Poem For the Weekend

Wallace Stephens' Man Carrying Thing

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious while, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that are suddenly real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

In Stephens vague way, he describes the most effective poetry (and I'm including song lyrics in this as well,) which consists of hints and issuniation, the painting of shadows on the wall of a cave. Painting the truth in too strong of a light diffuses its power, negating the universal power of the image.

The trick to me was always making the individual details work in the context of this vague universality. It's not easy to do.

Poem of the Day

I love this poem, despite not knowing what some of it (douce campagna?) means:
The Well Dressed Man with a Beard by Wallace Stephens

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.

Despite its rather dark tone, I find the poem affirming. If only one thing, no matter how ephemeral, survives, then things are not as dark as they seem. And that's all that really matters at the end of the day.

Poem of the Day

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

And they said then, "But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are."

- Wallace Stevens, part I of The Man with the Blue Guitar (1937)

Thoughts from a Parking Lot

I went on a walk around the commercial complex I'm working in now so that I could see what was around me. Since the CA building is only a 10 minute drive away from my house, I'm trying to find a way to bike to work, but so far no such luck: this office park was designed only for the automobile. The roads serve one function: get cars off and onto the Mass Pike as quickly as possible.

Anyways, as I was walking through parking lots (no sidewalks) and trying to ignore the roar of cars whipping down the Mass Pike, this poem came to mind:

The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens

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.