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Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving to the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

by Billy Collins
from Poetry 180
Random House 2003

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Alexander Menden at Prospect Magazine:

In the spring of 1961, Gerhard Richter, a young East German artist noted mainly for his portraits and socialist wall paintings, slipped through the last chink in the Iron Curtain—West Berlin—and fled to the Federal Republic of Germany. A few weeks later, he justified this move in a letter to his former teacher at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts: “My reasons are mainly professional. The whole cultural ‘climate’ of the West can offer me more, in that it corresponds better and more coherently with my way of being and working than that of the East.”

Richter, 29 at the time and deeply impressed by the works of Lucio Fontana and Jackson Pollock, which he had seen during a visit to the contemporary art exhibition Documenta in Kassel two years earlier, wanted the same stylistic and thematic freedom of those artists. He intended to settle in Munich. But an old friend from Dresden, the sculptor Reinhard Graner, who had moved to the West before Richter, strongly advised him against it, saying: “No, for God’s sake, Düsseldorf is the city of art!”

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Elica Le Bon in Newsweek:

My first visceral memories of the regime in Iran were formed before I was born. My mother had been in the notorious Evin prison in the 1980s, when hanged bodies were lined up along the entrance path so that prisoners knew what to expect. Although naturally apolitical, my mother was seen with a dissident. She narrowly escaped lynching, only because the dissident learned of my mother’s arrest and turned herself in.

The dissident was, of course, hanged.

Perhaps this is just a Persian mother’s retelling, notorious for its embellishment, but according to her, back then, she was one of the “only people to make it out alive.” When she left the prison, she demanded that a guard walk behind her so she wouldn’t be shot in the back. The regime was never more brutal than in its nascent years of life. Anyone caught with anti-regime materials—books, articles, publications, or anything of the sort—was executed. I often marvel at how miraculous my own existence is. It wasn’t just one time that my mother narrowly escaped death; it happened three times.

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Linda Carroll in Time Magazine:

With multiple game-changing developments over the past two decades, kidney cancer patients are now living longer and better. A big part of the reason is that many are being diagnosed at earlier stages of the disease, when it can often be more easily treated and sometimes cured. Even when cancers are caught later, advances in medications and in methods of targeting cancer cells are significantly extending survival.

“When I started two decades ago, the average survival for patients with advanced kidney cancer was one year,” says Dr. Brian Rini, a professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. “Now, the median survival is between five and six years. It’s amazing.” The growing use of scanning technologies in medicine overall has been one of the most important changes over the last couple of decades: Tumors are being detected during scans for non-cancerous conditions.

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Joseph M Keegin at Aeon Magazine:

The prairie schools of philosophy were not just local curiosities; over the course of their roughly three decades of existence, they exerted a lasting influence on US intellectual culture, however much they themselves have been forgotten. They encouraged the growth of similar philosophical societies from the Midwest to the Eastern seaboard, in places like Chicago, Philadelphia and Massachusetts; they established a model for small-group adult education, contrasted with, for instance, the popular Lyceum model of the large public lecture; and they rekindled an interest in the study of classical, Medieval and early modern philosophy and literature among US thinkers who, influenced by transcendentalism and pragmatism, were all too often focused on what was simply useful or new.

‘We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson had bemoaned in his speech ‘The American Scholar’ (1837). The philosophers of the prairie had no such complaint with the minds of the Old World.

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Rachel Cooke in The Guardian:

Twenty-five years ago, my father and I were out walking in the Peak District. Beside us was his dog; ahead of us was a familiar fell, low and craggy and bare. My dad was boasting, as he often did, about the cairn at its top, a pile of rocks he claimed to have nurtured into existence, when from nowhere the silhouette of a man suddenly appeared beside it: first a head, then a torso, and finally a pair of legs. “Ah,” said my dad, sage where I was startled. “A caver.” We stood and squinted. Moments later, another man materialised, and then another: a human string of sausages, pulled from the limestone’s darkest reaches as if from a top hat.

The memory of this came to me as I read The Island: WH Auden and the Last of Englishness, a new study of the poet and his world. In part, this was because Auden visited the same hills as a schoolboy; even before he famously became transfixed by the abandoned lead mines of the northern Pennines, he had seen – in 1919, when he was 12 – the Blue John Cavern near Castleton in Derbyshire, a place he would later refer to as one of the names on his “numinous map” of sacred spots. Mostly, though, it was because caving is a good metaphor for the experience of reading Nicholas Jenkins’s book, which runs to 543 pages (minus its extensive notes). Headlamp at the ready, I thought, whenever I opened it.

