The Eternal Form of Gertrude Stein.

If Wednesday was confusing, go and take a class on literary criticism and it will help you. Wallace Stevens was an originator of reality; he did not copy things as they were but things as they should be. His philosophy was that if you have to be an imitator, you should imitate the eternal form of things. We need to adjust the way we see so that we can visualize the real things. In the world of Wallace Stevens, no longer being deep is a good thing. Picasso painted Gertrude Stein, and everyone said that it looked nothing like her, the phenomenal object, and so Picasso replied, “That's all right, it will.” In time, she will come to resemble this thing. It is the essence of Gertrude Stein and not her image.

The artist does not imitate reality, they create reality. Mimesis & Poeisis are truly important. If you think mimetically you are imitating what you see in nature, but if you think poetically you are creating things that do not show up in nature. We tend to try to make things correspond to what we see in reality. What would happen if we could see things the way they really are, instead of seeing things through a glass darkly?

We could not see anything at all until an artist came along and taught us how to see that way.

Poetry is the subject of the poem. Films about film are some of the greatest films there are; songs are all about songs. Van Gogh saw things as they were, like in Starry Night.

Fabric does not hold in such a way. Poetry is a verb, the poet's job is to dress those around him, to help them see things as they really are. In the soul, the heart is of the greatest importance. James' reading was a beautiful illustration of brick allure, of taking a bunch of beautiful things and putting them together. We patch things together as we can. The man with the blue guitar is a tailor, he is going to put them together as they are. Stevens is not dictatorial, his color references are not set in stone.

How is it possible for us to see things beyond what they are, but yet still see them as they are? Think of all the ways you have been trained to see by people who are not poets, and then think of the training you've received by those who are. It will not be a man who will lead us out of our delusions; a man cannot do this for us. The man that Stevens would have us follow is a fiction, like Dr. Who : “I'm not a hero, I'm really just a madman in a box.”

Stevens and Seuss really had a lot in common if you stop to think about it.

We are moving into a place where there are not even any shadows, there is only the bright light of masculine clarity. It becomes a very masculine world; even the woman singing has a sort of masculine quality to her, an aggressiveness. Are we going to be able to create an order from this rage?

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place,
Even in the chattering of your guitar.

A tune beyond us as we are,
Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar;

Gertrude Stein on her portrait: "I was and still am satisfied with my portrait, for me it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I, for me."

Makers Rage to Order.

Is there a connection between Dr. Who and The Man With The Blue Guitar?

Your homework assignment is to go home and stand between two mirrors, in order to experience the sensation of falling into the abyss, of infinity. We need to believe without belief and beyond belief. Stevens is not trying to turn us into unbelievers, he is trying to lift us to a higher level of belief. Bad poets always copy, but good poets steal. We should not be trying to escape Stevens' influence, but embracing it.

Anxiety of influence vs ecstasy of influence. Harold Bloom's idea of influence is much more powerful and strange than general borrowing of tropes. Weak poets are influenced by others; strong writers have read precursors and are influenced by them but deny that influence. There are always people here before we got here, and if you are a writer, other writers got here before you. Reading deeply and profoundly and being influenced is good!

Your assignment is to fall into the rabbit hole and enjoy it, to read someone else's blog and respond to it.

The Idea of Order at Key West – if you memorize it, very strange things will happen to you. See if you can memorize it and find out if it ruins your life as it has done before.

Many of the people who survived in concentration camps were those who had memorized things. Memorization is much more than just a class assignment; it is a life-saving technique. Having these infernal words at your disposal is invaluable.

Your project should communicate to us that you have made a discovery, a discovery which excites you.

There are four elements of any given work of art:

• the work, or objective
• the artist, or expressive
• the world, mimetic
• audience, or pragmatic

Although it may be too soon for us to understand Sexson wants us to know that poetry is the subject of the poems. The Romantic valorized the poet as almost next to god, while the ancient world was concerned with what the work is about. How does your work of art relate to the world? Is it an accurate representation of the actual subject?

Mimesis vs. Poiesis
if you are looking for realism, then photography is the ultimate form of art, because it captures things exactly as they are.

IOKW is not about emptying out, but about filling up, about the ability to create something out of nothing. She consumed her world in Her work of art, and everything became as She saw it to be.

Open up your Stevens book, look at the words on the page, and then answer the question "What am I reading about?"

Mickey Mockers and Plaited Pairs.

mise en abyme \mē-zäⁿ-nä-bēm\

foreign term
placement at the center of an escutcheon of a smaller copy of the same escutcheon
containment of an entity within another identical entity
image of an image

incantation |ˌinkanˈtā sh ən|

noun
a series of words said as a magic spell or charm : an incantation to raise the dead.
the use of such words : there was no magic in such incantation | incantations of old slogans.

mimesis |məˈmēsis; mī-|

noun formal or technical
imitation, in particular

• representation or imitation of the real world in art and literature.
• the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change.
• Zoology another term for mimicry.

Things As They Are.

It is possible to have two lines of poetry in which the words are identical and somehow still mean two different things. Human life oscillates between desire unfulfilled and desire fulfilled; pain and boredom. Stevens is a master of taking the simile and making it totally unexpected, like the spittle of cows threading in the wind. Sunday Morning is the ultimate displacement of the human being; it makes us totally and completely free and unconditioned.

