You May Have Noticed.

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I Have No Life, Except In Poetry.

How in the world could Wallace Stevens write poetry for children?

Everyone should have their blog url sent by Tuesday! Your blog will be the most important assignment in this class, so be sure to make it interesting for your classmates. Exemplary blogs will be displayed.

The planet on the table refers to the book!

James' dream of a buck with red eyes in a dark alleyway; bucks are passion and the firecat is your psychic intuition.

Are Stevens' poems for children, or are they for the children in us? They celebrate the marriage of sky and earth and water, to recreate this period in all of our lives when we were not yet aware. Learning to speak is your downfall – you learn to speak and lose your innocence. The poems are not just about synesthesia or dyslexia, they are synesthetic and dyslexic.

Wallace Stevens only talks about one subject, and once you know it, all of his poems make sense. One must always keep the dance between imagination and reality in mind, but which one is which?

Think of all the poems in this way and things will become a lot less clear than they were before. He believes that we have lost sight of the earth and we need to regain that consciousness

• Everything is made of invisible particles
• They are indestructible and eternal
• The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size
• All particles are in motion in an infinite void
• The universe has no creator or designer
• Everything comes into being as a result of the swerve

The ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances is the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.

To An Old Philosopher In Rome.

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street
Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement
Of men growing small in the distances of space,
Singing, with smaller and still smaller sound,
Unintelligible absolution and an end -

The threshold, Rome, and that more merciful Rome
Beyond, the two alike in the make of the mind.
It is as if in a human dignity
Two parallels become one, a perspective, of which
Men are part both in the inch and in the mile.

How easily the blown banners change to wings...
Things dark on the horizons of perception
Become accompaniments of fortune, but
Of the fortune of the spirit, beyond the eye,
Not of its sphere, and yet not far beyond,

The human end in the spirit's greatest reach,
The extreme of the known in the presence of the extreme
Of the unknown. The newsboys' muttering
Becomes another murmuring; the smell
Of medicine, a fragrantness not to be spoiled...

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns,
The candle as it evades the sight, these are
The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome,
A shape within the ancient circles of shapes,
And these beneath the shadow of a shape

In a confusion on bed and books, a portent
On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns,
A light on the candle tearing against the wick
To join a hovering excellence, to escape
From fire and be part only of that which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible.
Speak to your pillow as if it was yourself.
Be orator but with an accurate tongue
And without eloquence, O, half-asleep,
Of the pity that is the memorial of this room,

So that we feel, in this illumined large,
The veritable small, so that each of us
Beholds himself in you, and hears his voice
In yours, master and commiserable man,
Intent on your particles of nether-do,

Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair,
alive
Yet living in two world, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need

In so much misery; and yet finding it
Only in misery, the afflatus of ruin,
Profound poetry of the poor and of the dead,
As in the last drop of the deepest blood,
As it falls from the heart and lies there to be seen,

Even as the blood of an empire, it might be,
For a citizen of heaven though still of Rome.
It is poverty's speech that seeks us out the most.
It is older than the oldest speech of Rome.
This is the tragic accent of the scene.

And you - it is you that speak it, without speech,
The loftiest syllable among loftiest things,
The one invulnerable man among
Crude captains, the naked majesty, if you like,
Of bird-nest arches and of rain-stained-vaults.

The sounds drift in. The buildings are remembered.
The life of the city never lets go, nor do you
Ever want it to. It is part of the life in your room.
Its domes are the architecture of your bed.
The bells keep on repeating solemn names

In choruses and choirs of choruses,
Unwilling that mercy should be a mystery
Of silence, that any solitude of sense
Should give you more than their peculiar chords
And reverbations clinging to whisper still.

It is a kind of total grandeur at the end,
With every visible thing enlarged and yet
No more than a bed, a chair and moving nuns,
The immensest theatre, and pillared porch,
The book and candle in your ambered room,

Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.

Anecdote of a Jar.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

An Earthy Anecdote.

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

The Snow Man.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Know These.

me·tem·psy·cho·sis noun
\mə-ˌtem(p)-si-ˈkō-səs, ˌme-təm-ˌsī-\

The passing of the soul at death into another body either human or animal

[Late Latin, from Greek metempsychōsis, from metempsychousthai to undergo metempsychosis, from meta- + empsychos animate, from en- + psychē soul]

an·am·ne·sis noun
n. pl. an·am·ne·ses

1. Psychology A recalling to memory; recollection.
2. Medicine The complete history recalled and recounted by a patient.

[Greek anamnsis, from anamimnskein, anamn-, to remind : ana-, ana- + mimnskein, to recall; see men-1 in Indo-European roots.]

How to Live. What to Do.

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound:
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock
Massively rising high and bare
Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown
Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor rested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.

Reawakening.

sub·lime/səˈblīm/
Adjective:
Of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe: "ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous".
Verb:
(of a solid substance) Change directly into vapor when heated, typically forming a solid deposit again on cooling.
Synonyms:
adjective. lofty - grand - noble - exalted - elevated - stately
verb. sublimate

I'm bringing this old blog back in anticipation of another epic foray into literature with the help of the imitable Michael Sexson. Since it'll be the final year at MSU for both of us, I couldn't resist the opportunity to come back for one last hurrah.

So, for those of you who are new, welcome to the club, and for the rest of you (it almost seems we've formed a cult or something) good to see you again. This should prove to be another fantastic foray into the world of the story. I'm not taking any art history classes this semester, so I won't have that to offer, but I am taking creative writing...maybe I'll post some things from that class if they prove to be relevant. At any rate the reading for this class should be of benefit to that one.

"People who fear the prospect of eternal non-existence after death should think back to the eternity of non-existence before their birth..."