Blog: About Literature, Teaching & Our Lives

Aesthetic Realism itself began with Eli Siegel’s seeing of the relations among all the things reality has. It showed through his early writing in poetry and prose. He later wrote: “It was these thoughts that, becoming passionate and musical, took the form of “Hot  ‘Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana.'” This grandly sweeping poem of relation—relation in time and space, the relation among the outward doings of life and the inner thoughts of people, the relation of the inanimate world and living beings—won the Nation magazine’s poetry prize in 1925.

The poem begins:

Award-winning filmmaker and Aesthetic Realism consultant Ken Kimmelman made a film of this majestic poem. Historian Howard Zinn wrote: “Ken Kimmelman’s reproduction, on film, of Eli Siegel’s magisterial poem, is an extraordinary achievement. It matches, in its visual beauty, the elegance of Siegel’s words, and adds the dimension of stunning imagery to an already profound work of art.”

You’ll be stirred to your depths by this great combination of words and visual images. Now, more than ever, we need to feel that beauty is just as real as the things that can frighten us. I’m grateful to be learning that from Aesthetic Realism. I hope this film encourages everyone else to feel it too.

Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana

Here is a poem I love, written by Ellen Reiss, with whom I’ve studied for many years in the course The Aesthetic Realism Explanation of Poetry. As the world today is, and has been for so long, in turmoil about how to see the sameness and difference of people—in place, time, language, religion, culture, appearance—I am reminded of this moving poem about reality, including the reality which is the human self, wherever one lives. It is introduced with this brief note by the poet:

“The Shadows, Black” is about two different aspects of the world: an Arabian desert and New York, with its skyscrapers. The poem says that these two are of each other, inseparable—as a person needs to see different aspects of herself as the same person. —Ellen Reiss

Ellen Reiss is the Aesthetic Realism Chair of Education, and is the editor of the groundbreaking periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known. In that journal, she has written powerfully and with great kindness about the justice with which one person needs to see another. To read more poems by Ms. Reiss, and by others, go to What Poetry Really Is: A Celebration. And you can read some of her critical writings, and also works by Eli Siegel, poet and founder of Aesthetic Realism, at On the Criticism of Poetry.

The Shadows, Black 

The shadows, dark, stretched across the desert sand,
Shadow-deep, shadow-thin,
Have the profundity of New York skyscrapers
Reaching toward blue.
A camel moves, pale against the large sun;
Feels the pulsing of the desert in his legs
Longs to curl up, puppy-like, beside a great tree:
He has known this life of winding caravans,
Of dark men shaded by white cloth.
The sand is grey now, the sun purely white,
The shadows black.
The camel drops his eyelids, trembles,
Remembering metal buildings soaked in rain,
The pounding of water on wide, dusty streets,
And he hears the tinkling of small bells echo over miles of sand
Made lovely by shadows.

©Ellen Reiss

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You may also be interested in these reports I’m proud to have written of poetry lectures by Eli Siegel:

• On a great lecture by Eli Siegel about the poetry of the African American poet Sterling A. Brown (1901-1989), from his book Southern Road
• On what Mr. Siegel showed, in his lecture Poetry, Atmosphere, and Neatness, about the poetry of John Keats
• On the work of the important 19th-century English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in the lecture Some Poetry Is Distinguished