Ashley said it ain't easy to give up all our illusions, those which we have been conditioned to believe by our culture. However, she is predispositioned to Stevens because she is actually a triplet, and Stevens likes to think in threes. Dante was also a trinitarian, writing in triple rhyme and connecting to the Biblical Trinity.

Decreation, Via Negativa, and Kenosis.

Negative Capability means that you can't actually know what you are talking about, you just know everything surrounding what you are talking about. Stevens wants to be a thinking stone. Alchemists were not actually frauds or charlatans; they were indeed removing all impurities of the base metal and making it into the purest stone. In some ways, Stevens had no more control over the stuff he was writing than Ashley has over being one of three; he was a modern-day alchemist although he never thought about that.

In Sunday Morning Stevens asked a question which was answered in Ideas of Order at Key West. His thought is that we should not put humans in the position of gods; gods are immortal and humans are not. Instead, in the place of god, we should put a fictional person: “...the final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction because there is nothing else.”

Ideas of Order is not a poem of kenosis, but of pleurosis, or being filled up.

genius (ˈdʒiːnɪəs, -njəs)

— n , pl ( for senses 5, 6 ) -uses , genii
1. a person with exceptional ability, esp of a highly original kind
2. such ability or capacity: Mozart's musical genius
3. the distinctive spirit or creative nature of a nation, era, language, etc
4. a person considered as exerting great influence of a certain sort: an evil genius
5. Roman myth
a. the guiding spirit who attends a person from birth to death
b. the guardian spirit of a place, group of people, or institution
6. ( usually plural ) Arabian myth a demon; jinn

Who is this impossible possible philosopher? What is the significance of the color blue? Blue is the color of the sea and sky, but it also calms you down and makes you mentally more able to accept things. The blue guitar does not show you the world as you perceive it, but the world as it actually is, because it is the world that you want to see.

Poetry
Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Says the man with the blue guitar.

She comes along and speaks, and the world comes into being. Logos does not mean psychology; it means the divine creative principle, the speaking word that brings about the creation of the world. Speech can bring out things that have no being without words. "Valuation of the creative imagination is what brings the world into being." One may think of poetry as an eye, a way to see things. We are spectators before an act of poetic will.

Be a Better Word.

So we've been asked to blog about epiphanies, and, true to form, I'd experienced one just before Sexson asked us to do so, so here it is. In my creative writing class this semester the professor has told us that if we have a story that we're currently working on, we can use the exercises in her class to further that story instead of trying to develop a new one. Mine has been a story about a group of witches trying to...you guessed it...

Kill off their gods.

What are the chances of that, right? At any rate, I knew that was taking place and didn't really think about it until I sat down to read Stevens one night and found How to Live. What to Do. I was so excited that I decided to memorize it on the spot, even though it has been a few years since I've tried to memorize anything even that long. As I worked on it, though, I found that each time I recited a line it made a little bit more sense to me.

Here's a tip for memorizing longer poems: go backwards. Start with the last stanza and memorize it, because people tend to remember the first few lines really well and then the further they go the harder things are to remember.

Anyway, I was doing that and suddenly realized that the poem begins right where my story is set to end, and the depth of what these people are trying to do, and it hits me so hard that all I can do is mutter to myself. They're killing the gods. I thought, once, that when they did that the world would just crumble around them, without the gods that they once knew to hold it together, but now I know that's not true. They are just going to create a new world, a Lucretian world. A world a little better than the one they are in right now.

A Glass Darkly.

If Sexson had known we would start memorizing our poems already, he would have assigned us one ten times as long. If things were “perfect” they would never change; fruit would never ripen and things would be downright boring. Great poems of heaven and hell were written by people such as Dante, but it has been claimed that a great poem of earth has never written. Maybe that was Stevens' job.

Once again I have my own little piece of the pie in today's discussion about Orson Welles and 1Q84; just two days ago I listened to another podcast talking about the radio drama and the hysteria that had occurred surrounding it. Did you know that a radio station in South America tried to do the same thing a few years later, and the town was so scared that they rioted and burned down the radio station and the man who started it had to flee the country? Did you know that George Orwell's real name was Eric Arthur Blair?

The only way to get to a miracle is to climb Cold Mountain and notice all the things along the way that aren't miracles. But how much will you find? Is it the world that changes, or is it the way that we see the world?

The blogs are blowing us all out of the water; the longer I wait to blog the more intimidated I am. Maybe that's good, but hopefully this weekend I'll get a chance to get a gulp of air and dive in. I certainly have a lot to talk about.

Heart of Darkness is very Lucretian; it's all about illusions. The wretch's last words at the end were “The horror, the horror!” but you simply can't tell a pretty lady that. Is it possible, though, as James alluded, that what he saw was the Lucretian sublime?

You'll remember Nudity at the Capital if you think of going to Helena in the buff, but it makes me think of the Capitol in the Hunger Games – the people there were pretty crazy and I could easily see a few of them running around naked.

The first thing you try to do in your writing should be to teach people to see. Dynamic quality is a constant epiphany; you are startled moment by moment by what you see. Where the Red Fern Grows is where we learn to see new things, though the movie just made me cry.

1 Corinthians 13:12
“For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Don't forget that Sexson is not a Ludite, but, he missed something in Things Merely Are - at the beginning of the chapter in which we find Stevens, Critchley admits that some of the words are his, but some are indeed Stevens'.

The reason that She sings beyond the genius of the sea is that every day She sings a new song, and nature's song is more like that of perfection.

See things.

Of Sea and Sky.

