A day of epiphany ...

... happiness gets a boost, the suburbs find a poet, and I - thanks to Patrick Kurp via Dave Lull - discover David Solway: `A Stubbornly Conservative Mind.'

Two quotes from the FrontPage interview Patrick links to:

"Politics, for me, consisted of a series of appropriate gestures and unexceptionable utterances, of a more or less demonstrable left-of-center tropism, and of course I read all the intellectually-certified gurus, Chomsky and Said in particular, with some enthusiasm. This was par for the course. You might say I belonged to what Milosz called the ketman society—he defined ketman as the false stance adopted by a person “in order to find himself at one with others, in order not to be alone.” Which is another way of saying that, although I was not a card-carrying member of the sinister cadre, I adhered to a pervasive culture of Leftist thinking predicated on the evasion of unpalatable truths."

"This did not mean that I would have to start theorizing in my poetry about specifically social or political themes. Indeed, when poets undertake to do so, they tend to produce what I’ve dubbed the “higher drivel”—even Seamus Heaney is no exception here—or generally make a hash of it—look at Yeats, Eliot or Pound, who all ended up flirting with fascism. (In Pound’s case, he married it.)"