Friday Links
St. Polycarp
February 23, 2024
The Tin Can Residency
Frank Guan: Speaking in Tongues, On Don DeLillo
Art as Obedience by Madison Morris
Lenten Realism from Glenn Arbery
Adam Fleming Petty: Ben Lerner loves poetry by hating it
The Tin Can Residency
Brought to you by Paul and Emily Pastor, the Tin Can Residency is “is a grassroots by-invitation experience meant to encourage writers and artists with restorative retreat and creative community at Wakerobin House” at the Pastor home in Oregon. The first resident will be the wonderful poet, Carla Galdo. You can help to bring some beauty into this world by donating to this wonderful initiative.
Frank Guan: Speaking in Tongues, On Don DeLillo
“What’s offered by the recent Library of America compilation Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s, then, is a rare potential avenue into the heart of multiple enigmas. How did the Eighties feel and taste, and how did one novelist, whose gifts during the Seventies were as obvious as his limits, tap into those strange sensibilities to author works now firmly in the canon? How could the decade’s various American artists produce, as if in unison, so much collective radiance? And given that our sensibilities and theirs have had to grow so radically distinct from one another, how relevant can all these peaks in culture be for artists operating now?”
Art as Obedience by Madison Morris
“As it turns out, it is surprisingly tricky to make art with a genuine spiritual core … Is wanting to listen to God’s voice the same as actually listening? When you accept a vocation to serve the Lord with your work, how should you keep that vocation from supplanting your personal relationship with Him? I wanted God to inspire the story, but I didn’t want all my conversations with Him to be simply for the sake of “being inspired.”
Lenten Realism from Glenn Arbery
“It is especially necessary to inhabit this real world imaginatively in a season of recollection and self-scrutiny like Lent. It is tempting to fantasize, tempting to think that we are better or worse than we are—or that the world is.”
Adam Fleming Petty: Ben Lerner loves poetry by hating it
“Yet the way Lerner writes about poetry risks reducing it to the social function of poets. One can’t help but recall Wallace Stevens’s injunction on poetry’s first responsibility: “It must give pleasure.” Amid the cleared spaces and private utterances, does Lerner’s work offer genuine pleasures? Yes, and in The Lights, those pleasures result from a change in direction from some of Lerner’s earlier work. He now seems less concerned about poetry’s vertical movement—whether or not it can ever reach some exalted stage—and more interested in its horizontal circulation, among everyday people in ordinary places.”
