Mother of the Muses

   I would like to give a special thanks to Megan Mother of the Muses for all of her encouragement and for laughing at me and with me everyday in class. She is truly is a Diva and I have greatly enjoyed the time I got to spend getting to know her this semester.

What we see in the mind is as real to us as what we see by the eye.

-Wallace Stevens

Megan Bruggeman=DIVA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNM5HW13_O8

Closing Thoughts

    This semester has been a whirlwind and seems to be over before it has even started. I am normally ecstatic for the semesters to end and for a break to ensue but this fall semester is different. This is my last. And as I run down the list of last mondays, last essays, last paragraphs, the one I find to be most sad is the last Sexson class. This class was daunting to me the first few days, but I stuck with it because I knew Sexson would make it all ok and I would regret it if I didn't in the end.
      The Lucritan Sublime in the poetry of Wallace Stevens .....What a title for a class. If that wasn't intimidating enough, my classmates have proven themselves brilliant and dedicated. I have to say that this might be the one class from my college career that really sticks with me. I have enjoyed nearly every minute of it and was constantly impressing myself with the new thoughts and ideas I would have about Stevens and the sublime.
     I think Eli said it perfectly...

"It should also be added that by reading Stevens poetry one will acquire a love for poetry."

  I too have found a love for poetry and it has been a direct result of this class and the guiding words of Stevens. I thought Biz's poem about Wallace Stevens' bio was perfect, and should be exactly what the wikipedia article says. 

   Thank you to Dr. Sexson and thank you to my classmates. I feel that the only appropriate way to end this class is to leave you all with another one of my favorite sublime paintings. I will give you guys the freedom to read and create your own interpretations from it and see Stevens where and how you want with in it. 

                                   This is by Joseph Turner titled Snow Storm.

The imagination wishes to be indulged....

The imagination wishes to be indulged.

-Wallace Stevens

            Wallace Stevens is an awesome poet. He challenges what we know to be truth and forces readers to ask themselves if what they are seeing it reality or a mere version of it. Stevens is to words what Picasso is to painting. Stevens’ poetry shows us that art is a way to describe what we see and feel around us in just the way we wish to see it. It has been previously mentioned that each reading of a Stevens poem will bring with it a new meaning and a new interpretation. That is because as readers we are never in the same moment of our lives twice and therefore what we need and desire of a poem will never replicate itself. This is why as Stevens says “we do not have to be told of the significance of art”^[1] because the significance will become as clear to the reader as they need it to be. Just as poetry is creating a version of reality, painting does the same only in a different medium. There is an intrinsic relationship between Stevens and painters, particularly with the modern artists. By examining Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar” a reader can extrapolate a multitude of meaning, significance, and references to the real world outside of the words of the poem, and that seems to be the intention of Stevens. The second part to this poem that screams for attention is Picasso’s painting “The Old Guitarist”, a modern expressionist painting that depicts an old man hunched over a guitar. The connection between these two modern arts pieces are not far reaching, the ideologies of the two respective creators, Stevens and Picasso, are very similar and thus the outcomes of their work share several characteristics. Stevens explains that “the world about us would be desolate except for the world within us. There is the same interchange between these two worlds that there is between one art and another.”^[2] People give meaning to the world, and art makes the world have meaning to people. “The Man with the Blue Guitar” provides a microcosmic platform to look at the symbiotic relationship of these ideas about Stevens, reality and truth.

