Word: nye
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...amplifying phrases, words, ideas, National Shihab Nye makes you do just that in her most recent collection of poems, Hugging the Jukebox. Some of the notes, at first might seem self-indulgent. Names which are not innately powerful, and whose connotations are simply act controlled or dealt with-not even dismissed-are assembled, implying verbs and actions-but the leaves these actions to be guessed. So, in "Martita and Luisa," the name "Martita," in a direct address, starts the action; then the name grows larger than the description, ending the first section of the poem and becoming the object...
...other half of the fallacy attributes to the words a power to conjure up images that verbs would evoke far more precisely-and assumes the audience will see some sort of universal meaning in a name like "San Francisco". In "West Side," Nye sets up a conflict in language, Spanish place names conflicting with Protestant names of men. The power in the poem does not come from the language quarrel, which exists only in the contrasting sounds, but from the risk that the names Nye uses will set into motion ideas that she never intended...
Since the names are completely unmodified, and the only motion, abstract or real, occurs when "names," the poem's subject, move around in weird physical ways, the conjuring becomes sloppy. Writing, "Domingo, Monico, Francisco, shining rivulets of sound." Nye plays with more than water in a desert. Since she has no control over the ideas these names evoke, the experiment fails-even if, by some coincidence, a reader jumps to the same ideas as Nye wants him to, the experiment misses as Art. A city cannot be reduced to a world because language can never be isolated from its meaning...
...Nye said the president's moderate position toward the USSR in the Polish crisis also reflected a move toward moderation from the campaign rhetoric of a year ago, adding that the Western allies in Europe prompted this move...
...Both Nye and Huntington said Reagan's decision not to sell F-5 fighter planes to Taiwan exemplified the administration's move toward moderation. "If Reagan had pushed ahead with Taiwan the way he wanted to initially, our relations with China would have deteriorated," Huntington said, adding, "He did the sensible thing...