Wallace Stevens was seen as a dandy, a poet who didn't really write about anything important. Between Harmonium and Ideas of Order there was 13 years of writers' block. Harmonium was basking in the maternal consciousness, the sense of warmth and water and metamorphosis, and then Stevens headed north, into the cold. We are only able to understand Farewell to Florida because we have been in this class for the last three weeks. This is a farewell to the mother and a venture into the masculine North, the land of men. Stevens is now searching for the man of glass, the impossible possible philosopher's man.

ke·no·sis /kəˈnōsis/
n.
(in Christian theology) The renunciation of the divine nature, at least in part, by Christ in the Incarnation.

decreation /de`cre*a"tion/
n.
Destruction; -- opposed to creation.

Stripping away everything so that nothing is left at the center, stripping the self of everything so that one is more ready to take everything in. The Cloud of Unknowing. Get rid of everything so that you are ready to stand pure before the divines. Even the bible says this in Matthew 19:21 –

'Jesus answered, “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”'

Sometimes it's more of an emotional purging than a physical, though –

Crying only a little bit
is no use. You must cry
until your pillow is soaked!
Then you can get up and laugh.
Then you can jump in the shower
and splash-splash-splash!
Then you can throw open your window
and, "Ha ha! ha ha!"
And if people say, "Hey
what's going on up there?"
"Ha ha!" sing back, "Happiness
was hiding in the last tear!
I wept it! Ha ha!"

There are so many wonderful blogs today, you simply must read them!

Is it important for music to have sounds in order to appreciate it? Ode to a Grecian Urn is a poem about the music we can find in silence. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter...” Hearing can change the way that we see. Artists are here to change the way we see things.

Nothing is ever destroyed, it is only destoried.

The Idea of Order at Key West

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
                          It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

Musical Language.

Our conversation today with Lace about music and speech reminded me of something that I listened to a couple weeks ago about how speech has a musical sort of power. This page gives you a link to the audio (some of the episodes are transcribed as well, but I did not see the link on this one) and some of the people that they talked about as well. The main idea of the episode, or the first third of it at least, was about how any snippet of conversation can sound musical if you listen to it enough times.

It was demonstrated in the episode and is really quite intriguing – we don't realize how much of a lyrical quality our speech has because we aren't one of those languages considered to be musical. However, listening to Sexson's lectures (particularly when he's reading poetry) is a great way to remind yourself of just how beautiful our language is.

It is interesting though to think about how a child's synesthesia might be affected by languages such as Chinese, where there is no variation in pitch by word – every time a Chinese word is repeated it sounds virtually identical, unlike in English where there is no limit to what a word should sound like. Does that mean that poetry in Chinese is different from poetry in English? I don't know, but it's something worth thinking about.

Some Friends.

Two or Three Ideas talks about how all the ideas that have come before are just trash now. We cannot go back to a past glory and see things the way they were, because that no longer exists.

“In the age of disbelief...it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief...”

200-300 years ago, the institutions and arbiters were the people who supplied our beliefs, but now that job is for the poet, for anyone who sees the world poetically, and those are some big shoes to fill.

“To see the gods dispelled in mid-air and dissolve like clouds is one of the great human experiences.”

How do we respond to the way in which we have been stripped of those psychological aids? The best way to respond is with a sense of wonder, as in How to Live, What to Do. It is up to us to find new things that might suffice through our imaginations. It is up to build a new world out of the trash of the old one.

Sexson has even assigned himself a poem: Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu.

There will be a day that will remind you, 30 years in the future, about this. Don't we all already know that Sexson has magic powers? The ordinary world in which ordinary stuff lies about you can be lit up by the imagination. Wallace Stevens is a dumpster diver – he knows how to take boring everyday things and bring them to life using only his imagination and his words.

Our little epiphanies are more like striking a match in the dark than being struck by a bolt of lightning – you will never truly see things as they are until you are dead.

When you are unpacking a poem, try to stick more closely to the original poem and don't leave things out! The thing you leave out might very well be the most important.

We don't even know who left the legacy, but we do know what the legacy is all about, and maybe it's okay that we don't know.

Six Significant Landscapes.

I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

Sea Surface Full of Clouds.

I

In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And in the morning summer hued the deck

And made one think of rosy chocolate
And gilt umbrellas. Paradisal green
Gave suavity to the perplexed machine

Of ocean, which like limpid water lay.
Who, then, in that ambrosial latitude
Out of the light evolved the morning blooms,

Who, then, evolved the sea-blooms from the clouds
Diffusing balm in that Pacific calm?
C’était mon enfant, mon bijou, mon âme.

The sea-clouds whitened far below the calm
And moved, as blooms move, in the swimming green
And in its watery radiance, while the hue

Of heaven in an antique reflection rolled
Round those flotillas. And sometimes the sea
Poured brilliant iris on the glistening blue.

II

In that November off Tehuantepec
The slopping of the sea grew still one night.
At breakfast jelly yellow streaked the deck

And made one think of chop-house chocolate
And sham umbrellas. And a sham-like green
Capped summer-seeming on the tense machine

Of ocean, which in sinister flatness lay.
Who, then, beheld the rising of the clouds
That strode submerged in that malevolent sheen,

Who saw the mortal massives of the blooms
Of water moving on the water-floor?
C’était mon frère du ciel, ma vie, mon or.

