Stevensiana

[AdamSmith]

Larger view into Bloom, ~25 years later than the video above, occasion his just published book How to Read and Why. https://books.google.com/books/about/How_to_Read_and_why.html?id=N-UJBBn-ABIC&hl=en

Please overlook the presence of Charlie Rose.

 

[AdamSmith]

Opening poem in John Ashbery's collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Stevens is Ashbery's favorite poet.

 

As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat

 

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.

Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight

Filters down, a little at a time,

Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,

As the sun yellows the green of the maple tree....

 

So this was all, but obscurely

I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages

Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.

New sentences were starting up. But the summer

Was well along, not yet past the mid-point

But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,

That time when one can no longer wander away

And even the least attentive fall silent

To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

 

A look of glass stops you

And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?

Did they notice me, this time, as I am,

Or is it postponed again? The children

Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift

Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate

As limpid, dense twilight comes.

Only in that tooting of a horn

Down there, for a moment, I thought

The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,

Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade

That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,

Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

 

The prevalence of those gray flakes falling?

They are sun motes. You have slept in the sun

Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.

Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door

But it was only her come to ask once more

If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't.

 

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor

Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,

Finally involved with the business of darkness.

And a sigh heaves from all the small things on earth,

The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons

Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower

Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.

The summer demands and takes away too much,

But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

[AdamSmith]

A.R. Ammons, my favorite contemporary poet after Stevens and Ashbery (next would be Elizabeth Bishop), explains Ashbery.

 

INTERVIEWER

 

When you begin a poem, do you have a specific source of inspiration, or do you start with words and push them around the page until they begin to take shape?

 

AMMONS

 

John Ashbery says that he would never begin to write a poem under the force of inspiration or with an idea already given. He prefers to wait until he has absolutely nothing to say, and then begins to find words and to sort them out and to associate with them. He likes to have the poem occur on the occasion of its occurrence rather than to be the result of some inspiration or imposition from the outside. Now I think that’s a brilliant point of view. That’s not the way I work. I’ve always been highly energized and have written poems in spurts. From the god-given first line right through the poem. And I don’t write two or three lines and then come back the next day and write two or three more; I write the whole poem at one sitting and then come back to it from time to time over the months or years and rework it.

 

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1394/the-art-of-poetry-no-73-a-r-ammons

[AdamSmith]

One Art

By Elizabeth Bishop

 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

 

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

 

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

 

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

 

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

[AdamSmith]

At the Fishhouses

By Elizabeth Bishop

 

Although it is a cold evening,

down by one of the fishhouses

an old man sits netting,

his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,

a dark purple-brown,

and his shuttle worn and polished.

The air smells so strong of codfish

it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.

The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs

and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up

to storerooms in the gables

for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.

All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,

swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,

is opaque, but the silver of the benches,

the lobster pots, and masts, scattered

among the wild jagged rocks,

is of an apparent translucence

like the small old buildings with an emerald moss

growing on their shoreward walls.

The big fish tubs are completely lined

with layers of beautiful herring scales

and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered

with creamy iridescent coats of mail,

with small iridescent flies crawling on them.

Up on the little slope behind the houses,

set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,

is an ancient wooden capstan,

cracked, with two long bleached handles

and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,

where the ironwork has rusted.

The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.

He was a friend of my grandfather.

We talk of the decline in the population

and of codfish and herring

while he waits for a herring boat to come in.

There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.

He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,

from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,

the blade of which is almost worn away.

 

Down at the water’s edge, at the place

where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp

descending into the water, thin silver

tree trunks are laid horizontally

across the gray stones, down and down

at intervals of four or five feet.

 

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

element bearable to no mortal,

to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly

I have seen here evening after evening.

He was curious about me. He was interested in music;

like me a believer in total immersion,

so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.

I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”

He stood up in the water and regarded me

steadily, moving his head a little.

Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge

almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug

as if it were against his better judgment.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,

the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,

the dignified tall firs begin.

Bluish, associating with their shadows,

a million Christmas trees stand

waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended

above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.

I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,

slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,

icily free above the stones,

above the stones and then the world.

