Thank you for reading.

I hope you've enjoyed the Wallace Stevens poems I've been posting this month; because you're going to see a lot more of his poetry in the next two months.

Starting tomorrow, I'll be posting Stevens's long poem, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, and following that up with another of his longer poems, The Man With the Blue Guitar. Each one will be posted over a month, and will be the only thing I post that month: so that the month's archive will be an archive of the complete poem, broken into installments.

Because I want the poems to appear in the archives in proper order, I'll be posting them backwards; so that the first part of NTaSF that will appear, tomorrow, is his Coda. That might be confusing to some readers, but I don't think it really hurts the experience.

In the old days before the Internet, TV, radio, or even daily newspapers, a reader might have time, leisure, and interest to read a long poem from start to finish in one go, like a novel; and it made sense for poets to write long poems like that. But today the reader is different; with so much else to do, and so much competition for his attention, he's less likely to engage with a poem that way, or to like the result if he tries it that way. That's my theory, anyway, and that's the type of reader I wrote "Penny; or, Penny's Hat" for: it's not designed to be read in sequence, but to be dipped into at any time, at any place. One can read any part without having to read and remember what went before; it can be savoured over a period of years, if the reader wants.

I see a similar structure to Stevens's poems -- any part can be read on its own, without having to read all the others -- and it's one reason I'd consider them the first modern long poems (I don't like to say 'epic', because that connotes a story, and that is precisely what they are not.) Trying to read one start to finish would result only in frustration or boredom (or boredom from frustration). There are other copies of Blue Guitar on the web, but they all present the poem as one uninterrupted piece; I tried to read one, but (for the reasons I've said) I didn't even finish it.

I hope that presenting the poems this way -- as one monthly archive, but broken down into individual posts -- provides a better way to read them, and they'll be read (and appreciated) more in consequence.

Since I'll be posting nothing else but those poems for the next two months, this is my last chance to tell you about my National Poetry Month project. I want to make April a sort of magazine of less familiar, contemporary poets. I've been approaching the poets I know on usenet; but here I'd like to make an appeal to blogger poets as well. I'd urge every reader with a blog to submit a poem for inclusion. It can be either a new one or one you've already published on your blog; I'll be happy to publish them all (subject to editorial discretion). I'll also ask you to give me your name (either real name or the name you use for your blog), where you're from (since I've been getting a response from around the world, I'd like to highlight that), and a url (the default I'll use will be the one to your blog). I can't pay anything, but it will be a way to advertise your blog, to attract more readers to your own work.

I hope you decide to participate in April, and, in the interim, I hope that you enjoy reading Stevens's two masterpieces.

The Dwarf / Wallace Stevens

     
The Dwarf

Now it is September and the web is woven.
The web is woven and you have to wear it.

The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,

For all the thoughts of summer that go with it,
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags.

It is the mind that was woven, the mind that was jerked
And tufted in straggling thunder and shattered sun.

It is all you are, the final dwarf of you,
That is woven and woven and waiting to be worn,

Neither as mask nor as garment but as a being,
Torn from insipid summer, for the mirror of cold,

Sitting beside your lamp, for the citron to nibble
And coffee dribble  . . .  Frost is in the stubble.

---
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), 1937
from Parts of a World, 1942

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Wallace Stevens biography

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

The Motive for Metaphor / Wallace Stevens

The Motive for Metaphor

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring,
With the half colors of quarter-things,
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon --

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound –
Steel against intimation – the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

~~
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), 1943
from Transport to Summer, 1947

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Wallace Stevens biography

"The Motive for Metaphor". Courtesy FizzgigLit.

United Dames of America / Wallace Stevens

United Dames of America

Je tache, en restant exact, d'être poète.
                            - JULES RENARD

There are not leaves enough to cover the face
It wears. This is the way the orator spoke:
"The mass is nothing. The number of men in a mass
Of men is nothing. The mass is no greater than

The singular man in a mass. Masses produce
Each one its paradigm." There are not leaves
Enough to hide away the face of the man
Of this dead mass and that. The wind might fill

With faces as with leaves, be gusty with mouths,
And with mouths crying and crying day by day.
Could all these be ourselves, sounding ourselves,
Our faces circling round a central face

And then nowhere again, away and away?
Yet one face keeps returning (never the one),
The face of the man of the mass, never the face
That hermit on reef sable would have seen,

Never the naked politician taught
By the wise. There are not enough leaves to crown,
To cover, to crown, to cover -- let it go --
The actor that will at last declaim our end.

~~
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), 1937
from Parts of a World, 1942

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Wallace Stevens biography

As at a Theatre / Wallace Stevens

As at a Theatre

Another sunlight might make another world,
Green, more or less, in green and blue in blue,
Like taste distasting the first fruit of a vine,
Like an eye too young to grapple its primitive,
Like the artifice of a new reality,
Like the chromatic calendar of time to come.

It might be the candle of another being,
Ragged in unkempt perceptions, that stands
And meditates an image of itself,
Studies and shapes a tallowy image, swarmed
With slight, prismatic reeks not recollected,
A bubble without a wall on which to hang.

The curtains, when pulled, might show another whole,
An azure outre-terre, oranged and rosed,
At the elbow of Copernicus, a sphere,
A universe without life's limp and lack,
Philosopher's end . . . What difference would it make,
So long as the mind, for once, fulfilled itself?

---
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), 1950
From Collected Poems, 1954

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Wallace Stevens biography

Men Made Out of Words / Wallace Stevens

Men Made Out of Words

What should we be without the sexual myth,
The human revery or poem of death?

Castratos of moon-mash – Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human

Revery is a solitude, in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,

By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that defeats and dreams are one.

The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.

---
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), 1946
from Transport to Summer, 1947

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Wallace Stevens biography

"Men Made out of Words" read by TomReads.

In the Garden / George J. Dance

   
    In the Garden

    First rose of spring
    blooms in the garden,
    where my lady lingers.

    ---
    George J. Dance

    from Doggerel and other Doggerel, 2015

[In the Garden by George Dance is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International Unported License]

  

 

photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons 

[Public Domain]

George J. Dance biography