The gongs rang loudly as the windy booms
Hoo-hooed it in the darkened ocean-blooms.
The gongs grew still. And then blue heaven spread

Its crystalline pendentives on the sea
And the macabre of the water-glooms
In an enormous undulation fled.

III

In that November off Tehuantepec,
The slopping of the sea grew still one night
And a pale silver patterned on the deck

And made one think of porcelain chocolate
And pied umbrellas. An uncertain green,
Piano-polished, held the tranced machine

Of ocean, as a prelude holds and holds,
Who, seeing silver petals of white blooms
Unfolding in the water, feeling sure

Of the milk within the saltiest spurge, heard, then,
The sea unfolding in the sunken clouds?
Oh! C’était mon extase et mon amour.

So deeply sunken were they that the shrouds,
The shrouding shadows, made the petals black
Until the rolling heaven made them blue,

A blue beyond the rainy hyacinth,
And smiting the crevasses of the leaves
Deluged the ocean with a sapphire blue.

IV

In that November off Tehuantepec
The night-long slopping of the sea grew still.
A mallow morning dozed upon the deck

And made one think of musky chocolate
And frail umbrellas. A too-fluent green
Suggested malice in the dry machine

Of ocean, pondering dank stratagem.
Who then beheld the figures of the clouds
Like blooms secluded in the thick marine?

Like blooms? Like damasks that were shaken off
From the loosed girdles in the spangling must.
C’était ma foi, la nonchalance divine.

The nakedness would rise and suddenly turn
Salt masks of beard and mouths of bellowing,
Would—But more suddenly the heaven rolled

Its bluest sea-clouds in the thinking green,
And the nakedness became the broadest blooms,
Mile-mallows that a mallow sun cajoled.

V

In that November off Tehuantepec
Night stilled the slopping of the sea.
The day came, bowing and voluble, upon the deck,

Good clown… One thought of Chinese chocolate
And large umbrellas. And a motley green
Followed the drift of the obese machine

Of ocean, perfected in indolence.
What pistache one, ingenious and droll,
Beheld the sovereign clouds as jugglery

And the sea as turquoise-turbaned Sambo, neat
At tossing saucers—cloudy-conjuring sea?
C’était mon esprit bâtard, l’ignominie.

The sovereign clouds came clustering. The conch
Of loyal conjuration trumped. The wind
Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue

To clearing opalescence. Then the sea
And heaven rolled as one and from the two
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue.

The Dove in the Belly.

Wallace Stevens' poems should help you live your lives! Poems are being assigned this week: if you weren't in class today, you probably have a poem anyway.

The reason that The Snow Man is so enchanting that it uses paratactic language, language used by small children and the gospel of Mark and Hemingway. You think that the sentence is going to end and then something else comes along and then you get caught up in the moment and then suddenly it's the end of the poem and the whole story just goes on and on and on. My next project, oddly enough, is to write from the perspective of a child. What are the chances?

1 in 3.

If your blog posts are as long as Dustin's, you don't have to worry about posting very often. You should read his post (find it here). The Swerve is at the core of Lucretius.

Today is Sunday Morning. The freedom of her cockatoo is symbolic of her own freedom. The little voices in her head are like the little angel and demon sitting on your shoulders in a cartoon. We have passions, grievings, moods – if you do not have these things you are not human and should leave this class. All we have is this life, there is nothing more, but this is enough. This poem is iambic pentameter without the end rhyme.

When Stevens uses the word blue he refers to imagination; he uses green for reality.

This poem is all about the afterlife: our desire for it, and Stevens' insistence that this life is all that there is. Is this close to the sublime? Death is the mother of beauty – if we life forever, then all of this will last forever and it will become incredibly dull and boring. The fact that things will die is what makes them beautiful. If there is no death in heaven, there is no ripe fruit, no change. It is eternal summer.

Stanzas VI and VIII are the most important and the best to memorize.

She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Wow. Yeah.

Sunday Morning VI.

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

Her Undulating Scales.

On the last day of class
We will be expected to go
To something.

Compact words collide,
Bringing headaches
And tearful nights.

Take a strand of yard and stretch it,
Sinewy words
Strands of everything and nothing,
Clear as glass.

One end to another
We race
To touch the setting sun. It brings
Two
Or Three
Ideas.

Unpack a postcard
From a far-away funeral
Truth and life are within.

One should live
As those around him live
Writing
As though everyone is watching.
Keep reading
Over and over and over again.
Words will find you.

Would you prefer
The inflection or the innuendo?
Doing the thing
Caught in the moment
                                or
Reflecting like a pool?

The sun is
Most important
Stevens
Is a poem
Of the weather.

Shadows.

I'm not sure if I love it or hate it but it exists now.

The Glistening Blue.

"Yet in every word he breathed was a meaning in line with the subtle principles of things, if only you thought of it deeply."

I've been thinking about synesthesia quite a bit lately. I had a project for another class in which I had to write using synesthesia, and it made me realize just how many of the turns of phrase we use are already synesthetic: things like hard stares, warm smiles, bright laughter. Those of you in the class (there are several) surely know what I'm talking about. I've always thought it was a particularly interesting concept, in part because my vision seems a particularly deficient sense. Not in the sense of blurriness (though I'm half blind without some sort of correction), but more in that there almost seems to be a disconnect between my eyes and brain; I can see and observe things but forget about them the instant that I look away - it is only when they are in my sight that I can see things.

Maybe I need to take oral traditions.

