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.