The Epic.

Whoever is tallest among men cannot reach the heavens, and the greatest cannot encompass the earth. - Gilgamesh

Of Poetry.

I'm going to go back a step now and talk about the poem about poetry we were supposed to discover. As many others have found, mine not only related to poetry, but mentioned poetry directly (I got July Mountain, from the late poems).

We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches.
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry--
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.

---

A mythology reflects its region. Here
In Connecticut, we never lived in a time
When mythology was possible--But if we had--
That raises the question of the image's truth.
The image must be of the nature of its creator.
It is the nature of its creator increased,
Heightened. It is he, anew, in a freshened youth
And it is he in the substance of his region
Woods of his forests and stone out of his fields
Or from under his mountains.

The second part, I think, is its own untitled poem, but it seems to relate, and I thought it was worth throwing in anyway. But anyway. The "constellation of patches and of pitches" reminded me of an orchestra tuning up, all of those different noises that eventually come together to make a beautiful song, and that's how poetry seems to come together, too, at least when I'm writing it - I take a jumble of ideas and toss them in a bowl, shake vigorously, and then pull out the things that seem to have some sort of connection.

I want to write more poetry.

Anyway, I don't think that I experienced the same epiphany from this experience that Carla and Grace and others did, but I did it at least, and I do see the connection there. Maybe if I read it again once I stop asking questions it will make more sense.

The Reader.

All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.

It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in the moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, "Everything
Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden."

The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.

Re-Statement of Romance.

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

Landscape With Boat.

An anti-master floribund ascetic.

He brushed away the thunder, then the clouds,
Then the colossal illusion of heaven. Yet still
The sky was blue. He wanted imperceptible air.
He wanted to see. He wanted the eye to see
And not be touched by blue. He wanted to know,
A naked man who regarded himself in the glass
Of air, who looked for the world beneath the blue,
Without blue, without any turqouise hint or phase,
Any azure under-side or after-color. Nabob
Of bones, he rejected, he denied, to arrive
At the neutral center, the omnious element,
The single colored, colorless, primitive.

It was not as if the truth lay where he thought,
Like a phantom, in an uncreated night.
It was easier to think it lay there. If
It was nowhere else, it was there and because
It was nowhere else, its place had to be supposed,
Itself had to be supposed, a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard. He would arrive.
He had only not to live, to walk in the dark,
To be projected by one void into
Another.

              It was his nature to suppose
To receive what others had supposed, without
Accepting. He received what he denied.
But as truth to be accepted, he supposed
A truth beyond all truths.

                                       He never supposed
That he might be truth, himself, or part of it,
That the things that he rejected might be part
And the irregular turquoise part, the perceptible blue
Grown dense, part, the eye so touched, so played
Upon by clouds, the ear so magnified
By thunder, parts, and all these things together,
Parts, and more things, parts. He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.

Had he been better able to suppose:
He might sit on a sofa on a balcony
Above the Mediterranean, emerald
Becoming emeralds. He might watch the palms
Flap green ears in the heat. He might observe
A yellow wine and follow a steamer's track
And say, "The thing I hum appears to be
The rhythm of this celestrial pantomime"

Loss of Faith is Growth.

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

I wish that I could be a thinking stone.

Just when I think I'm feeling confident that I know what's going on in this class we get thrown a curveball. I've had a lot of epiphanies this semester, or at least I think I have, but the idea of getting rid of imagination frankly makes me rather angry. I have enough trouble being imaginative as it is...you would think that would mean that I wouldn't mind giving it up but no...I feel like I can't, like I won't be creative enough if I give up imagination. Not that I feel as though I'm brimming with creativity as it is right now.

"The romantic exists in precision as well as in imprecision."

That's one of the adages that caught my eye, and it's a little bit of an insight for me as well. I like things to be just-so, and it's very frustrating when they're not. Just taking my thoughts and throwing them out onto my blog is difficult because of this, but my semester has been so hectic that doing anything more than that is nigh impossible. So I've been putting it off and convincing myself "I'll blog tomorrow, when I have some free time."

Yesterday I was having a conversation with my otter about epilogues in stories. My personal thought is that epilogues are rarely necessary to the story, and serve only as a sequel hook or a way to show that the couple did get married in the end and had eighteen children. I don't care what happens after most stories and I don't understand, if that information is so important, why the writer doesn't just make it a part of the story.

This is where the conversation segued off and we started talking about our own stories (we are both writers, or at least try to think we are). My otter mentioned that he would like to write a whole series of books set in the world he's building now, and I realized then that the idea of having a sequel to the story I'm writing now had never even occurred to me. In fact, I don't think I could write a sequel. I'm loving the Lucretian elements that I've been finding to pull in and it's been a great joy (and a challenge) to see things start to take shape, plotwise, in this setting that's been brewing in my head for a while, but I see the ending of the story, and that's where the story, well, ends.

I'm stuck on the idea of How to Live. What to Do. It adds a very satisfying ending, I think, to the piece. The problem is that there's this whole new world that has just opened up in front of these characters (and me) and I have no idea what will happen. I just don't. As much as I'm loving the idea of being able to throw off everything old, all of your illusions and preconceptions and notions of the way life should be, I have absolutely no idea what should happen after that...

"The man who asks questions seeks only to reach a point where it will no longer be necessary for him to ask questions."

