The title of the blog is from the Hopkins poem That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.
I think Hopkins makes a good touchstone for what poetry can be. His work is difficult – both linguistically experimental and intellectually abstruse – but it is always trying to communicate something. He is nothing if not sincere. And he never stops making beautiful noises.
Or, rather, the old blog in a new place. I hope you like the new look; I think it’s now pretty much set up as I want it, but if you spot any glitches, let me know. I managed to import all the old posts, which was a minor victory (I’ll spare you the techy details), but unfortunately not the comments. All the imported posts seem to have been set to not accept comments as a default, so you won’t be able to post to them, but all the new ones, starting with this, will be open for comments as usual.
Frustrated by the frequent downtime at Freezope, I’m shifting my site, starting with this blog, to a new location. This involves moving from Squishdot, a Zope-based piece of blogging software, to WordPress (php/MySQL based). Since I’ve never used php this is a potentially fraught process that is likely to take up most of my attention for at least a couple of days. Wish me luck.
In the Washington Post, Salman Rushdie makes the case for a profound reform of Islam – which I don’t have a problem with. There’s a certain irony, though, in calling it an Islamic Reformation, since the Reformation was a time of biblical literalism and iconoclasm – the closest thing Britain ever had to the Taleban.
Stuckism came up in the context of the New Sincerity.
Certainly the manifesto provides parallels. The actual work turns out to be seriously disappointing. For a movement than emphasises authenticity and non-cleverness, the Stuckists seem to produce a lot of work which is jokey and shallow:
‘Dog and Cat Underwater’ – Wolf Howard
‘Two Wine Glasses Remembering that They Used To Be Very Fond Of Each Other’ – Charles Thomson
… or very image-conscious and referential. Paul Harvey, who actually looks like the pick of them in terms of producing attractive objects, does things like paintings of supermodels in the style of Alphonse Mucha. How much more PoMo can you get? He’s even done a Mucha-esque painting of a woman holding one of his own Mucha-esque paintings:
‘The Stuckists Punk Victorian’ – Paul Harvey
Others are just mediocre. Some rather clunky naive painting:
‘About Last Night’ – Philip Absolon
…some complete tat:
Poetry should sing.