Steven Weiner, Computer Specialist and Aesthetic Realism associate, writes:

What is the deep, unspoken debate present always in a person’s mind—including as one goes to sleep? Is it an ethical debate? And what does it have to do with sleeplessness? For the very necessary answers to these questions, read “Day & Night, Awake & Asleep—We Are Related,” the current issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

We publish here the 3rd section of the magnificent Hail, Relation; or, A Study in Poetry. This 1972 lecture by Eli Siegel can be seen as illustrating the following sentences from the Preface to his Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana: Poems:

Poetry, like life, states that the very self of a thing is its relations, its having-to-do-with other things. Whatever is in the world, whatever person, has meaning because it or he has to do with the whole universe: immeasurable and crowded reality.

Mostly, people do not feel that the things they meet, the persons, the occurrences, are related to each other—let alone to millions of other things and people of now and the past. Therefore, they have a pervasive yet taken for granted feeling that most of reality is messy and dull. If we do not see things as related, we have to feel agitated and feel too an essential emptiness, absence of meaning.

Poetry: Our Friend & Critic

In this lecture, Mr. Siegel shows that poetry, real poetry, is always a graceful, intense, surprising, true dealing with the RELATEDNESS of things. Poetry is, therefore, a criticism of how we see; and it also meets our largest hope, shows us what we long for.

A poem that Mr. Siegel discusses in the section printed here is one of the most difficult and puzzling poems in American literature. It is poem 7 of Wallace Stevens’s “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle.” And Mr. Siegel explains what it means. His greatness as a critic of poetry was in the fact that he saw and could show what made a poem beautiful (or not beautiful); and that he also could make clear what the poem meant, what the poet was saying. He understood truly what a poem was about, just as he understood people, the biggest and most delicate things in a person.  >>Read more