            Looking first at Stevens’ personal regard for poetry and painting enlightens us to his own feelings and takes away the need for much assumption. “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting” is an essay that provides a lot of different information and ideas, and few answers. But again it is not Stevens who we turn to for answers, he is there to shed a different light and provide guidance to the answer for which we need in that moment. Stevens does clearly convey that “one of the characteristics of modern art is that it is uncompromising” and through that it is able to contain the truth of reality. In an article written by Bruce Lawder, he mentions in his first paragraph that “the whole effort of modern art has been about: the attachment to real things”.^[3] It is upon the blue guitar that Stevens alludes to the truth being resident of, saying that “that’s life, then: things as they are, This buzzing of the blue guitar” and “of things as they are, as the blue guitar”. These lines say many things, one, is that the blue guitar is as real as life is real. The guitar is a physical object, it can be held, strummed, and looked at more or less unchanging, the guitar is an easy truth to realize. Michel Benamou clarifies that “there were two realities for Stevens-- the reality of things observed and the reality of things imagined” and this duality is what makes his poetry so expansive and relatable to so many different people.^[4] The “buzzing” is the creation of the guitar, it cannot be held or seen, and it is always changing in unimaginable combinations, it is more of an unrealizable truth.  And yet, this physical object plays the truth of life, of things as they are. This is an example of the “reality beyond reality” which Stevens references in “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting”. He also explains that through art “the search for the supreme truth has been a search in reality or through reality or even a search for supremely acceptable fiction”.^[5] Art is one of the most important ways of subscribing meaning both to and from the world we live in. When one form of art may not suffice it is nice to have a coinciding item to help affix more or better meaning. This is how Picasso’s painting and the poem help each other reach a new level of sublimity, the one picks up where the other leaves off. Michel Benamou expounds that “Stevens teaches us that the center of modern art is metamorphosis” the change and the morphing of artistic mediums fits this thought as well, the guitar in the poem and the guitar in the painting are in different stages of their being, but that is dependent on the viewer.^[6]  Benamou also mentions that “the metaphors of poetry and the metamorphoses of painting tap the same reservoir analogies” and this is another layer adding to why the two arts are so complexly interconnected.^[7] The reality is that nothing is the same twice, in order to capture or explain something the most comprehensive way to achieve that would be through many different mediums.

            The senses are another way to approach the poem, “The Man With the Blue Guitar”, sight and sound play into the poem and the painting working together to create a greater meaning. The reader can speak the words of the poem as easily as they can see them written on the page. The painting can only be seen, but the cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words is very applicable. Seeing something gives tangible proof and a constant with which to revert to. The idea of using the senses to gain sensibility about the art in front of us is not a random notion. Stevens says that “the origins of poetry are to be found in sensibility”, without an audience’s response the purpose of art is moot. Benamou notes that “visual appearance and mental reality are one...the mind of the beholder mirrors his surroundings and fluctuates with the slightest change of light”.^[8] As I mentioned before, the viewer sees or hears what they want or need at that precise moment, as the light changes on the painting or in the room where the poem is being read so too does the meaning of the art. It is near impossible to see what we do not already have a sense of knowing. The two stanzas of Cantos VI read:

The thinking of god is smoky dew.

The tune is space. The Blue Guitar

Becomes the place of things as they are,

A composing of senses of the guitar.

One way of looking at these lines is to look literally at what the words mean; god cannot be seen in clarity, but only through a haze. The guitar is where reality of space lives and gives true light to things, and the guitar is the link that makes sense of it all, gives composure to the fictions of truth in the world we live in.

            Each one of the cantos in this very long poem paints a picture for the reader, words narrating the creation of mental images all conjuring the vivid reality of light and dark, life and change. Cantos VI can be looked at to gain even closer familiarity with Stevens and what the poem is trying to convey. Each line, each word Stevens uses is no accident, the words are chosen as purposefully as paint hues were chosen and lines were drawn by Picasso. With a meticulous eye that only a great artist could achieve. “A thing beyond us as we are, Yet nothing changed by the blue guitar” is the opening line of the cantos and it is not easy to digest and offers so much to the reader. Stevens seems to be trying to convey that we cannot understand because things are beyond us, but that it is completely fine to feel this way, because we have things like music, poetry, and painting to help reign in the meaning. One of the few things we can be certain about is uncertainty, but Stevens lends his writing as the place to find solace in this idea. Another line from the IX cantos reads “the maker of a thing yet to be made” and that is Stevens and the it is also the reader. The future is unknown by everyone and there is no point in driving oneself crazy over trying to sort it out, just sit back and listen to the buzz of the guitar, that is why art exists, as a refuge from the chaos that bombards our senses in the world. “Of things as they are and only the place you play them, on the blue guitar, Placed so beyond the compass of change, perceived in a final atmosphere”. Living in the now, the present is what matters. The Lucretian idea that death should not be feared because you will not know death any more than you were aware of birth shines through preeminently in these lines. Stevens gives readers the encouragement to just enjoy what you believe to be true and what is good for you, and the rest will fall away into insignificance. “For a moment final, in the way The thinking of art seems final when The thinking of god is smoky dew.” Nothing is final. Everything changes, but for one instance finality can be achieved for a breadth of time, before the next wave of change washes over it. The smoke can clear and the artist can create, capturing that instant in a forever fixed position. The art does not change, but the need for it and the viewer of it do, that is what keeps art constantly alive.

