Tag Archives: wallace stevens

November 23, 2010 · 1:09 am

“One must have a mind of winter”*

The house in Westerly Terrace, Hartford, CT, where Wallace Stevens lived.

In the week when we’re told London can expect its first freak snowfall of the season – straight from Russia, I should be giving you Pushkin right now – there’s an apposite opportunity to revisit our little Wallace Stevens-fest of last autumn. (Do revisit Steve Kemper’s article, too. Click the link.) Regular readers will know the great standing in which the elliptical bard of insurance is held here in the halls of Baroque. And I’ve just discovered this very nice essay, by one WF Lantry, about taking a child along the Wallace Stevens path in Hartford, CT.

Now, this path – thirteen granite slabs, one for each way of looking at a blackbird – was inaugurated last year by a wonderful organisation called the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens, whose website is well worth a visit (and cheaper for most of us than going to Hartford). It’s good to read about it because Stevens’ famous route to work in the insurance company is also my old route to school, and the thought of all that, and the big old slate sidewalks they used to have in that city – maybe still do have – is a physical memory for me.

But this is about winter. We’re getting ready for snow, and my warm coat’s at the cleaners!

It surprised me. People were just going about their daily lives, taking buses, ducking inside the church, pushing babies. I felt a little ridiculous. I wanted to jump up and down, shouting, “Honor the poet.” But he was part of the landscape now.

James found the first stone. Kate read it aloud to him. Then she asked me to tell him what it meant. What was I supposed to say? “Among twenty snowy mountains, the only moving thing was the eye of the blackbird.” Try explaining that to a young boy just five, on a hot August day, with the traffic loud behind us. Google it, adding the word ‘meaning’ to the title in quotes, and you’ll see the problem. It was easier to explain the man.

“He used to walk to work every day, and he’d think about the poems when he was walking.” “Could he write on paper when he was walking?” “No, he just thought about stuff. Maybe he wrote it down when he got there.”

from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
…
Well, there you go. Now, to bed: nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. I might sleep in my socks, you know.
* Here: The Snow Man

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January 22, 2010 · 9:33 am

the idea of colour and order

Wallace Stevens, by David Hockney

George Szirtes has posted this, my new favourite picture, on his blog, in a post I can relate to because it’s about being insanely busy to the point of forgetting things as soon as they’re behind you, with birthdays and other things coming up and work everywhere you look.

But look! Lovely Wallace Stevens. Lovely David Hockney. Lovely thinking.

Just keep going.

And this.

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 whole, 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 suddenly are real.

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

Wallace Stevens

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October 2, 2009 · 11:30 pm

happy birthday Wallace Stevens

wallace stevens

The writer Steve Kemper went in search of that well-known will-o’-the-modernist-wisp, Wallace Stevens. Here he is, finding Stevens’ grandson:

“It’s a perfect case of you reap what you sow. He was very private. He was so up in his head all the time that a lot of stuff that I would consider normal, like getting to know people, wasn’t a big feature of his life. He wasn’t a worldly guy, he was an otherworldly guy. Look at the words he uses. My son just memorized ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ for school, and I mean, ‘concupiscent’? Give me a break. How many guys use words like that?”

This is a really great article. Full of wonderful things; it’s all incredibly vivid, especially to me, as I grew up in Hartford. And every time we ever drove down Westerley Terrace, my mother would say, “Look – there’s Wallace Sevens’ house.”

Here’s something I remember vividly from about that time – the urgency, simplicity, mystery of it:

(from) The Man with the Blue Guitar

I

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.”

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

…

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August 16, 2009 · 3:26 pm

the Ford Fabergé that never was

edsel-ford

By  the way. Look at those absolutely gorgeous letters in the headline. They look as if they’re made of chrome.

The other week Roddy Lumsden posed a question on the poets’ forum I sometimes frequent. He asked: “would you write a poem for a baked bean TV advert for £1500?”

Needless to say, most of the comments ran along the lines of “I’d write a poem for a tin of baked beans.” The first one, which did make me smile (it wasn’t me, by the way) (thanks Rik), went: “C’mon. I wrote a double dactyl and entered it into a competition to win a free colonoscopy. Didn’t win.”

The chat turned a little more serious, revolving around the problems of writing to commission, what is The Muse, and what’s a fair price. In the end it was a slightly non-topic, I thought, because basically we do sell our facility with words in other ways anyway, to pay the bills. Ad men. Teachers. Copywriters. Ghostwriters. Journalists. Crossword-puzzle writers. Quiz-masters. Lion tamers. You know…

But I did think of this today when I saw a rather charming op-ed piece from the New York Times. Pegged on the current rapid demise of the US car industry, it tells the story of the time, in 1955, when Ford Motors enlisted the help of Marianne Moore to try and find a name for the new line of “rather important” cars they were developing.

Throughout the fall and winter of 1955, Moore’s steady stream of suggestions arrived at Ford: “the Ford Silver Sword,” “Intelligent Bullet,” “the Ford Fabergé,” “Mongoose Civique,” “Anticipator,” “Pastelogram,” “Astranaut” and, the highest flight of fancy, “Utopian Turtletop.”

Moore apparently had no qualms about enlisting her muse in the service of the automotive industry. She was also willing to embrace the risks of the marketplace, agreeing to be paid only if she came up with a winning name. As Moore’s biographer Charles Molesworth points out, she “had always enjoyed the language of advertisement, delighting in its inventiveness and ebullience, and even relating it to the poetics of praise.”

I don’t know about you but I find that last quote very telling and wonderful: the poetics of praise… the ebullience of advertising copy. There is SO much to unpack in that sentence, especially when you think of Miss Moore’s exquisite little Fabergé ostrich-eggs of poems.

Some thoughts:

A blog post about how Twitter, with its 140-character limit, can help copywriters hone their headline skills.

The way advertising copy has in fact over the past fifty years become looser, more elliptical, more allusive.

The suggestion of the African praise poem tradition getting mixed up in this.

Enthusiastic description. Values and merits and various applications of.

The possibility of seeing cars – or anything else – a exotic animals?

The way even in her longer, or longer-lined, poems there’s hardly a quotable line or two, because everything is so tightly woven that the whole thing stands together. In other words, even a two-page Moore poem is as integrated as advertising copy.

The absolute enmeshment, even for a poet as meticulous as the divine Miss M, of poetry in the daily world of commerce.

Even the beauty of the commerce itself, the to-ing and fro-ing and lack of pretentiousness about doing.

Also the complete unusability of most of her phrases! The Utopian Turtletop, indeed. You have to love it. Picture the 1955 consumers, riding in their convertibles, chasing tigers around in red weather…

Lorine Neidecker’s famous poem, Poet’s Work:

Grandfather
….advised me:
……..Learn a trade

I learned
….to sit at desk
……..and condense

No layoff
….from this
……..condensery

And – because I can – because I have the late Duc de Baroque’s Complete Moore here, although I had to scrap the remaining scraps of its beautiful and familiar seventies dust jacket:

To a Snail

If “compression is the first grace of style,”
you have it…

The epigraph to Moore’s Collected Poems: “Omissions are not accidents.” MM

The sudden lightning-flash notion that I could somehow make a Marianne Moore Car Name Generator. Yes! It’s what the world needs!

Any ideas, just send them to me in a Pastelogram.

And no. I don’t know what “Edsel” means either.

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