Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Throughout his career Singer was criticized for this mix of sexuality and catastrophe. In his Nobel lecture he finally replied: "The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for the redemption of man. While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths . . . to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice...
...right down to his repudiation of America. No one ever embraced life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness more lustily. An Emersonic boom was his, and Whitmanic energy. Like Emerson, he saw the Greek roots in enthusiasm -- the word means divine possession -- and knew that the poet "speaks adequately only when he speaks somewhat wildly . . . Not with intellect alone, but with intellect inebriated by nectar." And like Whitman, his fellow rhapsodist of Brooklyn, he sang only of himself -- in that great American form, the comic-romantic monologue -- but found in the self everything he needed: "If we have not found...
...Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, a moderate reformer, agrees that many Soviet citizens have learned to survive by "being ready to adapt to any kind of order and to fulfill any instruction, to forget about the morality of state policy and to accept everything from above." Even those who have begun to shake off this passivity have had no chance to develop the initiative and self-reliance that democracy demands. "They are longing for freedom, but they don't know what to do with it," says Yevtushenko. "This is true even of some of our democrats. They are wonderful in meetings...
These activities do constitute a kind of movement, but it is a spiritual one. The white-haired guru of this transformation is the poet Robert Bly, whose book Iron John has been on the best-seller list for more than seven months. Bly and his fellow wise men believe that since the Industrial Revolution, when fathers left the home to work in offices and factories, boys have been raised by women and co-opted by a female view of masculinity. Later, the women's movement came along, creating an epidemic of what Bly calls "soft males," men who lacked fierceness...
...more people have seen him pushing Nike Air Jordans, Pepsi and Wheaties than performing magic -- make that outperforming Magic -- on a basketball court. But all the commercial hype and publicity fade away when he does play, for Michael Jordan is the artwork and the artist, the poem and the . poet. He reinvents the sport every time he rises -- and rises -- into the air. He plays the game without cliche...