If you should dip your hand in,

your wrist would ache immediately,

your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn

as if the water were a transmutation of fire

that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,

then briny, then surely burn your tongue.

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

[AdamSmith]

Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore

by Elizabeth Bishop

 

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,

please come flying.

In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,

please come flying,

to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums

descending out of the mackerel sky

over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,

please come flying.

 

Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships

are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags

rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.

Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing

countless little pellucid jellies

in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.

The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.

The waves are running in verses this fine morning.

Please come flying.

 

Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe

trailing a sapphire highlight,

with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,

with heaven knows how many angels all riding

on the broad black brim of your hat,

please come flying.

 

Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,

a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,

please come flying.

Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan

is all awash with morals this fine morning,

so please come flying.

 

Mounting the sky with natural heroism,

above the accidents, above the malignant movies,

the taxicabs and injustices at large,

while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears

that simultaneously listen to

a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,

please come flying.

 

For whom the grim museums will behave

like courteous male bower-birds,

for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait

on the steps of the Public Library,

eager to rise and follow through the doors

up into the reading rooms,

please come flying.

We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,

or play at a game of constantly being wrong

with a priceless set of vocabularies,

or we can bravely deplore, but please

please come flying.

 

With dynasties of negative constructions

darkening and dying around you,

with grammar that suddenly turns and shines

like flocks of sandpipers flying,

please come flying.

 

Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,

come like a daytime comet

with a long unnebulous train of words,

from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,

please come flying.

[AdamSmith]

Roosters

By Elizabeth Bishop

 

At four o’clock

in the gun-metal blue dark

we hear the first crow of the first cock

 

just below

the gun-metal blue window

and immediately there is an echo

 

off in the distance,

then one from the backyard fence,

then one, with horrible insistence,

 

grates like a wet match

from the broccoli patch,

flares, and all over town begins to catch.

 

Cries galore

come from the water-closet door,

from the dropping-plastered henhouse floor,

 

where in the blue blur

their rustling wives admire,

the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare

 

with stupid eyes

while from their beaks there rise

the uncontrolled, traditional cries.

 

Deep from protruding chests

in green-gold medals dressed,

planned to command and terrorize the rest,

 

the many wives

who lead hens’ lives

of being courted and despised;

 

deep from raw throats

a senseless order floats

all over town. A rooster gloats

 

over our beds

from rusty iron sheds

and fences made from old bedsteads,

 

over our churches

where the tin rooster perches,

over our little wooden northern houses,

 

making sallies

from all the muddy alleys,

marking out maps like Rand McNally’s:

 

glass-headed pins,

oil-golds and copper greens,

anthracite blues, alizarins,

 

each one an active

displacement in perspective;

each screaming, “This is where I live!”

 

Each screaming

“Get up! Stop dreaming!”

Roosters, what are you projecting?

 

You, whom the Greeks elected

to shoot at on a post, who struggled

when sacrificed, you whom they labeled

 

“Very combative ...”

what right have you to give

commands and tell us how to live,

 

cry “Here!” and “Here!”

and wake us here where are

unwanted love, conceit and war?

 

The crown of red

set on your little head

is charged with all your fighting blood.

 

Yes, that excrescence

makes a most virile presence,

plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence.

 

Now in mid-air

by twos they fight each other.

Down comes a first flame-feather,

 

and one is flying,

with raging heroism defying

even the sensation of dying.

 

And one has fallen,

but still above the town

his torn-out, bloodied feathers drift down;

 

and what he sung

no matter. He is flung

on the gray ash-heap, lies in dung

 

with his dead wives

with open, bloody eyes,

while those metallic feathers oxidize.

 

St. Peter’s sin

was worse than that of Magdalen

whose sin was of the flesh alone;

 

of spirit, Peter’s,

falling, beneath the flares,

among the “servants and officers.”

 

Old holy sculpture

could set it all together

in one small scene, past and future:

 

Christ stands amazed,

Peter, two fingers raised

to surprised lips, both as if dazed.

 

But in between

a little cock is seen

carved on a dim column in the travertine,

 

explained by gallus canit;

flet Petrus underneath it.

