“You become aware of your not noticing” (47).  Jena Osman finds this one result of her project to photograph, of public sculptures in Philadelphia, not images looking at the sculptures but images of what the figures depicted in the sculptures are themselves looking at.  But if poetry can have a thesis (and why can it not?), I would identify as Osman’s thesis in Public Figures something like this modified version of that sentence: One would be wise to become aware of her/his not noticing.

Which might be a precondition for the insight suggested by the Dubravka Ugresic book in a recent “Notice.”  Perhaps it is possible to challenge our resistance to seeing the there-before-our-very-eyes only if we acknowledge that there might be a there-before-our-very-eyes that we have not noticed.

Osman, Jena.  Public Figures.  Wesleyan, 2012.

Since philosophy is an intellectual enterprise, one might think that antiphilosophy would be analogous to anti-intellectualism.  But the prefix anti- might have various connotations.  To be anti-x might be to refuse x, not to go there at all; but it might also mean to surpass x, to go beyond it.  So when Alain Badiou describes Wittgenstein as an antiphilosopher, he draws on the rhetorical appeal of the former, but makes a case for the latter, grouping Wittgenstein with a short list of others (St. Paul, Pascal, Rousseau, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) as an “antiphilosopher.”

A worthy ideal for those of us who consider ourselves (in Sara Ahmed’s terms) “affect aliens”: not to refuse philosophy, nor to be satisfied with it, but to go beyond it, to antiphilosophy.

Badiou, Alain.  Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy.  Verso, 2011.

Maybe the hidden is always hidden in plain sight.  One of the clues about membership in a community is tacit agreement on what things will not be seen, though they are in plain sight, and what things will not be said, though they’re perfectly obvious.  The outcast, the alien, the stranger is so in part because she/he hasn’t consented to those agreements, because she is willing to see and say the obvious.

Dubravka Ugresic occupies the role of “transitional intellectual,” pointing out obvious contradictions in global culture.  From the first page of her book: “We live in a new, visual era, but the global view of the world is more opaque than ever.”  From the “Author’s Note” after the last section of the book: “We live in a time that urges us to behave as if we are in paradise.  Yet the world we live in is no paradise.”

The new role of the intellectual: not to discover the difficult-to-see, but to challenge our resistance to seeing the there-before-our-very-eyes.

Ugresic, Dubravka.  Nobody’s Home.  Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursac.  Open Letter, 2008.

Dear Harvey and Heather,

I’ve been informally documenting Latin American street art for several years and this is one from Bogotá, Colombia, taken in November 2012. It is (or was) near the entrance to the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá. I arrived near noon, so the door and his suit were almost fathomlessly black. He might be a politician, but his relatively relaxed body language and face suggest to me someone more like an artist, perhaps a writer.

Jan Conn is a Canadian poet and a research scientist. She is also a member of the collaborative writing group Yoko’s Dogs. Their most recent publication is Whisk (Pedlar Press, 2013).

Dear Harvey,

We adopted our youngest son from Ethiopia six months ago, and we traveled to the capital, Addis Ababa, a couple times in the process. We couldn’t believe the scaffolding that workers use in constructing new buildings; they balance on Eucalyptus poles , risking their lives every moment of the project-although the sight of the scaffolds is beautiful, too. This photo is a reminder for us of the resilience of the Ethiopian people, their simple ingenuity in the face of terrible economic times. It was an unforgettable opportunity to get to know this ancient culture.

Hope you are well this early summer!

April

Dear Harvey,

Greetings from Wagadake! I hope you are well, and enjoying the turn toward summer. This photo is from this time of year, but  taken several years ago. Nevertheless, it brings me back each time–to the green mountains of northern Honshu, and the natural hot springs that dot the area. This ridge,  part of the Ou Range, separates Iwate and Akita prefectures, and on a day like this one it’s truly breathtaking. After driving past working farms, a small abandoned clear-cut logging operation, and several rusted vehicle chassis to arrive at the trailhead, the hike nearly straight up through a shady cedar forest, giving way to an ancient, nationally protected old-growth beech forest is unforgettable, and wordlessly conveys what is at stake in restraining high-impact human activities.

With Blessings,

Josh

Josh Weinstein teaches English and environmental studies at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, Va., where he lives with his family. He recently launched a new online journal: Green Humanities.

We know — or think we know, or often act as if we know — the value of transparency: a process, to be fair, should be transparent; a person’s intentions should be transparent; and so on.  But is there an equal and opposite value, or simply an alternative value, to opacity?  Édouard Glissant proposes that there is, as for instance when he says of theater that it offers not proposition or analysis but an unveiling, of which “the participating public becomes the consciousness” and in which “opacity is irreducible” (188).  That is only one of the ways in which Glissant’s pursuit of otherness asserts/questions itself.  To note just one more example, he asks after the value not of distinction (as in Descartes’ confidence that I know something with certainty if my idea is clear and distinct).  Glissant counters that a poem “reaches toward that indistinction which is not confusion but synthesis … ; and the synthesis in turn is neither interlace nor mechanism, but projection and maturation forever postponed” (79).

Glissant, Édouard.  Poetic Intention.  Trans. Nathalie Stephens.  Nightboat Books, 2010.

The possibility always stays open that one may find another spiritual sibling.  Here’s a passage from the syllabus of an MFA workshop I taught a few semesters ago: “It is not self-evident what constitutes the essence of poetry (assuming that poetry even has an essence).  Surely no one would dispute the claim that poetry is a kind of literature. But that view is so obvious that it may be (to borrow Wittgenstein’s metaphor) ‘like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at.  It never occurs to us to take them off.’  In this workshop, we will try to take off that pair of glasses, to ask whether thinking of poetry as literature may be not the only (or the primary or the most apt) way to conceptualize it.” And here’s a passage from page one of Oren Izenberg’s Being Numerous: “Poetry is not always and everywhere understood as a literary project aiming to produce a special kind of verbal artifact….  Nor is it always understood as an aesthetic project seeking to provoke or promote a special kind of experience… in its readers.”

The question of what poetry might be and do is also the question of what I might be and do, and what we might be and do.  It is an existential question, a political question, an ethical question, a civic question, an ontological question (that’s Izenberg’s emphasis), and so on; by no means exclusively aesthetic.

Izenberg, Oren.  Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life.  Princeton Univ. Press, 2011.

Dear Harvey and Heather,

When I was very young my great aunt lived in a small apartment across the street from the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. The Palace stood just the other side of what I thought of as the duck pond. It must have been the mid-to-late 50’s, because Tante died in 1971. I remember little other than that the sun was out, the grass was really green and soft, and the ducks–wholly white ducks and the mismatched mallard pairs—were paddling around in the still water in the foreground of the Palace. I was probably only there for a half-hour or less, but it still feels like a place of cease-fire. I don’t plan to ever return. It’s my available peace.

hugs,
Renée

Heather,

Greetings from Rock Lake in lovely Lake Mills, Wisconsin.  My parents grew up and were high school sweethearts in this lovely town, so you might say my fondness for Lake Mills is in my blood.  I swam away entire summers in this lake and my dad has had a sail boat on its waters since I can remember.  Pictured here is my family’s pier on this small body of water that holds so many of my favorite memories.

Love,

Leah