Ange Mlinko

Poetry Tourism?

We are now approaching that time of year … when we wish we were elsewhere.
…I am now in the town that time forgot, San Carlos, after a night on a crazy ferry, but on my way to tropical islands presided over by Ernesto Cardenal, known as El Poeta, probably the most famous Nicaraguan, who built his own community of local primitive artists and foreign mystics. Ange should aspire to so rule.
Hasta luego,
David
I had known nothing of Cardenal’s community (described in various places on the web as Marxist-Christian and primitivist) in the Solentiname archipelago until my husband passed his friend’s email to me. It is very difficult to find any information about it on the web, and doesn’t present itself as a place one may visit.
On the other hand, Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, in Scotland, is open to the public. The most famous vis-poet/gardener seems worlds apart in sensibility from Cardenal, but he too had a political vision, one that married Arcady and the French Revolution. (I am not yet an expert on Finlay, but visiting Little Sparta is one of my life goals….)

12.09.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (3)

Ange Mlinko

The Canon within the Canon

W.H. Auden’s Christianity is the subject of a fascinating article by Edward Mendelson in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. “In apparently secular poems, he kept hidden what was often their religious starting-point.” That Auden kept his religious awakening under wraps at first, so as not to call down the wrath of his rationalist friends, is understandable. But fellow Christians would hardly have been any happier with Auden’s version of Christianity:

Auden took seriously his membership in the Anglican Church and derived many of his moral and aesthetic ideas from Christian doctrines developed over two millennia, but he valued his church and its doctrines only to the degree that they helped to make it possible to love one’s neighbor as oneself. To the extent that they became ends in themselves, or made it easier for a believer to isolate or elevate himself, they became—in the word Auden used about most aspects of Christendom—unchristian.

11.20.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (14)

Ange Mlinko

What’s a Political Poem For?

This is for Rigoberto following his Szymborska post.
A few weeks ago, I attended my first town meeting. Somehow, it was nothing like the town meetings of Stars Hollow, with its “lovable curmudgeon” of a mayor and enchanting agendas, motions to rename the streets to reflect their 17th-century heritage, etc. No, it was a town meeting in a toneless courtroom, presided over by a technocrat who wants to put zinc orthophosphate in the otherwise fairly pristine water supply. Zinc orthosphosphate is an anti-corrosive; its sole purpose is to coat the pipes because some villagers on dead-end streets have brown-water problems.
Offhand, I would say, this already sounds like a boring poem.

11.15.07 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (44)