Althouse: Art means nothing in Washington.

March 8, 2011

Art means nothing in Washington.

A venerable poet is a figure of fun.

36 comments:

TWM said...: Well look at the bright side . . . mocking him is certainly not as bad as putting him down which is what's in store for him should Obamacare make it all the way.

BTW, I don't even know who this guy is, I just find it disgusting that they're making fun of him.

Bullies . . .; 3/8/11, 3:17 PM
Martin L. Shoemaker said...: Before I got too upset about this, I'd like to know: did it upset Mr. Hall, or did he find it funny? Some people can laugh at themselves. Both Mr. Hall and President Obama seem to be having fun in this picture, so I don't see why other people can't find amusement as well.

And frankly, this isn't that much different from Obama photos that have drawn laughs here and at Drudge.

I don't see the outrage here.; 3/8/11, 3:19 PM
TWM said...: "And frankly, this isn't that much different from Obama photos that have drawn laughs here and at Drudge.

I don't see the outrage here."

I think the difference is laughing with someone and laughing at someone.

I've never seen a caption contest the purpose of which was to laugh with someone.; 3/8/11, 3:21 PM
Pastafarian said...: Martie, I see a difference between ridiculing an enfeebled old man with great personal achievements; and ridiculing a dapper young man with none, who holds infinitely more power than the elder ever did, and infinitely more than he deserves to hold.

Pshaw, I say.

As for this Philip Terzian, the Weekly Standard author who calls these people out for their age-ism: Remind me never to piss this guy off. He tore them new assholes. And they had it coming.; 3/8/11, 3:26 PM
Anonymous said...: Look at the dude-- he looks like an elderly, cancer-stricken Karl Marx! You just know he's a hard-core Socialist.

Even the Weekly Standard labels him as part of "high culture"... a "Harvard/Oxford-educated formalist poet of soaring reputation and long tenure"... Isn't that conservative-speak for being an unpatriotic Leftist commie who is out of touch with the real Palinesque America?

Plus, he's getting an award from our commie President, himself a non-American citizen who grew up in Kenya. Only a true commie would accept an award (in public no less!) from the anti-American Socialist who has illegally usurped the Presidency.; 3/8/11, 3:31 PM
Bob_R said...: The WaPo is a company paper in a company town. No mid-western Rotary club is as sensitive to the class markers of imperial Washington as the Post. And of course, Milbank is as big a provincial putz as there is.; 3/8/11, 3:36 PM
ricpic said...: Well, I looked at some of his poems and they didn't thrill me. But apparently he had a full life with lots of love, honors and loss. Soon the open road, hand in hand with Walt.; 3/8/11, 3:39 PM
The Crack Emcee said...: I'd say "shame" but they can't be shamed.; 3/8/11, 3:44 PM
Henry said...: I think the difference is laughing with someone and laughing at someone.

I think the difference is the venue.; 3/8/11, 3:45 PM
Henry said...: Speaking of poetry, and cabbage, I just discovered that ricpic is the Poet Laureate of the Althouse Blog. Congratulations!; 3/8/11, 3:53 PM
Steven said...: He is the author of a book with one of the most evocative titles I can recall: "Fathers Playing Catch With Sons"; 3/8/11, 4:00 PM
traditionalguy said...: Does old and feeble draw respect or does it draw ridicule, that is the question. This internet youth culture under 25 seem to have a big empty spot where we older folks have our social skill that recognizes the duty to respect others. Maybe youth has always tended that way, but now they can go infect the culture with that over the internet.; 3/8/11, 4:04 PM
ricpic said...: Cabbage? My work is not gassy! Well, a bit.; 3/8/11, 4:06 PM
Mitch H. said...: Here I thought this was about the Reid cowboy-poetry slam brainfart-of-the-day.

Speaking as someone who occasionally sports a really weird beard, Hall's beard is kind of out of control. I think I would have trimmed before meeting the president.

