John Ashbery has died. He was my favourite American poet for a long time, challenging to read, but the kind of poet that completely draws you in to a poem, into a little universe of wordplay and image and sense. You don’t read Ashbery so much as you taste his work. He took the legacies of modernity placed them beside the lessons of post-modernity and produced beauty, which tells you something of his genius.
The Poetry Foundation has a number of his poems online. Like all poets who cared so deeply about their words and how they were presented, I think he’s still best experienced in his books, whether the long form poems of the 1990s or the shorter works of his earlier years.
I am astounded at the breadth of his inspiration and the way he was able to draw meaning from disparate images and weave them together in a way that presented a musical, rhythmic poem that had what the Irish fiddler Martin Hayes has called “The Lonesome Note.” In his work you can feel the pining for the meaning that is his alone, privately held, implied, offered to you to discover or, in the absence of your ability to relate to what he is saying, to leave you with a sensation, an in-breath, sometimes an uneasy feeling, sometimes a feeling of delight.
He was prolific and left a huge legacy of work and a massive imprint on American and world poetry. Here’s one, sort of randomly picked, that talks about the sanitization of American life and reveals something of his poetics as well.
The One Thing That Can Save AmericaIs anything central?Orchards flung out on the land,Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?Are place names central?Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?As they concur with a rush at eye levelBeating themselves into eyes which have had enoughThank you, no more thank you.And they come on like scenery mingled with darknessThe damp plains, overgrown suburbs,Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.These are connected to my version of AmericaBut the juice is elsewhere.This morning as I walked out of your roomAfter breakfast crosshatched withBackward and forward glances, backward into light,Forward into unfamiliar light,Was it our doing, and was itThe material, the lumber of life, or of livesWe were measuring, counting?A mood soon to be forgottenIn crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadowIn this morning that has seized us again?I know that I braid too much on my ownSnapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.They are private and always will be.Where then are the private turns of eventDestined to bloom later like golden chimesReleased over a city from a highest tower?The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,And you know instantly what I mean?What remote orchard reached by winding roadsHides them? Where are these roots?It is the lumps and trialsThat tell us whether we shall be knownAnd whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.All the rest is waitingFor a letter that never arrives,Day after day, the exasperationUntil finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,The two envelope halves lying on a plate.The message was wise, and seeminglyDictated a long time ago, but its time has stillNot arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limitedSteps that can be taken against dangerNow and in the future, in cool yards,In quiet small houses in the country,Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.
Nadia has a small piece this morning on one element of good design, reflecting on a book review by Ian Pinasoo. I like the way she puts this:
Great workshops are based on a creative challenge. A creative challenge is real and not fake. It matters. A creative challenge engages, pulls us in and takes us on a discovery tour. Responding to a creative challenge is like the hero’s journey of accepting a call, going through the process of revelation and returning with deep insights.
I would add that if the challenge is anchored to a common need, and the people you have identified and invited are the ones with enough agency to take on the challenge, you really start cooking.
In Tofino for this week, today preparing for 60 people who will be joining us for an Art of Hosting.
The beach here, as anyone living on the exposed west coast will know, is constantly buffeted by surf and there is an endless white noise created by the waves crashing on the four sets of reefs offshore. Once, when I was in Quinault in Washington State, I remarked to an Elder that this sound must have had a beginning at some time in the earth’s history and perhaps will have an end. But in the meantime, as long as human ears have lived on this coast, the sound of surf has always filled them.
That’s pretty much forever.
As we begin a week of teaching some of the arts of community, I am reminded of the aspects of our better nature that we humans have always had, and my focus is fixed on what ways of being community, like the sound of this surf, have accompanied human beings forever.
