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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
the Wallace Stevens community's LiveJournal:
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| Monday, October 17th, 2011 | 1:19 pm
[mauvais_genre]
 |
Bits
There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place. | | Thursday, June 15th, 2006 | 3:59 am
[mauvais_genre]
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The Indigo Glass in the Grass
Which is real--
This bottle of indigo glass in the grass,
Or the bench with the pot of geraniums, the stained
mattress and the washed overalls drying in the sun?
Which of these truly contains the world?
Neither one, nor the two together.
| | Friday, December 9th, 2005 | 4:07 am
[proximoception]
 |
from Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue[A sculpture of horses in a park is being contemplated.] II Come, all celestial paramours, Whether in-dwelling haughty clouds, frigid And crisply musical, or holy caverns temple-toned, Entwine your arms and moving to and fro, Now like a ballet infantine in awkward steps, Chant sibilant requiems for this effigy. Bring down from nowhere nothing's wax-like blooms, Calling them what you will but loosely-named In a mortal lullaby, like porcelain. Then, while the music makes you, make, yourselves, Long autumn sheens and pittering sounds like sounds On pattering leaves and suddenly with lights, Astral and Shelleyan, diffuse new day; And on this ring of marble horses shed The rainbow in its glistening serpentines Made by the sun ascending seventy seas. Agree: the apple in the orchard, round And red, will not be redder, rounder then Than now. No: nor the ploughman in his bed Be free to sleep there sounder, for the plough And the dew and the ploughman still will best be one. But this gawky plaster will not be here. from Stevens' letter to Hi Simons, August 27, 1940 2. Forget about Mr. Burnshaw. The paramours are all the things in our nature that are celestial. In their very movements they are of the future (ballet infantine). They are compelled by desire (music makes you) in the commingling of those two immense reflections (autumn sheens: the past, and the glistening serpentines: the future), even in their requiem for the effete, etc. to diffuse the new day. The music makes them. The astral and Shelleyan lights are not going to alter the structure of nature. Apples will always be apples, and whoever is a ploughman hereafter will be what the ploughman has always been. For all that, the astral and the Shelleyan will have transformed the world. | 3:38 am
[mauvais_genre]
|
Daily poem: Jumbo
Jumbo
by Wallace Stevens
The trees were plucked like iron bars
And Jumbo, the loud general-large
Singsonged and singsonged, wildly free. Who was the musician, fatly soft
And wildly free, whose clawing thumb
Clawed on the ear these consonants? Who the transformer, himself transformed,
Whose single being, single form
Were their resemblances to ours? The companion in nothingness,
Loud, general, large, fat, soft
And wild and free, the secondary man, Cloud-clown, blue painter, sun as horn,
Hill-scholar, man that never is,
The bad-bespoken lacker, Ancestor of Narcissus, prince
Of the secondary men. There are no rocks
And stones, only this imager.
——
from Parts of a World (1942)
| | Tuesday, December 6th, 2005 | 4:20 pm
[proximoception]
|
The main Harmonium poems are always going to be his most popular, aren't they? I think it's because they're so assimilable to other tacks than his own. In his later volumes he's so deep in his thing that if you aren't also you won't enjoy the poetry. But the early verse, while still giving his view of the world, gives it so ambiguously and atomistically that you can borrow it and make it your own. Reminds me of Stephen Crane's verse a bit. Or early Blake, the Songs and Heaven and Hell. I wonder if this is a value in itself, in poetry? Cutting the head off to make it live, so to speak. Personally I'm most moved by the late lyrics, so maybe it's more a matter of how much time and intellectual energy you have to invest in a long-term project like 1940-55 Stevens'. And yet there's definitely something special about the Harmonium pieces, so full of sounds, shapes, movements, colors, all stirred up at once. | | Monday, December 5th, 2005 | 10:04 pm
[mauvais_genre]
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| 6:49 pm
[mauvais_genre]
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Okay, another favorite. Hope no one has posted this recently.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird | | | by Wallace Stevens |
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.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs. |
| | Sunday, December 4th, 2005 | 6:26 am
[mauvais_genre]
|
Review of Harmonium
1924 essay by a frustrated Edmund Wilson. March 19, 1924
Harmonium, by Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $2.00.
 r. Wallace Stevens is the master of a style: that is the most remarkable thing about him. His gift for combining words is fantastic but sure: even when you do not know what he is saying, you know that he is saying it well. He derives plainly from several French sources of the last fifty years but he never--except for a fleeting phrase or two--really sounds like any of them. You could not mistake even a title by Wallace Stevens for a title by anyone else: Invective Against Swans, Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores, A High-Toned Old Christian Woman, The Emperor of Ice-Cream, Exposition of the Contents of a Cab, The Bird with the Coppery Keen Claws, Two Figures in Dense Violet Night, Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion, and Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.
