Nancy Huntting, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:
The new issue of TRO, “Poetry, Ourselves, & What Reality Has,” is richly surprising and kind. Do you know how much meaning things and people can have for you? You’ll have a new sight of how much through this issue. Here, some important poems—and also large matters in the world and in every person—are looked at in new ways, exciting and exact. And through this, you’ll see your own life and the world you’re in better, thrillingly better. The three elements in the title—“Poetry, Ourselves, & What Reality Has”—are honored mightily in this latest issue of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known.
The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:
Dear Unknown Friends:
Here is the conclusion of Poetry Is Alphabetical, a 1971 lecture by Eli Siegel that is authoritative and lighthearted at once, playful in its scholarship, literary and about the life of everyone. In it, Mr. Siegel uses the alphabet to present qualities poetry has: a quality for each letter, beginning with A. And by the end, we have traversed more than half the English alphabet. In this final section he speaks of qualities beginning with letters J through P. They are, respectively: Je ne sais quoi; Kindness; Likeness; Majesty; Naïveté; Order; Persistence.
The use of the alphabet in this talk, while having a certain lightness, is not meant to be clever. Mr. Siegel is using it to illustrate the fact that poetry has the things, qualities, subjects that reality itself supplies—as represented by that organizer of the world which is the alphabet.
There Is Persistence
The qualities Mr. Siegel speaks of in this talk are in the lives of people too. And in us, and in nations, there can be a terrific mix-up and even cruelty about them. Take the final word Mr. Siegel speaks about: Persistence. How beautiful persistence can be!—as the heartbeat persists; or as tulips bloom in spring because what they are persisted underground through months of coldness; or as a true scientist found a remedy for an ailment by persisting carefully, passionately—amid many disappointments perhaps….Read more