April 26, 2024
“Talent is insignificant.
What matters are love, discipline, luck and most of all, endurance.”
James Baldwin
Dear Friends
Today’s Bread presents the most ephemeral and central elements of being human. The undefinable and much explored terrains of love and of art. Much written, much argued, and yet much more elusive than our language implies. Much like our definition of God, once we clearly define, we have lost the essence. The heart of the mystery can only be found in the pure nature of experience. We know it when we see it, taste it, bathe in the wonder of it. We take it all in and are transformed. Once we try to tidy it all up, which means we seek to control it, then we are done.
Ezra Klein interviews Adam Moss on his new book, “The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing”. Please treat yourself to this listen. You will be different at the end of the podcast.
The episode of Modern Love features the food writer Samin Nosrat who reads the well-known essay, “You May Want to Marry My Husband”. Kleenex warning, it will make you cry. Another one of those.
As a gift for National Poetry Month- Emily Skaja has created a Poetry Prompt Generator. Even if you don’t write poetry (and why not?) You need to play with this.
Lastly, the great Fr. Richard Rohr describes poetry as a spiritual contemplative practice. I love his line:
If we’re reading a poem too quickly, between two urgent meetings or other hurried spaces, we probably won’t get it, because we don’t have time to release ourselves.”
Love-Art- Poetry-
What more do we need? I mean besides SPAM musubi.
Deep bows- Much Aretha-
Bill
This Conversation Made Me a Sharper Editor
The Ezra Klein Show
In our recent series on artificial intelligence, I kept returning to a thought: This technology might be able to churn out content faster than we can, but we still need a human mind to sift through the dross and figure out what’s good. In other words, A.I. is going to turn more of us into editors. But editing is a peculiar skill. It’s hard to test for, or teach, or even describe. But it’s the crucial step in the creative process that takes work that’s decent and can turn it into something great. Adam Moss is widely known as one of the great magazine editors of his generation: He remade The New York Times Magazine in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and during his 15 years as editor in chief of New York magazine, shaped that outlet into one of the greatest print and digital publications we have. And he’s now out with a new book, “The Work of Art: How Something Comes From Nothing.” It’s a curation of 43 conversations with artists about the marginalia, doodles, drafts and revisions that lead to great art.
Listen on Apple Podcasts:
Sunday Special: 'Modern Love'
The Daily
The chef Samin Nosrat lives by the idea that food is love. Her Netflix series, “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat,” and the James Beard Award-winning cookbook that inspired it, were about using food to build community and forge connections. Since then, all of her creative projects and collaborations have focused on inspiring people to cook, and eat, with their friends and loved ones. After the recent loss of her father, Samin has gained an even deeper understanding of what it means to savor a meal — or even an hour — with loved ones. This week, she reads an essay about exactly that: “You May Want to Marry My Husband” by Amy Krouse Rosenthal. It’s one of the most-read Modern Love essays ever.
Listen on Apple Podcasts:
From Emily Skaja
As a teacher, I want my students to appreciate that you can find inspiration for a poem anywhere, but giving yourself a few obstacles to work around will help you write this ONE poem rather than every conceivable poem there is. That’s why I created the Poetry Prompt Generator, an online resource for poets that randomizes potential features for a poem. Using a prompt—even if you stray from it—is a great way to kickstart a poem. But how do you finish a poem, especially a problem poem that needs something you can’t yet see?
https://www.poetrypromptgenerator.com/
Father Richard describes how reading poetry contemplatively can be a sacred practice:
Great art and great myth try to evoke an epiphany in us. They want to give us an inherent and original sense of the holy. They make us want to kneel and kiss the ground. Robert Frost said, “A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a love-sickness.” [1] If a poem doesn’t give us a lump in the throat, is it really great poetry? My final theological conclusion is that there’s only one world and that it’s all sacred. However, we have to be prepared to know what we’re saying when we say that. If we say too glibly that the trees are sacred, along with our dog, a friend, and the roses, then we don’t really believe it. We first need to experience “a lump in the throat” to have encountered the sacred. The sacred is something that inspires awe and wonder, something that makes us cry, something that gives us the lump in the throat. We must first encounter the sacred in the concrete and kneel before it there, because we can’t start with the universal.
Poets are masters of the concrete. They first pull us into a single similarity between an animal, an object in nature, or an event, before they shock us with the dissimilarity. Then, they leave us there to make the connection between the concrete and the universal. When we make that connection, there’s suddenly a great leap of meaning, an understanding that it’s one world. The very word “metaphor,” which comes from two Greek words, means to “carry across.” A good metaphor carries us across, and we don’t even know how it’s occurred. Here are a few lines from Mary Oliver’s poem “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches”:
Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches
of other lives—
tried to imagine what the crisp fringes, full of honey,
hanging
from the branches of the young locust trees, in early summer,
feel like? ...
Who can open the door who does not reach for the latch?
Who can travel the miles who does not put one foot
in front of the other, all attentive to what presents itself
continually?
Who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed
with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone?
Well, there is time left—
fields everywhere invite you into them. [2]
When reading poetry like this, we have to release ourselves and we have to have time to do it. If we’re reading a poem too quickly, between two urgent meetings or other hurried spaces, we probably won’t get it, because we don’t have time to release ourselves. We need quiet, solitude, and open space to read poetry at greater depth. Then and only then do poems work their magic
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