Sherry Chandler

Unfortunately, the congress voted against net neutrality, pretty much along party lines. So now it’s up to the Senate.

Josh Marshall is keeping a running tally of how the Senators stand over at Talking Points Memo. Perhaps not surprisingly, most Senators are uncommitted or are not admitting that they’re committed.

This really is a bipartisan issue. We may not be united on much in this country right now, but apparently many of us on both sides can agree that we don’t want big telephone playing favorites on the internet for money. I urge you to call your Senator and let them know how you stand on this issue. You can look the information up here.

For more information, visit Save the Internet.

Literally, then, a poem’s narrative is its rhythm or movement of words. If a dramatist writes a speech in prose, and then rewrites in in blank verse, he has made a strategic rhythmical change, and therefore a change in the literal narrative. Even if he alters “came a day” to “a day came” he has still made a tiny alteration of sequence, and so, literally, of his rhythm and narrative. Similarly, a poem’s meaning is literally its pattern or integrity as a verbal structure.

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

I read this to mean that a poem is “about” its structure. It means what it says in the way that it says it and cannot be paraphrased.

Which leads me back to an old dictum of mine: Style is content.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, musing on Donald Hall in the NYTimes, asks [and answers] this question:

The question, What is poetry for? has a corollary: What is everything that is not poetry for? That’s what I found myself wondering as I reread Donald Hall’s poem “The One Day” after hearing the good news that he will be the next poet laureate of the United States. The question has a circular, elliptical answer. In the life of a poet, what is not poetry is for the making of poems. It is the raw stuff…

Yesterday when I broke the news to a friend of mine that Donald Hall had been named our new Poet Laureate, her response was “Oh no! I love Donald Hall. This is the only thing he’s ever done that has disappointed me.”

Why, you might ask, is it a betrayal to accept the laurel crown? Klinkenborg may address that question, too:

It’s assumed that the laureate will try to advance the cause of poetry — especially the public awareness of poetry — in a manner somehow separate from the writing of poems. To speak on behalf of poetry sounds like a natural task for a poet, and for some poets it certainly is. I don’t know whether Donald Hall will turn out to be that kind of laureate, and, in a way, I hope he doesn’t. So much of his poetry has emerged from the rigor of his privacy — from what appears in his verse to be a deep, unsettling sense of what’s possible in one’s life. There’s always the temptation for the laureate to find some anodyne ground to stand on. But these are not anodyne times.

It is a thoughtful meditation on Hall and the laurels that deserves to be read in its entirety.