There is inescapable hope, the pivot;

 

yes, and there Peter’s tears

run down our chanticleer’s

sides and gem his spurs.

 

Tear-encrusted thick

as a medieval relic

he waits. Poor Peter, heart-sick,

 

still cannot guess

those cock-a-doodles yet might bless,

his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness,

 

a new weathervane

on basilica and barn,

and that outside the Lateran

 

there would always be

a bronze cock on a porphyry

pillar so the people and the Pope might see

 

that even the Prince

of the Apostles long since

had been forgiven, and to convince

 

all the assembly

that “Deny deny deny”

is not all the roosters cry.

 

In the morning

a low light is floating

in the backyard, and gilding

 

from underneath

the broccoli, leaf by leaf;

how could the night have come to grief?

 

gilding the tiny

floating swallow’s belly

and lines of pink cloud in the sky,

 

the day’s preamble

like wandering lines in marble.

The cocks are now almost inaudible.

 

The sun climbs in,

following “to see the end,”

faithful as enemy, or friend.

[AdamSmith]

Lebensweisheitspielerei

Wallace Stevens

 

Weaker and weaker, the sunlight falls

In the afternoon. The proud and the strong

Have departed.

 

Those that are left are the unaccomplished,

The finally human,

Natives of a dwindled sphere.

 

Their indigence is an indigence

That is an indigence of the light,

A stellar pallor that hangs on the threads.

 

Little by little, the poverty

Of autumnal space becomes

A look, a few words spoken.

 

Each person completely touches us

With what he is and as he is,

In the stale grandeur of annihilation.

[AdamSmith]

Racking the noggin to recall which critical wag observed that parts of The Waste Land are, at base, Tennyson refracted through the sensibility of Bram Stoker.

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

 

Although the thing does have its moments. Such as this explicitly queer (homosexual come-on) bit.

 

Unreal City

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants 210

C. i. f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a week-end at the Metropole.

 

The hotel Metropole (in Brighton, UK) being a known place for such.

[AdamSmith]

Contrast with the (explicitly, consciously) anti-Eliot, Hart Crane. Whose great work The Bridge he conceived quite directly as a rebuke to The Waste Land.

 

This is not The Bridge, but rather one of his greatest standalone short pieces.

 

The Broken Tower

 

The bell-rope that gathers God at dawn

Dispatches me as though I dropped down the knell

Of a spent day--to wander the cathedral lawn

From pit to crucifix, feet chill on steps from hell.

 

Have you not heard, have you not seen that corps

Of shadows in the tower, whose shoulders sway

Antiphonal carillons launched before

The stars are caught and hived in the sun's ray?

 

The bells, I say, the bells break down their tower;

And swing I know not where. Their tongues engrave

Membrane through marrow, my long-scattered score

Of broken intervals… And I, their sexton slave!

 

Oval encyclicals in canyons heaping

The impasse high with choir. Banked voices slain!

Pagodas, campaniles with reveilles out leaping--

O terraced echoes prostrate on the plain!…

 

And so it was I entered the broken world

To trace the visionary company of love, its voice

An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)

But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

 

My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored

Of that tribunal monarch of the air

Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word

In wounds pledged once to hope - cleft to despair?

 

The steep encroachments of my blood left me

No answer (could blood hold such a lofty tower

As flings the question true?) -or is it she

Whose sweet mortality stirs latent power?-

 

And through whose pulse I hear, counting the strokes

My veins recall and add, revived and sure

The angelus of wars my chest evokes:

What I hold healed, original now, and pure…

 

And builds, within, a tower that is not stone

(Not stone can jacket heaven) - but slip

Of pebbles, - visible wings of silence sown

In azure circles, widening as they dip

 

The matrix of the heart, lift down the eye

That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…

The commodious, tall decorum of that sky

Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

[AdamSmith]

Proem to The Bridge.

 

To Brooklyn Bridge

 

How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest

The seagull’s wings shall dip and pivot him,

Shedding white rings of tumult, building high

Over the chained bay waters Liberty—

 

Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes

As apparitional as sails that cross

Some page of figures to be filed away;

—Till elevators drop us from our day . . .

 

I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights

With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene

Never disclosed, but hastened to again,

Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;

 

And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced

As though the sun took step of thee, yet left

Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,—

Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!

