Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Week 11 | 4/17/16 Poet(s) of the Week: Robert Lowell and Frank OHara Major Poem: The Auroras of Autumn 355 Large Red Man Reading 365; This Solitude of Cataracts 366; The Ultimate Poem is Abstract 369; The Owl in the Sarcophagus 371; Saint John and the Back-Ache 375; A Primitive Like an Orb 377; Metaphor as Degeneration 381; What We See is What We Think 392; Angel Surrounded by Paysans 423 Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Poet(s) of the Week: Robert Lowell ( ) and Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Poet(s) of the Week: Robert Lowell ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) For The Union Dead Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam. The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sign still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) For The Union Dead Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half of the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) For The Union Dead He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gentle tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die- when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year- wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) For The Union Dead Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his 'niggers.' The ditch is nearer. There are no statutes for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the 'Rock of Ages' that survived the blast. Space is nearer. when I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the blessed break. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) Skunk Hour (for Elizabeth Bishop) Nautilus Island's hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village; she's in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria's century she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season's ill- we've lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) Skunk Hour And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall; his fishnet's filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler's bench and awl; there is no money in his work, he'd rather marry. One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull; I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town.... My mind's not right. A car radio bleats, 'Love, O careless Love....' I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat... I myself am hell; nobody's here- Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) Skunk Hour only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their solves up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air- a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) Children of Light Our fathers wrung their bread from stocks and stones And fenced their gardens with the Redmen's bones; Embarking from the Nether Land of Holland, Pilgrims unhouseled by Geneva's night, They planted here the Serpent's seeds of light; And here the pivoting searchlights probe to shock The riotous glass houses built on rock, And candles gutter by an empty altar, And light is where the landless blood of Cain Is burning, burning the unburied grain. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) Mr. Edwards and the Spider I saw the spiders marching through the air, Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day In latter August when the hay Came creaking to the barn. But where The wind is westerly, Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly Into the apparitions of the sky, They purpose nothing but their ease and die Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea; What are we in the hands of the great God? It was in vain you set up thorn and briar In battle array against the fire And treason crackling in your blood; For the wild thorns grow tame And will do nothing to oppose the flame; Your lacerations tell the losing game You play against a sickness past your cure. How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure? Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) Mr. Edwards and the Spider A very little thing, a little worm, Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said, Can kill a tiger. Will the dead Hold up his mirror and affirm To the four winds the smell And flash of his authority? Its well If God who holds you to the pit of hell, Much as one holds a spider, will destroy, Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy On Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire: Theres no long struggle, no desire To get up on its feet and fly It stretches out its feet And dies. This is the sinners last retreat; Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat Then sinews the abolished will, when sick And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) Mr. Edwards and the Spider But who can plumb the sinking of that soul? Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast Into a brick-kiln where the blast Fans your quick vitals to a coal If measured by a glass, How long would it seem burning! Let there pass A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze Is infinite, eternal: this is death, To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Lowell ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Poet(s) of the Week: Frank OHara ( ) The New York School of Poets Its wonderful to have three good friends you think are geniuses.Kenneth Koch Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens From poetry.org The New York School of poetry began around 1960 in New York City and included poets such as John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara. Heavily influenced by surrealism and modernism, the poetry of the New York School was serious but also ironic, and incorporated an urban sensibility into much of the work. An excerpt from Ashberys poem, "My Philosophy of Life" demonstrates this attitude: Just when I thought there wasn't room enough for another thought in my head, I had this great idea-- call it a philosophy of life, if you will. Briefly, it involved living the way philosophers live, according to a set of principles. OK, but which ones? Abstract expressionist art was also a major influence, and the New York School poets had strong artistic and personal relationships with artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem DeKooning. Both O'Hara and James Schuyler worked at the Museum of Modern Art, and Guest, Ashbery, and Schuyler were critics for Art News. O'Hara also took inspiration from artists, entitling two poems "Joseph Cornell" and "On Seeing Larry Rivers. Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens From poetry.org O'Hara's poem "Why I am Not a Painter" includes the lines "I am not a painter, I am a poet. / Why? I think I would rather be / a painter, but I am not. A second generation of New York School poets arose during the 1960s and included Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, and Joe Brainard. These poets were also influenced by art and their work contained much of the same humour and collaborative spirit. Their scene grew up around downtown New York and was associated with the Poetry Project at St Mark's Church, a poetry organization started in the mid 1960s.Poetry Project at St Mark's Church The New York School continues to influence poets writing today. Recently published books such as Daniel Kane's All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s and David LehmanThe Last-Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets are important histories of this poetic movement that still captures readers nearly fifty years later.All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960sThe Last-Avant Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens In an age of split-level conformism, the poets of the New York School put their trust in the idea of an artistic vanguard that would sanction their devotions from the norm. The liberating effect of their writing became increasingly evident in the passionate, experimental, taboo-breaking early 1960s, when the nations youngest president was in office, men discarded their hats, women started using the Pill, the acceleration in the speed of social change seemed to double overnight, and America finally left the nineteenth century behind (Lehman 1). Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Substitute Frank OHara for Apollinaire and Abstract Expressionism for Cubism, and you get an eerie fit. The poets of the New York School were as heterodox, and belligerent toward the literary establishment and as loyal to each other, as their predecessors had been. The 1950 and early 60s in New York were their banquet years.David Lehman (2) Guillaume Apollonaire Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Witnesses to what Robert Motherwell called the the greatest painting adventure of our time, [the New York School of Poets] strove for the same excitement in poetry, looking to painters as the agents for artistic change.David Lehman (2) Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens New York poets, except I suppose the color-blind, are effected most by the floods of paint in whose crashing surf we all scramble.... In New York, the art world is a painters world; writers and musicians are in the boat but they dont steer. James Schuyler (Lehman 2). Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Jackson Pollack, Number 1 Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Jackson Pollack, Number 8 (detail) Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Jackson Pollack, Convergence: 10 Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Motherwell, Razors Edge Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Robert Motherwell, Untitled Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens DeKooning, Whose Name was Writ in Water Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Willem DeKooning, Fire Island Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens From Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, they learned that it was okay for a poem to chronicle the history of its own makingthat the mind of the poet, rather than the world, could be the true subject of the poem and that it was possible for a poem to be (or to perform) a statement without making a statement (Lehman 3). Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Like painting, writing was properly understood to be an activity, a present- tense process, and the residue of that activity could not help referring to itself. All poetry was a product of a collaboration with language. While mimesis, the imitation of nature, remained a goal of art, the abstract painters had redefined the concept by enlarging the meaning of nature: I am nature, Jackson Pollock said. This, too, was a liberty the poets could take. Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens It came to me that all this time There had been no real poetry and that it needed to be invented. --Kenneth Koch, Days and Nights [The New York School] understood too that a poem no less than a painting could be a hoard of destructions, in Picassos phrase (Lehman 6) [M]odern poetry gave the poet the license to be strange. --John Ashbery Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Unlike the Beats, however, the poets of the New York School pursued an aesthetic agenda that was deliberately apolitical, even antipolitical (Lehman 9). Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens For a long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everyone accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation (1926) (Lehman 11) Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Personism: A Manifesto Frank O'Hara Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man's Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can't be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep. Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Personism: A Manifesto That's for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you're in love and somebody's mistreating (mal aime) you, you don't say, "Hey, you can't hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do after a few months. But that's not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you. I'm not saying that I don't have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They're just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I've stopped thinking and that's when refreshment arrives. Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Personism: A Manifesto But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you're experiencing is "yearning. The New York School of Poets Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Personism: A Manifesto Abstraction in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarm). Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Personism: A Manifesto Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la posi pure was to Branger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Personism: A Manifesto poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. His relation is no more astounding than Dubuffet's to painting. The New York School of Poets Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Personism: A Manifesto What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn't it?) Everything, but we won't get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out. September 3, 1959 Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens For Those Who Think Young, 8:46 & 47:00 Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Excerpt from Mayakovsky "Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern. The country is grey and brown and white in trees, snows and skies of laughter always diminishing, less funny not just darker, not just grey. It may be the coldest day of the year, what does he think of that? I mean, what do I? And if I do, perhaps I am myself again." Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art Now that our hero has come back to us in his white pants and we know his nose trembling like a flag under fire, we see the calm cold river is supporting our forces, the beautiful history. To be more revolutionary than a nun is our desire, to be secular and intimate as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile and pull the trigger. Anxieties and animosities, flaming and feeding Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art on theoretical considerations and the jealous spiritualities of the abstract the robot? they're smoke, billows above the physical event. They have burned up. See how free we are! as a nation of persons. Dear father of our country, so alive you must have lied incessantly to be immediate, here are your bones crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock, a pirate's flag, bravely specific Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art and ever so light in the misty glare of a crossing by water in winter to a shore other than that the bridge reaches for. Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting on your gun barrel, you see the general fear. Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Larry Rivers, Washington Crossing the Delaware To the Film Industry in Crisis Not you, lean quarterlies and swarthy periodicals with your studious incursions toward the pomposity of ants, nor you, experimental theatre in which Emotive Fruition is wedding Poetic Insight perpetually, nor you, promenading Grand Opera, obvious as an ear (though you are close to my heart), but you, Motion Picture Industry, it's you I love! In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love. And give credit where it's due: not to my starched nurse, who taught me how to be bad and not bad rather than good (and has lately availed herself of this information), not to the Catholic Church which is at best an oversolemn introduction to cosmic entertainment, not to the American Legion, which hates everybody, but to you, glorious Silver Screen, tragic Technicolor, amorous Cinemascope, stretching Vistavision and startling Stereophonic Sound, with all your heavenly dimensions and reverberations and iconoclasms! To Richard Barthelmess as the "tol'able" boy barefoot and in pants, Frank OHara ( ) To the Film Industry in Crisis Jeanette MacDonald of the flaming hair and lips and long, long neck, Sue Carroll as she sits for eternity on the damaged fender of a car and smiles, Ginger Rogers with her pageboy bob like a sausage on her shuffling shoulders, peach-melba-voiced Fred Astaire of the feet, Eric von Stroheim, the seducer of mountain-climbers' gasping spouses, the Tarzans, each and every one of you (I cannot bring myself to prefer Johnny Weissmuller to Lex Barker, I cannot!), Mae West in a furry sled, her bordello radiance and bland remarks, Rudolph Valentino of the moon, its crushing passions, and moonlike, too, the gentle Norma Shearer, Miriam Hopkins dropping her champagne glass off Joel McCrea's yacht, and crying into the dappled sea, Clark Gable rescuing Gene Tierney from Russia and Allan Jones rescuing Kitty Carlisle from Harpo Marx, Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens To the Film Industry in Crisis Cornel Wilde coughing blood on the piano keys while Merle Oberon berates, Marilyn Monroe in her little spike heels reeling through Niagara Falls, Joseph Cotten puzzling and Orson Welles puzzled and Dolores del Rio eating orchids for lunch and breaking mirrors, Gloria Swanson reclining, and Jean Harlow reclining and wiggling, and Alice Faye reclining and wiggling and singing, Myrna Loy being calm and wise, William Powell in his stunning urbanity, Elizabeth Taylor blossoming, yes, to you and to all you others, the great, the near-great, the featured, the extras who pass quickly and return in dreams saying your one or two lines, my love! Long may you illumine space with your marvellous appearances, delays and enunciations, and may the money of the world glitteringly cover you as you rest after a long day under the kleig lights with your faces in packs for our edification, the way the clouds come often at night but the heavens operate on the star system. It is a divine precedent you perpetuate! Roll on, reels of celluloid, as the great earth rolls on! Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Why I am Not a Painter I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well, for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. "Sit down and have a drink" he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." "Oh." I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. "Where's SARDINES? Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens All that's left is just letters, "It was too much," Mike says. But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mikes painting, called SARDINES. The Day Lady Died It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I dont know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesnt even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Day Lady Died for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behans new play or Le Balcon or Les Ngres of Genet, but I dont, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing The New York School of Poets Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Willem DeKooning, Fire Island The Day Frank OHara Died, July 25 th, 1966 Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Day Frank OHara Died, July 25 th, 1966 in an electric storm which is what you were more lives than a cat dancing you had a feline grace, poised on the balls of your feet ready to dive and all of it, your poems, compressed into twenty years. How you charmed, fumed blew smoke from your nostrils like a race horse that just won the race steaming, eager to run only you used words --James Schuyler, To Frank OHara (1974) Frank OHara ( ) Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Large Red Man Reading (365) There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases, As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae. They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more. There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life, Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them. They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality, That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae, The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law: Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines, Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts, Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.... Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens This Solitude of Cataracts (366) He never felt twice the same about the flecked river, Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing Through many places, as if it stood in one, Fixed like a lake on which the wild ducks fluttered. Ruffling its common reflections, thought-like Monadnocks. There seemed to be an apostrophe that was not spoken. There was so much that was real that was not real at all. He wanted to feel the same way over and over. He wanted the river to go on flowing the same way, To keep on flowing. He wanted to walk beside it, Under the buttonwoods, beneath a moon nailed fast. He wanted his heart to stop beating and his mind to rest . You could not step twice into the same river.-- Haraclitus Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens This Solitude of Cataracts In a permanent realization, without any wild ducks Or mountains that were not mountains, just to know how it would be, Just to know how it would feel, released from destruction, To be a bronze man breathing under archaic lapis, Without the oscillation of planetary pass-pass, Breathing his bronzen breath at the azury center of time. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract (369) This day writhes with what? The lecturer On This Beautiful World Of Ours composes himself And hems the planet rose and haws it ripe, And red, and right. The particular questionhere The particular answer to the particular question Is not in pointthe question is in point. If the day writhes, it is not with revelations. One goes on asking questions. That, then, is one Of the categories. So said, this placed space Is changed. It is not so blue as we thought. To be blue, there must be no questions. It is an intellect Of windings round and dodges to and fro, Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract---- Writhings in wrong obliques and distances, Not an intellect in which we are fleet: present Everywhere in space at once, cloud-pole Of communication. It would be enough If we were ever, just once, at the middle, fixed In This Beautiful World Of Ours and not as now, Helplessly at the edge, enough to be Complete, because at the middle, if only in sense, And in that enormous sense, merely enjoy. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Owl in the Sarcophagus (371) I Two forms move among the dead, high sleep Who by his highness quiets them, high peace Upon whose shoulders even the heavens rest, Two brothers. And a third form, she that says Good-by in the darkness, speaking quietly there, To those that cannot say good-by themselves. These forms are visible to the eye that needs, Needs out of the whole necessity of sight. The third form speaks, because the ear repeats, Without a voice, inventions of farewell. These forms are not abortive figures, rocks, Impenetrable symbols, motionless. They move Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Owl in the Sarcophagus About the night. They live without our light, In an element not the heaviness of time, In which reality is prodigy. There sleep the brother is the father, too, And peace is cousin by a hundred names And she that in the syllable between life And death cries quickly, in a flash of voice, Keep you, keep you, I am gone, oh keep you as My memory, is the mother of us all, The earthly mother and the mother of The dead. Only the thought of those dark three Is dark, thought of the forms of dark desire. II There came a day, there was a day--one day A man walked living among the forms of thought To see their lustre truly as it is Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Owl in the Sarcophagus And in harmonious prodigy to be, A while, conceiving his passage as into a time That of itself stood still, perennial, Less time than place, less place than thought of place And, if of substance, a likeness of the earth, That by resemblance twanged him through and through, Releasing an abysmal melody, A meeting, an emerging in the light, A dazzle of remembrance and of sight. III There he saw well the foldings in the height Of sleep, the whiteness folded into less, Like many robings, as moving masses are, As a moving mountain is, moving through day And night, colored from distances, central Where luminous agitations come to rest, Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Owl in the Sarcophagus In an ever-changing, calmest unity, The unique composure, harshest streakings joined In a vanishing-vanished violet that wraps round The giant body the meanings of its folds, The weaving and the crinkling and the vex, As on water of an afternoon in the wind After the wind has passed. Sleep realized Was the whiteness that is the ultimate intellect, A diamond jubilance beyond the fire, That gives its power to the wild-ringed eye. Then he breathed deeply the deep atmosphere Of sleep, the accomplished, the fulfilling air. IV There peace, the godolphin and fellow, estranged, estranged, Hewn in their middle as the beam of leaves, The prince of shither-shade and tinsel lights, Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Owl in the Sarcophagus Stood flourishing the world. The brilliant height And hollow of him by its brilliance calmed, Its brightness burned the way good solace seethes. This was peace after death, the brother of sleep, The inhuman brother so much like, so near, Yet vested in a foreign absolute, Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines, An immaculate personage in nothingness, With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth, Generations of the imagination piled In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread, In the weaving round the wonder of its need, And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet By which to spell out holy doom and end, A bee for the remembering of happiness. