My Lost ? Paintings
Who out there has any of these of my paintings? I'm trying to figure out which if any survived the fire. Thanks and enjoy. These are approximately 27 images. And here am I getting
back in the saddle again! Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edjcoletti(AT)gmail.com, and I can post it.
W.H. Auden's Honest & Painful Description of a Serious Poet's Lot
"IN the eyes of every author, I fancy, his own past work falls into four classes. First, the pure rubbish which he regrets ever having conceived; second--for him the most painful--the good ideas which his incompetence or impatience prevented from coming to much (The Orators seems to me such a case of the fair notion fatally injured); third, the pieces he has nothing against except their lack of importance; these must inevitably form the bulk of any collection since, were he to limit it to the fourth class alone, to those poems for which he is honestly grateful, his volume would be too depressingly slim."
from Preface to The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden
When I go through my own poetry and find poems to which which I no longer relate, I go to the Auden portions of Maria Konnikova's 2012 essay in the Atlantic to get my bearings. I'd be very interested in your own ideas on the subject.
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How to respond when a writer tries
to retract beloved poems, novels, and plays-In this case specifically W. H.
Auden
"September
1, 1939" is one of W. H. Auden's most famous and oft-quoted
poems. Its images of futility and despair in the face of violence, of the
inevitable destruction and sacrifice of yet another war have such a universal
immediacy that they've been revived time and time again, whenever sudden bloodshed
rears its head. Perhaps the most quoted line of all is the one that closes the
poem's penultimate stanza: "We must love one another or die."Only,
there's one minor problem. During his life, Auden rewrote and then renounced
the text in question, barring it from future anthologies and publications and
distancing himself as much as possible from its creation. As the poet wrote in
the 1965 preface to his Collected Poems, "Some poems which I wrote
and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest,
or bad-mannered, or boring." And what did he mean by that? "A dishonest
poem is one which expresses, no matter how well, feelings or beliefs which its
author never felt or entertained," he explains. "Youth may be
forgiven when it is brash and noisy, but this does not mean that brashness and
noise are virtues." And that famous line? The worst offender of the lot. A
line, in Auden's estimation, as false as it is falsely reassuring and
self-congratulatory. (Auden first tried to alter it to "We must love one
another and die" before altogether giving up on line and poem both.)But
are we bound by Auden's own evaluation of his work, and are we somehow wrong if
we seek out—and even dare to enjoy—words that he doesn't believe in any longer?
If he didn't want to see the poem, should we turn from it as well? The question
is an old one, long predating Auden's famous revisions and recastings: The
decision to unwrite, in a manner of speaking, certain moments of past work—and
the subsequent split of popular opinion on the justifiability of that choice.
When it comes to such arguments, who is right? Who is justified? Why does it
matter—and what does it even matter, in the modern age where it's no
longer an easy thing for the past to simply disappear?...
…For, here is the crucial
difference. Auden didn't pull a Nabokov or a Kafka, requesting that his
originals be burned (of course, this isn't a perfect comparison. Nabokov and
Kafka's works remained unfinished, while Auden's was done—and yet, Auden argued
that one never actually finishes a poem; one only ever puts it aside). We
should remember that Auden's instructions to Mendelson had an important caveat.
"I once asked him what he wanted done with the poem, what I should do as
his literary executor," Mendelson recalled on the occasion of what would
have been Auden's 100th birthday. "And he thought for a moment
and said, 'I don't want it reprinted during my lifetime.'" That
"during my lifetime" is key. Auden didn't want anything destroyed. He
just didn't want to see it, to have it haunt him, taunt him, even, in his
advancing age.
Auden's distaste, however, need not
be ours, should we not choose it for ourselves. Joseph Brodsky certainly didn't
think "September 1, 1939" should be ignored, devoting an entire
lecture (later republished in full in Less Than One) to what he
considered a masterpiece, and urging his listeners on with the hope that they
would "develop the same sentiment toward this poem as the one that
prompted it into existence—one of love." And this, despite agreeing with
Auden that that damned line was quite problematic.
Perhaps Auden, too, would come to
agree were he still alive. As he wrote in a poem that was not disowned,
"In Memory of W. B. Yeats," "The words of a dead man are
modified in the guts of the living." A work need not be the same for
author and reader alike, especially the longer the time that passes between
them. If a work doesn't feel true, it will lose its steam—and perhaps the best
proof of the universality of something like "September 1, 1939" is
how often it has been called upon during its lifetime, to help us understand
violence and humanity, war and responsibility, love and guilt.
At the end, we can embrace and love
whatever we want of an author's work. But we also can't ignore a writer's
express wish just because we don't happen to agree with it. Instead, we can use
that wish to enrich our understanding of the disinherited words, by doing our
best to understand their history and the reason why their author chose to cast
them aside as unworthy. We can, in other words, give authors the same
consideration we'd want if we ourselves come to decide that something in our
past no longer suits our present selves: the freedom to rethink and reconsider,
to take back and reframe as we mature and as our understanding of the world
changes. And we don't even have to unwrite history to do that.
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Poem
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Comment or Read Comments Here on any of the above or below. If you do not have a Google account, then log in by checking "Name/URL," (it's easy). Just the name (don't worry about the URL). Actual name is best, but use what you like. Or email me at edjcoletti(AT)gmail.com, and I can post it.
Paradise Lost/Regained (occasioned by Donald
Trump’s brief visit
to
the ruins of Paradise, CA —November 17,
2018)
by Ed Coletti
Swing
thuribles lit with sweet flickering
frankincense
and cedar shavings over Paradise
this
place where everything aspired to be pleasant
when
no thing or place ever truly is all good
Purge
us with hyssop and we shall be clean
Bathe
us in the rose water used in Arabia to clean the Kaaba
and
in Persia to prepare graves for the dead
For
evil must be washed away that death have not dominion
where
the land will be reclaimed from possession by monsters
Bring
forth the tincture of a billion blossoms
The
evil creature hath been amongst us
befouling
our wounded land
with
the stench of offal from its breath
condemning
each of us to its lingering presence
our
fate far worse if we do nothing to dissipate
the
foul choking blackening smoke that
the
monster has belched forth and left us
wearily
sickening all the more so that he’d been
here
amongst us during another time of great sorrow
Gather
sage and cedar to smudge the sacred places twice destroyed
first
by fire then by sacrilege to the ancients the Mechoopda
of the Maidu
people whose spirits reside in the central Sierras
in the watershed area of the Feather and American
rivers
as well as in Humbug Valley Maidu meaning Man
will persist watching over this land
so rudely visited by fire and evil
Today we chant
with them to Creator
to restore the trees and native plants, grasses, animals ... Everything out
here is connected to the lives of
our Maidu ancestors
whom we protect and by whom we are protected
that
such affronts to each and every Mechoopda too shall pass beyond
In
Fire
& Mud Poetry Anthology (2019)
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