Anyway, I'm working on that whole turning-notes-into-a-poem thing, and you may see it today or you may not. This week has been a rather long and overwhelming one and I feel an early bedtime is in order tonight. I'll be lucky indeed if I can make it through the day without being eaten by a firecat.

Speak Our Speech and Never Know.

It only takes a moment for a perfect life to end. I realized this too late; I regret learning it sooner, perhaps if I had studied the thought more intently I would not be here right now, staring into the face of death. There are only seconds left, and in these last heartbeats I find myself wanting to leave as much of myself in this place as I can, weaving my words into the landscape as I've been doing for the past fifteen years.

Everyone said that the two of us were crazy when we packed up our things and left the city. We ignored them. Our overloaded boat had skidded out of the port and drifted along for weeks until we finally found this island and decided to stop. It was a noisy place, but it was a crackling of imagination set aflame, of parrots squawking and macaques screeching and flies buzzing over fruits dripping with juices. We settled down then, claiming the island as our own, finding a high cliff which overlooked the sea on which the build our new house. My wife helped me with the building, though it was a long and wearisome task with just the two of us, and it had been almost three years before the task was complete.

I could see it now, glimmering up on the cliffs, our mansion. It was beyond our reach now, I realized sadly, all our labor lost in a single day. Long after we were gone the house would stand as a tribute to our work. That house was the only sort of lasting mark we had left here. Instead of trying to carve out the island to suit our whims, we had let ourselves grow into a part of it: racing the foxes across the hills and through the bright tangled vines; letting the sharp air seep into our lungs and make us stronger, faster; harvesting grapes that tinted the air a rich purple; and in the winter, attacking the cold and frost with a ferocity that seemed to come from outside of us. We never grew cold or tired. It was as if, for a while, the island had lent some of its life to us.

Although we had not tried to change things, there seemed to be a trail constantly following us, as if the place lit up at our presence. Flowers we had stared at seemed to grow brighter, faster. Color and vibrance and joy burst forth from my wife almost visibly, and tinted the whole place with its ineffable fragrance. She assured me that it was much the same with me. I wondered if those changes would stay once we were gone. It would be a shame if they were to disappear with us.

"Someone will find this place someday," my wife said, and I could feel the hope in her voice. I thought of little children running along the beach turned hard and black, voices laughing and cheering, bringing color back into this world again, and smiled. If I could not take joy from this place anymore, it might as well be shared with someone else, even if it was years from now, even if it took so long that the house faded and grew tattered, lonely from want of life.

I could see the lava rushing down the slope from where the mountaintop used to be. Up on its cliff, the house would be safe from most of the flow, merely covered in ash, but the beach where my wife and I stood would be buried in seconds. There was no time to react when the mountaintop blew off. There had been no warning, no trembling of the lush ferns, no rumbling emanating from the ground. We had been watching the sunset on the beach, feet splashing in the cold water, never suspecting. One minute the world was perfect, and the next the volcano sang, and the world was changed to a white-hot trembling bliss.

No Angels, No Demons, No Ghosts.

Each of us will be assigned a poem to recite for the class. As long as you do it, and understand the poem as being chosen out of desire, we will be happy.

Is is possible to enjoy a poem without understanding it?

Things are patient – you leave the house and are gone all day, and the coffeepot is always exactly where you left it.

Stevens is looking to build the impossible possible philosopher's man. Not looking at the mythological context so much as the scene and how the imagination came up with it.

Start thinking about what your project is going to be and how it ties in with Lucretius and Stevens. You can do whatever you want, but it should involve words somehow, because it won't be gradable otherwise.

Blog, blog, blog! It doesn't matter what to say, as long as you just say something.

In the bible is a book called Proverbs. Most people can remember proverbs because they are written to be memorable. Take these for example:

“Life is an affair of people, not places.
But for me,
Life is an affair of places
And that is the problem.”

“There is only the weather.”

“The collecting of poetry
For one's experience
As one goes along
Is not the same as merely writing poetry.”

You may want to read the poem The Motive for Metaphor. Stevens belonged to a group of poets called the imagists; their motto was “no ideas but in things.” Umbrellas are trees.

Let's Make a Plan.

Lucretian Sublime in Wallace Stevens LIT 438 Fall 2012-Sexson
9/10-14	Reading Harmonium, especially “Sunday Morning.” Assignment: Read “Two or Three Ideas,” p. 839.
9/17-21	Read “Ideas of Order,” with emphasis on: Waving Adieu, Idea of Order at Key West, How to Live, American Sublime, Sad Strains, Evening without Angels. Prose: Figure of Youth as Virile Poet, p. 666
9/24-28	Read ”Man with the Blue Guitar” 135. Prose: Three Academic Pieces, p. 680
10/1-5	Read “Parts of a World” , p. 177. Esp. Poems of our Climate, Study of 2 Pears, On the Road Home, Latest Freed Man, Dezembrum, Of Modern Poetry, Mrs. Alfred Uruguay, Asides on Oboe.
10/8-12	Continue reading Parts of a World. Prose: Effects of Analogy, p. 707
10/15-18	Read Transport to Summer, p. 255. Esp. Motive for Metaphor, Esthetique du Mal, Flyer’s Fall, Men Made out of Words, House was Quiet, Dove in the Belly, Credences of Summer, NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FICTION.
10/22-26	Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, p. 329.
10/29-N2	Read “Auroras of Autumn” p.355. Esp. Title poem, Large Red Man, Primitive like an Orb, Angel Surrounded by Paysans. Prose: Imagination as Value, p 724
11/5-9	Week to catch up. Individual presentations 1.
11/12-15	No class Nov 12. SOLARIS-- LEM (Possibly Tarkovsky’s film version). Discussion.
11/18-22	Read: “The Rock,” esp. Plain Sense, Hermitage, Old Philosopher in Rome, World as Meditation, Final Soliloquy, The Rock, Planet of Table. Not Ideas. Read “Late Poems” esp. Course of Particular, Child Asleep, Of Mere Being, p. 476 Prose: Poetry and Painting, p. 740.
11/25-29	Projects Part 1.
12/3-7	Projects Part 2. NO CLASS ON DEC 7. Instead, attend Pirsig “Event” at 7pm in place to be designated.

