A poem, for me, is often very clearly a response to what I am reading and the way it fits into my material existence. The poem in other words is both a reflection on literature…
Browsing Category poetry
What Else Was There?
From Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty, “A Yeti in the District.” The next day I got back to writing. What else was there? Well, there was anticlimax. When Linda and I returned to my house,…
A Nothing More Blank
Stevens and Frost “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens One must have a mind of winter To regard the frost and the boughs Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; And have been cold a long…
A Discernment: Frost or Stevens
To ask the question concerning he daemon is to seek an origin of inspiration. Whereas Robert Frost is possessed by an external daemon whose name is Loss, hence the power of Directive, Wallace Stevens undergoes…
Soldier-Sentimentalist-Poet
Two snippets from Ford’s The Good Soldier (1924). The word “sentimental” or some form of it occurs 28 times in the novel–a use for big data! ************ For all good soldiers are sentimentalists—all good soldiers…
The Whole Pieces of Modernist Poetry
Stevens places a jar in Tennessee and Williams breaks a bottle and places it “between walls.” I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround…
Choral Rings: Stevens’ “Circled Sea”?
Stevens ends his Collected Poems with “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.” At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind….
Placing Things
These trees! Rilke, Sonnet #1 of Sonnets to Orpheus A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence a…
Bantling Psalms
Hard upon the last entry I remembered that Waldo penned his own “psalm” to the new nation commemorating a commemoration of the Battles of Lexington & Concord (April 19, 1775). I thought it would serve…
Pedantic Prosody
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