From Spring and All (the book; the poem is really just I in that book, "The Red Wheelbarrow" is poem XXII in the book):
Composition is in no essential an escape from life. In fact if it is so it is negligible to the point of insignificance. Whatever "life" the artist may be forced to lead has no relation to the vitality of his compositions. Such names as Homer, the blind; Scheherazade, who lived under threat--Their compositions have as their excellence an identity with life since they are as actual, as sappy as the leaf of the tree which never moves from one spot.
His poems, especially from around this period, deliberately played with form and imagery in order to challenge the traditionalist ideas of poetry as having specific formal limits, and relying heavily on complex and often obscure imagery.
You could ask the same question of any of the poems from that book. Look at "The Red Wheelbarrow": it could be read as just part of a full sentence, the rest of which (why so much depends on it, for what it depends, whatever) is missing.
Anyway, if you're asking yourself why this is poetry and not prose, and then thinking about that question, you're on the right track. I also recommend reading Spring and All. It is mostly an essay on poetry in a time of war , industrialization, and alienation, and why what the world needs from poetry in that time (and perhaps this) is something more than formal restrictions and imagery that pulls us away from, instead of towards life and new possibilities.
I do the tortilla by hand things to this day, though I don't know that I'm great at it. I do this mostly because I'm too lazy to go through all the work of heating tortillas properly when it's just me eating.
I read Playing With The Boys 15 or 16 years ago in a reading group. I think it's a flawed book, but worth reading. The biggest issue, I think, is that separate but equal always does separate well, but never approaches equal, and it's difficult to assess the potential of female athletes relative to men when their training, facilities, even diets, are unequal, as is the case in virtually all major sports (and probably the minor ones as well). On top of that, there are likely some women who'd do well in major men's sports, even if that's not true for most women in sports, so excluding them entirely on the basis of race starts to look a lot like discrimination on top of the unequal part of separate but equal.
Anyway, I'd recommend the book to people who are obsessed with trans women in men's sports, but I think it's safe to say the vast majority of them don't read books.
When I was in grad school, lo, these many years ago, those Tyson's chicken cordon bleu were very cheap in bulk at Sam's Club, so I always had a box in the freezer. Those were a real life saver in lean times, supplementing my diet of ramen, mac 'n' cheese, and whatever free food they had at some faculty event. I think Sam's had the broccoli and cheese one too (and I may have tried it), but the other two I don't think I've seen before.
When I was a freshman in high school, we read The Red Wheelbarrow, and while it would be a stretch to say that we understood it, either in itself or in its place in the history of modern poetry, my friends and I enjoyed it immensely, and began to write variants of it. This lasted my entire time in high school, so that some of the quotes in my senior yearbook are silly plays on that poem. Anyway, for that reason, and because it really is kinda cool, I will always love that poem.
An inevitable result of letting Israel commit genocide without consequences is that other countries in similar situations will think, "Well, if there are no rules...": https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/kashmir-experts-warn-impunity-amidst-calls-india-implement-israel-playbook?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Social_Traffic&utm_content=ap_9ulhfxyzek
If the only way you can prevent an ethnic group from being a minority in a region is to ethnically cleanse and systematically murder the people who would comprise the ethnic majority, then what the people doing the ethnic cleansing and murder want seems particularly irrelevant in any decent person's moral calculus.
In the last 3 years, there have been, to my knowledge, five major ethnic cleansings, at least two of which likely qualify as genocides, and one of which definitely so qualifies:
1) Of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh by the Azerbaijani regime. Ethnic cleansing, not likely to be classified a genocide.
2) Of ethnic Amharas in the Amhara region by the Ethiopian National Defence Forces, the Oromo Liberation Army, and other armed groups. Almost certainly genocide by international definitions.
3) Of the entire non-Arab civilian population by Arab militias and both major warring parties (SAF and RSF). Almost certainly genocide by interinatonal definitions, and at this point, I don't think there are many interanational groups who aren't calling it such.
4) Of the Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers and IDF. Pretty much universally recognized as ethnic cleansing, with aide groups and other NGOs marking the region as at high risk for genocide.
5) Of the population of Gaza by the IDF. Pretty much universally recognized at this point by aide groups, NGOs, and genocide scholars, as a genocide, though this is vehemently denied by s dwindling number of blind supporters of Israel as an ethnostate.
With the exception of (5), and to a lesser extent (4), almost all of the information I have about these comes from left media, not because, at least in the cases of (1) through (3), the American liberal and conservative media outlets don't think genocide or ethnic cleansing is happening in those places, but because they don't care enough to report on it extensively.