On Undulating Wings.

On the last day of class we will be expected to go to something.

Poetry is more difficult because it is more compact. If we unpack a poem, perhaps we can learn more about it. Not only are we going to read all the poems, we will also read a prose piece: Two or Three Ideas. Why don't we unpack A Postcard From The Volcano and see what we learn from it?

Want to know what you need from a blog? Read everyone else's blog – that is what you should be doing. Blog about stuff you read over and over and over again.

Would you prefer the inflection or the innuendo? Doing the thing, being in the moment, or reflecting upon it afterwards?

The sun is one of the most important symbols – Stevens is a poem of the weather.

Shadows.

Seventy-Three.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

With Socks of Lace.

It is the summer I turned seven, and everything is insufferably hot. My pillow is drenched with sweat, and even the breeze propelled through the living room with the two noisy box fans, which must be older than my parents, does nothing to help with the heat. I wonder, as I toss and turn, blanket tangled about my feet, whether it is possible to die of heatstroke in your sleep or whether you would wake up first.

I seem to be the only one having trouble sleeping. My cousins lay sprawled out across the living room, limbs every which way. Briefly I wonder why the heat does not stifle them as it does me. For a horrified moment I wonder if they have not died already, and I sit up with a shock, but then Sophie snores and rolls over, and I can see the gentle rise and fall of breath as each of them slumber dreamlessly. All in a rush my own breath comes back, and I sit quietly for a moment, just taking in slow gulps of air.

After a moment I decide that maybe a drink might help. I stand up quietly and patter on bare feet to the kitchen. The linoleum feels hot and sticky, so I stand on my tiptoes so I do not have to touch it. As I reach into the cupboard for a glass, barely at the tip of my reach, a flash of color from the kitchen window catches my eye, and I freeze.

Petrified, I turn slowly to look out the window, but nothing is there. I tiptoe to the kitchen sink to fill my glass. The pipes thumps three times before the water turns on, and I wince. As the glass fills, I peer intently out the window, but I can't figure out what it was that I saw. Nervous, I turn the sink off and take a sip from the glass. Even the water is disgustingly warm. I spit a mouthful into the sink, and then the light flashes again. It's a ghost! I realize with horror.

An empty nightgown flaps slowly in the breeze, lit as if by a flashlight, glowing purple and green and sickly in the night. My legs feel as though they have been frozen in place. Almost as soon as I realize what it is, the light seems to twist off the nightgown, and it disappears into the black. My legs tremble. Slowly I regain my courage and slink towards the kitchen door. I wonder what will happen in the morning, when my cousins and grandparents discover that I have gone missing.

The screen door opening seems to be the loudest noise in the world. I slink as far out onto the porch as I can, still holding the door to keep it from slamming shut, and stand for a moment, bewildered. Nothing there. The breeze on the porch was a bit cooler than inside, but there was no sign of the ghost I could have sworn I saw just a moment ago. Disappointed, I turn to go back inside, only to slam into someone. I try to scream, but a hand quickly covers my mouth. "Shhh!"

It is only my cousin Steven. Air fills my lungs with a gasp as he lets go. "You scared me!" I whisper angrily.

He responds with a question. "What are you doing out here?"

"I saw a ghost!" I insist, and as I speak light fills the air, and the nightgown appears again. There are two of them this time, fluttering lightly in the breeze, all blue and green and yellow. Light dances on them in ways I do not understand, and I wrap my arms around Steven's waist with a yelp. "There they are!"

A low chuckle escapes him. "Ghosts, eh?" He turns me around so I can see the brake lights of the car disappearing around the bend, the source of the eerie light. When I turn back to look at where the nightgowns had come from, I saw them, dangling from grandma's wash line. "But," I insist, "The colors! You saw! They were rainbows!"

Wordlessly, Steven points to the crystal dangling from the end of the porch. "It's a prism," he explains. "When light shines through it, it breaks into rainbows." I frowned, and then for the first time noticed grandpa sitting at the end of the porch with a bottle of whiskey in his hand and his boots still on. It looked as though he'd fallen asleep there. I went to go wake him up, and Steven stopped me. "He's asleep. Dreaming." Grandpa twitched a bit. I watched him curiously. My cousins told us of their dreams sometimes, of missing the school bus and running to class, of forgetting to write a paper.

Their dreams were not interesting, not like grandpa's. Grandma said it was because when he was younger he was a sailor, and he had been all over the world. He had seen lots of things, she said, and that was why he sat quietly at the dinner table while the cousins all chattered away. Late at night, once he'd drunk some of his whiskey, he would sometimes tell stories that made a chill run down my spine. I wanted to wake him now, to ask him about his dreams. Maybe he would share them with me, and I would dream of those things too.