 

Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft

A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,

Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,

A jest falls from the speechless caravan.

 

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,

A rip-tooth of the sky’s acetylene;

All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .

Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

 

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,

Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow

Of anonymity time cannot raise:

Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

 

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,

(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)

Terrific threshold of the prophet’s pledge,

Prayer of pariah, and the lover’s cry,—

 

Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift

Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,

Beading thy path—condense eternity:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.

 

Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;

Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

The City’s fiery parcels all undone,

Already snow submerges an iron year . . .

 

O Sleepless as the river under thee,

Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,

Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend

And of the curveship lend a myth to God.

The University of Illinois' Modern American Poetry website analyses the symbolic meaning of "the bridge" as central image throughout the book:

When Crane positions himself under the shadows of the bridge, he is, in one sense, simply the poet of the romantic tradition, the observer who stands aside the better to see; but he is, in another sense, the gay male cruising in an area notorious for its casual sex. Even the bridge itself, the Brooklyn Bridge that is the central object of the poem, was strongly identified in Crane’s own mind with [Crane's lover] Emil Opffer, to whom Voyages was dedicated. The appearance of the bridge secretly encrypts a highly personal memory and a specific presence in the text. Crane’s "epic of America" gets underway as a personal quest, as a poem divided against itself, in devotion to an urban setting that encourages social diversity, with secret inscriptions that retain their meanings to which only a privileged few are accessible.

"Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" is the short lyrical ode to the Brooklyn Bridge and New York City which opens the sequence and serves as an introduction (and New York City's urban landscape remains a dominant presence throughout the book). After beginning with this ode, "Ave Maria" begins the first longer sequence labeled Roman numeral I which describes Columbus' accidental voyage to the Americas. The title of the piece is based upon the fact that Columbus attributed his crew's survival across the Atlantic Ocean to "the intercession of the Virgin Mary." The second major section of the poem, "Powhatan's Daughter," is divided into five parts, and one well-known part, entitled "The River," follows a group of vagabonds, in the 20th century, who are traveling west through America via train. In "The River," Crane incorporates advertisements and references Minstrel shows. He claimed in a letter that "the rhythm [in this section] is jazz." The section also includes the story of Pocahontas (who was "Powhatan's Daughter") and a section on the fictional character Rip Van Winkle.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bridge_(long_poem)

[AdamSmith]

Soaring concluding canto of The Bridge.

 

The Bridge: Atlantis

By Hart Crane

 

Through the bound cable strands, the arching path

Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—

Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate

The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.

Up the index of night, granite and steel—

Transparent meshes—fleckless the gleaming staves—

Sibylline voices flicker, waveringly stream

As though a god were issue of the strings. . . .

 

And through that cordage, threading with its call

One arc synoptic of all tides below—

Their labyrinthine mouths of history

Pouring reply as though all ships at sea

Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry,—

“Make thy love sure—to weave whose song we ply!”

—From black embankments, moveless soundings hailed,

So seven oceans answer from their dream.

 

And on, obliquely up bright carrier bars

New octaves trestle the twin monoliths

Beyond whose frosted capes the moon bequeaths

Two worlds of sleep (O arching strands of song!)—

Onward and up the crystal-flooded aisle

White tempest nets file upward, upward ring

With silver terraces the humming spars,

The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars.

 

Sheerly the eyes, like seagulls stung with rime—

Slit and propelled by glistening fins of light—

Pick biting way up towering looms that press

Sidelong with flight of blade on tendon blade

—Tomorrows into yesteryear—and link

What cipher-script of time no traveller reads

But who, through smoking pyres of love and death,

Searches the timeless laugh of mythic spears.

 

Like hails, farewells—up planet-sequined heights

Some trillion whispering hammers glimmer Tyre:

Serenely, sharply up the long anvil cry

Of inchling aeons silence rivets Troy.

And you, aloft there—Jason! hesting Shout!

Still wrapping harness to the swarming air!

Silvery the rushing wake, surpassing call,

Beams yelling Aeolus! splintered in the straits!