I'm feeling pretty philistine myself, since I've never heard of this guy who is supposedly our greatest living formalist, and I thought I had a passing interest in formalism. Copyright really does a number on low-interest art forms like poetry. Everybody and their brother knows and can even quote public domain poets like Tennyson, Frost, Kipling, Whitman, or even Algernon Swinburne but nobody's even heard of most of our living poet laureates, unless they have the ill grace to be spectacularly odious in public.; 3/8/11, 4:12 PM
ricpic said...: Seen from the vantage of age the yutes are nekulturny and terrible;
Blind to all but themselves whirl the dancers in ecstase-unbearable:
And rightly so.; 3/8/11, 4:18 PM
Unknown said...: I've noticed the nasty little sneer Terzian mentions from time to time. It's nice to see he calls them on it.; 3/8/11, 4:25 PM
Chip S. said...: @Julius, At the very significant risk of encouraging more unfunny snark attempts on your part, I will nevertheless point out that among libertarians Hall's term as poet laureate of NH far offsets his having been a Harvard undergrad.; 3/8/11, 4:42 PM
PaulV said...: Because of the administration war on Kaplan division of WashPost, the paper has to defer to Obama.
If I were cruel i would submit "Dumb and Dumber"; 3/8/11, 5:14 PM
rhhardin said...: I never heard of him - poet laureates don't have a good record, either.

The name of horses isn't bad.; 3/8/11, 5:18 PM
MamaM said...: Donald Hall has seen many things from his window. I can't imagine the words of those with limited vision would bother him overmuch.

Sudden Things

A storm was coming, that was why it was dark. The wind was blowing the fronds of the palm trees off. They were maples. I looked out the window across the big lawn. The house was huge, full of children and old people. The lion was loose. Either because of the wind, or by malevolent human energy, which is the same thing, the cage had come open. Suppose a child walked outside!

A child walked outside. I knew that I must protect him from the lion. I threw myself on top of the child. The lion roared over me. In the branches and the bushes there was suddenly a loud crackling. The lion cringed. I looked up and saw that the elephant was loose!

The elephant was taller than the redwoods. He was hairy like a mammoth. His tusks trailed vines. Parrots screeched around his head. His eyes rolled crazily. He trumpeted. The ice-cap was breaking up!

The lion backed off, whining. The boy ran for the house. I covered his retreat, locked all the doors and pulled the bars across them. An old lady tried to open a door to get a better look. I spoke sharply to her, she sat down grumbling and pulled a blanket over her knees.

Out of the window I saw zebras and rattlesnakes and wildebeests and cougars and woodchucks on the lawns and in the tennis courts. I worried how, after the storm, we would put the animals back in their cages, and get to the mainland.

Donald Hall; 3/8/11, 5:29 PM
Trooper York said...: I remember him when he was in Hall and Oates. He has really aged.; 3/8/11, 5:32 PM
Trooper York said...: Wait is this thread where we were supposed to be pissed at liberals for not being properly respectfull of people.

Sorry. I was misinformed.; 3/8/11, 5:33 PM
Trooper York said...: I think someone is suffering from a humor deficiency.

Meade should turn down the offer of free tickets to the "State of the Union" and start making some pizza and doing some foot rubbing.

Otherwise we are going to have a real cranky pants on our hands.; 3/8/11, 5:35 PM
kathleen said...: This callow snark is representative of the typical Washington professional. The Post drips with it. And it should tell you something about the state of our politics.; 3/8/11, 5:46 PM
Trooper York said...: Look the dude looks like the guy at the begining of Monty Python.
Or like Howard Hughes before he got into that dudes car in Vegas.

It is ok to make fun of him. Seriously you guys have got to be kidding me.

Next thing you know you are gonna tell me I can't say that Michelle looks like a Klingon. Seriously get a life.; 3/8/11, 5:52 PM
Anonymous said...: Somehow Sarah Palin is to blame.; 3/8/11, 6:08 PM
sakredkow said...: And the poet and the painter
Far behind his rightful time; 3/8/11, 7:11 PM
Kirby Olson said...: I am not OBama's biggest fan but one thing I like about him is that I trust that he knows something about the arts. I think he really enjoys poetry, and symbolic culture, and can understand it. His mother wrote a fairly decent book about textile arts in Indonesia, and his high school mentor was a half-decent poet Frank Marshall Davis. It's one of the few things I like in him. Many of our recent presidents at least back to Carter (who had Suzanne Sommers' understanding of poetry if that) were not exactly culture vultures. I would rather have a cowboy in charge of home security, but it's nice in this one instance to see him liking, genuinely liking, a poet, even if the yahoo press goes to town on the poet and tries to reduce him to their level of understanding (Yeti). Hall has had many beautiful poems, and has a very great story of loss having to do with his poet wife. I didn't realize he was still alive. I liked this picture of Obama and Hall. It's one of the first times I've liked Obama.

