Friday Links
August 2, 2024
Children Playing on the Beach Mary Cassatt
An Irreplaceable Cog in the Wheel
Danielle Heckenkamp on Karen Ullo’s “To Crown with Liberty”
The Crown of Liberty is a Crown of Thorns
Heaping Old Bones: The Rough Aesthetic of Robinson Jeffers
A Conversation with James Matthew Wilson
An Irreplaceable Cog in the Wheel
It is not an easy task to make oneself replaceable. One must deny the desire to be praised, and must commit to the hard work of instilling skill into those who are our protégé – be they students or offspring. By our witness and instruction, we can guide them to do as we see must be done. It would be easier to clean the house and bake the bread and cook the meals without interruption – and yet what good is a clean home and a full stomach if nobody can continue the good work tomorrow without you? However validating it may feel to be indispensable, our true mission is to have those under our wings become our apprentices. Instead of offering your guest a glass of water, tell your child to carry it until your child is naturally hospitable on his own.
Danielle Heckenkamp on Karen Ullo’s “To Crown with Liberty”
Throughout this captivating tale, Alix de Morainville, a former lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoniette, seeks to flee the Reign of Terror but finds her past catching up with her present life in the New World. She is not alone. Her down-to-earth husband, Joseph Carpentier, flees into the rough lands of colonial Louisiana with her:
He was not the kind of dreamer who, if he could not touch the stars, would try to pull them closer. He was the kind of man who turns away and does his best to content himself with earth.
The novel is an exquisite tale that interlaces Joseph Carpentier and Alix de Morainville Carpentier’s journey through the swamp of Attakapas, while recollecting their past life in France. The social barriers that had once restrained their lives are now shattered, but there is no guarantee life will be easier in the wild territory of Louisiana.
The Crown of Liberty is a Crown of Thorns
The always perceptive Joan Bauer on Karen Ullo’s To Crown with Liberty
Like Hilary Mantel—or like Maggie O’Farrell, whose 2020 novel Hamnet peers into the family tragedy behind Shakespeare’s greatest play—Ullo beautifully immerses the reader in a period of great political and spiritual upheaval. While Mantel adopts Thomas Cromwell’s jaundiced political eye, Ullo gives us a woman’s perspective unclouded by resentment at her state in life, which is always in flux. But Ullo avoids deifying the feminine genius—unlike O’Farrell, in whose undoubtedly excellent book Shakespeare’s wife becomes almost fey, plying her herbs and attempting to conjure her dead.
Heaping Old Bones: The Rough Aesthetic of Robinson Jeffers
The indispensable New Verse Review with a guest post from Carter Davis Johnson on Robinson Jeffers:
Jeffers’ poetic voice, in many ways, matches the roughness and density of stone. From early in his career, he promised himself that he would tell no lies in verse (unlike Shakespeare and Homer, whom he said “flattered the race!”). Although this duty to the truth sounds direct, Jeffers recognized the countless ways we compromise our art: “If we alter thought or expression for any of the hundred reasons: in order to seem original, or to seem sophisticated, or to conform to a fashion, or to startle the citizenry, or because we fancy ourselves decadent, or merely to avoid commonplace: for whatever reason we alter them, for that reason they are made false.” This poetic commitment was foundational for Jeffers’ aesthetic vision. He would pursue and pronounce un-altered truths, even if they were unpopular.
A Conversation with James Matthew Wilson
Ben Palpant over at Rabbit Room Poetry is doing very good things! Here’s an interview with JMW. There are other interviews and discussions about poetry. It’s worth your time to take a gander over there. And I want to remind you that Substack has many other excellent poetry newsletters including our friends at Poems Ancient and Modern, New Verse Review, Let Go the Goat, and others. (I must say for a a supposedly dead thing, poetry sure has a lot of well-functioning organs.)