But Steven took me by the shoulders and led me back into the house. "Let's not wake him. He's probably back in India, hunting tigers again."

The Idea of Order at Key West.

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.

For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.

If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

No Words to Speak.

It feels as though for the first time, I am starting to see.

Yesterday I watched a baby patter through the grocery store, AAaaaaAAaaaaAAaaaaAAaaaaAAaaaaAAaaaa, each footfall triggering a burst of joy, noise falling from her lips in bursts. It almost seemed as though she could not run without shouting, for when she was quiet she looked down at the ground when she walked, and each step was slow, cautious, not like the reckless abandon of her running chant. For this little one, mobility and noise walked hand in hand. Another form of synesthesia?

Today I realized just how much I've come to appreciate the awful brevity of this world. It struck me today as I sat with my grandma, thinking about the tea parties we used to have when my sister and I were little. We didn't drink tea then, but we do now. The time has changed me far more than my grandmother, but I can see the difference in her as well. She is an inch shorter, frailer, all the muscle gone from her body now. She will be eighty-six this November. Her heartbeats are past spent. But it wasn't until she fell and broke her hip at the beginning of this year that I realized just how short our time together might be.

It makes me want to run and dance and scream just to hear the sound of my own voice. It makes me want to create things, though I'm afraid that I can never do justice to creating. I feel myself inadequate, as if I cannot possibly create enough to make my existence worthwhile. But I'll do the best that I can. Even if homework tends to get in the way every now and again. And I'll see what I can do to inspire others while I'm at it - maybe a few mind babies would help make my life worth it as well.

It's difficult for me to find the words I need to say right now. I think I'll go and see if Stevens has something to say for me.

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

To Sleep Before Evening

An esthete is a person who spends a good amount of their time thinking about art or poetry, who think that not only do you need to write to be understood, but you need your writing to be the thing you are talking about. Walter Pater was the esthete of esthetes.

Lucretius, sublime, Wallace Stevens – the things that we are asked to think about so far. But how can we think about Lucretius and the sublime in relation to each other?

Lucretius was one of the first empiricists, which means that he looks at natural processes and thinks of very different ways that thing have come about. Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face...

A response to the question how to live, and what to do:

“To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy of Comte, or of Hegel, or of our own. Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us. "Philosophy is the microscope of thought." The theory or idea or system which requires of us the sacrifice of any part of this experience, in consideration of some interest into which we cannot enter, or some abstract theory we have not identified with ourselves, or of what is only conventional, has no real claim upon us.

“One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of the Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. An undefinable taint of death had clung always about him, and now in early manhood he believed himself smitten by mortal disease. He asked himself how he might make as much as possible of the interval that remained; and he was not biassed by anything in his previous life when he decided that it must be by intellectual excitement, which he found just then in the clear, fresh writings of Voltaire. Well! we are all condamnés, as Victor Hugo says: we are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve—les hommes sont tous condamnés à mort avec des sursis indéfinis: we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest, at least among "the children of this world," in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which come naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.”

The best of the children of the world spend their pulses in two things: art, and song.

It wouldn't be sublime if it wasn't Lucretian! It only works if you have this brief interview, and nothing on the other sides. Death means nothing for the people who die, it only concerns those who are left there watching. Things are only beautiful because we die – if we had them forever they would have no value to us.

Although drawing it out into prose makes it make more sense, it does not have this same compact beauty that a poem will. We have been dancing around poems, but now it's time to get analytical. Find a poem, and go to work on it.

The jar is probably the third or fourth cousin of the most famous holding container ever – the Grecian urn. A Dominion Jar was a common jar for canning in Stevens' day. It is the act of imagination that creates order in the world.

Look at these 7:
Domination of Black
Snow Man (Dustin)
A High Toned Old Christian Woman
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Disillusionment of Ten O'clock
Anecdote of the Jar
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

Also
Sunday Morning

The Red Wheelbarrow.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Participation Mystique.

Please make a notation in your blog about which book you have borrowed and will be reading! Also, do not be afraid to mark them up, in fact you are required to mark them up. Just make sure we know who is doing the marking!

As for me, I will be reading Wallace Stevens: A collection of critical essays, edited by Marie Borroff. It looks pretty well-worn already, so I hope that my predecessors aren't lying when they say that it is good.

Harmonium should not be an intellectual exercise, but a joyful experience of what it is like to be young. We should become absorbed in the motions and sounds of words.

Like the Bible, Wallace Stevens is divinatory, meaning that you can open it anywhere and it will give you what you need. You don't need to understand it , you just need to enjoy it.

If you feel as though everyone else is better than you, don't worry: everyone else feels the same way! As a poem, Comedian as the Letter C sounds like gibberish. Stevens' poems do not work singly; listen to them talk to one another, as we talk to one another.

You cannot get to the other shore until you leave the one they're on. Not only do we have to pay attention to the words, but we need to listen to the way they sound. Debate has to do with speaking, and speaking has to do with oratory. There has to be something important about the sounds of words, even without sense. What is important to you is to love the sound of the words. Under Milk Wood is a poem enigmatic of Wallace Stevens' early works.

Read the essay by Stevens: The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.

Polymorphous Perverse Infantile Sexuality only means that a child, before they learn to speak, does not locate pleasure zones on any one part of the body because the entire body is a pleasure zone.

