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Category: Essays

New Year Paintings and Poetry

New Year Paintings and Poetry

So, another year, another variant, and we trudge on across the tundra. Courage, creativity, and, yes, peace, love, and understanding are needed now more than . . . Well, they’re needed. In that spirit of hopeful trudging, Spinozablue offers new literature, literary criticism, and home-brewed paintings. Robert Mueller brings us his unique take on Petrarch, and David Groulx gets obliquely iambic. It looks like we’re off to a solid start. I had a stretch there with at least two kinds…

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Robert Mueller and Petrarcan Mirrors

Robert Mueller and Petrarcan Mirrors

Petrarcan Naissance by Robert Mueller Here is a poem from the great sequence of poetry using the native Italian tongue, instead of being written in Latin, by Francesco Petrarca and covering much of a life lived during the 14th century. Readers will know him as Petrarch. The time he lived is important to the extent he is regarded as a proto-Renaissance-humanist and well ahead of his time. The later developments emphasizing human autonomy are already in evidence in Petrarca’s poetry,…

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Robert Mueller: On the Poetry of Mary Orovan

Robert Mueller: On the Poetry of Mary Orovan

  From Mary Orovan a Touch of e.e. cummings if You Like by Robert Mueller These Elective Affinities, what are they?  You do not have to believe ce personnage distingué in Goethe’s novel who has a way of explaining things.  Thus der Hauptmann, supreme intellect with superb practical bent, can speak of a situation to which his old friend the Baron (and spouse) have invited him.  Put, or putting himself, in charge, he can explore it fully, and in the…

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Robert Mueller: Anna Shukeylo’s Urban Diaries

Robert Mueller: Anna Shukeylo’s Urban Diaries

How to Do Urban, by New Yorker of Choice   Two young women, art students, funnel into the bleak and lead-like dreary light of the subway car grasping in their hands, by the frames on which they have been crafted, smallish paintings (maybe 12 by 16).  Apparitions they are, the young artists, and holdings of the imagination, their finished images that I may never have the opportunity to observe again. In New York City one can still think of opportunities…

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Donal Mahoney: Why We Write

Donal Mahoney: Why We Write

Why Did You Write That?   Anyone who has written fiction or poetry probably has been asked at one time or another, “Why did you write that?” I’ve been asked that question and I have never been able to provide an answer. Some writers may set out to write a poem that will address an important question about life, such as who we are as human beings and what purpose, if any, we have on Earth. I have never tried…

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Between the Notes

Between the Notes

Bang on the Chasm   by Robert Mueller     I am wondering about new jazz and new art music, and separating them entirely for the convenience of entertaining these thoughts. I am thinking about consorting with a difference even though what I have to say about one has to be true of the other (again assuming for the purpose that they are separate). Specifically as a matter of degree I want to distinguish new jazz as a living production…

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Jill Magi: Labor Lost and Found

Jill Magi: Labor Lost and Found

  by Jill Magi Last fall I found myself at the gate of an archive. Remembering something from my labor and union past and thinking about my work life at present, I came across the on-line finding guides for the Wagner Labor Archive at New York University. The writings here are a warm-up to my trip into that archive. As of this spring, I’ve been inside, but that writing—is it poetry?—is slow to come along. For now, I’m using exposition…

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Poetic Synchronicity, by Sean Howard

Poetic Synchronicity, by Sean Howard

Poetic Implications: Synchronicity and The Language of Meaning A Personal Reflection by Sean Howard Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Cape Breton University November 2008   A few months ago, I began work on a project I’ve been putting off for over a year: an account of my time in the clutches of what Jungian analysts call the ‘puer aeternus’ complex, or neurosis; an inflated sense of the self as a precious, creative but foredoomed ‘eternal youth,’ destroyed, to quote Jung’s…

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David Haan: Irony

David Haan: Irony

  Rumormongers have hypocritically insinuated that I make use of cheap irony. Nothing could be further from the truth. I employ only the finest quality of irony, procured at great expense, its like not to be had discounted. In fact, I do not entrust supply to outside provisioners, but participate at every stage of manufacture, from the selection of raw material (unalloyed, never scrap) through its refinement—forged under sublime pressure, even tempered, under controlled heat, by a process of my…

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Yahia Lababidi: Monks of LA

Yahia Lababidi: Monks of LA

  The songs of both these artists are generally perceived as music to slash your wrists to, and playing either of their records at a party signals its certain death (or yours). To their intensely loyal cult following, in the privacy of their bedrooms, they sing to each alone. And by making their anxieties public, these artists are Saviors to brethren of solitaries. Both are literary types; one is a novelist and poet, while the other as a librarian’s son…

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