These titles also represent Mr. Stevens's curious ironic imagination at its very best. The poems themselves--ingenious, charming and sometimes beautiful as they are--do not always quite satisfy the expectation aroused by the titles. When you read a few poems of Mr. Stevens, you get the impression from the richness of his verbal imagination that he is a poet of rich personality, but when you come to read the whole volume through you are struck by a sort of aridity. Mr. Stevens, who is so observant and has so distinguished a fancy, seems to have emotion neither in abundance nor in intensity. He is ironic a little in Mr. Eliot's manner; but he is not poignantly, not tragically ironic. Emotion seems to emerge only furtively in the cryptic images of his poetry, as if it had been driven, as he seems to hint, into the remotest crannies of sleep or disposed of by being dexterously turned into exquisite amusing words. Nothing could be more perfect in its tone and nothing by itself could be more satisfactory than such a thing as Last Looks at the Lilacs. But when we have gone all through Mr. Stevens, we find ourselves putting to him the same question which he, in the last poem of his book, puts To a Roaring Wind: What syllable are you seeking,
Vocallissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it. | | Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 | 11:30 pm
[tenebredentro]
 |
I'll post one too.
This is the first Stevens poems I memorized, and definately one of my favorites. Two Figures in Dense Violet Light I had as lief be embraced by the porter at the hotel As to get no more from the moonlight Than your moist hand. Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear. Use dusky words and dusky images. Darken your speech. Speak, even, as if I did not hear you speaking, But spoke for you perfectly in my thoughts, Conceiving words, As the night conceives the sea-sounds in silence, And out of the droning sibilants makes A serenade. Say, puerile, that the buzzards crouch on the ridge-pole And sleep with one eye watching the stars fall Below Key West. Say that the palms are clear in a total blue, Are clear and are obscure; that it is night; That the moon shines. ::EDIT:: You may notice that this poem is a little different from several online versions. I have taken it directly from The Palm at the End of the Mind, and not Harmonium. Holly Stevens makes no comments on the changes in this poem, but says in her preface: "Because no manuscript of poems that appeared in earlier books was submitted for Collected Poems, and because certain discrepancies in manuscript and magazine publication versions have not been resolved, minor changes have been made in punctuation, spelling, and line spacing without comment. Where more extensive vatriations occur, brief explanatory notes appear at the back of this book, although limitations of space preclude a full textual apparatus." ::/EDIT:: ::Further Edit:: I have just checked Harmonium, and the only difference in my version is the title (Light/Night). There are a lot of online versions with "Beyond Key West,"( 17 compared to the 7 you get when searching for the correct text). Does anyone know why this is? ::/Further Edit:: | 1:07 am
[mauvais_genre]
|
Another favorite Wallace Stevens poem: The Snow Man
The Snow Man 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 time To behold the junipers shagged with ice, The spruces rough in the distant glitter Of the January sun; and not to think Of any misery in the sound of the wind, In the sound of a few leaves, Which is the sound of the land Full of the same wind That is blowing in the same bare place For the listener, who listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is. ------------------- Somewhere I have audio of Stevens reading this. I'll see if I can find it this weekend and post it. Or I'd be happy for someone else to post a link if they have it. :) | | Friday, December 2nd, 2005 | 6:02 am
[mauvais_genre]
|
One of my favorite Stevens poems
Okay, I almost went to bed; then I remembered I told myself I'd post at least one Stevens poem per day until they were all posted. One of my favorites. Somewhere I published a paper over this long ago, so I invite questions--although I'm not sure I remember a lot (it was a linguistics paper of all things). The Emperor of Ice-Cream Call the roller of big cigars, The muscular one, and bid him whip In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Let the wenches dawdle in such dress As they are used to wear, and let the boys Bring flowers in last month's newspapers. Let be be finale of seem. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. Take from the dresser of deal. Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet On which she embroidered fantails once And spread it so as to cover her face. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. | | Thursday, December 1st, 2005 | 9:38 pm
[mauvais_genre]
|
Anyone in this community currently subscribe to _The Wallace Stevens Journal_? Haven't read it in years, but I was thinking about buying a 2-yr subscription to keep next to the tub for bubble bath reading (yes, and other bathroom readings). Anyone opposed to posting Wallace Stevens poem parodies, pastiches, and "translations" in this forum? Anyone for it? Anyone read this LJ much anymore? Well, other than four or five of us? Still, "where two or more are gathered". Best, MG Current Mood: SICK as hello | 12:53 am
[mauvais_genre]
|
Having just lost two paragraphs and a Stevens poem
While I was getting some audio ready to post, I lost everything I wrote. I guess that post will wait until another day. For now, some audio: http://www.handcraftguitars.com/audio/Stevens/Stevens_poemtookplacemountain.wavAnd the text (p. 512 for those in the congregation following along): The Poem that Took the Place of a Mountain There it was, word for word, The poem that took the place of a mountain. He breathed its oxygen, Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table. It reminded him how he had needed A place to go to in his own direction, How he had recomposed the pines, Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds, For the outlook that would be right, Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion: The exact rock where his inexactnesses Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged, Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea, Recognize his unique and solitary home. | | Monday, September 19th, 2005 | 12:38 pm
[vyla]
 |
It has been a while...
