Why Elon Musk Is Reading ‘The Waste Land’

By Max Read

Elon Musk, the billionaire electric-car salesman and sworn enemy of Azealia Banks, recently exhorted his followers on Twitter to “read Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land”:
It would be an exhausting task to limn this tweet for substance, and yet what is the internet for if not exhaustion? And also, for showing off that you have read “The Waste Land”? On Breitbart, John Carney suggests that Musk “may very well see himself with his hand upon the wheel, sails up and headed seaward. Perhaps he will meet the fate of Phlebas but even in that there is beauty and nobility.” Hmm. Indeed.
.
At Slate, Felix Salmon proposes an alternate theory:

But there’s a much simpler and more elegant explanation, which is that this is all part of the breakup between Musk and his (ex?) girlfriend, Grimes. Here’s a hypothetical yet credible sequence of events: First, Grimes sends Musk the screenshot in question. As a message from Grimes to Musk, the excerpt makes much more sense: She’s telling him to get over himself, that he too will go the way of Phlebas.
.
National Review Online’s Kevin Williamson, for his part, muses that Musk is “seeking solace in poetry,” before listing, one by one, nearly every work referenced in “The Waste Land,” presumably to ensure that the reader is aware that Williamson has read not just “The Waste Land” but also, at the very least, its Wikipedia page. Williamson writes:

Read the complete article

Cutting Greens

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

curling them around

i hold their bodies in obscene embrace

thinking of everything but kinship.

collards and kale

strain against each strange other

away from my kissmaking hand and

the iron bedpot.

the pot is black,

the cutting board is black,

my hand,

and just for a minute

the greens roll black under the knife,

and the kitchen twists dark on its spine

and I taste in my natural appetite

the bond of live things everywhere.

Another reminder that registration for the fall sessions is now open

Another reminder that registration for the September 27, October 25 and November 22 sessions is now open. Please register online, in person or via telephone: (604) 713-1800. The Roundhouse Community Arts and Recreation Centre has expressed concern about the abrupt and striking decline in registration and attendance at the Poetry Circle sessions. This places the existence of our group in jeopardy, making registration for the fall sessions critical. Let’s keep this exceptional troop alive!

The Robots are Coming

BY KYLE DARGAN

with clear-cased woofers for heads,

no eyes. They see us as a bat sees

a mosquito—a fleshy echo,

a morsel of sound. You’ve heard

their intergalactic tour busses

purring at our stratosphere’s curb.

They await counterintelligence

transmissions from our laptops

and our blue teeth, await word

of humanity’s critical mass,

our ripening. How many times

have we dreamed it this way:

the Age of the Machines,

postindustrial terrors whose

tempered paws—five welded fingers

—wrench back our roofs,

siderophilic tongues seeking blood,

licking the crumbs of us from our beds.

O, great nation, it won’t be pretty.

What land will we now barter

for our lives ? A treaty inked

in advance of the metal ones’ footfall.

Give them Gary. Give them Detroit,

Pittsburgh, Braddock—those forgotten

nurseries of girders and axels.

Tell the machines we honor their dead,

distant cousins. Tell them

we tendered those cities to repose

out of respect for welded steel’s

bygone era. Tell them Ford

and Carnegie were giant men, that war

glazed their palms with gold.

Tell them we soft beings mourn

manufacture’s death as our own.

How Poetry Came to Matter Again

A young generation of artists is winning prizes, acclaim, and legions of readers while exploring identity in new ways.

JESSE LICHTENSTEIN

The poetry world would hardly seem a likely place for a “race row,” the phrase The Guardian applied in 2011 to a blunt exchange of literary verdicts. The celebrated (and white) critic Helen Vendler had disparaged the celebrated (and black) poet Rita Dove’s selections for the new Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Dove, Vendler wrote, had favored “multicultural inclusiveness” over quality. She’d tried to “shift the balance” by choosing too many minority poets at the expense of better (and better-known) writers. The poems were “mostly short” and “of rather restricted vocabulary,” the presiding keeper of the 20th-century canon judged. Over at the Boston Review, the (also white) critic Marjorie Perloff, the doyenne of American avant-garde poetics, weighed in too. She lamented what she saw as new poets’ reliance on a formulaic kind of lyric already stale by the 1960s and ’70s—a personal memory dressed up with “poeticity,” building to “a profound thought or small epiphany.” Her example: a poem by the acclaimed (also black) poet Natasha Trethewey about her mother’s painful hair-straightening routine.

Read the complete article

Witchgrass

Louise Glück

Something

comes into the world unwelcome

calling disorder, disorder—
.

If you hate me so much

don’t bother to give me

a name: do you need

one more slur

in your language, another

way to blame

one tribe for everything—
.

as we both know,

if you worship

one god, you only need

One enemy—

I’m not the enemy.
.

