How I Stole a Poem from Wallace Stevens

First, I erased all the old graffiti.
Then I looked up all the new words.

Then I wrote some of my own,
Retaining all the ambiguities,
Assigning a few neologisms.

Damn all that phony clarity, I said,
Talking to no one in particular
Outside my own head...

The poem has to come from somewhere,
Even if only from ten thousand years
Of one person after another looking for
Just the right word.

But I was never quite sure
Of where the line breaks came...

Was it with the pause
At the end of a telling phrase,
After I’d corrected all the typos,

Or was it when my fingers started to hurt,
Or when the view from my window
Was just too beautiful?

If I was lucky,
I knew when to stop.
Stop.

But I was never quite sure
Of where the line breaks came...

Was it with the pause
At the end of a telling phrase,
After I’d corrected all the typos,

Or was it when my fingers started to hurt,
Or when the view from my window
Was just too beautiful?


From the little I remember of Stevens from college lectures, I think your poem, and this part especially, captures one of the philosophical questions that concerned him - should man try, or be concerned with trying, to place order in an unordered universe? I'm not sure what his conclusion or opinion was since I never read much of his poetry. Perhaps it is time.

At any rate, this is really well done...solidly structured from the intriguing title to the thought-provoking conclusion.

Joe

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/09/2021 09:51PM by hpesoj.

Thanks, Joseph.

I actually wrote a Ph. D. dissertation on his poetry years ago...an almost unreadable document. Still. he is a great poet who does some wonderfully intriguing things with his poems. Many hours of pleasure. I especially meditated on 'An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,' which changed my ideas on the transition from Modernist poetry to postmodern thinking.

Peter

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven

I

The eye's plain version is a thing apart,
The vulgate of experience. Of this,
A few words, an and yet, and yet, and yet —

As part of the never-ending meditation,
Part of the question that is a giant himself:
Of what is this house composed if not of the sun,

These houses, these difficult objects, dilapidate
Appearances of what appearances,
Words, lines, not meanings, not communications,

Dark things without a double, after all,
Unless a second giant kills the first —
A recent imagining of reality,

Much like a new resemblance of the sun,
Down-pouring, up-springing and inevitable,
A larger poem for a larger audience,

As if the crude collops came together as one,
A mythological form, a festival sphere,
A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age.

[This is the beginning of Stevens’ long poem. It is followed by thirty more such sections.]

XXXI

The less legible meanings of sounds, the little reds
Not often realized, the lighter words
In the heavy drum of speech, the inner men

Behind the outer shields, the sheets of music
In the strokes of thunder, dead candles at the window
When day comes, fire-foams in the motions of the sea,

Flickings from finikin to fine finikin
And the general fidget from busts of Constantine
To photographs of the late president, Mr. Blank,

These are the edgings and inchings of final form,
The swarming activities of the formulae
Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at,

Like an evening evoking the spectrum of violet,
A philosopher practicing scales on his piano,
A woman writing a note and tearing it up.

It is not in the premise that reality
Is a solid. It may be a shade that traverses
A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

Here, in Stevens' final stanza from "An Ordinary Evening In New Haven is a lesson in poetry, where, in my reading, every phrase, from beginning to end, could give rise to a poem of its own. The poetic density is overwhelming. btw, this was not the specific poem that gave rise to my own poem about, but this is an example of modern poetry at its best.

Peter

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/26/2009 09:29PM by petersz.

Stevens, the modern romanticist. Peter, you seem to be still over-complicating things.

I fear that is in the apparatus, Chesil. Thanks for dropping by,

Peter

Pete,
can you imagine what it would look like if I wrote a Phd dissertation on poetry?

I wrote a paper oncet on why I don't think it was William Shakespeare who wrote all that stuff. I think it was another guy with the same name.

Now, let's cut the larceny, stealing pomes.. fer cryin' out loud, you gonna cross the line, go for a bank. well maybe not today, you'd get a large bag of IOU's.

Oh well,,, watch the sun go down on Sodom Bay. I have two months to go before I leave home again for the summer. Not looking forward to it this year.

I've noticed something Pete, I quit over a year ago, and Blackwater is still in business. Who'd'a thunk it? Maybe I didn't make a difference all those years. Oh well, got fairly wealthy, saw a lot of the world that only hippies will ever get to see, and knew some good people. May be time to retreat to Mexico.

Audie Ous.... A mee go.

Ain't they callin' themselve eek! or somethin' like that now?