En route, there are lovely moments.

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Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

Though bears loom large in our collective imagination, their flesh-and-blood counterparts are increasingly losing ground. Eight Bears, the debut of environmental journalist Gloria Dickie, draws on visits to key hotspots where Earth’s remaining bear species come into conflict with humans. By interviewing scores of people, both conservationists and those suffering at the paws of these large predators, this nuanced and thought-provoking reportage asks whether humans and bears can coexist.

The roots of this book go back to 2013 when Dickie started a master’s in environmental journalism and midway settled on bear-human conflicts in the Rocky Mountains. Since then, she has travelled to Asia and the Americas to see first-hand all eight extant bear species (spectacled, sloth, panda, moon/Asiatic black, sun, American black, brown/grizzly, and polar bear*).

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Emily R. Klancher Merchant in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In the Operation Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, 50 wealthy parents were charged with trying to get their children into elite universities through fraudulent means. The story dramatically demonstrated the lengths to which some parents will go to ensure their children’s acceptance into places like Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and USC. Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, bribed athletic coaches to recruit their children for sports they did not play. Actress Felicity Huffman and private equity mogul William E. McGlashan Jr. were among the parents who paid to falsify their children’s SAT and ACT test scores. Those who were caught faced criminal charges, yet the scandal also shed light on the perfectly legal tactics used by wealthy parents to get their children into elite institutions, such as endowing buildings or hiring expensive consultants.

The Pennsylvania couple Malcolm and Simone Collins have taken a different approach. For their two daughters, Titan Invictus and Industry Americus, the Collinses used eugenics.

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Sam Weller at the LARB:

SEVENTY YEARS AGO, Ray Bradbury, then 33 years old—the author of The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—stood in front of a mirror in a London hotel room and declared, “I … am Herman Melville!” It was a last-ditch effort to channel the great American writer of Moby-Dick (1851). For Bradbury, it was either that or accept complete failure.

Today, few people are aware that Bradbury, renowned science fiction writer, beloved fantasist, and mainstay on banned-book lists, wrote the screenplay for the 1956 John Huston adaptation of the Melville classic, which starred Gregory Peck as the iconic and obsessive Captain Ahab. Writing the screenplay was a dream come true for Bradbury, until it morphed into a waking nightmare. As the old adage goes: Never meet your heroes. So how did a writer known for conjuring carnival sideshow freaks, Art Deco rocket ships blasting off for Mars, and a dystopian future where books are illegal come to adapt what is often deemed the great American novel? If you asked Ray Bradbury, who died in 2012, he would tell you the answer to this question was a four-letter word: L-O-V-E.

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Steven Poole in The Guardian:

As befits a writer whose breakout work, Sapiens, was a history of the entire human race, Yuval Noah Harari is a master of the sententious generalisation. “Human life,” he writes here, “is a balancing act between endeavouring to improve ourselves and accepting who we were.” Is it? Is that all it is? Elsewhere, one might be surprised to read: “The ancient Romans had a clear understanding of what democracy means.” No doubt the Romans would have been happy to hear that they would, 2,000 years in the future, be given a gold star for their comprehension of eternally stable political concepts by Yuval Noah Harari.

In his 2018 book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Harari wrote: “Liberals don’t understand how history deviated from its preordained course, and they lack an alternative prism through which to interpret reality. Disorientation causes them to think in apocalyptic terms.” It seems that, in the intervening years, Harari has himself become a liberal, because this book is about the apocalyptic scenario of how the “computer network” – everything from digital surveillance capitalism to social feed algorithms and AI – might destroy civilisation and usher in “the end of human history”. Take that, Fukuyama.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Depression doesn’t mean you’re always feeling low. Sure, most times it’s hard to crawl out of bed or get motivated. Once in a while, however, you feel a spark of your old self—only to get sucked back into an emotional black hole. There’s a reason for this variability. Depression changes brain connections, even when the person is feeling okay at the moment. Scientists have long tried to map these alternate networks. But traditional brain mapping technologies average multiple brains, which doesn’t capture individual brain changes.

