Wednesday, February 9, 2011

What we wish to discourage, we send to our poets

Who does not know recital's object lesson, from his youth, of discomfort to be heard? I wonder what genius first perceived the young's undefended tendency to own the first person voice of a sonneteer, and so be held up to ridicule for his words. Experience of the classroom is not far from Abu Ghraib's celebrated humiliations, as a mode of raising sheep. Was a revolt against indignity absent from the scholar's sense of self under these mocking compulsions? In every class of anxious lambs, we know some culling by a text will backfire in precocious assimilation, steeling the exile in its isolating glory.



William Shakespeare
Sonnet 53
Alex Jennings
Naxos, 1997©


3 comments:

  1. sorry if I prefer Brittain Ward's reticent stance from Alex Jennings reciting performance
    :(

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  2. Ward supplies the emergency, to account for his situation. Shakespeare supplies the account. Jennings only carries it.

    But while we are on the matter of odious comparison, may I implore you not to apply it to Jordan Coulter's treatment of the wall in this morning's entry? I have no interest in discouraging other voices for other rooms.

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  3. I would like there to be more people to see what could be going on in this model's posture, framing, and expression, before his portrait is assimilated as interchangeable with every other face. But this isn't why I brought it here; I brought it here to give it a reader's imagination and respect.

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