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?"