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."