Only a ruse to ignore

what you see happening

right here in this bed,

a little paradigm

of failure. One of your precious flowers

dies here almost every day

and you can’t rest until

you attack the cause, meaning

whatever is left, whatever

happens to be sturdier

than your personal passion—
.

It was not meant

to last forever in the real world.

But why admit that, when you can go on

doing what you always do,

mourning and laying blame,

always the two together.
.

I don’t need your praise

to survive. I was here first,

before you were here, before

you ever planted a garden.

And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon

are left, and the sea, and the wide field.
.

I will constitute the field.

Don Juan in Hell

ALGIS VALIUNAS

When English lyric poetry is the subject, one thinks first of the Romantics. To many readers for whom poetry is not a life-sustaining staple, and even to some for whom it is, the Romantics have come to define poetry’s very essence: the eruption of exorbitant feeling too rich for the heart to contain in silence. Readers better versed in older and more recent poetry may downgrade Romantic extravagances in favor of, say, the brainy eroticism of John Donne, the eviscerating wit of Alexander Pope, or the chill austerity of Geoffrey Hill. Yet there is no denying that the two poetic generations that thrived from the 1790s to the 1820s represent an artistic efflorescence surpassed in English literature only by that of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
.
Although they may be herded together to mark a period or even a movement, each of the Romantics was a singular figure. In the first generation, whose principals outlived those of the second, William Blake, almost unknown in his day, couched shattering curses and blessings in language of disarming simplicity, and conceived theogonies and prophecies intended to rival or even supplant the Bible. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth joined forces in the collection Lyrical Ballads (1798) “with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.” Coleridge took opium as more conventional gentlemen took snuff and gave birth to fantastic visions, while Wordsworth made heroes of leech gatherers and idiot boys and mourned the loss of “the visionary gleam” in a world hellbent on “getting and spending.” In the second generation, Percy Bysshe Shelley took the lash to a political, social, and religious order that bred human depravity and abjection, and he proclaimed the glorious coming day when freedom and true worship will make a heaven on earth. John Keats, bound for a consumptive’s early grave, kept house with rapturous melancholy and “beauty that must die.”
.
And then there was Lord Byron (1788-1824), the most famous poet of his time and the most notorious hellion, whose life and work together created the superb desperado known as the Byronic hero, dubious exemplar for numerous impressionable young souls bent on artistic glory, sensual feasting, and political high daring, overlaid with world-weariness that made all such aspirations seem ultimately and deliciously pointless. Byron set himself at a haughty remove from the other Romantics. An aristocrat’s vanity informed and undercut Byron’s sense of literary vocation, so that he deprecated his own poetry as inferior to heroic action and simply dismissed that of his most estimable contemporaries.

Read the complete article

Praise the Rain

Joy Harjo

Praise the rain, the seagull dive

The curl of plant, the raven talk­—

Praise the hurt, the house slack

The stand of trees, the dignity­—

Praise the dark, the moon cradle

The sky fall, the bear sleep­—

Praise the mist, the warrior name

The earth eclipse, the fired leap—­

Praise the backwards, upward sky

The baby cry, the spirit food-—

Praise canoe, the fish rush

The hole for frog, the upside-down­—

Praise the day, the cloud cup

The mind flat, forget it all—
.

Praise crazy. Praise sad.

Praise the path on which we’re led.

Praise the roads on earth and water.

Praise the eater and the eaten.

Praise beginnings; praise the end.

Praise the song and praise the singer.
.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

Trust Poetry: Ada Limón Interviewed by Lauren LeBlanc

The poet on the power of naming, the freedom of writing, and when to carry and let go of grief.

An American poet, now living in Lexington, Kentucky, Ada Limón was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award and the 2016 National Book Critics Circle awards for poetry with her fourth collection Bright Dead Things. It’s only fitting that some of the poems in her new collection The Carrying (Milkweed Editions) is a series of correspondence between herself and fellow poet Natalie Diaz. With the knowing directness of a letter, Limón’s poems speak to the marrow of our everyday condition. She grapples with fertility, hard fought acceptance, and empathy all the while admitting, “I don’t know how to hold this truth,/ so I kill it, pin its terrible wings down/ in case, later, no one believes me.” The Carrying is a vital collection for a noisy, brutal time. The power of Limón’s unflinching examination of grief and loss is only surpassed by her love of beauty and compassion.

Read the complete interview

My Last Duchess

BY ROBERT BROWNING

FERRARA

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—which I have not—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
.
Listen to James Mason read “My Last Duchess” by ROBERT BROWNING
.
An early reminder that we will be reading and discussing great narrative poetry of the Victorian era on September 27. Please bring your own favourite examples and, preferably, post them first on the blog via the CONTACT US page, or email it to me directly. See the SCHEDULE PAGE for selections to-date.