That describes me in a nutshell.

So how do I stop asking?

A Pear is a Pear.

Read Adagia and find a couple of adages that you like.

“The ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances is the single greatest thought that mankind has ever had.”

...or is it...

“This double experience of mutation and recurrence, an experience at once sentimental and scientific, soon brought with it a very great thought, perhaps the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon, and which was the chief inspiration of Lucretius. It is that all we observe about us, and ourselves also, may be so many passing forms of a permanent substance.”

We say “carpe diem” because we see the horrifying brevity of life that poets have taught us to see, that of mayflies. One generation comes and another generation goes but the earth abides forever. The word that shows up as vanity should really be something to the effect of “breath”. If things are here and then gone, what are we going to do once they are?

There is an Indian philosophy that everything is made of the same substances, in fact, that all things are one, even the flies that buzz around our heads. A gadfly is someone who asks questions that aren't pertinent, who can interrupt progress by bothering these issues relentlessly. Looking for a cure for that buzzing? Try a poem.

Sonnets are cures in an almost medicinal sense. They are very strict; fourteen lines in either three quatrains and a couplet, or an octet and a sextet. The emphasis always has to be on the right syllable, and the right number of syllables must be on each line. You only get fourteen lines to do what you want to do; you need this form of order, or else the cure just won't work. Keep in mind that everything is used to speak about poetry.

Cutting down the tree that connected us to heaven helps us to see the world in a way that we have never seen it before. Get in touch with all the things that are alienated to you. If you are in touch with everything, there will be nothing that you do not enjoy, because they are all a part of you. Everything is wonderful.

We should probably get rid of the way that we want to see things, and see things as they actually are. "The pears are not seen as the observer wills." Stevens, in this phase, is trying to get us to strip away all of these distractions that make us see things in relation to another.

Read landscape with boat, and then go out and see something as it really is.

Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Rooms.

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells;
And students with their pensive citadels;
Maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom,
Sit blithe and happy; bees that soar for bloom,
High as the highest Peak of Furness-fells,
Will murmur by the hour in foxglove bells:
In truth the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence for me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground;
Pleased if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find brief solace there, as I have found.

Imperfection is our Paradise.

In this class, we are going to empty ourselves out and then build up new things to fill that emptiness. We are going to finally see things as they are, and that epiphany will fill us. Everybody hears the same thing when we listen to the music of the earth. It is called a dawn chorus, tying it back to Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing Itself. Why is it that things always seem to tie back to Stevens? Do they really, or are we just drawing meanings from it? I think we could say that it is not just a coincidence, but rather that it is a poetic coincidence, a poesis.

Today's magic word is thing. Stevens is the King of Things, the Thing King (thinking). In the volume we are in right now, he is obsessed with things. This comes back to On the Nature of Things. When we are unable to sort things out we find that we want to cease all thought and find a cure of the mind. Many critics dismiss this volume, and say it's not as good as the rest.

cure (ky
r) n.
1. Restoration of health; recovery from disease.
2. A method or course of medical treatment used to restore health.
3. An agent, such as a drug, that restores health; a remedy.
4. Something that corrects or relieves a harmful or disturbing situation: The cats proved to be a good cure for our mouse problem.
5. Ecclesiastical Spiritual charge or care, as of a priest for a congregation.
6. The office or duties of a curate.
7. The act or process of preserving a product.
v. cured, cur·ing, cures
v.tr.
1. To restore to health.
2. To effect a recovery from: cure a cold.
3. To remove or remedy (something harmful or disturbing): cure an evil.
4. To preserve (meat, for example), as by salting, smoking, or aging.
5. To prepare, preserve, or finish (a substance) by a chemical or physical process.
6. To vulcanize (rubber).
v.intr.
1. To effect a cure or recovery: a medicine that cures.
2. To be prepared, preserved, or finished by a chemical or physical process: hams curing in the smokehouse.

The primordial tree is what allowed people in heaven to talk to people on earth and so on. As long as this tree was there the world was all right. Look at as many still lives as you can between now and Friday.

To Be Without a Description of To Be.

We now know what the earth itself sounds like. Chorus...is one of the clearest examples we've ever heard. Keep in mind that it is not actually sound waves, no sounds that we can hear, but waves much deeper than that. Maybe deep isn't such a bad thing after all.

Steve Kemper is researching painting and Stevens; Paul Klee says that painting is simply to put color in the right place. Not only do Stevens' poems talk about poetry, but his prose does, too.

Everything is starting to draw together – just imagine how we'll look at things by the end of the semester. Words Chosen of Desire is a phrase drawn by Primitive of an Orb. We should only choose words out of desire; they will not work otherwise. Unfortunately we will not be able to read the entirety of Man With a Blue Guitar in class but we encourage you to do so anyway.

We're reaching the point in the semester where if you read peoples' blogs you can get a pretty idea of what's going on in class because that is what we talk about. You should probably watch the video that Alexandra put on her blog, though. And read Spencer's poem, because it's pretty rad.

Also, if you're sad, try writing sonnets until you will feel better. It's worked for me when I try it, though I should try it more. I might have my own harmonium by now.

"My mother said to me, 'If you become a soldier you'll be a general; if you become a monk you'll end up as the Pope.' Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso."