random stuff, but mostly Wallace Stevens

[novapsyche]

I spent time with some friends this weekend. We ate hot dogs, kielbasa, polish sausage, chips, chocolate-butterscotch-peanut butter Rice Krispie treats, and an Oreo pie. (The pie was fantastic.) Also, relatively large amounts of alcohol were consumed. We played the Warner Bros. version of Trivial Pursuit, which is ridiculously difficult. Somehow, I ended up with the most pie pieces before we called it quits.

I've been reading the collected prose and poetry of Wallace Stevens. I can hardly believe that "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," "The Emperor of Ice Cream," and "Sunday Morning" were all published in his very first book of poems.

What I've mostly been paying attention to has been his prose. The complete text of The Necessary Angel, his book on the nature of poetry, is included in this text. It's been very eyeopening and extremely helpful, reading his theories.

[Poetry] is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals.

Those of us who may have been thinking of the path of poetry, those who understand that words are thoughts and not only our thoughts but the thoughts of men and women ignorant of what it is that they are thinking, must be conscious of this: that, above all else, poetry is words; and that words, above everything else, are, in poetry, sounds. . . . A poet's words are of things that do not exist without the words. . . . Poetry is a revelation in words by means of the words.

If we consider the nature of our experience when we are in agreement with reality, we find, for one thing, that we cease to be metaphysicians.

A poem is a particular of life thought of for so long that one's thought has become an inseparable part of it or a particular of life so intensely felt that the feeling has entered into it.

[I]t is the subject in poetry that releases the energy of the poet.

The adherents of the imagination are mystics to begin with and pass from one mysticism to another.

There is always an analogy between nature and the imagination, and possibly poetry is merely the strange rhetoric of that parallel: a rhetoric in which the feeling of one man is communicated to another in the words of the exquisit appositeness that takes away all their verbality.

I finished "Confession" today (it was begun four days ago). It's my first attempt at a villanelle, and it just kind of came on its own. I'm still not quite at ease with form, but I'm trying to stick my toe in the water so as to get more used to it.