            “It would be tragic not to realize the extent of man’s dependence on the arts”.^[9] The arts keep us sane; they keep us alive as much as we keep them alive. Stevens believes in the supreme fiction being the truth of reality. Modern art is this supreme fiction and as Stevens says, “it has a reason for everything. Even the lack of a reason becomes a reason...This explains everything”.^[10] Michel Benamou ends his chapter on Poetry and Painting with this thought, that art is “understood as the poetic and moral principle of an order protecting us from chaos, art becomes more than a source of beautiful shapes and colors; it becomes a ‘supreme fiction’”.^[11] This metamorphoses into something more is what Stevens achieves with his words. The subject of his poems is poetry because nothing more is needed. Within the scope of his poetry he shows us what we want and what we need, sometimes without our consent and sometimes without conscious recognition, but if answers are needed they are there, forever changing and forming new truths and a new idea of reality.

The power of poetry, leaves a mark on whatever it touches.

 The mark of poetry creates the resemblance of poetry

as between the most disparate things and

unites them all in its recognizable virtue.

-Wallace Stevens

           

---

^[1] Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poetry and Prose. “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting”. Literary Classics of the U.S., Inc. New York, NY. 1997. Pg 747.

^[2] Stevens, Wallace. Pg 747.

^[3] Lawder, Bruce. “Poetry and Painting: Wallace Stevens and Pierre Tal-Coat”. Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry. 18.1.2002. 348-356. Pg 348.

^[4] Benamou, Michel. Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination. Princeton University Press. 1972. Pg 20.

^[5] Stevens, Wallace. Pg 749.

^[6] Benamou, Michel. Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination. Princeton University Press. 1972. Pg 9.

^[7] Benamou, Michel. Pg11.

^[8] Benamou, Michel. Pg 6.

^[9] Stevens, Wallace. Pg 751.

^[10] Stevens, Wallace. “The Relations Between Poetry and Painting”. Pg 745.

^[11] Benamou, Michel. Pg 24.

Solaris and Seeing

     I got nightmares. I am one of those people that rarely remembers dreams, unless its a midday nap. But I read Solaris at night, alone, right before going to sleep, and I had three nights of nightmares. Its not the nightmares I remember so much as waking up feeling like someone was in my room and having to turn the light on to check and verify with myself that there was no one there. This was my main reaction to Solaris, other than this disturbance, which has gone away since finishing the book, I don't have much to say. I like the novel, the plot was interesting, it was a quick and fairly easy text to read. I do have to admit I glossed over the sciencey parts for the desire to not be bogged down by that and lose track of the story.
    The novel for me did not cross paths with Stevens until the last five or so chapters. It may have been because my Dad asked me if I still remembered "that one poem I had to memorize a while back", and I replied confidently by reciting A Postcard from the Volcano for him. It was after that when I was reminded of Solaris.

Children picking up our bones will

 never know...and least will guess that 

with our bones we left much more, left what

 still is the look of things, 

left what we felt at what we saw....

     We leave behind pieces of us when we die, be it in accomplishments or the impressions we have made on peoples live, these are legacies. For Kelvin he leaves behind his work as a Solarist and all the other fantastical things that he goes through in the book. The last two paragraph he becomes very Lucretian, talking about life and humans and how the ocean has affected all of it. I can now answer the question Sexson posed to us, about why he would assign this book, and I feel that it was a way for me to read something that was not Lucretius and was not Wallace Stevens and was not presented obviously as sublime, and yet I saw all three of those things in the novel. This for me goes back to the first few days of class when we were talking about seeing things for the first time, and how it is all about what you want to see, what your attention is drawn to notice. Before this class if I had read Solaris I would not have seen any of Stevens, Lucretius, or the sublime. Actually, to be honest I would not have read Solaris at all if it hadn't been assigned. But that is the beauty of classes, making you read things you may not have otherwise and coming out all the better for it.
   I will close with one last thought, I am currently home in Southern California for break and I ventured down to the beach this afternoon. Sitting on the sand looking out at the Pacific Ocean I very much believe that it is alive, not in the bizarre way the ocean on Solaris is, but watching the birds dive into the waster and the seaweed swaying in the current, the waves crashing set after set I found myself completely mesmerized by the rhythmic nature of it. It was as though I was seeing the ocean for the first time.

Random Stevens

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2012/8-bit-poem-thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-blackbird/

       So here is another random appearance of Stevens in my day to day life. This article posted on The Thought Catalog blog website about Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
       Now I have to throw the disclaimer out there that I did not particularly enjoy the author of this article's writing style nor the flippant way he describes the poem and I think that our class has been blogging on a much better level than this. But I thought I would share it anyway....

How many lives can you live?

       An extra hour on a lazy Sunday let me to the most obscure discovery....

   I was bored with reading, no longer able to focus on the text in front of me but still wanting to feign productivity, I turned to the internet. I decided to enlighten myself with a Ted Talk or two. Pursuing the video tags I first looked for art, nothing. Then down to Literature, maybe one or two to come back to. Then down to Poetry, where on the last page of the 31videos one existed with the title "How Many Lives can you Live?" This could be relevant to the Lucritian thoughts that were consuming me after reading The Swerve....
    This is where the weird part comes in....the young woman on my computer scene looked eerily familiar. Her name Sarah Kay, no longer a generic name but one that seemed even more familiar than the girl's face....
    As she started speaking I realized I knew her. Not only did I know her but I spent five or so summers with her in our childhood. Her cousin, was my best friend. The three of us, my best friend, Sarah and I would become inseparable whenever she came to visit, leaving our brothers to do what they wanted. And I remember hearing her voice again today that she was a great storyteller back then. She was three years older than my friend and I, she was our leader, our voice of wisdom.
    Her video has astounded me, not because of the profound thought or her poetry, but because here is this young woman, no longer the girl I went to the zoo and beach and museums and wherever else our mothers felt we needed exposure to, here is an articulate grown up version of a friend, long forgotten in the time when our lives got busy and she no longer came to California to spend the summer in her Grandmother's house, at the beach with her cousins and friend.

     I encourage you to watch her video, it is about 12 minutes long and the way she talks about her perspective on life and the poem she shares at the end are beautiful.

http://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_kay_how_many_lives_can_you_live.html

     She quotes Paul Valery saying "a poem is never finished, only abandoned." Sarah talks about rewriting and rewriting until you get something just right in how you want to say it, but that even then the words can only capture how you felt in that moment. This is something that we have talked about in our class before, that Stevens' writing is a reflection of how he was feeling at the moment he was writing. Sarah says that for her she can look back at a poem she has written and know exactly what she was trying to navigate or overcome by the words and what she wrote in that moment. For her poetry is a way to navigate life.
   At the end of her poem she says that she had learned "the art of letting go". For me this ties back into Lucretius, and how finding pleasure is the goal in life and that death is nothing because we won't know it. By letting go of things and not trying to hold onto everything in our lives at all times, I feel that there can be a sense of freedom and enlightening. For Sarah, realizing that she could not be a princess and a ballerina and an astronaut, and that she could only be herself she has been able to deal with the anxiety of life. Also by letting go, there is not the anxiety of life, you can just live.

   

He Shall be Compelled to Read....

 

    I started reading The Swerve over the weekend and I am really enjoying it. I have found it a much easier and palatable text than Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence. Greenblatt does a great job guiding the reader with him as he makes points about the past and takes those thoughts into present time. I like that we have Poggio as our guide as if we were there with him. Searching for these old manuscripts as he was, a book hunter of the humanities.
            
         As you may have come to know I am pretty into paintings and art history, throughout reading the first three chapters Greenblatt mentions some very important pieces of art work thats caught my attention. Particularly what stood out to me was his mention of The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, CA. This is one of my favorite museums and I have been over a dozen times even though the exhibits do not change very frequently. There was however an exhibit of Illuminated Manuscripts last Christmas that I drug my parents to go see them with me. The combination of text and the decoration of each letter and page have always draw me to these ancient pages. 

 These pictures can not even display the beauty of these buildings. It is standing alone on the top of a hill overlooking all of Los Angeles County. You walk up the white steps to the main entrance and from there you meander your way through room after room, going through different buildings just engrossed in the art.

  "In the 1980's, modern archeologists resumed serious work on the buried villa, (near Pompeii, after the eruption of Vesuvius) in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the whole style of life expressed in its design, a design vividly evoked in the architecture of the Getty Museum...where some of the statues and other treasures found at Herculaneum now reside" (63).
    The Getty's website says that the Villa of the Papyr was the inspiration for the design of the museum. This Villa is where parts of Lucretius's De rerum natura was found.

   
       Another part that stood out to me while reading was the huge importance placed on these manuscripts and the role the monasteries had in preserving and perpetuating these texts existence. I titled this blog "he shall be compelled to read" because Greenblatt states that as one of the rules for the monks. Because of the tremendous dedication of monks to reading and writing these texts have survived.

I guess on a simple level the journey to remote and far off monasteries is very intriguing to me, a sort of impossible task or a treasure hunt. Greenblatt writes in a way that makes me feel Poggio's excitement at discovering the manuscripts and the joy that was felt when the papyrus scrolls were found as the Villa of the Papry.

"What is not clear is whether [Poggio] had any intuition at all that he was releasing a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world." (50)

"Lucretius had accomplished a near-perfect integration of intellectual distinction and aesthetic mastery." (51)

"...a single incandescent idea: that everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructible building blocks, irreducibly small in size, unimaginably vast in number...atoms" (73).

"atoms and void and nothing else" (75)

"What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure" (76).

     I was hesitant to start reading another text for fear of confusing myself. Lucretius seemed daunting and a bit too much to handle, but I am glad I have been able to just read Stevens poems and now take a guided tour with Greenblatt.

Supreme Fiction

Dante and Virgil in the Underworld

By:

Ferdinand Victor Eugene Delacroix

Salon of 1822

        Delacroix was a French Romantic painter at the close of the 18th and into the 19th century. He is known for his expressive brushstrokes and optical effects of shapes and colors. He emphasized color and movement like his predecessors Rubens and other painters of the Renaissance. He was a talented lithographer and illustrated scenes from Shakespeare and Goethe as well as others. It is also mentioned that Delacroix took inspiration from Lord Byron, particularly in their shared interest in the "forces of the sublime...of nature in often violent action."
       I say all this because of the link I found to Stevens. In the final bonus canto at the end of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Stevens' line reads "To his Virgilian cadences, up down, Up Down. It is a war that never ends."......Vigilian cadence...this caught my eye because I knew that through this Vigil reference, I could find a painting that might help to encapsulate the rest of the poem. It seems to have been a theme for me through this class that the best way for me to express what I see in one of Stevens' poems is through finding a painting that pairs with it. A sort of combating art with art, for I feel that in a battle of words, Stevens will always win out.
     This painting Dante and Virgil in the Underworld did just that, again it was a painting I had encountered previously and one that exudes tremendous passion and romantic emotion. Stevens final, final cantos in this section addresses a soldier and the war that is going on "between the mind and sky, between thought and day and night." In the painting Dante is in the red cowl, and is attempting to cross the River Styx described in Dante's Eighth Canto, using the guidance of Virgil to steady him as they travel through the water laden with heavy souls of fraud.
      The final stanza of this very last, eleventh cantos, reads:

How simply the fictive hero becomes the real;

How gladly with proper words the solider dies,

If he must, or lives on the bread of faithful speech.

....Words are our guidance, they are a "passion that we feel, not understand" (Cantos IV). Words and poems and art are the supreme ficiton, giving us the guidance with which to live our lives. Virgil guides Dante. Dante gave Delacroix the words with which to paint. Stevens made the reference and I pieced a connection.

The imagination wishes to be indulged.  

 

 

 

Where the Sidewalk Ends...And Stevens Begins

     Thank you Alex Miller for re-reminding me of my absolute love of Shel Silverstein poetry! I had a second grade teacher who read us his poems and I made my mom buy me Where the Sidewalk Ends and absolutely loved it as a little girl. I now have a tremendous feeling of guilt for having set aside one of my favorite poets for so long, but after a little online searching I have been reminded and reinvigorated. These are a few of my favorites....

Come In
If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer...
If you're a pretender come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!


        I read Peanut-Butter Sandwich over and over, I think I even used to have parts of it memorized, sadly the words have since been replaced with a decade or so of new knowledge...

Peanut-Butter Sandwich

I'll sing you a poem of a silly young king
Who played with the world at the end of a string,
But he only loved one single thing—
And that was just a peanut-butter sandwich.

His scepter and his royal gowns,
His regal throne and golden crowns
Were brown and sticky from the mounds
And drippings from each peanut-butter sandwich.
His subjects all were silly fools
For he had passed a royal rule
That all that they could learn in school
Was how to make a peanut-butter sandwich.
He would not eat his sovereign steak,
He scorned his soup and kingly cake,
And told his courtly cook to bake
An extra-sticky peanut-butter sandwich.
And then one day he took a bit
And started chewing with delight,
But found his mouth was stuck quite tight
From that last bite of peanut-butter sandwich.
His brother pulled, his sister pried,
The wizard pushed, his mother cried,
"My boy's committed suicide
From eating his last peanut-butter sandwich!"
The dentist came, and the royal doc.
The royal plumber banged and knocked,
But still those jaws stayed tightly locked.
Oh darn that sticky peanut-butter sandwich!
The carpenter, he tried with pliers,
The telephone man tried with wires,
The firemen, they tried with fire,
But couldn't melt that peanut-butter sandwich.
With ropes and pulleys, drills and coil,
With steam and lubricating oil—
For twenty years of tears and toil—
They fought that awful peanut-butter sandwich.
Then all his royal subjects came.
They hooked his jaws with grapplin' chains
And pulled both ways with might and main
Against that stubborn peanut-butter sandwich.
Each man and woman, girl and boy
Put down their ploughs and pots and toys
And pulled until kerack! Oh, joy—
They broke right through that peanut-butter sandwhich
A puff of dust, a screech, a squeak—
The king's jaw opened with a creak.
And then in voice so faint and weak—
The first words that they heard him speak
Were, "How about a peanut-butter sandwich?"

        And the poem that shares the title of the entire collection.....

Where the Sidewalk Ends

“There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermind wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.” 

      I read these poems and I think of Stevens. I see Stevens more in these poems than I do in Dr.Seuss's writing. Particularly in the Peanut-Butter Sandwich, in the way that the poem goes round and round and then at the end the King asks for the same thing that got him into his situation in the first place. Reading the poem now, as opposed to 12 years ago I can see the circular pattern of the poem, the way we as people have habits and desires that repeat because we like them and they are apart of who we are. But I want to stop there, because I have the Stevinsian perspective and I want to leave the poem as it is meant to be, a poem. Just reading them for the way the words feel in my mouth, and the way my imagination paints the poem in my head. Silverstein, like Stevens, is a master with his words and each word has a purpose and a meaning and that, for me at least, is where I find my place and peace in the poem.
      I think it is also a testament to Silverstein's abilities that I am as enthralled and wrapped up in his poetry now at 22 as I was at 8 and at 12, and whenever else his poems appeared in my life. Sexson in class today said that Stevens picks up "where the sidewalk ends"...I wasn't sure at the time what he meant, because in my head they went together, a sort of individuation. But now I see that Stevens has picked up where Silverstein left off, I can read the poems I read as a child and now I am actually reading them, with the lens that Wallace Stevens' poem have given me.

      

Brushy Winds in Brushy Clouds

Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction

VI

Not to be realized because not to

Be seen, not to be loved nor hated because

Not to be realized. Weather by Franz Hals,

Brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds,

Wetted by blue, colder for white. Not to

Be spoken to, without a roof, without

First fruits, without the virginal of birds,

The dark-blown ceinture loosened, not relinquished.

Gay is, gay was, the gay forsythia

And yellow, yellow thins the Northern blue.

Without a name and nothing to be desired,

If only imagined but imagined well.

My house has changed a little in the sun.

The fragrance of the magnolias come close,

False flick, false form, but falseness close to kin.

It must be visible or invisible,

Invisible or visible or both:

A seeing and unseeing in the eye.

The weather and the giant of the weather,

Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:

An abstraction blooded, as a man by though.

      This is a self portrait of the painter Frans Hals, the man who Stevens says the weather is by in the first stanza. Or at least who I think Stevens is talking about, he spells his name with a "z" not and "s", but I am choosing to leave that out. Frans was known for his loose painterly brushwork, and that can be seen in the delicate lace detail in the portrait above. Stevens in the next stanza lends a little explanation for this by saying "brushed up by brushy winds in brushy clouds". I love this line, I would never use brushy to describe the winds but if you think about it, it is actually a good way to describe them. 

     I am not sure what made this section stand out to me, but of course it has an obvious reference to art in it. (Sexson's magic at work again is all I can assume) I was entranced by the word repetition and how  it makes sense in a nonsensical way. "It must be visible or invisible, invisible or visible, or both: A seeing and unseen eye." You can either see something or you can't. But what about air or water? You can't see air, but you know its there and you can see water, but you can also see through water.....

     I once again took another run at reading The Anatomy of Influence by H. Bloom, I seem to always get interrupted or disastrously distracted and have reread the first 25 pages 3 times now. But in this attempt I took notice of a quote by Lev Tolstoy about Bloom on the page facing the Contents.  I feel like it ties into the last line of this section from Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction, "An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought." .......

“For art criticism we need people who 

would show the senselessness of looking for ideas in 

a work of art, and who instead would continually 

guide readers in that endless labyrinth of 

linkages that makes up the stuff of art, and 

bring them to the laws that serve as the 

foundation for those linkages.”

The Motive for Metaphor

by Wallace Stevens

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon--

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were not quite yourself,
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound--
Steel against intimation--the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

     A week ago I was in the library working on homework for another class and finding myself unfocused and restless I decided that I could at least do something semi productive with my time. I looked up a book on Stevens. I was then overwhelmed by the large amount of titles and texts dedicated to Stevens' work. I wandered over to the PS35 section of shelves and started sifting through the books. The one I landed on was Wallace Stevens Supreme Fiction: New Romanticism by Joseph Carroll. Until this morning I had not looked at it since checking it out. But I should have know that it would address what we talked about on Friday, because Sexson has magical powers.

    After a lovely introduction that seems to cover all of Stevens in as straightforward of a way as is possible; chapter one is titled "The Imagination as Metaphysics":

        "The referent of a supreme fiction is an object

that is no object; it is an illimitable presence that contains

all other objects, including poetic

 representations of it."- Pg 13.

     We are all the fly and the fly is all of us, we are J.Bieber vomit. There is no way to limit where we start and stop, begin and end it all leaks together. How can an object be not an object and still an object? I feel that poetry is one way of defining objects, at least it serves as one way of lending a definition to things. Then in The Motive for Metaphor the third stanza made a little more sense to me. In this circle of trying to define the undefinable, "of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were not quite yourself, and did not want nor have to be". What makes us ourselves? What makes us different from the fly? I think Stevens is trying to comfort us by saying that its fine because we do "not want nor have to be" anything more than what we are or are trying to be. I feel as though it is starting to make sense in my own head but I don't think I can yet articulate it in a way clear enough for someone else to get it.

    A few weeks ago we head the Earth's song. Yesterday a man jumped from 24miles above the earth, broke the sound barrier and survived.

Wikipedia says this about Metaphysics.....

Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world,^[1] although the term is not easily defined.^[2] Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:

1. What is there?
2. What is it like?

I feel as though we are constantly changing and adding to what there is and what it is like.



A D A G I A

An evening's thought is like a day of clear weather.

The imagination wishes to be indulged.

Politics is the struggle for Existence.

The individual partakes of the whole. Except in extraordinary cases he never adds to it.

It is belief and not god that counts.

Things seen are things as seen. Absolute real.

Realism is a corruption of reality.

Reality is a vacuum.

Society is a sea.


    I really like the Adagia section of Steven's collected work. To me each line was a mini Stevens poem, that you can easily hold in your mind and carry with you always. Memorizing an entire poem is a daunting task to me, but these might be a better place to start. These were a few that I particularly liked, no real reason other than they made me think just a little bit more than I would have with other ordered words. I think that is what I am really starting to like about Stevens' poetry, his choice of words are very specific, he places words to conjure feelings from the reader. No word seems to be used without meaning.

One of Those Hibiscuses of Damozel

    I randomly opened my Stevens book and ended up on the page with the poem One of Those Hibiscuses of Damozels which is apart of the Uncollected Poems section. I chose this poem and not one of the others on this page for the simple fact that I have always loved hibiscus flowers. After reading the poem however, I think that this flower may not have been the meaning desired in the poem. That fact aside, I really enjoyed this poem and the way it read like a Dr. Seuss work, with an interesting rhythm and repetition that I liked. Beyond the surface level the poem is talking about a woman and her being and what she is made up of. As we talked about in class a few times the poem is about poetry, but it is also about this damsel being made of the air and the things that she wears being made of her and also making her. I took away from the poem the idea of actually seeing this woman. Stevens seems to be questioning the actuality of seeing her and how that can change from seeing to really seeing for the first time. A line in the last stanza really solidified this for me:

  "This was not how she walked for she walked in a way And the way was more than the walk and was hard to see." 

    I feel like this line really summarizes a main feeling of Stevens, that you can see her walking, and recognize it is her; because each person walks in their own way, but it is never just walking to walk, people are always walking in a way that means a variety of other things both consciously and unconsciously navigating the world around them in a certain way, all because of how they are walking. I know that that definition is just about as confusing as the line from Stevens poem, but it is an idea that resonates with me because people have frequently commented on the way in which I walk. I tend to walk with purpose and direction, I am not someone who will idle passively on my way to somewhere. I want to get to where I am going and be there. I also tend to walk somewhat assertively and it has drawn more than a few comments from people who walk next to me. I walk like I walk and that is something which defines me as an individual.  Just as this woman's walk helps contribute to her being.

