Why Do Some Poets Sound Like Middle-Aged Mothers Trying to Get Their Kids to Eat Too Much Cooked Meat?

Also: The origins of the Basque language, how BookTok is changing publishing, the unspoken rules of the crossword, and more.

Frank O’Hara (right) listening to Alfred Leslie (left) talk about his portraits. Still from USA: Poetry (1966).

August is Sealey Challenge month. What is the Sealey Challenge? It is pretty simple, though, like other social media literary challenges (National Novel Writing Month), it is rather ambitious. It’s a challenge to read one book or one chapbook of poetry a day in the month of August. It was started by the poet Nicole Sealey in 2017 when “balancing her administrative work with the promotion of her first book” left her “with little time to read for pleasure.” So, she created the Sealey Challenge and announced it online.

I have nothing against the Sealey Challenge per se. If you want to read a book of poetry a day, go for it! I can even suggest some titles if you are giving this a shot.

My only comment is that reading a book of poetry every day for a month doesn’t sound much like reading “for pleasure” to me—and I already like poetry. It sounds like work, like some sort of self-improvement program—which is how Tyler Meier pitches it at LitHub.

Meier argues that reading poetry has all sorts of benefits. “Life-changing experiences are unpredictable and hard to come by,” he writes, “but poetry is one of the most reliable places I know to seek them.” (And who doesn’t like reliable life-changing experiences?) “We know,” he continues, that “reading poetry is good for you”:

The International Arts + Mind Lab in the Center for Applied NeuroAesthetics at Johns Hopkins University aggregated a range of studies to show that experiences with poetry—reading, writing, and reciting it—can improve mental health, heal traumas, elevate mood, and stimulate the right hemisphere of the brain—critical for creative problem solving.

Poetry improves your “focus and attention” and “builds our civic connections.” In fact, reading poetry might even save us from a dystopian future brought about by Artificial Intelligence:

We’re on the precipice of a future that will look very different than our past, that will increasingly be driven by powerful adaptations of artificial intelligence stuffed to the brim with computer-generated language. Choosing the originality of poets is a choice to remind yourself of the pleasure and the complexity and the richness of humanity.

Meier seems like an earnest guy—he is the Executive Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center, and his work has appeared in Boston Review, Poetry, and elsewhere—but these are terrible reasons to read poetry.

In 1959, Frank O’Hara complained in his sardonic “Personism: A Manifesto” about poets who worried about the benefits of their work:

But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don’t give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete).

His point—and he’s right—is that urging people to read poetry because it “improves” them is not only wrong (according to O’Hara, you should read poetry for pleasure), but it makes reading poetry even less appetizing than it might already be for some people (“Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness”).

So, dear friends of poetry, let’s stop with the poetry-as-self-actualization reading program. Instead, let’s say read whatever you want, whenever you want, and if you like it, tell someone else about it. Call it the Frank O’Hara Challenge.

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In other news, the incorrupt body of St. Benedict of Palermo recently went up in flames: “The church of Santa Maria di Gesu, erected in 1426 by Blessed Matthew Guimerà and located next to the convent of the Friars Minor in the city of Palermo, Sicily, was completely razed by a great fire. In addition to the loss of the building, the faithful deeply regret having lost in the fire the incorrupt body of St. Benedict of Palermo, which was preserved there: only a few bone fragments were saved.” (HT: The Lamp)

What is Euskara exactly? It is spoken by nearly a million Basque, but no one knows where it came from:

Many researchers have taken a crack at the Basque problem over the years, each coming up with a different solution. It has been suggested that Euskara is a predecessor to and a survivor of Iberian, a non-Indo-European tongue spoken on the Iberian Peninsula before the Romans arrived. Euskara has also been linked to a number of languages spoken in the Caucasus, as well to the Saharan Berbers, a pre-Arab ethnic group from northern Africa.

Until recently, it was believed that the Basques descended from a relict Paleolithic population unaffected by the prehistoric migrations that shaped the rest of Europe, which explains why Euskara bears no similarities to Romance and Germanic languages. This hypothesis has been debunked by recent genetic research, which indicates that Basque Country didn’t become culturally isolated from other European societies until much later, during the Roman and Islamic occupations of the Iberian Peninsula.

While the independent spirit of the Basques undoubtedly contributed to their isolation, the defining factor seems to have been the geography of Basque Country itself. Protected by the Bay of Biscay and Pyrenees mountains, the rugged terrain wards off outsiders as easily as it prevents insiders from leaving. Genetics has only made the history of Euskara more puzzling. If the Basques are related to the Indo-Europeans in some way, why isn’t their language? Right now, we just don’t know.

“I can’t stress how much BookTok sells.” How BookTok may be changing publishing: “The famous Waterstones in London’s Piccadilly is a modernist/art deco building. It started life as a menswear store and has the feel of that sort of traditional shop that is fast disappearing. But this bookshop, like many others, is enjoying a very modern sales boost from social media. Groups of teenage girls regularly gather here to buy new books and meet new friends, both discovered on the social media app TikTok. Recommendations by influencers for authors and novels on BookTok – a community of users who are passionate about books and make videos recommending titles – can send sales into the stratosphere.”

The unspoken rules of the crossword puzzle: “The rules of crosswords are part of a rich set of conventions shared by those who solve them—and they are intimately related to the grammar of language in general.”

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Douglas Murray reviews Nigel Biggar’s important history of colonialism: “As a previous reviewer, Niall Ferguson, has said, the result is a book that ‘simply cannot be ignored by anyone who wishes to hold a view on the subject.’ After this book, there will be scholars and pseudo-scholars who will try to continue their ‘post-colonial’ studies while ignoring this book, but their own pursuits will become increasingly meaningless. For the deep shades of black that colonialism has been painted in during recent years are here shown to be at least as ludicrous as any whitewashing of the crimes of empire that may have gone on in centuries past (though even this is shown to be much exaggerated by modern campaigners). For example, those demagogues and others who insist that the empire was purely a history of slavery and oppression must find some way to disappear the simple facts of how Britain abolished slavery and against what opposition.”

John Palattella remembers the critic James Longenbach: “Jim had a sensibility that blended the intellectual and aesthetic virtues of the modernists whose work he returned to regularly: Yeats’s self-questioning, Pound’s exquisite ear, Eliot’s philosophical agility, Wallace Stevens’s sense of contingency, Elizabeth Bishop’s skepticism, George Oppen’s refusal of romance and Kenneth Burke’s element of grace. What Jim enjoyed most and did best was to draw on his own archival discoveries and vast reading to tell elegant stories about the deliberate and haphazard work of discovery, experimentation and transformation lived by twentieth-century poets.” I first came across Longenbach over twenty years ago and second Palattella’s appreciation.

I have never read Steven Millhauser, but Charles McGrath recommends his latest collection of short stories and other work in the New Yorker: “Steven Millhauser, whose new collection, “Disruptions” (Knopf), is out just in time for his eightieth birthday, is the great eccentric of American fiction: a sleight-of-hand artist who from time to time seems to vanish into his own work. His first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright—ostensibly a biography of an eleven-year-old novelist by his fifth-grade classmate—was a minor sensation when it first appeared, in 1972, and it became a cult classic. There has never been anything like it, both a parody of literary biography and a mesmerizing evocation of a small-town nineteen-fifties childhood.”

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Ladoga Canal Locks, Russia. Image via Wikimedia Commons.