The left cares about these things, and to the extent that the U.S. is involved, the left is pissed at the U.S. and its institutions (public and private) about it (see, e.g., the anti-imperialist left media reporting and opinions on the Saudis in Yemen, and the U.S.'s role in that conflict).
Something I've been thinking about lately is that, while this blog has long been a site for the discussion of the nitty gritty of American politics and contemporary events, it was also the site of a great deal of, I don't want to say theoretical or philosophical posts and discussions, but let's say the discussion of ideas, both as they relate to American politics and contemporary events, and more generally. I miss the ideas.
Now, so much of it seems to be things like this, little gotchas taken from the Right-Wing-o-sphere that serve as a sort of bait for the folks here who are less inclined to hang out in the Right-Wing-o-sphere.
This is a function, of course, of pretty much all of the discussion here centering around the person who wades most deeply into the Right-Wing-o-sphere, and when I first started hanging around here again, I wanted to blame him, but you know what, I don't think it's his fault. The fault lies almost entirely with the people who fall for the bait (and I've fallen for it more than once myself).
I don't expect OT to ever go back to what it was: communities change, blogs change, and so on, but I think it would be pretty easy to radically change the discussions here just by not responding to bait. Jaybird has done what I think he wants to do by making us all aware of what the Right-Wing-o-sphere is saying and thinking, and I think we can all just say, "Huh," and move on, knowing that taking the bait is pointless.
I get where you're coming from, and I've seen other moderates say something similar (there was even a piece in Axios with moderate House Democrats saying effectively this).
My position is different: I see a very slippery slope from denying non-citizens, documented and undocumented, due processes, to denying citizens such. That is to say, this is not merely an immigration issue, it's a basic Constitutional issue, and more fundamentally, a basic issue of rights, and whether we have them in any meaningful sense.
So yes, Trump tanking the economy is very important, and we should be pushing back on that, but Trump sending anyone to an El Salvadorian prison without due process (and fankly even with it), revoking visas and green cards for political dissent, ICE showing up at schools demanding to see immigrant children for "welfare checks," etc., should freak us all the hell out.
I admit I'm a bit more freaked out about this stuff than moderates are likely to be, because I share some of the political views of the people who are losing their visas and green cards. I'm already anxious enough about my politics that I go out of my way to avoid discussing them anywhere my name might be found (though I've been doxed by local conservatives, who have been to my house and gone after my and my partner's jobs, and you can find my name on the leaked member lists of certain left groups). Even before Trump, it would not have been an exaggeration to say that my politics could cost me my job, and now with Trump, what might they cost me? Or more pressingly, my friends who are non-citizens with similar politics?
Point being, I see all of this as not only a general threat, but a personal one as well. And I think just about everyone else should.
Coincidentally, actual researchers have just shown pretty strong evidence that it came from raccoon dogs. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00426-3
"Arrested at Home Depot with a group of immigrants" just makes it sound like he was looking for day work. You're not helping the case here.
Last summer, I went to a game between the Venezuelan and Jamaican national teams. 95% of the people in the stadium, and literally everyone within 10 rows of me, was Venezuelan. Assuming there were at least 2 gang members at that game, is anyone arrested at that gang (no one, to my knowledge, was, but hypothetically) therefore also a Venezuelan gang member? This is the same logic.
Sorry, that's all I can say to this. He may have entered the country illegally, but when he was arrested, he was here legally, and there's 0 non-circumstantial evidence that he's a gang member, and even the circumstantial stuff is pretty sketchy and relies on us to trust an administration and federal agencies that are known to lie their asses off, and to treat even the slightest connection (like a tattoo of a crown) as evidence of gang membership. It's very weird to see non-MAGA buy this nonsense.
Once upon a time, when I lived in certain neighborhoods and took buses from certain stops (and going back further, to when I hung out in downtown Nashville 30 years ago), I spent a lot of time talking to people experiencing homelessness. I learned a lot from those conversations, but the biggest lesson is that for most of us, homelessness is way closer than we'd like to think. The cracks in the system that lead to homelessness are quite large, and all it takes to fall through it them are one of many pretty common precipitating events, e.g., a head injury, abuse at home (particularly for teenagers and women), surprisingly minor mental illness (though homelessness itself has a way of exacerbating most mental illnesses), or drug addiction (either what we think of as illicit drugs, or prescription drug addiction, which often comes from relatively common injuries), and a lack of resources and support (from family, community, or state).
