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Formal logic
Oct. 4th, 2020 01:53 pm
I hafta say, I really thought we'd have plentiful quick COVID tests by the time we came back around to the time of year when my eight straight months of continuous COVID-like symptoms starts. My nose is like a thermostat, except it is capable of only two beliefs: "it is warm enough", and "run!".
I was reminded by this interview with A.M. Juster that one of the things that discouraged me from pursuing poetry "seriously" when I was an undergrad was my impression that formal poetry--broadly meaning anything other than free verse--wasn't taken seriously by whatever people it was who would have to take it seriously for anyone to be able to "make it" as a formal poet. Despite all the complaints I keep seeing and hearing in interviews about biases against formal poetry, it turns out the contemporary poetry scene in North America is vastly more formal-friendly than I ever would've expected. An early compelling indicator of this for me was lucking into a copy of the 2018 volume of Best American Poetry last summer at the used bookstore in Bancroft, and finding it liberally sprinkled with rhyming and metered poems.
One of the ways I've noticed that the poetry, uh, scene is like academic philosophy (and, you know, presumably everything else) is that people (and I guess the point is, people who have some reason to feel insecure about their place in the world, which is, you know, presumably everyone) tend to discount themselves and their allies when they're surveying the scene. (This was something I saw most strikingly in Sam, who it sometimes struck me would only feel respected if people who didn't respect him respected him.) A.M. Juster, to me, is a pretty important gatekeeper in poetry (in English, in North America) today. The editors of Poetry, the New Yorker, and Rattle are to my mind probably the most important gatekeepers of poetry today. Juster's inclinations, obviously, are strongly if not entirely formalist. Poetry runs enough of all kinds of stuff to make everyone, pro-formalists and anti-formalists alike, mad about how much stuff that makes them mad is in it. The editors of the New Yorker and Rattle are both enthusiastic about formal poetry. But where the rub is is that all of these things are outside the academic poetry establishment (although I'd say the academic poetry establishment has been trying hard to colonize Poetry), and my sense--gathered in part from the fact that a lot of the student- or recent-student-run magazines that have sprung up lately seem to run nothing but more-or-less-free verse--is that Juster is not wrong about the MFA crowd having a bias against formal poetry. (On the other hand--how can MFA programs not teach forms, as exercises if nothing else? If for no other reason than that forms are things you can actually, you know, teach? I mean, where did all these ghazals start coming from a few years ago?) But from the perspective of someone coming to the scene from the outside altogether, as opposed to someone who has come to see themselves as an outsider relative to an establishment from which they're excluded, Poetry, the New Yorker, and Rattle are the very most establishment parts of the establishment. It's a lot like how, as I learned some years ago, reading around Pierre Bourdieu, there is (was?) a mindset in France according to which the folks at the Sorbonne have all the prestige, while the folks at the Collège de France are outsiders who don't get no respect. It was shocking to me to learn that people like Bourdieu and Foucault saw things that way, when to so many people--like me, in my earlier grad student years--outside France, the Collège de France might well be the single most prestigious academic institution (for, I guess you'd say, "social theory") in the world.
Elsewhere in the news, I have now participated in my first leadership election for a political party. It was done with a Single Transferable Vote system (just like Convergence!--I, uh, did not rank Boo's Pants first), which showed up a couple of great things about STV: (1) it gives the candidates a strong incentive to be nice to each other (though in some cases, especially as the race went on, that incentive was washed out by other incentives, and the winner was the one candidate who I don't remember ever saying anything nice about any other candidate on twitter), and (2) it gives voters a strong incentive to learn about more than one or two candidates, since, ideally, voters aren't just trying to identify the one person they want to win. But related to (2), I have to say, it turns out it's a pretty big let-down when, after fretting about how to rank eight candidates relative to each other, it happens that none of that mattered because the one you were always going to rank first was one of the last two standing, and also lost. (This whole thing, and being reminded of how the Liberals got saddled with Stéphane Dion as their leader after he picked up less than a fifth of the first-ballot votes, has got me thinking that weighted ballots are better than straight ranked ballots, but that's the kind of rabbit hole I need to forget about until the middle of winter.)
