Friday Links
Feast of St. Scholastica
Seth Wieck reviews Dana Gioia’s new collection of poetry
Ted Gioia on The State of the Culture (2023)
Anthony Esolen on Marty
God and the Poet: Sally Read in Humanum Review
Seth Wieck reviews Dana Gioia’s new collection of poetry
Seth Wieck ends his wonderful Front Porch Republic review of Dana Gioia’s new collection of poetry, Meet Me at the Lighthouse, with this: “As I mount midlife—Tennyson’s rocky walls—and attempt to gather my bearings for what’s coming in the next 40 years, I find fewer and fewer people have been able to run the long race. The energy and ambition and love I had in my youth is running low. Wouldn’t it be easier to fold my hands, to repeat the catch phrases and sound bites, to laugh at the canned cues and teach my children to? Whose woods these are I think I know. Then out on the wrinkled sea, the high notes come shimmering over the cold waves, and 72-year-old Dana Gioia says, “Meet me at the Lighthouse.” This new collection will lead you on a journey you won’t want to miss. Bonus content: “At the Crossroads”, a poem from the new collection.
Ted Gioia on The State of the Culture
In this most recent installment of his must-read Substack newsletter, Honest Broker, Ted Gioia gives us his take on The State of the Culture. It’s an absolutely fascinating assessment of today’s culture. As Gioia points out, there’s lots of content being made today — books, music, videos, journals, plays, etc. The question is: “Where’s the audience? The supply of culture is HUGE and GROWING. But the demand side of the equation is ugly.” Big corporations (Disney, Netflix, etc) and stars play it safe, churning out the same old stuff, even though this strategy isn’t really working because audiences are supporting what Gioia calls alt culture. As he sees it, “these alternative people and platforms represent the only really successful audience development force in contemporary culture.” And as Gioia points out, we need to support good art. Buy your books directly from the press (but leave reviews on Amazon because it helps authors) or a good indie bookstore. Go to concerts and plays. Pay for the journal and the Substack newsletter. Gioia believes that if the big players — studios, record studios, non-profits — join us “to build an audience and infrastructure for bold creative work, we have a golden age of artistry and culture ahead of us.” I’m not sure this is true, maybe they’d eventually end up stifling truly good art, but, either way, the rest of us can support them. As Gioia says, “And if those big players don’t get on board, let’s do it without them.”
Anthony Esolen on the film Marty
On his fantastic Substack newsletter, Word & Song, Anthony Esolen suggests the 1955 Oscar winning film (Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor) Marty starring Ernestine Borgnine for your Valentine’s Day viewing. The film is “a celebration of genuine goodness, and it is never merely ironic, never flippant, never gray.” Marty is an antidote to so many of the terrible films you’ll find on Valentine’s Day movie lists. The screenplay and the acting are spot on. Borgnine, especially, is so good.
God and the Poet: Sally Read in Humanum Review
While working as a mental health nurse, Sally Read turned to poetry for solace and order amidst chaos. Reading T.S. Eliot’s The Four Quartets on the tube, she says she “could make little real sense of it, and yet I knew it contained the deepest sense. Its wisdom, lyricism and startling images reminded me of something I almost knew.” She started a poetry group with her patients, whose“initial protestations of “I don’t understand poetry” were silenced in the face of poetry understanding them too well.” She became a poet herself, publishing three books of poetry. And then, at thirty-nine, she converted to Catholicism. In this lovely, thoughtful essay in Humanum Review, Read goes on to explore poetry as craft, as work that “should have everything to do with labor and form,” and how the intensity of her poetry was transformed and made new by her conversion.