Read the last paragraph of Walter Pater's The Renaissance...“All the arts aspire to the condition of music...” You should approach these poems as if they were music. Stevens is entranced with the mothers (muses). Don't try to figure it out too soon, stick with the sounds and the music.

"In the presto of the morning, Crispin trod,
Each day, still curious, but in a round
Less prickly and much more condign than that
He once thought necessary. Like Candide,
Yeoman and grub, but with a fig in sight,
And cream for the fig and silver for the cream,
A blonde to tip the silver and to taste
The rapey gouts. Good star, how that to be
Annealed them in their cabin ribaldries!
Yet the quotidian saps philosophers
And men like Crispin like them in intent,
If not in will, to track the knaves of thought.
But the quotidian composed as his,
Of breakfast ribands, fruits laid in their leaves,
The tomtit and the cassia and the rose,
Although the rose was not the noble thorn
Of crinoline spread, but of a pining sweet,
Composed of evenings like cracked shutters flung
Upon the rumpling bottomness, and nights
In which those frail custodians watched,
Indifferent to the tepid summer cold,
While he poured out upon the lips of her
That lay beside him, the quotidian
Like this, saps like the sun, true fortuner.
For all it takes it gives a humped return
Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed."

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon.

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

The Emperor of Ice Cream.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Tea.

When the elephant's-ear in the park
Shrivelled in frost,
And the leaves on the paths
Ran like rats,
Your lamp-light fell
On shining pillows,
Of sea-shades and sky-shades
Like umbrellas in Java.

With eyes wide shut
I drink until
My cup overfloweth
Pages dog-eared, I
Cannot
Get enough.

Explanation.

Ach, Mutter,
This old, black dress,
I have been embroidering
French flowers on it.

Not by way of romance,
Here is nothing of the ideal,
Nein,
Nein.

It would have been different,
Liebchen,
If I had imagined myself,
In an orange gown,
Drifting through space,
Like a figure on the church-wall.

Depression Before Spring.

The cock crows
But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde
Is dazzling,
As the spittle of cows
Threading the wind.

Ho! Ho!

But ki-ki-ri-ki
Brings no rou-cou,
No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes
In slipper green.

Mostly, I Love the Word Scaramouche.

It is with a strange malice
That I distort the world.

Ah! that ill humors
Should mask as white girls.
And ah! that Scaramouche
Should have a black barouche.

The sorry verities!
Yet in excess, continual,
There is cure of sorrow.

Permit that if as ghost I come
Among the people burning in me still,
I come as belle design
Of foppish line.

And I, then, tortured for old speech,
A white of wildly woven rings;
I, weeping in a calcined heart,
My hands such sharp, imagined things.

The Weeping Burgher

I Cannot Stop.

Someone help me. It's as though I'm being pulled in, as if reality is drifting away, imagination taking flight, and I cannot help leaping from one poem to the next to the next, hungry for more.

On second thought, maybe I do not want to be saved after all.

Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks.

In the moonlight
I met Berserk,
In the moonlight
On the bushy plain.
Oh, sharp he was
As the sleepless!

And, "Why are you red
In this milky blue?"
I said.

"Why sun-colored,
As if awake
In the midst of sleep?"

"You that wander,"
So he said,
"On the bushy plain,
Forget so soon.
But I set my traps
In the midst of dreams."

I knew from this
That the blue ground
Was full of blocks
And blocking steel.
I knew the dread
Of the bushy plain,

And the beauty
Of the moonlight
Falling there,
Falling
As sleep falls
In the innocent air.

Anecdote of Men by the Thousands.

The soul, he said, is composed
Of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said,
Who are the East.
There are men of a province
Who are that province.
There are men of a valley
Who are that valley.

There are men whose words
Are as natural sounds
Of their places
As the cackle of toucans
In the place of toucans.

The mandoline is the instrument
Of a place.

Are there mandolines of western mountains?
Are there mandolines of northern moonlight?

The dress of a woman of Lhassa,
In its place,
Is an invisible element of that place
Made visible.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

I.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II.
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III.
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV.
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI.
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII.
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII.
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X.
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI.
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII.
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Two Figures in Dense Violet Night.

I had as lief be embraced by the portier of the hotel
As to get no more from the moonlight
Than your moist hand.

Be the voice of the night and Florida in my ear.
Use dasky words and dusky images.
Darken your speech.

Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking,
But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts,
Conceiving words,

As the night conceives the sea-sound in silence,
And out of the droning sibilants makes
A serenade.

Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole
and sleep with one eye watching the stars fall
Beyond Key West.

Say that the palms are clear in the total blue.
Are clear and are obscure; that it is night;
That the moon shines.

Gubbinal.

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.
That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.
The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

Jasmine's Beautiful Thoughts Underneath The Willow.

My titillations have no foot-notes
And their memorials are the phrases
Of idiosyncratic music.

The love that will not be transported
In an old, frizzled, flambeaud manner,
But muses on its eccentricity,

Is like a vivid apprehension
Of bliss beyond the mutes of plaster,
Or paper souvenirs of rapture,

Of bliss submerged beneath appearance,
In an interior ocean's rocking
Of long, capricious fugues and chorals.

Sonatina to Hans Christian.

If any duck in any brook,
Fluttering the water
For your crumb,
Seemed the helpless daughter

Of a mother
Regretful that she bore her;
Or of another,
Barren, and longing for her;

What of the dove,
Or thrush, or any singing mysteries?
What of the trees
And intonations of the trees?

What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?