Wormy metaphors

A very felicitous eve,

Herr Doktor, and that's enough,

Though the brow in your palm may grieve

At the vernacular of light

(Omitting reefs of cloud) :

Empurpled garden grass;

The spruces' outstretched hands;

The twilight overfull

Of wormy metaphors.

Delightful Evening by Wallace Stevens (The Collected Poems. Vintage Books New York. 1990).

I like they way each line is interesting on its own in this poem and how it seems to be set against lazy adjectives. I'm not sure what 'Herr Doktor' refers too though? Given the time it was written (before 1936) it seems like it could be something to do with WWI maybe. I don't know. But the main focus seems to be on describing the night even if it is full of 'wormy metaphors'.

Back to school sale!

Read Wallace Stevens' massively long poem The Man with the Blue Guitar. 33 different sections, all needing to be read incredibly slowly and carefully. Not that I did that. Some of it was quite elusive. I kind of got the general gist of 'the man with the blue guitar' being the writer, the artist not saying things 'as they are,' but as they could be, the bread as opposed to the stone. There was also some stuff in there about imagination, dreams and sleep/wakefulness too. The thing is I am pretty sure there was also at least another dozen or so things going on that I didn't get. I'll have to read it a few more time I think. Sheesh, he is so dense (not in the pre-teen slang kind of way) and so philosophical. I think sometimes he misses out on thoese lovely small details though, because the poem is so stripped back to it's symbolic, philosophical core. Maybe that's the post-domestic poetry coming out in me, the whole observational thing that I guess he was arguing against in the Blue Guitar, poetry not being about things 'as they are' or at least not in the factual, demonstratable sense.

First day of school today. So good to be back after so long in the wilderness. Can't wait to hear what everyone has/hasn't been up to.

The Stevens/Douglas connection

I got out a small Wallace Stevens book (Selected Poems. 1953. Faber and Faber Ltd.) yesterday and I've been reading that because I think he is the one from that era that I respect the most. I haven't been let down so far. He has some beautiful and, I think, varied music. Like he will have a line or two of really lovely rhyme that comes as a shock to the rest of the poem, but fits into the rhythm of it perfectly. He writes a kind of free verse that is incredibly controlled, so it seems almost form like. Maybe that is the definition of good free verse? The Worms at Heaven's Gate:

[...]

Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,

The lashes of that eye and its white lid.

Here is the cheek on which that lid declined,

And, finger after finger, here, the hand,

The genuis of that cheek. Here are the lips,

The bundle of the body and the feet.

[...]

That rhyme at the end of this section (and also the sound of the 'lid declined') is for me what makes this poem so special. It jumps out as a lovely piece of music, even though in a way he is describing quite a banal thing, using quite ordinary words. It's the syntax and the control that makes this so gorgeous.

And I wrote a found poem from the book I bought last week Completing the Circle by Roger Douglas. I'm not sure if it is working. I might show it to Damien etc and see what they think. Generally I don't like found poems. They have to be exceptional I think. I'm not sure this is. The most interesting thing about the book is that it is signed and he pressed so hard with the pen that you can see the indent of the signature all the way to page 9. Maybe I should write a poem about that? His solid grip or something?

History, language and influence

Wrote the third part to the Unsettlement/Settlement poem today. Thanks Chris for suggesting this and also giving me the 'Morning, Noon and Night' exercise, which I didn't do, but helped with the three-parter thing.

Watched Michael Palmer reading at Berkeley's Lunch Poems series. He mentioned a poem called 'So' (I think?) by Wallace Stevens that inspired a series of poems of his called 'So 1 (2,3,4...)' which piqued my interested because I think I am also influenced by Wallace Stevens, although I haven't read much of his stuff. The reason I say that because some of the things I have read of his just look and sound a little similar to mine, although I'm sure I've never read them before. So I'll try and find the 'So' series, it would be great to read a series of poems by someone who directly influences me on someone who indirectly influences me.

And on that note, I've just finished reading another Jay Parini essay on 'Tradition and Originality' which talks about borrowing/stealing from your precursor. This seems to have become accepted for writers to do in even the most obvious of ways since Eliot wrote The Wasteland and there doesn't seem to be much argument about this, not by writers at least. The most interesting thing he mentioned though, was how contemporary writing seems to inform how the canon is read (he cited an Eliot essay on this), so that by reinterpreting the past we are actually altering it. So if Michael Palmer was to write a poem that is influenced by a Wallace Steven's poem, then we would read the Wallace Steven's poem in a different way, perhaps contextually, perhaps just by giving it more significance. So it is a two way street, which is nice.

But he went on to compare this with the nature of language itself, how all words and stolen from the past and reinterpreted, recontextualised every time we use them and it is just that poets are conscious of this process and actively seek to give old words new meanings, old poems new life. I like that too.

Poetry is "about" the past, in that poets understand that language itself is history and that words have slipped through time, undergone mutations, shifts in meaning; but each word is a palimpest as well: it contains multiple erasures, which underlie its current meaning, coloring it, giving it character and ambiguity and direction. A poem, in this sense, is also a palimpest, a "writing over" of previous poems, and therefore a gift to the future, where it will be misread, misdirected, even misplaced.

Also, I like that small phrase "language itself is history." That might give me some help with my history series I think, which I really don't want to be about 'history' in the sense of this is what has happened in the past. Maybe etymology (and influence?) is the key. I started down that direction in one of the poems, although not very successfully. Maybe I could pick some interesting words that are 'normally' associated with history and look up the etymology, writing the poem from there? So it becomes the history of the word I guess.