 

From gulfs unfolding, terrible of drums,

Tall Vision-of-the-Voyage, tensely spare—

Bridge, lifting night to cycloramic crest

Of deepest day—O Choir, translating time

Into what multitudinous Verb the suns

And synergy of waters ever fuse, recast

In myriad syllables,—Psalm of Cathay!

O Love, thy white, pervasive Paradigm . . . !

 

We left the haven hanging in the night

Sheened harbor lanterns backward fled the keel.

Pacific here at time’s end, bearing corn,—

Eyes stammer through the pangs of dust and steel.

And still the circular, indubitable frieze

Of heaven’s meditation, yoking wave

To kneeling wave, one song devoutly binds—

The vernal strophe chimes from deathless strings!

 

O Thou steeled Cognizance whose leap commits

The agile precincts of the lark’s return;

Within whose lariat sweep encinctured sing

In single chrysalis the many twain,—

Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow

And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom—

Sight, sound and flesh Thou leadest from time’s realm

As love strikes clear direction for the helm.

 

Swift peal of secular light, intrinsic Myth

Whose fell unshadow is death’s utter wound,—

O River-throated—iridescently upborne

Through the bright drench and fabric of our veins;

With white escarpments swinging into light,

Sustained in tears the cities are endowed

And justified conclamant with ripe fields

Revolving through their harvests in sweet torment.

 

Forever Deity’s glittering Pledge, O Thou

Whose canticle fresh chemistry assigns

To wrapt inception and beatitude,—

Always through blinding cables, to our joy,

Of thy white seizure springs the prophecy:

Always through spiring cordage, pyramids

Of silver sequel, Deity’s young name

Kinetic of white choiring wings . . . ascends.

 

Migrations that must needs void memory,

Inventions that cobblestone the heart,—

Unspeakable Thou Bridge to Thee, O Love.

Thy pardon for this history, whitest Flower,

O Answerer of all,—Anemone,—

Now while thy petals spend the suns about us, hold—

(O Thou whose radiance doth inherit me)

Atlantis,—hold thy floating singer late!

 

So to thine Everpresence, beyond time,

Like spears ensanguined of one tolling star

That bleeds infinity—the orphic strings,

Sidereal phalanxes, leap and converge:

—One Song, one Bridge of Fire! Is it Cathay,

Now pity steeps the grass and rainbows ring

The serpent with the eagle in the leaves. . . . ?

Whispers antiphonal in azure swing.

[AdamSmith]

And how that closing line is echoed in ('influence' ) the conclusion of Ashbery's great Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

 

...Therefore I beseech you, withdraw that hand,

Offer it no longer as shield or greeting,

The shield of a greeting, Francesco:

There is room for one bullet in the chamber:

Our looking through the wrong end

Of the telescope as you fall back at a speed

Faster than that of light to flatten ultimately

Among the features of the room, an invitation

Never mailed, the "it was all a dream"

Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely

Enough how it wasn't. Its existence

Was real, though troubled, and the ache

Of this waking dream can never drown out

The diagram still sketched on the wind,

Chosen, meant for me and materialized

In the disguising radiance of my room.

We have seen the city; it is the gibbous

Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen

On its balcony and are resumed within,

But the action is the cold, syrupy flow

Of a pageant. One feels too confined,

Sifting the April sunlight for clues,

In the mere stillness of the ease of its

Parameter. The hand holds no chalk

And each part of the whole falls off

And cannot know it knew, except

Here and there, in cold pockets

Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-portrait_in_a_Convex_Mirror

[AdamSmith]

Farewell to Florida

Stevens

 

I

Go on, high ship, since now, upon the shore,

The snake has left its skin upon the floor.

Key West sank downward under massive clouds

And silvers and greens spread over the sea. The moon

Is at the mast-head and the past is dead.

Her mind will never speak to me again.

I am free. High above the mast the moon

Rides clear of her mind and the waves make a refrain

Of this: that the snake has shed its skin upon

The floor. Go on through the darkness. The waves fly back.

 

 

II

Her mind had bound me round. The palms were hot

As if I lived in ashen ground, as if

The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound

From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South,

Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea,

Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys,

Her days, her oceanic nights, calling

For music, for whisperings from the reefs.

