#anahid nersessian

[kitchen-light]

To read Keats in a time of plague is to confront the same question asked in his unfinished epic 'The Fall of Hyperion': "what benefit" do poets offer to a world in which so many people suffer so much? This question obsessed Keats, who never quite shook off his guilt at having abandon medicine for literature and its more subtle ministrations. Whenever he tried to convince himself that a poet is "physician to all men", he ended up thinking he was hardly a poet at all, but rather a self-destructive fantasist who "venoms all his days". As he drew nearer to his own death, Keats was sure he was more patient than healer, more venom than remedy. The argument of this book is that Keats was wrong. Needless to say, plenty of readers have found comfort in the vitality, wit and aesthetic amplitude of his poems; a thing of beauty is perhaps a joy forever. 'Keat's Odes', however, locates its subject's social genius at a distance from his reputation as a card-carrying Great Poet. It identifies Keats as a radical writer and his poetry as a radical expression of the art. More controversially, it claims a resemblance between Keats and Karl Marx, who was likewise preoccupied by the deformation of all aspects of human life under capital. Everywhere in his poetry Keats seeks both to describe that deformation and to undo it, to create a language of such lavish and uncompromising passion that it drives home the outrage of what we have become and the grandeur of what we still might be.

Anahid Nersessian, from Preface to the UK Edition, “Keats Odes | A Lover’s Discourse”, Verso Books, 2022

#anahid nersessian #john keats #quotes #essays #words #found* #on poetry #on politics

[a-chilleus]

What ['Ode to Autumn'] wants is to show us the human incapacity for resisting beauty—to show us that it really is impossible sometimes not to love the world, even when it provides ample evidence that it should not be loved. Keats does his best to present this state of affairs in a way that is neutral and detached. He refuses to make excuses for the poem, to discharge its difficult energies in the vapid, hysterical idiom of “complicity.” Instead, he forces us to inhabit an excruciating contradiction: we are attached, despite everything, to this place that has been weaponized against us, where the earth ingests our oozings and its ambient noises muffle our screams. We are attached, too, to poems about this place, especially when they commute suffering to metaphor—a halfreaped furrow, a choir of ululating bugs.

Anahid Nersessian, ‘Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse’, (University of Chicago Press, 2021)

on Ode to Autumn and whether or not it responds to the Peterloo Massacre which had occurred very recently when Keats composed the poem

#words #poetry #keats #john keats #anahid nersessian

[loneberry]

Alice Oswald on Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn

Listen to Alice Oswald read her gorgeous essay on Keat’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, quietness, reading, Beckett, poetic form, grief, writing, trauma, orality and breath, music, the Parthenon frieze, time, and Homer (BBC / Spotify).

It’s a pity there are so few recordings of Alice Oswald reading (I’m told it’s because she believes so passionately about poetry as a performative oral tradition that she does not allow recordings of her poetry readings)—I could literally listen to her all day.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001xjk

From Fleur Jaeggy’s essay on John Keats in These Possible Lives:

Keats was overcome by sleep and [Joseph] Severn drew a portrait of Keats’s head on his pillow, eyes closed, face hollowed, a few curls glued to his forehead with cold sweat. Then transcribed Keats’s words, his last testimony. Severn was in the presence of a great poet. He may have been already thinking that one day he would be buried beside him. He’d been to visit the Protestant cemetery near the Pyramid of Cestius, its grounds were glazed over with violets and it seemed that Keats liked the spot. He said he would feel the flowers grow over him. Severn knew that violets were Keats’s favorite flower. He plucked for him a just budded rose, a winter rose. Keats received it darkly and said “I hope to no longer be alive in spring.” He wanted what he called in his last letter a “posthumous existence” to come to an end. Inscribed on his gravestone: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” His words are set into the stone as if on a mirror, touching everything and not touched by anything — strange asymmetry.

