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by delicatemonster Sat Jan 19th, 2008 at 06:58:42 PM EST
Inspired by recent discussion about Wallace Stevens, and few snow flakes today falling in Richmond, VA, where they are fairly rare, I put together a little snow blogging piece you might enjoy.
With apologies to Wallace Stevens.
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. --Wallace Stevens
Anyway, this is a comment... something or nothing...
Nice diary, delicatemonster, thanks! (Too warm here!)
(now)
Thanks, afew!
I remember your photographs of Merida. My wife and I had visited in August (weatherwise, a little toasty, but still really beautiful) and fell in love with the place. Your photographs brought it all back. They were superb.
That is all far more interesting than "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." And if the "listener" is "nothing", presumably they can neither listen nor behold - not that we would have missed - anything :-) Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
Until now, the secretary's poetry has found only a small and skeptical audience: the Pentagon press corps. Every day, Rumsfeld regales reporters with his jazzy, impromptu riffs. Few of them seem to appreciate it. But we should all be listening. Rumsfeld's poetry is paradoxical: It uses playful language to address the most somber subjects: war, terrorism, mortality. Much of it is about indirection and evasion: He never faces his subjects head on but weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile. His work, with its dedication to the fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams'. Some readers may find that Rumsfeld's gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank O'Hara's. And so Slate has compiled a collection of Rumsfeld's poems, bringing them to a wider public for the first time. The poems that follow are the exact words of the defense secretary, as taken from the official transcripts on the Defense Department Web site. The Unknown As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know. --Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing http://www.slate.com/id/2081042/
Until now, the secretary's poetry has found only a small and skeptical audience: the Pentagon press corps. Every day, Rumsfeld regales reporters with his jazzy, impromptu riffs. Few of them seem to appreciate it.
But we should all be listening. Rumsfeld's poetry is paradoxical: It uses playful language to address the most somber subjects: war, terrorism, mortality. Much of it is about indirection and evasion: He never faces his subjects head on but weaves away, letting inversions and repetitions confuse and beguile. His work, with its dedication to the fractured rhythms of the plainspoken vernacular, is reminiscent of William Carlos Williams'. Some readers may find that Rumsfeld's gift for offhand, quotidian pronouncements is as entrancing as Frank O'Hara's.
And so Slate has compiled a collection of Rumsfeld's poems, bringing them to a wider public for the first time. The poems that follow are the exact words of the defense secretary, as taken from the official transcripts on the Defense Department Web site.
The Unknown As we know, There are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know There are known unknowns. That is to say We know there are some things We do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, The ones we don't know We don't know.
--Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing
http://www.slate.com/id/2081042/
The No Man
This seems to get it right - and without obscurity:
The really reticent poet of this quintet is Wallace Stevens. His is a reticence which results in determined obscurity, an obscurity of intention as well as an uncertainty of communication. There are, in fact, many pages in `Harmonium' which lead one to doubt whether its author even cares to communicate in a tongue familiar to the reader; he is preoccupied with language as color or contrasting sound-values, scarcely as a medium for registering degrees of emotion. Moreover, what Stevens spreads before us is less like a canvas and more like a color-palette. But for the most part, this conscious aesthete `at war with reality' achieves little beyond an amusing preciosity; he luxuriates in an ingeniously distorted world. Even his titles -- which deliberately add to the reader's confusion by having little or no connection with most of the poems -- are typical. . . . For all its word-painting, there is little of the human voice in these glittering lines. Louis Untermeyer, 1924 http://www.myweb.dal.ca/diepev/3220/Stevens.ppt
The really reticent poet of this quintet is Wallace Stevens. His is a reticence which results in determined obscurity, an obscurity of intention as well as an uncertainty of communication. There are, in fact, many pages in `Harmonium' which lead one to doubt whether its author even cares to communicate in a tongue familiar to the reader; he is preoccupied with language as color or contrasting sound-values, scarcely as a medium for registering degrees of emotion. Moreover, what Stevens spreads before us is less like a canvas and more like a color-palette.
But for the most part, this conscious aesthete `at war with reality' achieves little beyond an amusing preciosity; he luxuriates in an ingeniously distorted world. Even his titles -- which deliberately add to the reader's confusion by having little or no connection with most of the poems -- are typical. . . . For all its word-painting, there is little of the human voice in these glittering lines.
Louis Untermeyer, 1924
http://www.myweb.dal.ca/diepev/3220/Stevens.ppt
He'd probably also find Louis Untermeyers prudish sentiments about the value of 'conscious aesthetes' an hilariously over the top take down of something he admitted quite openly:"Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully."
For your further edification, here's Stevens' Ars Poetica.
Of Modern Poetry
The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir.
It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. It has To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage, And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and With meditation, speak words that in the ear, In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat, Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound Of which, an invisible audience listens, Not to the play, but to itself, expressed In an emotion as of two people, as of two Emotions becoming one. The actor is A metaphysician in the dark, twanging An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend, Beyond which it has no will to rise. It must Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
I think Stevens would like your pun, The No Man, but he might change it to This NOW man or perhaps even better, "This Know Man".
I'm sure he'd prefer the latter - but hardly merits it - the know "nothing" man ? Or in his words "A metaphysician in the dark" :-)
I don't know why Untermeyer's "sentiments" are "prudish". Anyway, how about Edmund Wilson:
"Mr. 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." "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."
"Mr. 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."
"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."
Nothing prudish there - he'd like some intense emotion - and perhaps also - to know what he's saying - if anything :-) Maybe it's because I'm a Londoner - that I moved to Nice.
Of course, an emotional aridity, is not nearly the same thing as "achiev[ing] little beyond an amusing preciosity" so I'm not sure we are dealing with the same criticisms at all. Undermeyer's main gripe is the obscurity of Stevens word play, as I read it: "His is a reticence which results in determined obscurity, an obscurity of intention as well as an uncertainty of communication. There are, in fact, many pages in `Harmonium' which lead one to doubt whether its author even cares to communicate in a tongue familiar to the reader..."
Wilson is complaining about Stevens emotional thinness, but I think he finds Stevens quite lucid ("Knowing") or at least trust that Stevens is actually saying something of note, significantly different (and considerably less disparaging) than Undermeyer's critique..."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."
However, even when it was only moderately cold, it was still cold enough that one of my favorite local pastimes, sitting in front of the local 7-11 on plastic egg crates and drinking beer, has been impossible.
Unless it snows, there is nothing even vaguely picturesque about winter in this area. It is simply uglier than at any other time of the year, without fail. Thus, I shall not post any pictures.
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