Jeffrey Carduner, Aesthetic Realism consultant, writes:

The new issue of TRO, “Reality Is, Nevertheless, a Friend,” is so truly titled! It will give the reader honest hope as it deals with a subject that has been with humanity for centuries: evil—what is it? This TRO is a down-to-earth understanding of its subject. It shows that there’s a structure to evil, including in the human self, and what that structure is and what’s so amiss and ugly about it. There are poems here presenting the subject richly, including a wonderful humorous poem by Eli Siegel.

Aesthetic Realism, then, shows what evil is and shows its hurtfulness, yet shows “Reality Is, Nevertheless, a Friend”—the title of this number of The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical.

The commentary by Ellen Reiss begins:

Dear Unknown Friends:

Here is part two in our two-part publication of Poetry and Evil, by Eli Siegel. It was in May of 1964 that he gave this lecture on what he called “the toughest subject in the world, and that subject in relation to poetry.” The achievement of this talk is immense—and immensely kind. Mr. Siegel explains what evil truly is in its structure, its make-up, in its everydayness and its ferocity. And we have the experience of seeing that “toughest subject” presented with authentic seriousness, and the experience of having (inseparably from the seriousness) an exceedingly good time.

The source of both the seriousness and the good time is this principle at the basis of Aesthetic Realism: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

At the beginning of this lecture, Mr. Siegel described what he would be doing throughout it. I’ll quote that description here as a means of placing what you’ll soon read in this second half. He said:

I am going to read and say something about some poems in the English language that definitely hint or show or say that the world is evil; and furthermore, I am not going to read any poem that contradicts them.

The contradiction is in the fact that these are poems. That is, if evil can be said well, it may be that the more evil is seen well, the more something which can be called good also can be seen. So the contradiction is in the fact that poems about evil, poems saying the world is evil, are poems….Read more