Search Results for: wallace stevens

We Made It Through January

By in poems, Wallace Stevens

Happy February first (or Imbolc, if you’re a Druid). Did we all enjoy the mix of snow and sun and high 40’s yesterday? It made me think that yes, we can get through this. I always think of a Wallace Stevens poem at this time of year–“at the end of winter when afternoons return.”

The Poems of our Climate

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one’s torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Friday Unrelated Information

By in Friday Unrelated Information

1. Happy birthday, Wallace Stevens (1879). I’ll try to remember this quote when I’m feeling overwhelmed: “Everything is complicated; if that were not so, life and poetry and everything else would be a bore.”

2. Go visit myvintagevogue.com before Conde Nast makes them take down the site for copyright infringement. Some of the dresses are so timeless:

3. I agree with this: “What we need is a word to describe ‘nostalgia for things we haven’t even experienced.’ Things like transistor radios, soda counters, and rabbit-eared televisions. Wes Anderson is a connoisseur of this sensation. No doubt the French have ten different words for it.” (From here, a blog about the production of Where the Wild Things Are.)

Robins: What Do They Do All Winter, Anyway?

By in poems, Wallace Stevens

Yesterday evening was so pretty; all the robins were singing. I’ve noticed them in the early mornings, too, which is my favorite part of late spring. So here is a poem about one bird starting to sing early, by our friend Wallace Stevens:

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

Something To Read While You’re Waiting To Start Working

By in poems, Wallace Stevens 

I'm waiting to organize web copy today and that
reminded me of Wallace Stevens' "The Idea of
Order at Key West," which you can read in full
here.

She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.  And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.  Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

A Snow Poem For A Monday

By in Uncategorized

I’ve been having trouble sleeping this last week, waking up at 4:00 or so and not being able to get back to sleep. Last night my eyes popped open at 2:00; around 4:00 I got tired of turning over and got up to have some tea (mmm, valerian). Just to get my mind on something other than not sleeping, I picked up the big poetry anthology and found some Wallace Stevens, which I read while looking out the window at the snow.

“The Snow Man”

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.

Then the valerian made me dizzy and I went back to bed, where I eventually fell asleep on my stomach and woke up with a neck ache. But it’s a nice poem, huh?

Kind Of

By in Uncategorized

It’s kind of dark this morning. I think it snowed in the night. It might be raining right now but I’m not going down to get the newspaper until I’m dressed and on my way to the car, because it’s kind of cold. Kind of reminds me of this section from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” by Wallace Stevens. (Well, it’s kind of a stretch. But it’s a good description of a snowy afternoon, which is kind of like a rainy morning.)

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Out of Order

By in Uncategorized

So the Mark Strand poem from last Monday that started out, “It is true, as someone has said, that in a world without heaven all is farewll,” is a reply to this one by Wallace Stevens, which I looked up last night. And while it’s probably not the best idea to post something I don’t really understand, I remember a professor once saying a poem was “an emotional map on paper.” And we all need maps.

“Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu”

That would be waving and that would be crying,
Crying and shouting and meaning farewell,
Farewell in the eyes and farewell at the center,
Just to stand still without moving a hand.

In a world without heaven to follow, the stops
Would be endings, more poignant than partings, profounder,
And that would be saying farewell, repeating farewell,
Just to be there and just to behold.

To be one’s singular self, to despise
The being that yielded so little, acquired
So little, too little to care, to turn
to the ever-jubilant weather, to sip

One’s cup and never to say a word,
Or to sleep or just to lie there still,
Just to be there, just to be beheld,
That would be bidding farewell, be bidding farewell.

One likes to practice the thing. They practice,
Enough, for heaven. Ever-jubilant,
What is there here but weather, what spirit
Have I except it comes from the sun?

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