After reading the Jaeggy essay on Keats as outsider-mystic, I started reading Anahid Nersessian’s Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse, which offers a materialist and political reading of Keats. I thought about Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, a meditation on Keats and the nature of truth in relation to the beautiful but perfidious lover. (Such wildly divergent readings made me think that Keats is a kind of Rorschach inkblot that activates different parts of our psyches. Maybe all poetry is. Maybe that’s what Jaeggy is touching on when she describes Keats’s words as mirror.)

#literature #poetry #alice oswald #Fleur Jaeggy #music #john keats #keats #Anahid Nersessian #water #ode on a grecian urn

[leohtttbriar]

This whole article about John Donne is so sexy but this passage in particular!

Anahid Nersessian, "A Vivisectional Style"

#literary criticism #poetry #john donne #out comes STUFF

[librarycards]

OK, very very happy new year 🩵🩵 Here are 5 books: Garments Against Women, Anne Boyer; Traces of Enayat by Iman Mersal; Keats Odes by Anahid Nersessian; Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (Ed. Kaveh Akbar); The Waste Land by TS Eliot

ooooh, thank you so much, i added the Mersal and Nersessian to my tbr!!

recs:

The Story of My Teeth, Valeria Luiselli

Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, Robin Coste Lewis

Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, Jennifer Bartlett (ed.)

Bonus: A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

#ty<3 #kitchen-light #book rec #ask

[borderepisteme]

“With the artist, we had spoken about why it was that Paradise, in Dante, is so boring. I said it was because Dante had never really known Beatrice, only laid eyes on her and run back to his room for the hot flush of fantasy. She was an absence, not a person, as contentless as every other abstracted desire – "and betaking me to the loneliness of mine own room, I fell to thinking." The artist disagreed, then told us about Marta, his Beatrice, with whom he fell in love and for whom he wrote eight poems, after which she moved to Patagonia and he forgot her. He couldn't remember her last name.

This is why heaven is boring: there is nothing substantial in it, only a ghost of a hope. Marta, aging in Patagonia. I wish I knew her. "I fell to thinking" — a morbid diversion of lust. It is so perverse: poetry, poets, and edging. Everyone else just wants what they wants and sets out to possess it, but the poet bends, veers, falls to thinking, and in the La Vita Nuova, at least, the height of romance, when the spotty glamor of surface desire has dissipated into the brighter light, is to explain the shape of stanzas, poetic technique. My Danteum would always be in the shape of La Vita Nuova, not the Divine Comedy. It would be all basements, tents, canopy beds, and closets, in which there was always a deranged poetics lecture being broadcast from a loudspeaker and the shards of the real were pulsating, sanctified, in heart shape valentine boxes. “Is being left ‘forever panting’ forever held at bay from bliss, actually ideal?” writes Anahid Nersessian in Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, about Ode on a Grecian Urn. And then I blushed, because I am a poet, and I had mistaken the universal answer for “yes.” (And if you haven’t read it — the correct answer, as far as I could tell -- was supposed to be ‘no.’)”

Anne Boyer

[gothiclit]

thanks @sofyarostova for tagging me :)

last song: blue monday by new order. absolute banger. obsessed with the outro

currently watching: i'm not really a tv show person in general, but the last thing i watched was an one hour documentary "nikola vaptsarov: five stories about one execution" which is. about the circumstances around ww2 poet vaptsarov's death, the subsequent myth-making and the political climate of ww2 bulgaria in general

currently reading: flitting between shelley: the pursuit by richard holmes (reread), keats' odes: a lover's discourse by anahid nersessian, harrow the ninth by tamsyn muir and time shelter by georgi gospodinov

current obsession: honestly...nothing. lol. i'm having a weird time

tagging @dykejohnmilton @rock-n-rollin-bitch @vladracul @samodivas @merrymorningofmay and whoever else wants to do it

#this list really is just [poet] [new wave] [weird post-modernist mediation on reality]

[kamreadsandrecs]

#books #reading

[kammartinez]

#books #reading

[snailgal]

favourite book i read each month of the year:

JAN: the hurting kind - ada limon

FEB: lady audleys secret - mary elizabeth braddon

MAR: interview with a vampire - anne rice (lol)

