Bring on the Wallace Stevens

2008-06-09 ~ 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.

2008-01-21 ~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

On NPR, a conversation about Holden Caulfield, protagonist of The Catcher in the Rye. The literary remembrance has some interesting segues into how you read the book differently as you grow older, the beginnings of a teenage culture in the ’50s, and whether or not you can imagine Holden as an adult.

The Road (review: 5/5)

2007-12-30 ~ Mark ~ 1 Comment

Cormac McCarthy‘s The Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic America. The novel centers on a father and son who, realizing they can’t survive another winter, start moving through the southeast towards the coast, trudging through snow and ash with their belongings in a scavenged shopping cart. Where they leave from, where exactly they are going, and what they hope to find are never made completely clear, just as the cause of society’s downfall is unexplained. But the beauty of the story is in everyday purpose they find in each other despite the struggle. There are a few tense moments avoiding bands of thieves and cannibals or other desperate nomads, but most of the book is a catalog of daily trials and conversations, simply and lovingly told.
McCarthy’s language is surprisingly simple and repetitive. It often called to mind a bit of the last stanza of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird“:

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.

Like Wallace Stevens’ poetry, McCarthy’s book has something of music in it. At times, since the book has no chapters or divisions larger than a few paragraphs, it reads like a very long unbroken poem or chant or something you might read aloud. McCarthy occasionally disrupts this flow with some whiz-bang vocabulary (e.g. gryke, chary, kerf), but for the most part it’s just really wonderful.