Homo Vitruvius and American Samizdat function houses for my weekly artistic writing and mental exploration. HV persists as my authentic and first Substack in these pursuits; AS arose in resistance to Trumpism and is devoted to its defeat. From memoir and poetry to fiction and drama, principally in HV, to historical past and political philosophy, predominantly in AS, you can see it right here, built-in throughout the 2 stacks by means of a artistic and mental sensibility I hope you can see invigorating. The stacks could also be subscribed collectively or singly in Handle Subscription.
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The German thinker G.W.F. Hegel known as poetry the “most excellent artwork.” The aim of true artwork, Hegel believed, was to present sensuous type to the expression of free spirit, and he argued that poetry, particularly spoken, might greatest fulfill that function.
Paths much less traveled are walked exactly in pursuit of free spirit — the shape, an individual; the artwork, a life. To make out of 1’s life artworks. To present that artwork poetic type.
Of the hooked up anthology, The Path Much less Traveled: A Assortment of Brave Verse, its impresario and writer,
and his co-editor, , are vacationers of latest paths for them. Matthew is a lately retired U.S. Navy officer, remodeled, with assistance from Substack, into a totally devoted guide lover and litterateur. Zina, a mom of 5, after lengthy delay, is pursuing her MFA in poetry.
Matthew and I grew to become pals early in his time on Substack, not that very lengthy after my arrival, and our mutual assist and my admiration for his dedication to a brand new path in life have solely grown. Matthew has develop into in style amongst Substacker readers and writers alike. We stay at a time when being “a very good man” appears particularly significant, and that Matthew is.
Amongst Matthew’s many tasks and month-to-month choices on his personal Past the Bookshelf Substack, is his present guide membership studying of Homer’s Iliad. Since Matthew is dedicated to drawing connections between literature and life, I really feel compelled to level out on this connection that when Julia and I traveled one in all our personal paths much less traveled some years again, all by means of America’s Indian Nation — throughout which era, my poem “Delusion,” included within the anthology was written, we did it with the companionship of Homer and Penelope, Shepherd and Shiba Inu mixes, respectively, who sensuously expressed their very own free spirits by operating, cavorting, and peeing throughout contemporary woodlands in each state we traveled.
The Path Much less Traveled is revealed in recognition of the celebration each April in the USA of Nationwide Poetry Month. Poetry celebrates — to make use of that phrase right here to indicate honoring with consideration — the total human expertise. Within the Iliad, Homer celebrated it by means of an epic poetry of human ardour, ambition, delight, honor, loyalty, foolishness, and the agon — the competitors or contest amongst people for all, rightly or wrongly, that issues to them, together with within the fight of battle, with its heedless destruction.
It’s practically three thousand years later, and although little has modified within the essence of what makes us human, that world is gone. However the poetry stays.
It’s my luck of the alphabet that in any alphabetical group of names, I have a tendency to come back first, besides, when it occurs, the ninety % of that point that I’m preceded by aardvark, who didn’t contribute to this assortment.
In my poem “Delusion,” to talk of paths, I write of being “barreled over some wheels on the 66, out West,” and — like each poet in Matthew and Zina’s beneficiant assortment — of my dedication to “crack a phrase in opposition to an empty on the spot, crack one other, / shouts within the wind rush.”
Or as Zina factors to Victoria Fach telling us in her poem “Calle de la Transfiguración”: “My soul unfurled to such extravagance.”
That impressed assertion proper there’s the sensuous expression of free spirit, and it’s out there not solely to actual paths much less traveled however to these in our imaginations as properly — as all of the poets on this assortment certainly know. It was with thought some years again of Samuel Johnson’s famed 1781 guide Lives of the Poets that I dropped an “s’ to suppose on the matter and wrote “Lives of the Poet,” as a substitute, revealed in my assortment Ready for Phrase.
In these pages assembled by Matthew and Zina await different lives of different poets, following their very own paths, in search of their very own free spirit.
Lives of the Poet
I see all of them
succumb to the electrical choke of the espresso drip
the canines at my ft moan for the bone
this tenor’s lyric flight
lands on the baseboard mud
a wash of sunshine within the afternoon’s
hushed diminuendo
on the sink earlier than me
and I, within the end-day yard by means of the window
journey again throughout this bounded place
to my solely fleeting self.
AJA