With this in mind, it makes no sense to see people experiencing homeless as an other, defined by some feature inherent to themselves that makes them homeless, and differences on which make it difficult or impossible for me to become homeless. However, this is how people tend to see homelessness: as a straightforward result of bad choices, caused by something inherent to the people who make them. And this is why people experiencing homelessness remain one of the few social categories, and in particular one of the few vulnerable social categories, that it's OK to treat poorly.
It's interesting that, given the language so many people use to talk about homelessness, the only language people like Jaybird are interested in is the language people trying to change how we see homelessness ask us to use. If I were a better Freudian than I am, I'd say it has something to do with our deep need to not see how alike people experiencing homelessness and we are.
One of the interesting things about homelessness is that we don't want to spend resources on people experiencing it, because we think about them in highly essentialized ways, but we end up spending a sh*t ton of resources on them anyway, as in the article you initially linked. One way to fix this vicious cycle would be for people to think about homelessness differently, and in particular, in a way that doesn't involve moral judgment of people who are experiencing it, and language change is way we can help people get there.
Having a philosophy background, I'm sure you've thought a lot about language and thought (the house of being, speech acts, and so on), and you might even be aware that labels tend to cause us to think in essentialist terms, that is, e.g., when we call someone homeless, we tend to see it as being the result of something inherent and possibly immutable about them, so trying to avoid essentializing labels is one part of a strategy to change the way people think about people who fall into a social category.
Again, focusing entirely on language, or harshly policing language (calling out instead of calling in, as the kids say), are generally bad, but so is a stubborn resistance to language change (a resistance usually explainable, obviously, by the fact that it really does affect how people think).
Anyway, like I said, I'm sure you know all this, but you are temporarily experiencing ressentiment.
On “POETS Day! Things from William Carlos Williams”
Another favorite we read in high school:
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
https://alexsheremet.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Pieter-Bruegels-Landscape-With-The-Fall-Of-Icarus-1560s.jpg
"
From Spring and All (the book; the poem is really just I in that book, "The Red Wheelbarrow" is poem XXII in the book):
His poems, especially from around this period, deliberately played with form and imagery in order to challenge the traditionalist ideas of poetry as having specific formal limits, and relying heavily on complex and often obscure imagery.
You could ask the same question of any of the poems from that book. Look at "The Red Wheelbarrow": it could be read as just part of a full sentence, the rest of which (why so much depends on it, for what it depends, whatever) is missing.
Anyway, if you're asking yourself why this is poetry and not prose, and then thinking about that question, you're on the right track. I also recommend reading Spring and All. It is mostly an essay on poetry in a time of war , industrialization, and alienation, and why what the world needs from poetry in that time (and perhaps this) is something more than formal restrictions and imagery that pulls us away from, instead of towards life and new possibilities.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Found a New Dinner to Add to the Rotation”
I do the tortilla by hand things to this day, though I don't know that I'm great at it. I do this mostly because I'm too lazy to go through all the work of heating tortillas properly when it's just me eating.
On “Gender Critical: Legally Defining Sex”
I read Playing With The Boys 15 or 16 years ago in a reading group. I think it's a flawed book, but worth reading. The biggest issue, I think, is that separate but equal always does separate well, but never approaches equal, and it's difficult to assess the potential of female athletes relative to men when their training, facilities, even diets, are unequal, as is the case in virtually all major sports (and probably the minor ones as well). On top of that, there are likely some women who'd do well in major men's sports, even if that's not true for most women in sports, so excluding them entirely on the basis of race starts to look a lot like discrimination on top of the unequal part of separate but equal.
Anyway, I'd recommend the book to people who are obsessed with trans women in men's sports, but I think it's safe to say the vast majority of them don't read books.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Found a New Dinner to Add to the Rotation”
When I was in grad school, lo, these many years ago, those Tyson's chicken cordon bleu were very cheap in bulk at Sam's Club, so I always had a box in the freezer. Those were a real life saver in lean times, supplementing my diet of ramen, mac 'n' cheese, and whatever free food they had at some faculty event. I think Sam's had the broccoli and cheese one too (and I may have tried it), but the other two I don't think I've seen before.
On “POETS Day! Things from William Carlos Williams”
When I was a freshman in high school, we read The Red Wheelbarrow, and while it would be a stretch to say that we understood it, either in itself or in its place in the history of modern poetry, my friends and I enjoyed it immensely, and began to write variants of it. This lasted my entire time in high school, so that some of the quotes in my senior yearbook are silly plays on that poem. Anyway, for that reason, and because it really is kinda cool, I will always love that poem.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/28/2025”
Amazon did a 180 so fast when the Trump admin called them out that they're probably too dizzy to deliver packages today.