I wish he was Czar of the Arts instead of having all these other duties he doesn't know anything about: he could probably make a dent in the world of the arts.; 3/8/11, 7:54 PM
Widmerpool said...: Independence Day
by Donald Hall

for Jane Kenyon

Five A.M., the Fourth of July.
I walk by Eagle Pond with the dog,
wearing my leather coat
against the clear early chill,
looking at water lilies that clutch
cool yellow fists together,
as I undertake another day
twelve weeks after the Tuesday
we learned that you would die.

This afternoon I’ll pay bills
and write a friend about her book
and watch Red Sox baseball.
I’ll walk Gussie again.
I’ll microwave some Stouffer’s.
A woman will drive from Bristol
to examine your mother’s Ford
parked beside your Saab
in the dead women’s used car lot.

Tonight the Andover fireworks
will have to go on without me
as I go to bed early, reading
The Man Without Qualities
with insufficient attention
because I keep watching you die.
Tomorrow I will wake at five
to the tenth Wednesday
after the Wednesday we buried you.; 3/8/11, 8:02 PM
MamaM said...: For me, this was not a thread about being pissed at liberals. It was an opportunity to look at a photo, regard an event, and consider an artist from a new angle.

I was apparently at the same poetry site as RhHardin, writing my comment while he was posting his.

But something about Hall's name seemed familar,and I couldn't place it until I found more of his work in the paper version of Good Poems Selected by Garrison Keillor. There I discovered Hall to be the author of Ox Cart Man, a 1980 Caldecott winner and children's book read many times at the M house.

Not only does Hall bear something of a resemblance to the Ox Cart Man himself, he leaves these words and truth to be considered by hundreds of children and parents who read this book:

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year's coin for salt and taxes,
and at home by fire's light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year's ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again.; 3/8/11, 8:13 PM
Henry said...: @MamaM -- I knew I recognized the name and I couldn't remember why. That is a great children's book.; 3/8/11, 8:26 PM
William said...: All the poems given by his fans here are terrific. I'm vaguely antagonistic to modern poetry, at least as found in the New Yorker. I suppose I'm not the target demographic for modern poetry, but most of the time they're over my head. The poems given here were clear and direct, and one could understand the meaning.....Presuming that he is not out of it and that organic poet look is what he intended, my guess is that he would not be bothered by the contest. He's in on the joke, and it's a fine one.; 3/9/11, 12:06 AM
Joan said...: A good part of my (admittedly unusual) education at MIT was consumed in the study of poetry, back in the early '80s. That's where I first read and studied Donald Hall. He's a master of the iambic pentameter, but he's not obscure or difficult. He's easy to get but not simple. I haven't thought about him in years, since I've been mostly too busy for poetry. I'll have to do something about that.

From what I've read of and about Hall, I'm pretty sure he'd laugh. He might even submit a caption or two of his own. Unlike our president, Hall has a both a sense of humor and a sense of humility.; 3/9/11, 2:18 AM
Mitch H. said...: I guess I am a philistine, because I wouldn't consider a poet who relies solely on scansion to be a "formalist". Only the poem MamaM cites meets my criteria for actual, y'know, poetry, as opposed to oddly-formated, structureless, rambling short-short stories.

And I can't say I'm surprised that self-infatuated bore Keillor used this guy as fodder for his poetry corner dronings. It's clearly tailor-made for Keillor's signature sing-song sonorous style.; 3/9/11, 9:27 AM
Sigivald said...: There are no "venerable poets".; 3/9/11, 2:17 PM
MamaM said...: Last Days is the name of the poem Hall wrote about his wife's death. No sing-song, sonorous, droning voice is needed to read this one and encounter the love, hardship and loss expressed.

Hall's wife, Jane Kenyon, wrote about her experience with depression in Having it Out with Melancholy

While veneration may not be in order, both poems and both poets reflect an integrity and respect that is noteworthy; 3/9/11, 6:10 PM