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Is an “Ode to Joy” currently possible?
(6)…The fate of poetry depends on whether such a work as Schiller’s and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” is possible. For that to be so, some basic confidence is needed, a sense of open space ahead of the individual and the human species. How did it happen that to be a poet of the twentieth century means to receive training in every kind of pessimism, sarcasm, bitterness, doubt? …Perhaps the specific trait of these last decades is that negative attitudes have become so widespread that the poets have been overtaken by the man in the street. As a youth I felt the complete absurdity of everything occurring on our planet, a nightmare that could not end well—and in fact it found its perfect expression in the barbed wire around the concentration camps and gas chambers. Brought up on Polish romantics, I obviously had to search for the causes of that contrast between their open future and our future laden with catastrophe. Today I think that, while the list of dreaded apocalyptic events may change, what is constant is a certain state of mind. This state precedes the perception of specific reasons for despair, which come later.
—Czeslaw Milosz in The Witness of Poetry (Harvard University Press, 1983)First comes despair, then we find the reasons? Is this so? Has despair become a habit of mind of poets? I’ve always thought not. Real despair means not writing at all. Writing is a way of taking action.
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6 Responses to “Is an “Ode to Joy” currently possible?”
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And you are right in having so thought.
Writing is a process whereby we set ourselves free – not always in our circumstances but in our minds and souls and hearts. This doesnt mean everything is right in the world; it means there is a germ of hope that no human being can completely stamp out. It means we are because God is, and that hope is the joy of this reality the promise of heaven.
Writing allows us entry, if only for a moment, to that place where joy is the norm, which in turn gives us the hope that we can create this peace for all people. We need not only writing with words but with music, and painting with color. Because of Hitler, we read Ann Frank. Because the world knows war, we need Beethovens joy more than ever. The muses must bring reality, because we live in a violent world.
The Ode to Joy is not only possible, it is essential to the possibility of peace.
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sherry May 22nd, 2007 at 2:47 pm
Thank you, Helen. You are wise. And I have committed the sin of excerpting. I cannot ever do so without remembering #99 from Ron Silliman’s Chinese Notebook: “99. Those who would excerpt or edit miss the point.”
As Milosz goes on to say “Yet to realize that the poetry of the twentieth century testifies to serious disturbances in our perception of the world that may already become the first step in self-therapy.”
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“Real despair means not writing at all. Writing is a way of taking action. ”
So true, dear friend, so true.
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This past week I read Barbara Ehrenreichs book, “Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy.” She investigates the social forces that diminish the natural human tendency to “go to another place” in well planned events of collective joy. Governments and social elites consider it a dangerous social concept because it is a time when the common people take responsibility for their own well being, thus to be discouraged by those in positions of power. At the risk of generalizing, it is a phenomena that was a vital part of western culture (festival) before literate society emerged in the late middle ages. Since then society has used the printed word as the basis of its symbolic codex. Thus poets, always the social raconteurs, as the artists of the printed words must wrinkle the mirror that reflects society so that it can be seen it as it actually is and not as it seems. Doing that requires an intimate knowledge of pessimism, sarcasm, bitterness, doubt thus it is a part of basic training. Great artists rise above the basics to produce beauty and joy. My own experience is to begin by writing a pessimistic and callous commentary that transforms itself into an positive expression of joy when allowed the opportunity. I dont quite know how or why it happens, but it is most common when I can back away from the contemporary source of inspiration and delve into the nuances of the metaphors and the language itself. In other words, joy is present just not apparent in the early go arounds, yet it emerges as the words and the structure inform the writer of the hidden message and is revealed in later drafts.
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[...] Poem On The Peace Tree My poem, “Songs of War,” first published in 2003 on the web site of Poets Against War, in now on The Peace Tree along with “How To Be Free in a War-Ridden World,” posted yesterday on this blog and as a comment to “Is an ‘Ode to Joy’ Currently Possible?” on Sherry Chandler’s blog. [...]
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sherry May 23rd, 2007 at 11:43 am
Shamash & Alan, thank you! I love the notion of wrinkling the mirror.
Alan, as a nice coincidental corollary to your comment, last night my family and I watched the film Before Night Falls, about the persecution of the Cuban poet and novelist Reinaldo Arenas, the whole force of which is that Castro, if he wanted to stay in power, could not allow the existence of anything beautiful, free, or joyful.
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Sherry has also received an Artist Enrichment grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women.
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