The Conservative Party of Canada has started heating up its leadership campaign and I have a passing interest in it. Two of the candidates – the two most odious – are known to me personally. Kellie Leitch is the MP in my parent’s riding in Ontario and she was very helpful in helping my dad and I to get some written comments before the commons committee looking at the omnibus bill C-30 that Harper passed in 2012 when my own MP wouldn’t do it. Since then she has supported asbestos exports (against her oath as an MD), a Barbarian Practices Act and a currently racist dog whistle campaign on “Canadian values.” Chris Alexander, who was her partner in crime on the Barbarian practices bill and the tip line campaign promise was an elementary school mate of mine. We grew up a half block from each other, and he came from a red Tory family, with his dad as a supporter of Joe Clark in the 1976 leadership of the PCs, and in retirement he has done some interesting leadership work on diversity. In 1984 I watched Brian Mulroney’s election vctory at their house. Chris was always the smartest kid in any room I was ever in with him, but he took a hard turn to the right and threw his lot in with Harper. What he has in smarts he desperately lacks in political graces. He’s become rude and inelegant. And his stock has fallen mightily. He was also a sore loser when his constituents kicked him out of the commons last year. It’s too bad. At one point, when he our ambasador to Afghanistan, I imagined that he might make a good leader of the Conservative party and given his roots, might even pull it back towards a progressive conservative agenda. He’s a disappointment of the highest order.
So I’m kind of personally invested in this strange campaign, which brought me to reading up on Kevin O’Leary this evening.
It’s interesting to read Kevin O’Leary’s Wikipedia biography. What stands out for me is how he basically has experience as a software developer, a celebrity and a finance guy. But look a bit deeper and you see that his software career included creating a product and companies that eventually created a massive catastrophe for Mattel, who bought his company, made him a multi millionaire and imediately went into a tail spin. He walked away golden while a massive company and the enterprise he built swiftly crumbled, wiping $3 billion of shareholder value of the books of Mattel. he parlayed that fortune into an investing career.
His investment strategies are heavily tilted to the oil and gas sector, which makes his recent pronouncements against carbon taxes to be self-interested at best. If he runs for office, it wil be interesting to see how he handles the conflict of interest issues that will come up as a candidate and later an MP, should he make it that far.
On the experience side I’m struck by how little experience he has with economics or governance, having never studied or served in those capacities. He certainly comes across as a financial whiz as a pundit, but he offers his takes on taxes, Canadian dollar valuation and enterprise from a business angle, not an economics angle. Remember that the Tories chastised Trudeau for being inexperienced. O’Leary is well known as a celebrity and a talker, but I don’t see much in the way of public service on his resume. He doesn’t even seem to be into philanthropy at all.
Lastly it is curious on his official website that he talks about his father’s ethnic Irish ancestry, but only mentions his mother’s family’s merchant background and not that they are also Lebanese. I actually think that’s an interesting aspect of his background and it seems a shame he doesn’t talk more about it. Perhaps he does in his books.
He’s an interesting character once you dive in. I find him rakish and irritating, short tempered and egotistical, all qualities that seem to have a place on Bay Street, but are grating on Wellington Street. I really think this crop of Conservative leardership candidates is weak sauce, and I fear that the party will go the Trump route and pick him because of his brashness. This, however is not a time for a celebrity self-promoter to be in power as prime minister of Canada, but the Conservative party seems to have a bare cupboard at the moment.
The world is in a weird place right now and a guy like O’Leary might appeal to Canadians desperate to have their own Trump. Some of this crowd would probably elect Don Cherry if he ran, or resurrect Rob Ford if they could, the man who was John the Baptist to Trump’s Christ. O’Leary is nothing more than a huckster, full of his father’s Irish charm and his own inflated sense of self-importance. Good god, public governance is in desperate times.
“The secrets to living are these: First, the past cannot be improved upon. Acknowledge what was and move on. Next, the future cannot be molded. Then, why bother? Last, nothing can ultimately be controlled; Not the past, nor the future, nor the present. Accept this moment as it is. Honoring these three, one lives without shackles.”
– Wu Hsin via whiskyriver
At some point I think the work of complexity cannot be done without a psycho-spiritual component. There are days which I would wish that Wu Hsin was a client. I feel like action like he is describing – Taoist wu wei or “doing non-doing” – is the high art of living as a human being in a complex world at whatever scale.