APR: are you listening? - tillie walden

MAY: the passion - jeanette winterson

JUN: a wizard of earthsea - ursula k le guin

JUL: nona the ninth - tamsyn muir

AUG: frankenstein - mary shelley

SEP: keat's odes: a lover's discourse - anahid nersessian + the dispossessed - ursula k le guin

OCT: gilgamesh - trans. sophus helle

NOV: the tombs of atuan - ursula k le guin

DEC: the haunting of hill house - shirley jackson + the heart is a lonely hunter - carson mccullers

#had a horribly mediocre reading year but it kind of picked up towards the end #first semester was so dud - i took a great popular fiction class but all the books ranged from bad to alright #hence. lady audleys secret and iwtv making the list #reading the haunting of hill house though im begging you #(desiirepath gave me the idea for this post)

[kitchen-light]

[Keats' work] is a poetics of the 360 degree view and the fourth dimension. It makes language thick and extends its reach through time, until it becomes capable of preserving what William Blake calls "every little act" of existence―kinetic exchange and thermal transfer, stimulus and response―in an undaunted assertion that, even amid the waste and savagery of history, "not one sigh, nor smile, nor tear, / One hair, nor particle of dust, not one can pass away." Love makes a good subject for this kind of writing. For one thing it is a paradigmatic case of Negative Capability. "You have absorb'd me," Keats wrote to Brawne, "I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving." For another, it is as good a name as any for the wish not to lose what the conditions of our lives demand be lost to us. You would call that our humanity, if, like Marx, you were willing to define "human nature" as "communal nature". You would call it freedom, if, like Keats, you were willing to define freedom as vulnerability, an absolute openness to the annihilation of self. When Keats writes about love, which is almost all the time, his offers it to us in exactly this light, as the feeling of knowing, for once, what we are truly capable of―the widening circle of pleasure and joy, the depth of a loss that is also a gift and relic, unable to pass away.

Anahid Nersessian, from the Introduction to “Keats Odes | A Lover’s Discourse”, Verso Books, 2022

#anahid nersessian #john keats #quotes #essays #words #found* #on poetry #on love

[iishtar]

Articles no. 2

The LAnd Interview: Mike Davis by Jeff Weiss theLAnd

A Tangier Home That Has Passed Between Design Legends by Christopher Garis T Magazine December 2021

‘I’ve Been Suffering for Years’: Stylist Law Roach on Retiring by Lindsay Peoples The Cut March 2023

To All the Final Girls by Marlowe Granados The Baffler January 2023

Posthumous Existence: A Conversation with Anahid Nersessian by Jack Skelley LA Review of Books February 2023

Who was the first King of England? The answer is.. complicated by Melissa Sartore National Geographic May 2023

#articles

[openlyandfreely]

[smallnouns]

Anahid Nersessian, Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse

Anne Boyer, “No,” from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate 

Miguel James, “Against the Police,” translated by Guillermo Parra

#anahid nersessian #john keats #miguel james #anne boyer #i just finished the nersessian & god i'm going to be thinking abt it for years

[thelonguepuree]

The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art, and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling. Great inventors, in all ages knew this: Protogenes and Apelles knew each other by this line. Rafael and Michael Angelo, and Albert Durer, are known by this and by this alone. The want of this determinate and bounding form evidences the want of idea in the artist’s mind and the pretense of the plagiary in all its branches. How do we distinguish the oak from the beech, the horse from the ox, but by the bounding line? How do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflections and movements? What is it that builds a house and plants a garden, but the definite and the determinate? What is it that distinguishes honesty from knavery, but the hard and wirey outline of rectitude and certainty in the actions and intentions. Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.

— William Blake, A Descriptive Catalogue of Pictures, “Number XV. Ruth.—A Drawing” (1809)

#william blake #the bounding line #limits #quarantine poetics? #adjustment #anahid nersessian #romanticism #romantic aesthetics

[bigtickhk]

Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse by Anahid Nersessian https://amzn.to/38bTwba 

https://bookshop.org/a/17891/9780226762678

#Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse #Anahid Nersessian #books #book review #keats #writers and writing #books and literature #literature #poetry