Mother's Day Reading, Lorca's Mysterious Lover & More

Stories about poets & writers around the world, curated by Evan Smith Rakoff for P&W, late for Mother's Day to be sure. Waste not, want not. I'm going through drafts, this one for Mother's Day but not used (I went with the story about dictators with mommy issues because that's the kind of mood I was in.)

Radio Free Europe explains how an obscure nineteenth-century Kazakh poet, Abai, has become an unlikely symbol of the protests opposing Putin's return to power in Russia; Forbes features Jeff Mayersohn, the person who saved Harvard Bookstore from oblivion; the Guardian reports that the mysterious lover Federico García Lorca directed his sonnets has been revealed; and other news.

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know.

Here are the day's stories. Enjoy: no telling when I'll get around to more:

Plato's “Ion”: What’s the Problem with Poets?

Buffalo Poetics (membership required) has recent thread on spirituality and poetry, also philosophy centered, especially in consideration of Wittgenstein. Here poetry examined through another philosophy lens raises the the question of its morality. Via Rufus @ The League of Ordinary Gentlemen Plato's dialogue Ion (Dialogue IX) is brief and seems to address a rather trifling question: Do poets know what they're talking about? If Homer composed beautiful passages about chariot-driving, does his art include technical knowledge of that skill? This is, to put it nicely, not what most of us consider to be a pressing concern. The School of Athens, Raphael It matters though because the implications of this short piece shed light on one of the most troubling ideas in Plato's corpus: that the ideal city (Republic, I-IV) would exile its poets. Living after the twentieth century, it's hard to accept the proposal that a leader could make his citizens better people by banning art. It's also hard to understand the idea given Socrates's deep admiration for poets, especially Homer. Although he expels the poets from his ideal city, it is also clear that he does so with great regret. So what exactly is the problem with poetry?