This week, an international team took a peek into the depressed mind. With brain imaging technology called precision functional mapping, they captured the brains of 135 people with depression for over a year and a half. The largest brain mapping study of the disorder to date, the results revealed a curious change in the brain’s connections in people with depression—a neural network, usually involved in attention, nearly doubled its size compared to those without the condition. The increase remained even during periods when the person no longer felt low. The brain signature isn’t just a neurobiological sign of depression—it could also be a predictor. When observed in the brain imaging data of nearly 12,000 children starting from nine years old, the expanded network predicted the onset of depression later in adolescence.

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Charlie Markbreiter in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In 2009, A US security intelligence operative stationed in Iraq began to notice some gaps in the American government’s “surgical precision” drone strategy. “I was trained to be an all-source analyst,” writes Chelsea Manning in her memoir, README.TXT (2022). “I’m used to collecting the full context and getting—and sharing—as much detail as possible.”

Manning’s childhood and adolescence in many ways exemplified the white millennial trans experience. While transness is culturally synonymized with coastal cities, Manning, like many trans people, grew up elsewhere; she was born to a former Navy intelligence officer and his Welsh wife in Oklahoma City in 1987. Not only did Manning’s father, Brian, instill “rigid cis gender sensibilities”; he also evoked a thoroughly militarized model of masculinity. Little Mermaid dolls were replaced with small fighter jets.

As it was for many isolated, closeted trans people in the aughts—not even out to themselves, let alone to anyone around them—the internet was Manning’s escape. First, it was forums: trolling, lolz, meeting other gay people. Then she became skilled at coding. Back in meatspace, she was aggressively bullied for being gay; her family eventually kicked her out. In Chicago’s Boystown gayborhood, she experienced IRL queer romance and community for the very first time.

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Josephine Quinn at Literary Hub:

In the eighth-century CE the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad. This project started with the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur (“the Conqueror,” r. 754–74), who commissioned Arabic translations of important scientific texts from Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, and Syriac (a late form of Aramaic), and came into its own under al-Ma’mun (“the Trusted One,” r. 813–33).

The operation was lavishly funded by the caliph himself, as well as by members of his household, courtiers, merchants, bankers, and military leaders. It reflects the prosperity of the era, as the Abbasids created a powerful centralized government based on a land tax, which as conversion became more common they pragmatically extended to Muslims as well as non-Muslims.

The most important thing to understand about what is often now called the “Translation Movement” is that it wasn’t primarily about translation. It was part of a wider commitment by Islamic scholars and political leaders to scientific investigation that also saw caliphs commission new works of science, geography, poetry, history, and medicine.

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Luke Harding in The Guardian:

On 24 February 2022, workers at the Chornobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine woke to the sound of explosions. A battle was going on, not far from the contaminated exclusion zone. By late afternoon, the Russians had arrived. A column of military vehicles pulled up at a checkpoint and an officer got out. Moscow, he said, was now in charge.

The plant’s 300 personnel – specialist operators and firefighters, plus troops from Ukraine’s national guard – became prisoners. Over the next few weeks, they kept the station’s systems going, working in cramped conditions and living side by side with their armed Russian masters. The enemy had invaded from Belarus. Its main force trundled onwards towards Kyiv.

Chernobyl Roulette by the Ukrainian historian Serhii Plokhy is a gripping account of the extraordinary events inside the plant (Plokhy spells the power station with an “e”). It is a tale of bravery and selflessness, reminiscent of the sacrifice demonstrated by the Chornobyl employees who went through the 1986 nuclear disaster, when reactor No 4 blew up. Some of those on duty in 2022 were involved in the original Soviet-era clean-up.

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Nick Stang at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Readers of Kant’s third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, are presented with a set of puzzles about the unity, indeed, the very existence, of the very book before them: why did Kant think his critical system was ‘incomplete’ without a critique of the power of judgment, and why would such a critique complete that system? Why must that critique contain a critique of aesthetic judgment and a critique of teleological judgment? Are each equally necessary to the critical project? To borrow a trope from Kant himself, is this book a mere aggregate of its parts, or is it unified by an idea of the whole that determines those parts? And if so, what is that idea, and does it determine that the third Critique must have these, and only these, parts (no more, no fewer)?

Ido Geiger’s excellent new book, Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World: a Transcendental Reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, offers a bold new take on some of these foundational issues about the unity and structure of the third Critique. Geiger’s leading thread is that the CPJ continues the project, begun in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), of uncovering transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience.

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