"
We should track down their schools and withhold federal funding.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
Should we find out what colleges these people go to and block their federal funding?
https://x.com/danpjsheehan/status/1915869709511364822?t=OywTD0hISakwcIJFjuLYWQ&s=19
"
An inevitable result of letting Israel commit genocide without consequences is that other countries in similar situations will think, "Well, if there are no rules...": https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/kashmir-experts-warn-impunity-amidst-calls-india-implement-israel-playbook?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Social_Traffic&utm_content=ap_9ulhfxyzek
On “Weekend Plans Post: Caffeine Rituals”
Congrats. My song got married a couple weeks ago, and it's still very surreal (made moreso by the fact that neither of his parents has ever married).
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/21/2025”
If the only way you can prevent an ethnic group from being a minority in a region is to ethnically cleanse and systematically murder the people who would comprise the ethnic majority, then what the people doing the ethnic cleansing and murder want seems particularly irrelevant in any decent person's moral calculus.
"
In the last 3 years, there have been, to my knowledge, five major ethnic cleansings, at least two of which likely qualify as genocides, and one of which definitely so qualifies:
1) Of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh by the Azerbaijani regime. Ethnic cleansing, not likely to be classified a genocide.
2) Of ethnic Amharas in the Amhara region by the Ethiopian National Defence Forces, the Oromo Liberation Army, and other armed groups. Almost certainly genocide by international definitions.
3) Of the entire non-Arab civilian population by Arab militias and both major warring parties (SAF and RSF). Almost certainly genocide by interinatonal definitions, and at this point, I don't think there are many interanational groups who aren't calling it such.
4) Of the Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers and IDF. Pretty much universally recognized as ethnic cleansing, with aide groups and other NGOs marking the region as at high risk for genocide.
5) Of the population of Gaza by the IDF. Pretty much universally recognized at this point by aide groups, NGOs, and genocide scholars, as a genocide, though this is vehemently denied by s dwindling number of blind supporters of Israel as an ethnostate.
With the exception of (5), and to a lesser extent (4), almost all of the information I have about these comes from left media, not because, at least in the cases of (1) through (3), the American liberal and conservative media outlets don't think genocide or ethnic cleansing is happening in those places, but because they don't care enough to report on it extensively.
The left cares about these things, and to the extent that the U.S. is involved, the left is pissed at the U.S. and its institutions (public and private) about it (see, e.g., the anti-imperialist left media reporting and opinions on the Saudis in Yemen, and the U.S.'s role in that conflict).
"
What the left "seems" to you bears little relation to what the left is or does.
"
Something I've been thinking about lately is that, while this blog has long been a site for the discussion of the nitty gritty of American politics and contemporary events, it was also the site of a great deal of, I don't want to say theoretical or philosophical posts and discussions, but let's say the discussion of ideas, both as they relate to American politics and contemporary events, and more generally. I miss the ideas.
Now, so much of it seems to be things like this, little gotchas taken from the Right-Wing-o-sphere that serve as a sort of bait for the folks here who are less inclined to hang out in the Right-Wing-o-sphere.
This is a function, of course, of pretty much all of the discussion here centering around the person who wades most deeply into the Right-Wing-o-sphere, and when I first started hanging around here again, I wanted to blame him, but you know what, I don't think it's his fault. The fault lies almost entirely with the people who fall for the bait (and I've fallen for it more than once myself).
I don't expect OT to ever go back to what it was: communities change, blogs change, and so on, but I think it would be pretty easy to radically change the discussions here just by not responding to bait. Jaybird has done what I think he wants to do by making us all aware of what the Right-Wing-o-sphere is saying and thinking, and I think we can all just say, "Huh," and move on, knowing that taking the bait is pointless.
On “Open Mic for the Week of 4/14/2025”
I get where you're coming from, and I've seen other moderates say something similar (there was even a piece in Axios with moderate House Democrats saying effectively this).
My position is different: I see a very slippery slope from denying non-citizens, documented and undocumented, due processes, to denying citizens such. That is to say, this is not merely an immigration issue, it's a basic Constitutional issue, and more fundamentally, a basic issue of rights, and whether we have them in any meaningful sense.