How content I shall be in the North to which I sail

And to feel sure and to forget the bleaching sand . . .

 

 

III

I hated the weathery yawl from which the pools

Disclosed the sea floor and the wilderness

Of waving weeds. I hated the vivid blooms

Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,

The trees likes bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.

To stand here on the deck in the dark and sand

Farewell and to know that that land is forever gone

And that she will not follow in any word

Or look, nor ever again in thought, except

That I loved her once . . . Farewell. Go on, high ship.

 

 

IV

My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime

Both of men and clouds, a slime of men in crowds.

The men are moving as the water moves,

This darkened water cloven by sullen swells

Against your sides, then shoving and slithering,

The darkness shattered, turbulent with foam.

To be free again, to return to the violent mind

That is their mind, these men, and that will bind

Me round, carry me, misty deck, carry me

To the cold, go on, high ship, go on, plunge on.

[AdamSmith]

Evening Hawk

Robert Penn Warren, 1905 - 1989

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through

Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,

Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding

The last tumultuous avalanche of

Light above pines and the guttural gorge,

The hawk comes.

His wing

Scythes down another day, his motion

Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear

The crashless fall of stalks of Time.

 

The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.

 

Look! Look! he is climbing the last light

Who knows neither Time nor error, and under

Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings

Into shadow.

 

Long now,

The last thrush is still, the last bat

Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom

Is ancient, too, and immense. The star

Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain.

 

If there were no wind we might, we think, hear

The earth grind on its axis, or history

Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

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.

[AdamSmith]

The Man on the Dump

By Wallace Stevens

 

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.

The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche

Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho ... The dump is full

Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.

The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,

And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems

Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,

The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box

From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.

 

The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.

The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says

That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs

More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.

The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green

Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea

On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew

For buttons, how many women have covered themselves

With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads

Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.

One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

 

Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,

Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),

Between that disgust and this, between the things

That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)

And those that will be (azaleas and so on),

One feels the purifying change. One rejects

The trash.

 

That’s the moment when the moon creeps up

To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time

One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.

Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon

(All its images are in the dump) and you see

As a man (not like an image of a man),

You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

 

One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.

One beats and beats for that which one believes.

That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all

Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear

To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,

Peck the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear

Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,

Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds

On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,

Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:

Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say

Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull

The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?

Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.

[AdamSmith]

Here is, oddly, a vastly better recitation by S of this poem than the one from later in his life that I posted above.

 

https://m.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/idea-order-key-west

[AdamSmith]

In the foregoing Stevens bit you will hear the famous Harvard accent. Contrast with the Yale accent, bodied forth with 100% fidelity by one William F. Buckley

 

The Jale accent is precisely how your Tarheel hick AS speaks aloud today.

 

I often get asked, from my pronunciation patterns (I still can't figure it out), "Are you Belgian?"

[AdamSmith]

Here is, oddly, a vastly better recitation by S of this poem than the one from later in his life that I posted above.

 

https://m.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/idea-order-key-west

See, this was a part of Stevens's genius: to see how to write poems that simply could not be declaimed in a voice-box-produced voice.

 

They were poems for the mind's ear alone (his own phrase.)

[AdamSmith]

Referenced above. Seasonally apt meditation on growing older, the northern lights as central imaginative figure, imaged in the first canto as a serpent sinuously weaving about in the sky. Contains some of my favorite lines in all of literature.

 

The Auroras of Autumn

 

I

 

This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.

His head is air. Beneath his tip at night

Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

 

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,

Another image at the end of the cave,

Another bodiless for the body's slough?

 

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,

These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,

And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

 

This is form gulping after formlessness,

Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances

And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

 

This is the height emerging and its base

These lights may finally attain a pole

In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

 

In another nest, the master of the maze

Of body and air and forms and images,

Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

 

This is his poison: that we should disbelieve

Even that. His meditations in the ferns,

When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

 

Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,

Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,

The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.

 

II

 

Farewell to an idea . . . A cabin stands,

Deserted, on a beach. It is white,

As by a custom or according to

 

An ancestral theme or as a consequence

Of an infinite course. The flowers against the wall

Are white, a little dried, a kind of mark

 

Reminding, trying to remind, of a white

That was different, something else, last year

Or before, not the white of an aging afternoon,

 

Whether fresher or duller, whether of winter cloud

Or of winter sky, from horizon to horizon.

