About Literature

Hugo’s desire to see what people feel, and describe this with such kind perception, such tenderness, moves me. I’ll point to some passages and comment on why I feel they’re beautiful, in keeping with this great principle of Aesthetic Realism, stated by its founder, Eli Siegel: “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”

Stay tuned!

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

“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

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

I’ve just started reading Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale–or should I say, rereading. It’s been a few decades since I read it, and though I remember very little of the story, I remember the style–and I’m very happy to be splashing around in it again. Next time, I’ll point to a few passages I really like, but for now, suffice it to say that I love the snappy and also thoughtfully probing way Bennett’s sentences portray his keen perception of humanity—its strengths and failings. More to come…