    After reading the poem I wanted to look a little more into the title, and that lead me to the poem The Blessed Damozel written by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. An interesting poem in itself about a young girl, or damozel, and what seems to be a love trial intermix with the ideas of youth and beauty and life and death. What I found more interesting was the poet, Rossetti and how he painted a picture to go along ith the poem. He seems to have done this with several poems and paintings. This again ties back into Stevens and his interest in art and the correlation from paintings to poems. 

   I again have the notion that Steven's poem One of Those Hibiscuses of Damozel could be transformed into a very interesting painting. He seems to be able to create such an amazing visual from the words he uses that a tremendous 2d visual could quite fluidly be created to go along side the poem, just as Rossetti's painting and poem flow together, to enhance the experience of the audience. 

The Blessed Damozel 

by 

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Guernica 3D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc1Nfx4c5LQ

Watch the YouTube video above. It was something that was shown to me a few years ago in an Art History class and it is truly mesmerizing. I think in regards to unpacking a painting it does a phenomenal job, but in a way that doesn't subscribe the viewer to any predetermined meaning. 

The ability to take the painting and pull it apart and then focus in on each aspect individually allows the viewer to see all the different intricacies that Picasso put into the painting. For me it also generates a very strong emotion. Picasso was in pain at the events happening around him and this painting does a tremendous job capturing that. 

Sometimes a work of art is overwhelming, especially poetry, and I think Stevens' notion of a poem being a poem and not trying to put too much reason behind it is a very important thing to do. Each and every viewer will come away with their own interpretation and meaning. That is where the beauty of art lies, that it is open ended to the audience. Once the painting or poem is created the author has to let it go and send it out into the public to be shared and admired.

Blue is Brown

    I experienced a very fleeting moment of clarity and an almost surreal feeling, between the time I sat down to read The Man With the Blue Guitar and then reading Chase's blog. I am now left to write a blog that will hopefully express how I felt and what is floating around in my head at the moment.
        In class today James told me that he loves The Man With the Blue Guitar, I agreed saying I read it, referring to my brief and almost irrelevant reading of it in Lit Crit. Then in class when Sexson asked what we had talked about in regard to Stevens' poem and I was ashamed that I could not remember a single thing, other than the Picasso relationship which had already been revealed in this class. This then lead to me an epiphany sort of moment, I didn't really realize anything, nor did I experience a moment of clarity, but I read The Man With the Blue Guitar. Sure I was just reading the words, but I reallyyyy READ it. And it made me realize that in Lit Crit we only had parts of the poem, which is not surprising because it is really lenghty, and that we really only focused on the first section. As I was reading it, it was as though the world around me faded away and all that was left was me and the poem. I am left now with the feeling that I could read this poem everyday for the rest of my life and enjoy it more every time. I now get what James meant when he expressed to me how much he liked this poem.
         After reading it myself, in entirety, I then went to Chase's blog and I completely agree with him in that things that made sense before suddenly were "shattered". I am forever changed, at least I think that I am, only time and more exposure to Stevens will tell. Even more relevant is that in this poem Stevens captures close to everything we talked about in class today.
   
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."

     In regard to Chase's question of why the guitar in the poem is blue, yet in the painting it is brown, I think that it might be Stevens questioning what is and the idea of seeing things as they are. The man in the painting is blue, which is not a real color for a human to be, but a guitar as an inanimate object can be blue or brown, or any color and still be a guitar. The guitar changes things as Stevens says in the second stanza. It is like my really reading this poem, I had read it before, maybe with less attentiveness and not the whole poem, and yet I needed to read it again to be able to see that what the man with the guitar is saying and I think that is that everything can and needs to be questioned. The reality or lack of reality of something is dependent on so many other things that it can not be easily decided on.
   Another part to this I feel is how we were talking in class about the subject matter of every poem being itself. This struck me as a very interesting way to look at poetry, and one that I had never been exposed to before. In section XXII Stevens says:
     Poetry is the subject of the poem,
     From this the poem issues and
    
     To this returns. Between two,
     Between issue and return, there is

    An absence in reality,
    Things as they are. Or so we say.

 Reality is really just what we say it is. Or what we have been told to believe it is. How do we know that the guitar is brown in the painting and blue in the poem, what if blue means brown, what if Stevens saw brown as blue? This could go on endlessly, and keep returning back to the same place. Issuing and returning just as Stevens points out. The influence of Stevens' work seems to only be growing more and more outward and is most certainly and influence that will be unshakable.