This morning I was catching up on some of the wonderful material referenced at Arts & Letters Daily: first, Dolan Cummings's piece from Spiked on institutional threats, especially from "ethics committees," to free speech within the academic world; then Brooke Allen in the Nation on "Our Godless Constitution"; and finally, from Andrew Sullivan, the gay Catholic neo-con Iraq-hawk who ended up endorsing John Kerry in the last election, an article in the Times (UK) online on the iPod nation (of which he and I are members):
You get your news from your favorite blogs, the ones that won't challenge your view of the world. You tune into a satellite radio service that also aims directly at a small market — for new age fanatics, liberal talk or Christian rock. Television is all cable. Culture is all subculture. Your cell phones can receive e-mail feeds of your favorite blogger's latest thoughts — seconds after he has posted them — get sports scores for your team or stock quotes of your portfolio.
Technology has given us a universe entirely for ourselves — where the serendipity of meeting a new stranger, hearing a piece of music we would never choose for ourselves or an opinion that might force us to change our mind about something are all effectively banished.
And then I remembered Cole Swensen's poems on baroque gardens, which, at the February Desert City reading, she described as being about "gardens and the military; control and nature; growth and precision." Now, I don't know Cole Swensen or her poetry, and I don't remember what she read well enough to characterize it in any way other than "enjoyable and interesting, but not what I'd like to write,"* so those remarks and poems are just a jumping-off place — nothing here should be considered a comment on her or her work or an imputation of any particular attitude on her part.
What I find interesting this Saturday afternoon is that there should be any mystery about gardens and the military or any of the rest of it. Artifices like gardens and poems are among the things people make as momentary stays against the evident indifference of the world. Who understands that indifference better than soldiers and statesmen? Who could be surprised that men and women who have trained for battle, and especially those who have experienced it, should sometimes find joy in order, decorum, and beauty? Or that powerful men and women should use their power to have gardens planted? — an expression of that power, of course, but also an opportunity of retreat from the necessity of its use.
I work on a Navy base. I'm married to a woman who was a sergeant in the army. Usually when I meet poets or academics (I was one of those once) in person those facts are no more an influence on their apparent attitudes towards me than say, the color of my shoes. When they seem to make any difference at all it is usually an increased fascination — but whether in any particular case it's from interest in an exotic or from Johnson's attitude toward women writers and dancing dogs I'm not so sure. Sometimes, in the online world of listserves and blogs, one hears intellectual nonsense about an adequate response to poetry (and gardens?) — not just to some particular poem — requiring serious study; very occasionally it becomes clear that there are people who regard soldiers as simple butchers — both attitudes are bigotry, though not to the same degree. The first and lesser bigotry is often reinforced in the narrow, academic, mostly self-styled avant garde world of poetry blogs, an instance of what Andrew Sullivan described.
*Chris Vitiello, the other reader that night, apparently paid attention better than I did.)
8:20:11 PM 
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