The wind is blowing the sand across the floor.

 

Here, being visible is being white,

Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment

Of an extremist in an exercise . . .

 

The season changes. A cold wind chills the beach.

The long lines of it grow longer, emptier,

A darkness gathers though it does not fall

 

And the whiteness grows less vivid on the wall.

The man who is walking turns blankly on the sand.

He observes how the north is always enlarging the change,

 

With its frigid brilliances, its blue-red sweeps

And gusts of great enkindlings, its polar green,

The color of ice and fire and solitude.

 

III

 

Farewell to an idea . . . The mother's face,

The purpose of the poem, fills the room.

They are together, here, and it is warm,

 

With none of the prescience of oncoming dreams.

It is evening. The house is evening, half dissolved.

Only the half they can never possess remains,

 

Still-starred. It is the mother they possess,

Who gives transparence to their present peace.

She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

 

And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.

She gives transparence. But she has grown old.

The necklace is a carving not a kiss.

 

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.

The house will crumble and the books will burn.

They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

 

And the house is of the mind and they and time,

Together, all together. Boreal night

Will look like frost as it approaches them

 

And to the mother as she falls asleep

And as they say good-night, good-night. Upstairs

The windows will be lighted, not the rooms.

 

A wind will spread its windy grandeurs round

And knock like a rifle-butt against the door.

The wind will command them with invincible sound.

 

IV

 

Farewell to an idea . . . The cancellings,

The negations are never final. The father sits

In space, wherever he sits, of bleak regard,

 

As one that is strong in the bushes of his eyes.

He says no to no and yes to yes. He says yes

To no; and in saying yes he says farewell.

 

He measures the velocities of change.

He leaps from heaven to heaven more rapidly

Than bad angels leap from heaven to hell in flames.

 

But now he sits in quiet and green-a-day.

He assumes the great speeds of space and flutters them

From cloud to cloudless, cloudless to keen clear

 

In flights of eye and ear, the highest eye

And the lowest ear, the deep ear that discerns,

At evening, things that attend it until it hears

 

The supernatural preludes of its own,

At the moment when the angelic eye defines

Its actors approaching, in company, in their masks.

 

Master O master seated by the fire

And yet in space and motionless and yet

Of motion the ever-brightening origin,

 

Profound, and yet the king and yet the crown,

Look at this present throne. What company,

In masks, can choir it with the naked wind?

 

V

 

The mother invites humanity to her house

And table. The father fetches tellers of tales

And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.

 

The father fetches negresses to dance,

Among the children, like curious ripenesses

Of pattern in the dance's ripening.

 

For these the musicians make insidious tones,

Clawing the sing-song of their instruments.

The children laugh and jangle a tinny time.

 

The father fetches pageants out of air,

Scenes of the theatre, vistas and blocks of woods

And curtains like a naive pretence of sleep.

 

Among these the musicians strike the instinctive poem.

The father fetches his unherded herds,

Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves

 

Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch.

This then is Chatillon or as you please.

We stand in the tumult of a festival.

 

What festival? This loud, disordered mooch?

These hospitaliers? These brute-like guests?

These musicians dubbing at a tragedy,

 

A-dub, a-dub, which is made up of this:

That there are no lines to speak? There is no play.

Or, the persons act one merely by being here.

[AdamSmith]

VI

 

It is a theatre floating through the clouds,

Itself a cloud, although of misted rock

And mountains running like water, wave on wave,

 

Through waves of light. It is of cloud transformed

To cloud transformed again, idly, the way

A season changes color to no end,

 

Except the lavishing of itself in change,

As light changes yellow into gold and gold

To its opal elements and fire's delight,

 

Splashed wide-wise because it likes magnificence

And the solemn pleasures of magnificent space

The cloud drifts idly through half-thought-of forms.

 

The theatre is filled with flying birds,

Wild wedges, as of a volcano's smoke, palm-eyed

And vanishing, a web in a corridor

 

Or massive portico. A capitol,

It may be, is emerging or has just

Collapsed. The denouement has to be postponed . . .

