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Comment by rsj_hn | Hacker News Reader

"“we believe the essay does not align with Chicago Review’s editorial and political agenda.”"

It's interesting that some academic literary magazines are now being forced to admit they have political agendas, which is a step in the right direction.

People like Kunin are the conscience of our generation, daring to stand up to the mobs and tell the truth - a political act that conflicts with the Chicago Review's agenda. But it is the truth tellers, not the political enforcers, who will be acknowledged as heroes, as the future belongs to the truth, not to the political lie.

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The hardest thing for my generation to understand is that the politics of our youth are no longer the politics of the present.

To quote the many times canceled Orwell: And this tolerance or plain dishonesty means much more than that admiration for the USSR happens to be fashionable at this moment. Quite possibly that particular fashion will not last. For all I know, by the time this book is published my view of the Soviet régime may be the generally-accepted one. But what use would that be in itself? To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

I don't meant this as a personal attack but there is something faintly ironic about this statement

Orwell is pretty the much the one-stop gramophone record for quotes when someone wants to express concern about censorship or authoritarianism in a vague, semi-lyrical way

Only if you know nothing about him or his life.

He was cancelled in Britain from when he went to fight in the Spanish civil war until the end of WWII and the start of the cold war.

Which is what makes his quote so noteworthy, he was right, his view became the dominant one, but it still wasn't an improvement because the people repeating it did so without thinking.

I'm not criticizing Orwell or the quote itself. I'm pointing out the irony of seeing this quote and others by the same author get regularly popped out following the very same gramophone mindset he warns about. People just pop an Orwell and call it a day. Could it be called recursive irony? I don't know if that's a thing.

I look forward to the day that we can't use reheated arguments from last century about current events. It doesn't help that people who want to destroy our ability to think use Orwell as a manual - hate speech might as well be something he coined in 1984 for all the emotion and lack of logic behind it, that it's law today will be judged harshly by future generations.

History never repeats quite the same way. There are some low-hanging parallels to 1984, but if we limit ourselves to that frame of reference we miss a large range of elements that might prove to be enormously important. There's stuff like hate speech regulations and all that but there's also a million things going on elsewhere, and any patterns only seem obvious many years later in retrospect, if they ever become so.

Future generations will probably have a frame of reference completely different from what we expect them to have now. Come to think of it, it would be hard to explain all the motivations of life in 2021 to someone in 1984 who had yet to live through the intervening years...

The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the lapdogs of the 1% are using divide and conquer to keep this going.

That is something Cicero would understand, let alone someone with a working brain from 1984. Of course one need to have a working brain first, something very few manage in any time.

How could one possibly publish poetry in a non political way?

In fact, he discusses this very cogently in the essay.

Perhaps give it a read?

If your poetry is political, you're doing it wrong

Lots of the best (by a number of standards) poetry ever written is deeply political.

Lots of art of all sorts is deeply political.

red-rag and pink-flag

blackshirt and brown

strut-mince and stink-rag

have all come to town

Ironically, this poem underline's cumming's general contempt for politics.

Also, cummings would struggle to be published in today's literary world, since he leaned to the right and was an ardent anti-communist (which began after visiting the Soviet Union in the early 30s).

Lots of art is political. But what makes art good has nothing to do with its politics.

It has to do with truth.

Great art and comedy both can illuminate truth in a way that prose and rhetoric can't touch, because they can approach it obliquely and not get hung up on the details.

This get missed by the overly ideological, and you can tell because they produce bad art and no comedy.

Absolutely untrue. Art is something that can make you think and elicit emotion.

Exactly. Years later, the political parts seem parochial and irrelevant, whereas the artistic parts remain relevant.

> If your poetry is political, you're doing it wrong

Seriously?

All you citizens of Boston, don't you think it's a scandal

how the people have to pay and pay

Fight the fare increase, vote for George O'Brien

and get Charlie off the M.T.A.!

Poetry with a totally blatant political call to action in it isn't poetry, it's propaganda

I was unaware there is One True Way™ to do poetry.

It's like any other art: sometimes it's just a aesthetically pleasing series of words (or musical notes, or colours, or shapes) with no real deeper meaning, or just because it's funny. And other times it's something aesthetically pleasing intended to provoke thought about some aspect of life such as love, the nature of humanity, or something else – some of these might be deemed "political".

Different people like different sort of art, and that's okay. Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0la5DBtOVNI

Art generally, and poetry specifically, ideally elicits emotion based on its engagement with universal human experiences. If I'm reading a poem from 200 years ago, I don't give a fuck who the poet supported politically; I give a fuck that their poetry is artistically durable enough to make me want to keep reading 200 years later.

  THE HEART of the rulers is sick, and the high-priest covers his head:
  For this is the song of the quick that is heard in the ears of the dead.
  The poor and the halt and the blind are keen and mighty and fleet:
  Like the noise of the blowing of wind is the sound of the noise of their feet.
  The wind has the sound of a laugh in the clamour of days and of deeds:
  The priests are scattered like chaff, and the rulers broken like reeds.

Algernon Charles Swinburne, A Song in Time of Revolution. 1860

"Roses are red

Violets are blue

Political poetry is dumb

TS Eliot disliked Swinburne and so should you"

me, 2021

That fragment I quoted is much better poetry than yours.

Not all of Swinburne's poetry is so explicitly political as that poem. And some of his poems are better than others. But I don't see any correlation between how good (in my opinion) some of poem of his is and how explicitly political it is.

I dislike TS Eliot. I'd much rather read Swinburne than TS Eliot.

Depends on what you mean by politics. Poems that don't engage in the specific electoral politics of the day? Yes. Politics in the sense that all interactions that involve more than one person are political (ie the nothing burger that is "everything is political")? Probably not, no.

> some academic literary magazines are now being forced to admit they have political agendas

I think "have political agendas" is a logical leap. If your employees or customers are going to be angry with you for working with someone, you don't work with that person. To go against the wishes of your employees and customers would be having a political agenda.

In this case, "political agenda" was claimed to be a direct quote from the magazine's staff, so it's a little less of an imputation than it might be in other contexts. :-)

They literally admitted to it themselves:

we believe the essay does not align with Chicago Review’s editorial and political agenda

So well said.

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