--
Currently under my porch: 10.9. Currently at Belmont Lake: 11.2. We did in fact get through September, both here and at Wollaston, without a real killing frost.
I was reminded by this interview with A.M. Juster that one of the things that discouraged me from pursuing poetry "seriously" when I was an undergrad was my impression that formal poetry--broadly meaning anything other than free verse--wasn't taken seriously by whatever people it was who would have to take it seriously for anyone to be able to "make it" as a formal poet. Despite all the complaints I keep seeing and hearing in interviews about biases against formal poetry, it turns out the contemporary poetry scene in North America is vastly more formal-friendly than I ever would've expected. An early compelling indicator of this for me was lucking into a copy of the 2018 volume of Best American Poetry last summer at the used bookstore in Bancroft, and finding it liberally sprinkled with rhyming and metered poems.
One of the ways I've noticed that the poetry, uh, scene is like academic philosophy (and, you know, presumably everything else) is that people (and I guess the point is, people who have some reason to feel insecure about their place in the world, which is, you know, presumably everyone) tend to discount themselves and their allies when they're surveying the scene. (This was something I saw most strikingly in Sam, who it sometimes struck me would only feel respected if people who didn't respect him respected him.) A.M. Juster, to me, is a pretty important gatekeeper in poetry (in English, in North America) today. The editors of Poetry, the New Yorker, and Rattle are to my mind probably the most important gatekeepers of poetry today. Juster's inclinations, obviously, are strongly if not entirely formalist. Poetry runs enough of all kinds of stuff to make everyone, pro-formalists and anti-formalists alike, mad about how much stuff that makes them mad is in it. The editors of the New Yorker and Rattle are both enthusiastic about formal poetry. But where the rub is is that all of these things are outside the academic poetry establishment (although I'd say the academic poetry establishment has been trying hard to colonize Poetry), and my sense--gathered in part from the fact that a lot of the student- or recent-student-run magazines that have sprung up lately seem to run nothing but more-or-less-free verse--is that Juster is not wrong about the MFA crowd having a bias against formal poetry. (On the other hand--how can MFA programs not teach forms, as exercises if nothing else? If for no other reason than that forms are things you can actually, you know, teach? I mean, where did all these ghazals start coming from a few years ago?) But from the perspective of someone coming to the scene from the outside altogether, as opposed to someone who has come to see themselves as an outsider relative to an establishment from which they're excluded, Poetry, the New Yorker, and Rattle are the very most establishment parts of the establishment. It's a lot like how, as I learned some years ago, reading around Pierre Bourdieu, there is (was?) a mindset in France according to which the folks at the Sorbonne have all the prestige, while the folks at the Collège de France are outsiders who don't get no respect. It was shocking to me to learn that people like Bourdieu and Foucault saw things that way, when to so many people--like me, in my earlier grad student years--outside France, the Collège de France might well be the single most prestigious academic institution (for, I guess you'd say, "social theory") in the world.
Elsewhere in the news, I have now participated in my first leadership election for a political party. It was done with a Single Transferable Vote system (just like Convergence!--I, uh, did not rank Boo's Pants first), which showed up a couple of great things about STV: (1) it gives the candidates a strong incentive to be nice to each other (though in some cases, especially as the race went on, that incentive was washed out by other incentives, and the winner was the one candidate who I don't remember ever saying anything nice about any other candidate on twitter), and (2) it gives voters a strong incentive to learn about more than one or two candidates, since, ideally, voters aren't just trying to identify the one person they want to win. But related to (2), I have to say, it turns out it's a pretty big let-down when, after fretting about how to rank eight candidates relative to each other, it happens that none of that mattered because the one you were always going to rank first was one of the last two standing, and also lost. (This whole thing, and being reminded of how the Liberals got saddled with Stéphane Dion as their leader after he picked up less than a fifth of the first-ballot votes, has got me thinking that weighted ballots are better than straight ranked ballots, but that's the kind of rabbit hole I need to forget about until the middle of winter.)
--
Currently under my porch: 10.9. Currently at Belmont Lake: 11.2. We did in fact get through September, both here and at Wollaston, without a real killing frost.