 

This is nothing until in a single man contained,

Nothing until this named thing nameless is

And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

 

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees

An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame

Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

 

VII

 

Is there an imagination that sits enthroned

As grim as it is benevolent, the just

And the unjust, which in the midst of summer stops

 

To imagine winter? When the leaves are dead,

Does it take its place in the north and enfold itself,

Goat-leaper, crystalled and luminous, sitting

 

In highest night? And do these heavens adorn

And proclaim it, the white creator of black, jetted

By extinguishings, even of planets as may be,

 

Even of earth, even of sight, in snow,

Except as needed by way of majesty,

In the sky, as crown and diamond cabala?

 

It leaps through us, through all our heavens leaps,

Extinguishing our planets, one by one,

Leaving, of where we were and looked, of where

 

We knew each other and of each other thought,

A shivering residue, chilled and foregone,

Except for that crown and mystical cabala.

 

But it dare not leap by chance in its own dark.

It must change from destiny to slight caprice.

And thus its jetted tragedy, its stele

 

And shape and mournful making move to find

What must unmake it and, at last, what can,

Say, a flippant communication under the moon.

 

VIII

 

There may be always a time of innocence.

There is never a place. Or if there is no time,

If it is not a thing of time, nor of place,

 

Existing in the idea of it, alone,

In the sense against calamity, it is not

Less real. For the oldest and coldest philosopher,

 

There is or may be a time of innocence

As pure principle. Its nature is its end,

That it should be, and yet not be, a thing

 

That pinches the pity of the pitiful man,

Like a book at evening beautiful but untrue,

Like a book on rising beautiful and true.

 

It is like a thing of ether that exists

Almost as predicate. But it exists,

It exists, it is visible, it is, it is.

 

So, then, these lights are not a spell of light,

A saying out of a cloud, but innocence.

An innocence of the earth and no false sign

 

Or symbol of malice. That we partake thereof,

Lie down like children in this holiness,

As if, awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,

 

As if the innocent mother sang in the dark

Of the room and on an accordion, half-heard,

Created the time and place in which we breathed . . .

 

IX

 

And of each other thought—in the idiom

Of the work, in the idiom of an innocent earth,

Not of the enigma of the guilty dream.

 

We were as Danes in Denmark all day long

And knew each other well, hale-hearted landsmen,

For whom the outlandish was another day

 

Of the week, queerer than Sunday. We thought alike

And that made brothers of us in a home

In which we fed on being brothers, fed

 

And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb.

This drama that we live—We lay sticky with sleep.

This sense of the activity of fate—

 

The rendezvous, when she came alone,

By her coming became a freedom of the two,

An isolation which only the two could share.

 

Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?

Of what disaster in this the imminence:

Bare limbs, bare trees and a wind as sharp as salt?

 

The stars are putting on their glittering belts.

They throw around their shoulders cloaks that flash

Like a great shadow's last embellishment.

 

It may come tomorrow in the simplest word,

Almost as part of innocence, almost,

Almost as the tenderest and the truest part.

 

X

 

An unhappy people in a happy world—

Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.

An unhappy people in an unhappy world—

 

Here are too many mirrors for misery.

A happy people in an unhappy world—

It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll

 

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.

A happy people in a happy world—

Buffo! A ball, an opera, a bar.

 

Turn back to where we were when we began:

An unhappy people in a happy world.

Now, solemnize the secretive syllables.

 

Read to the congregation, for today

And for tomorrow, this extremity,

This contrivance of the spectre of the spheres,

 

Contriving balance to contrive a whole,

The vital, the never-failing genius,

Fulfilling his meditations, great and small.

 

In these unhappy he meditates a whole,

The full of fortune and the full of fate,

As if he lived all lives, that he might know,

 

In hall harridan, not hushful paradise,

To a haggling of wind and weather, by these lights

Like a blaze of summer straw, in winter's nick.

[mike carey]

@AdamSmith, the all sleeper train from Sydney to Melbourne, when it ran years ago, was the Southern Aurora. When I think of the lights in the sky I think Aurora Australis rather than Borealis.