Tag: poetry

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.

Men Made Out of Words

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

What should we be without the sexual myth,The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash—Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

—Wallace Stevens

~ Mark ~ 2 Comments

George Orwell’s essay Poetry and the Microphone talks about broadcasting verse over the radio, but I think there are some internet parallels here, another way to cross distances. People who are interested can find and enjoy just as easily as those who aren’t interested can move along. That combination of distance and intimacy affects how you perceive your own work:

It is reasonable to assume that your audience is sympathetic, or at least interested, for anyone who is bored can promptly switch you off by turning a knob. But though presumably sympathetic, the audience has no power over you. It is just here that a broadcast differs from a speech or a lecture. On the platform, as anyone used to public speaking knows, it is almost impossible not to take your tone from the audience. It is always obvious within a few minutes what they will respond to and what they will not, and in practice you are almost compelled to speak for the benefit of what you estimate as the stupidest person present, and also to ingratiate yourself by means of the ballyhoo known as ‚Äúpersonality‚Äù. If you don‚Äôt do so, the result is always an atmosphere of frigid embarrassment. That grisly thing, a ‚Äúpoetry reading‚Äù, is what it is because there will always be some among the audience who are bored or all but frankly hostile and who can‚Äôt remove themselves by the simple act of turning a knob…

The poet feels that he is addressing people to whom poetry means something, and it is a fact that poets who are used to broadcasting can read into the microphone with a virtuosity they would not equal if they had a visible audience in front of them. The element of make-believe that enters here does not greatly matter. The point is that in the only way now possible the poet has been brought into a situation in which reading verse aloud seems a natural unembarrassing thing, a normal exchange between man and man: also he has been led to think of his work as sound rather than as a pattern on paper. By that much the reconciliation between poetry and the common man is nearer. It already exists at the poet’s end of the ether-waves, whatever may be happening at the other end.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

The Well-Dressed Man With A Beard.

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a thought to be rehearsed all day, a speech
Of the self that must sustain itself on speech,
One thing remaining, infallible, would be
Enough. Ah! douce campagna of that thing!
Ah! douce campagna, honey in the heart,
Green in the body, out of a petty phrase,
Out of a thing believed, a thing affirmed:
The form on the pillow humming while one sleeps,
The aureole above the humming house…
It can never be satisfied, the mind, never.

Man, I really like Wallace Stevens. [via 1000timesno]

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

“I remember saying once, I can‚Äôt understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it‚Äôs like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife. Whoever I was talking to said, They‚Äôd do that too, if their agents could fix it.” Phillip Larkin in the Paris Review.