Category: writing

Robert Frost on creative growth

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

influence + experience = the waterspout
I’ve been flipping through The Collected Prose of Robert Frost and came across this marvelous bit:

No one given to looking under-ground in spring can have failed to notice how a bean starts its growth from the seed. Now the manner of a poet’s germination is less like that of a bean in the ground than of a waterspout at sea. He has to begin as a cloud of all the other poets he ever read. That can’t be helped. And first the cloud reaches down toward the water from above and then the water reaches up toward the cloud from below and finally cloud and water join together to roll as one pillar between heaven and earth. The base of water he picks up from below is of course all the life he ever lived outside of books.

Frost speaks elsewhere of “the person who writes out of the eddy in his mind.” Great images.

As an aside, not only is this a really great metaphor, but it also strikes me as a killer opening paragraph. It starts with a kind of odd idea, but not too uncomfortable (I mean, I know what a bean is, but I haven’t looked at one in the ground in decades). Then the contrast of beans with what he really wants to talk about, poets. And waterspouts. What? Then a couple short prep sentences. Then the rolling polysyndetonic waterspout of a sentence to flesh out the metaphor and to be a sort of pillar in itself connecting the odd ideas at the opening with real-world experience down at the bottom of the paragraph. The language here mirrors the concepts in a very cool way.

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Classical and pop reviews 2, Greg Sandow’s follow-up to his previous post on the topic:

Certainly we’re not immersed in classical music because we want to check whether the latest pianist to come along really knows what to do with Beethoven — whether her tempo in the slow movement of some sonata really is correct or not. And probably we’re not so deeply tied to this art because some work can be called “magnificent,” or because we identify a particular emotion inside some classical piece. We can go to the movies and get emotional. I think we’d say that the rewards we get from classical music go pretty deep. But I’m not sure we could say that reviews of classical concerts normally convey how deep and powerful those rewards can be. Whereas pop reviews pretty accurately convey what we get from pop, which among other things might mean — I think it does mean this, actually — that pop reviewing is easier. My own experience, writing both pop and classical reviews, is that I’ve had to work much harder to say what’s powerful in classical music.

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How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, by Philip K. Dick:

The strange thing is, in some way, some real way, much of what appears under the title “science fiction” is true. It may not be literally true, I suppose. We have not really been invaded by creatures from another star system, as depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The producers of that film never intended for us to believe it. Or did they?

And, more important, if they did intend to state this, is it actually true? That is the issue: not, Does the author or producer believe it, but‚ÄîIs it true? Because, quite by accident, in the pursuit of a good yarn, a science fiction author or producer or scriptwriter might stumble onto the truth… and only later on realize it.

The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

I’ll call an end to the Stevens binge with this one. It’s been fun, especially for something that I took up on impulse. Sometimes it’s best to just pick something and start it and see where it leads.

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Restatement of Romance

~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Going to a wedding this weekend.

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.

—Wallace Stevens

The “thirteen ways” meme

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

Selections from a couple dozen pages of Googling…

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

I haven’t shared any of Wallace Stevens’ longer works that I like because it doesn’t seem like a good context for it. But I can’t overlook this one. Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird was the focus of one of my research papers back in college. I remember finding it when class was looking at another poem in the book, Peter Quince at the Clavier, and I got bored and flipped around to find something more interesting.
I looked at the musical side of “Thirteen Ways,” aided by listening to Lukas Foss‘ composition of the same name that set the text of the poem for vocals and chamber ensemble. I got to blend my love of music and my love of making my schoolwork easier—I even managed to cite, in one fell swoop, nearly 100 pages of a music history textbook I was using that semester: “(Grout 676-764)”. Ha!

I like the individual moments here. One analogy I had going in the paper was that many poems are like melodies, they develop over time as the words flow by and develop and interact. These stanzas work more like a series of chords, frozen moments with each their own mood and texture. I made the deadline, anyway.

—

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.

The Snow Man

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Wallace Stevens reads The Snow Man. Jay Keyser reads it on NPR (less dreary, more enthusiasm) and praises it highly before dissecting a little bit. Keyser also has this crazy idea of writing the poem out on notecards and making a hanging mobile out of it a la Alexander Calder.

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.

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Alex Ross on Wallace Stevens:

Stevens’ grandeur is an inch away from absurdity, if not in the thick of it. This is by intention. He liked to deflate solemnity with silliness. His humor is his least noticed attribute, probably because it is so widespread. Even his titles—“The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade,” “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”—undercut their own pomposity. Sometimes I think Stevens was a collegiate prankster who never gave away the joke he played on literature.

The Brave Man

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A good wake-up poem from Wallace Stevens:

The sun, that brave man,
Comes through boughs that lie in wait,
That brave man.

Green and gloomy eyes
In dark forms of the grass
Run away.

The good stars,
Pale helms and spiky spurs,
Run away.

Fears of my bed,
Fears of life and fears of death,
Run away.

That brave man comes up
From below and walks without meditation,
That brave man.

I think this pairs nicely with one from William Carlos Williams, “El Hombre”:

It’s a strange courage
you give me ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise
toward which you lend no part!

Bring on the Wallace Stevens

~ Mark ~ 4 Comments

I’ve been going back and reading Wallace Stevens lately. I first came across his poetry a while back in a college modernist lit class, and keep coming back every so often. For the next couple days I’m going to go on a little Stevens bender around here, sort of like my Frans Masereel festival a while back (which was ruined by pesky lawyer-types, but that’s another story).
To start things off, a bit from a New York Times interview with Wallace Stevens. Stevens worked a regular day job in insurance while writing his poetry in the evenings.

Regarding the inevitable work-by-day, muse-by-night question which he has been asked for upward of forty years: “I’ve always skipped answering that. I prefer to think I’m just a man, not a poet part time, business man the rest. This is a fortunate thing, considering how inconsiderate the ravens are. I don’t divide my life, just go on living.”

Later in life Stevens even turned down a gig at Harvard because he didn’t want to leave his insurance job. There’s a refreshing lack of self-pity. Selling insurance is fine. Writing poetry is nice, too. Just a guy doing things he likes.

I’m no different from anyone else, just a run of the mine person. I like painting, books, poems. In my younger days I liked girls. But let’s not stress that. I have a wife.