So yes, Trump tanking the economy is very important, and we should be pushing back on that, but Trump sending anyone to an El Salvadorian prison without due process (and fankly even with it), revoking visas and green cards for political dissent, ICE showing up at schools demanding to see immigrant children for "welfare checks," etc., should freak us all the hell out.
I admit I'm a bit more freaked out about this stuff than moderates are likely to be, because I share some of the political views of the people who are losing their visas and green cards. I'm already anxious enough about my politics that I go out of my way to avoid discussing them anywhere my name might be found (though I've been doxed by local conservatives, who have been to my house and gone after my and my partner's jobs, and you can find my name on the leaked member lists of certain left groups). Even before Trump, it would not have been an exaggeration to say that my politics could cost me my job, and now with Trump, what might they cost me? Or more pressingly, my friends who are non-citizens with similar politics?
Point being, I see all of this as not only a general threat, but a personal one as well. And I think just about everyone else should.
"
Coincidentally, actual researchers have just shown pretty strong evidence that it came from raccoon dogs. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00426-3
"
I mean, not doing genocide is something that could be done.
"
"Arrested at Home Depot with a group of immigrants" just makes it sound like he was looking for day work. You're not helping the case here.
Last summer, I went to a game between the Venezuelan and Jamaican national teams. 95% of the people in the stadium, and literally everyone within 10 rows of me, was Venezuelan. Assuming there were at least 2 gang members at that game, is anyone arrested at that gang (no one, to my knowledge, was, but hypothetically) therefore also a Venezuelan gang member? This is the same logic.
"
Ooooooof.
Sorry, that's all I can say to this. He may have entered the country illegally, but when he was arrested, he was here legally, and there's 0 non-circumstantial evidence that he's a gang member, and even the circumstantial stuff is pretty sketchy and relies on us to trust an administration and federal agencies that are known to lie their asses off, and to treat even the slightest connection (like a tattoo of a crown) as evidence of gang membership. It's very weird to see non-MAGA buy this nonsense.
"
Perhaps if Israel agrees to disarm as well.
"
Once upon a time, when I lived in certain neighborhoods and took buses from certain stops (and going back further, to when I hung out in downtown Nashville 30 years ago), I spent a lot of time talking to people experiencing homelessness. I learned a lot from those conversations, but the biggest lesson is that for most of us, homelessness is way closer than we'd like to think. The cracks in the system that lead to homelessness are quite large, and all it takes to fall through it them are one of many pretty common precipitating events, e.g., a head injury, abuse at home (particularly for teenagers and women), surprisingly minor mental illness (though homelessness itself has a way of exacerbating most mental illnesses), or drug addiction (either what we think of as illicit drugs, or prescription drug addiction, which often comes from relatively common injuries), and a lack of resources and support (from family, community, or state).
With this in mind, it makes no sense to see people experiencing homeless as an other, defined by some feature inherent to themselves that makes them homeless, and differences on which make it difficult or impossible for me to become homeless. However, this is how people tend to see homelessness: as a straightforward result of bad choices, caused by something inherent to the people who make them. And this is why people experiencing homelessness remain one of the few social categories, and in particular one of the few vulnerable social categories, that it's OK to treat poorly.
It's interesting that, given the language so many people use to talk about homelessness, the only language people like Jaybird are interested in is the language people trying to change how we see homelessness ask us to use. If I were a better Freudian than I am, I'd say it has something to do with our deep need to not see how alike people experiencing homelessness and we are.
"
One of the interesting things about homelessness is that we don't want to spend resources on people experiencing it, because we think about them in highly essentialized ways, but we end up spending a sh*t ton of resources on them anyway, as in the article you initially linked. One way to fix this vicious cycle would be for people to think about homelessness differently, and in particular, in a way that doesn't involve moral judgment of people who are experiencing it, and language change is way we can help people get there.
"
Having a philosophy background, I'm sure you've thought a lot about language and thought (the house of being, speech acts, and so on), and you might even be aware that labels tend to cause us to think in essentialist terms, that is, e.g., when we call someone homeless, we tend to see it as being the result of something inherent and possibly immutable about them, so trying to avoid essentializing labels is one part of a strategy to change the way people think about people who fall into a social category.
Again, focusing entirely on language, or harshly policing language (calling out instead of calling in, as the kids say), are generally bad, but so is a stubborn resistance to language change (a resistance usually explainable, obviously, by the fact that it really does affect how people think).
Anyway, like I said, I'm sure you know all this, but you are temporarily experiencing ressentiment.
"
Commenters temporarily experiencing shitposting?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.