Friday Links
December 15, 2023
October 7, 2023 by James Matthew Wilson
A. E. Stallings: The Bat Poet: Poetry as Echolocation
Jaclyn Warren’s mission is to draw others into Catholic beauty
Nick Cave: Faith, Hope, and Carnage: The Terrible Beauty of Grief
Scientists Pinpoint Cause of Severe Morning Sickness
October 7, 2023 by James Matthew Wilson
There are certain things that only poetry can do. We all saw video of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the paragliders, the terrified civilians, the young women bound and bruised and beaten. . . we all saw it, and many of us were so shocked by the images on our screens that we were unable to describe what we saw. Resorting to words like “horrific,” “awful,” and “terrible” in an effort to describe the unspeakable, we spoke without saying very much. But poetry can take the unspeakable—that for which there are no words—and put it into words, into an arrangement, an order, a form, that bears witness to the event and thus allow us to re-experience it, to “see” the images again, to feel again the shock and horror, to bear it and not look away. It is good that poetry can do this for there are some things that we should not look away from, some things that we should not forget.
A. E. Stallings: The Bat Poet: Poetry as Echolocation
The great A. E. Stallings gave her inaugural lecture as the Oxford Professor of Poetry on November 20. Take a listen. She’s always interesting and surprising.
Jaclyn Warren’s mission is to draw others into Catholic beauty
Simcha Fisher interviews Jaclyn Warren on art and more:
“You’re not going to engage people by hammering them over the head with the truth. You’re going to catch more flies with honey, and the honey is the goodness and beauty we show in artwork,” she said.
“Beauty is always the right answer,” Warren said.
Nick Cave: Faith, Hope, and Carnage: The Terrible Beauty of Grief
Nick Cave on vulnerability and freedom, loss and grief:
I think to be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually. It can be perversely a point of advantage, not disadvantage as one might think. It is a nuanced place that feels both dangerous and teeming with potential. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is.
Scientists Pinpoint Cause of Severe Morning Sickness
This does not have anything to do with literature or art, but it is an important discovery. So many pregnant women suffer with morning sickness during the first trimester, but there is a smaller percentage who suffer from hyperemesis gravidarum, severe, sometimes life-threatening, nausea and vomiting. Finally, it seems that scientists have discovered at least one of the hormones responsible for HG. The NYT article is behind a paywall so here’s a non-paywalled article. (H/T: Haley Stewart)
