Las Meninas in Aesthetics for Birds

The latest in my obsession with Las Meninas is up at Aesthetics for Birds, the philosophy and art website. It’s a short piece about the enigmatic painting, restricted by design to only 100 words. The tight limit provides the kind of challenge that appeals to me as a poet and as someone who writes philosophy about art. One ought to be able to say something meaningful in so little space.  

Las Meninas– https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2018/10/26/100-philosophers-100-artworks-100-words-69/

Check out all of their 100x100x100 series. One hundred works of art, written about by 100 philosophers, using only 100 words each. It’s not just paintings; there are entries on film, sculpture, poetry, conceptual art, photography, and some that defy categorization. 

All 100x100x100 – https://aestheticsforbirds.com/category/100-x-100-x-100/

A favorite of mine, pulled from the long list, is Joshua Hall’s reading of Mark Strand’s poem, in which Hall sees a distillation of Simone De Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity.  https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2016/11/11/100-philosophers-100-artworks-100-words-58/

Las Meninas, Diego Velázquez, 1656 (Prado)

Podcast discussion on poetic meaning, philosophy of poetry

My friend and colleague Cody Turner really digs podcasts. He listens to them, recommends them, and even started his own. His Tent Talks are wide-ranging conversations on everything from what psychedelics can tell us about consciousness to truth models in philosophical logic. This past week, Cody had me on the show to talk about my work in poetry and philosophy. I’m grateful to Cody for doing such a close reading of my current work in philosophy of language, on the topic of poetic meaning. Like any piece of writing, I learn just as much about what I have written by talking with someone else about how they interpreted my text. 

It’s a long discussion (2:40:25), so here’s a breakdown. The episode opens with general questions about, what he calls, my intellectual history, which I interpret as, how I ended up here. At 36:52, he asks me whether I consider myself to be a poet or philosopher primarily. At 40:44, he then leads us into a close reading and discussion of my claims about the relationship between personal significance and semantic meaning, specifically how poetry blurs the distinction between them. Finally, at 1:30:50, Cody reads some of his favorite poems from my book, What Comes from a Thing, and we talk about the joy and difficulty of writing, reading, and interpreting poetry.

You can also download the episode from iTunes, under Podcasts, here

Or, you can check out the full range of his podcasts at his website, codyturnercreations.com