Poetry and Painting

     I am really starting to believe that Sexson has divine powers. Or falling short of that some sort of foresight that allows him to weave connections that seem too amazing to be mere chance. Over the weekend I finally got around to cracking open the book I randomly grabbed out of the bag circulating the room. I chose, Wallace Stevens and the Symbolist Imagination written by Michel Benamou. Intrigued by the title alone and the simplicity of the cover I stored this book on my bookshelf and repeatedly wrote in my planner to blog about the borrowed book.
   Chapter one of Benamou's book is titled, "Poetry and Painting". How bizarre that Friday in class we were talking about Stevens and his tie to painting. Another strange coincidence is that I had talked about Stevens and Picasso's "Man With the Blue Guitar" connection, and also that I did a blog on two paintings just last week. It seems as though poetry and painting have been a large part of my Stevens studying since the start of class, and now by some sort of weird concurrence I am reading a chapter focused solely on that.
    Stranger still is that just a few pages into the chapter Benamou sites "A Postcard from the Volcano" as an example that even "the meanest and most derelict thing can thus be made significant, beautiful. 'A Postcard from the Volcano' typifies this procedure; it shows
      A dirty house in a gutted world,
      A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
      Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.
...Stevens teaches us that the center of modern art is metamorphosis" (8-9). Just Friday I was assigned this poem to put to memory and then perform for the class. If these chance overlapping of subject matter are not some sort of predestined, and already worked out series of events I don't know what else could help to explain them; other than Sexson has magic powers.

    The chapter does a very nice job of explaining the importance of art and how it connects the real, external world to the metaphorical one. The influence of artistic imagination over the real world and the reflection of it is hugely important and a large focus for Stevens. Sexson has mentioned in class that Stevens is a weather poet, writing about the sun, and seasons, a subject that the readers can easily grasp onto. Benamou summarizes a very complex idea of poetry and art by saying that "the metaphors of poetry and the metamorphoses of painting tap the same reservoir of analogies" (11). Art is expressive, written or painted it is the artist trying to communicate something. The medium is important, but only if the artist is able to convey the message. I struggled when I was first reading Stevens’ poetry because I was trying to do too much. When I just opened my mind and read the words and unpacked the complexity little by little I was able to get more from the poem as a whole. Just as when I first looked at Picasso, and other more challenging painters I had to step back and accept the work as a whole before I was able to focus on any smaller part and start to unpack the complexities of that.

    As I move forward in my readings of Benamou's book and Steven's work and even Harold Bloom's Anatomy of Influence, which is appearing in various other aspect of my classes this semester, I look forward to the final culminating moment of clarity. Until then I will just keep reading...