only this virus would destroy the ego rather than one's ability to breathe.
The problem with progressives is that they think they're smarter than they are and that they have a vision for the future. I'm just barely smart enough to know I'm one of them.
Looking for stuff to read during the quarantine I go back to the same old things. Mostly poetry. Denise Levertov who I haven't read in years. Takahashi the Japanese. Tom Hennen's human nature poems.
Reading mostly old to middle-aged poetry it seems entirely appropriate to me that the supreme literary genre of our 'age' is the memoir, given our cultural penchant for narcissistic self-aggrandizement.
I'm also watching a TV series about a lawyer from a dysfunctional family. He gets involved with some really bad guys. What's most interesting to me isn't the character or the plot but the way the series shows how much work it takes to be a criminal! It takes far more effort to be a criminal than it does being an ordinary citizen. Why not just be good in the first place, pay your taxes, vote in the primaries, and put your cigarette butts in the proper receptacle?
My daughter-in-law who lives in Oregon says HBO is having a special. That you can get 500 hours free, or something like that, but to be careful. If you go to HBO Now or HBO Go you must go up to the browser and hit the button that says Free.