Hello, community! I recently joined and was upset to see that there haven't any postings since April. So this is for you all, because I continue to check anyway, living in constant "broken" circles... Continual Conversation With A Silent Man Wallace Stevens The old brown hen and the old blue sky, Between the two we live and die-- The broken cartwheel on the hill. As if, in the presence of the sea, We dried our nets and mended sail And talked of never-ending things, Of the never-ending storm of will, One will and many wills, and the wind, Of many meanings in the leaves, Brought down to one below the eaves, Link, of that tempest, to the farm, The chain of the turquoise hen and sky And the wheel that broke as the cart went by. It is not a voice that is under the eaves. It is not speech, the sound we hear In this conversation, but the sound Of things and their motion: the other man, A turquoise monster moving round. | | Wednesday, April 13th, 2005 | 8:09 pm
[craziepixie]
 |
Hey Guys, I'm working on a small Stevens project and I'm trying to find the online text for "The Rock" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Anyway, I was wondering if any of you had any idea as to where I might find that? I've looked everywhere and I can't seem to find it. | | Friday, February 11th, 2005 | 11:01 pm
[proximoception]
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Reality Is an Activity of the Most August Imagination, Stevens Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night, We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late. It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust. There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round, Under the front of the westward evening star, The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins, As things emerged and moved and were dissolved, Either in distance, change or nothingness, The visible transformations of summer night, An argentine abstraction approaching form And suddenly denying itself away. There was an insolid billowing of the solid. Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air. | 11:00 pm
[proximoception]
|
Narrative elements are so rare in Stevens yet he handles them so well. This is a favorite of mine. And surely is some kind of response or tribute to Yeats. Mrs. Alfred Uruguay, Stevens So what said the others and the sun went down And, in the brown blues of evening, the lady said, In the Donkey's ear, "I fear that elegance Must struggle like the rest." She climbed until The moonlight in her lap, mewing her velvet, And her dress were one and she said, "I have said no To everything, in order to get at myself. I have wiped away moonlight like mud. Your innocent ear And I, if I rode naked, are what remain." The moonlight crumbled to degenerate forms, While she approached the real, upon her mountain, With lofty darkness. The donkey was there to ride, To hold by the ear, even though it wished for a bell, Wished faithfully for a falsifying bell. Neither the moonlight could change it. And for her, To be regardless of velvet, could never be more Than to be, she could never differently be, Her no and no made yes impossible. Who was it passed her there on a horse all will, What figure of capable imagination? Whose horse clattered on the road on which she rose, As it descended, blind to her velvet and The moonlight? Was it a rider intent on the sun, A youth, a lover with phosphorescent hair, Dressed poorly, arrogant of his streaming forces, Lost in an integration of the martyrs' bones, Rushing from what was real; and capable? The villages slept as the capable man went down, Time swished on the village clocks and dreams were alive, The enormous gongs gave edges to their sounds, As the rider, no chevalere and poorly dressed, Impatient of the bells and midnight forms, Rode over the picket rocks, rode down the road, And, capable, created in his mind, Eventual victor, out of the martyrs' bones, The ultimate elegance: the imagined land. | | Thursday, December 9th, 2004 | 1:01 pm
[liquidmoonlight]
 |
HELP ME PLEASE!!
I have less than 24 hours to work this into some kind of formal paper. I am assigned the prompt: Does the atheism of Wallace Stevens convince or repel you? Do you see any merit in it at all? He does offer an alternative to traditional religion - what you might call a "religion" of the earth, a joyous application of what we do have, not what we might have in some hypothetical afterlife. What do you think? Ok, not too much to handle, but I am ripping my eyes out trying to understand his work. The more I read the more I love but it's killing me to get through, and if I had more time I wouldn't ask for help but please anyone who can help, could you give me some examples of his blatant atheism? I know it's everywhere but I can't formalize my thoughts into some kind of analytical view. Some examples of the religion of the earth? I'll take whatever you can offer and I am completely thankful for anything. Thanks, Sheena Current Mood:  nervous | | Wednesday, September 29th, 2004 | 11:36 pm
[angularanonymid]
 |
bio?
Is there a "definitive" biography of Stevens? | | Sunday, August 29th, 2004 | 12:22 am
[angularanonymid]
|
 r_w_emersonThe first LJ community, as far as I can tell, devoted to Ralph Waldo Emerson. |
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