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Owl in the Sarcophagus Peace stood with our last blood adorned, last mind, Damasked in the originals of green, A thousand begettings of the broken bold. This is that figure stationed at our end, Always, in brilliance, fatal, final, formed Out of our lives to keep us in our death, To watch us in the summer of Cyclops Underground, a king as candle by our beds In a robe that is our glory as he guards. V But she that says good-by losing in self The sense of self, rosed out of prestiges Of rose, stood tall in self not symbol, quick And potent, an influence felt instead of seen. She spoke with backward gestures of her hand. She held men closely with discovery, Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Owl in the Sarcophagus Almost as speed discovers, in the way Invisible change discovers what is changed, In the way what was has ceased to be what is. It was not her look but a knowledge that she had. She was a self that knew, an inner thing, Subtler than look's declaiming, although she moved With a sad splendor, beyond artifice, Impassioned by the knowledge that she had, There on the edges of oblivion. O exhalation, O fling without a sleeve And motion outward, reddened and resolved From sight, in the silence that follows her last word-- Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Owl in the Sarcophagus VI This is the mythology of modern death And these, in their mufflings, monsters of elegy, Of their own marvel made, of pity made, Compounded and compounded, life by life, These are death's own supremest images, The pure perfections of parental space, The children of a desire that is the will, Even of death, the beings of the mind In the light-bound space of the mind, the floreate flare... It is a child that sings itself to sleep, The mind, among the creatures that it makes, The people, those by which it lives and dies. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Saint John and the Back-Ache (375) The Back-Ache The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father, Because, in chief, it, only, can defend Against itself. At its mercy, we depend Upon it. Saint John The world is presence and not force, Presence is not mind. The Back-Ache Presence is Kinder-Scenen. Saint John It fills the being before the mind can think. The effect of the object is beyond the minds Extremist pitch and, easily, as in A sudden color pm the sea. But it is not That big-brushed green. Or in a tragic mode, As is at the moment of the year when tick Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Saint John and the Back-Ache Autumn howls upon half-naked summer. But It is not the unravelling of her yellow shift. Presence is not the woman, come upon, Not yet accustomed, yet, at sight, humane To most incredible depths. I speak below The tension of the lyre. My point is that These illustrations are neither angels, no Nor brilliant blows thereof, ti-rill-a-roo, Nor all ones luck at once in a play of strings. They help us face the dumbfoundering abyss Between us and the object, external cause, The little ignorance that is everything, The possible nest in the invisible tree, Which in a composite season, now unknown, Denied, dismissed, may hold a serpent, loud In our captious hymns, erect and sinuous, Whose venom and whose wisdom will be one. Then the stale turtle will grow limp from age. We shall be heavy with the knowledge of that day. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Saint John and the Back-Ache The Back-Ache It may be, may be. It is possible. Presence lies far too deep, for me to know Its irrational reaction, as from pain. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens A Primitive Like an Orb (377) I The essential poem at the center of things, The arias that spiritual fiddlings make, Have gorged the cast-iron of our lives with good And the cast-iron of our works. But it is, dear sirs, A difficult apperception, this gorging good, Fetched by such slick-eyed nymphs, this essential gold, This fortune's finding, disposed and re-disposed By such slight genii in such pale air. II We do not prove the existence of the poem. It is something seen and known in lesser poems. It is the huge, high harmony that sounds A little and a little, suddenly, By means of a separate sense. It is and it Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech, The breadth of an accelerando moves, Captives the being, widens--and was there. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens A Primitive Like an Orb III What milk there is in such captivity, What wheaten bread and oaten cake and kind, Green guests and table in the woods and songs At heart, within an instant's motion, within A space grown wide, the inevitable blue Of secluded thunder, an illusion, as it was, Oh as, always too heavy for the sense To seize, the obscurest as, the distant was... IV One poem proves another and the whole, For the clairvoyant men that need no proof: The lover, the believer and the poet, Their words are chosen out of their desire, The joy of language, when it is themselves. With these they celebrate the central poem, The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent, Las terms, the largest, bulging still with more, Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens A Primitive Like an Orb V Until the used-to earth and sky, and the tree And cloud, the used-to tree and used-to cloud, Lose the old uses that they made of them, And they: these men, and earth and sky, inform Each other by sharp informations, sharp, Free knowledges, secreted until then, Breaches of that which held them fast. It is As if the central poem became the world, VI And the world the central poem, each one the mate Of the other, as if summer was a spouse, Espoused each morning, each long afternoon, And the mate of summer: her mirror and her look, Her only place and person, a self of her That speaks, denouncing separate selves, both one. The essential poem begets the others. The light Of it is not a light apart, up-hill. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens A Primitive Like an Orb VII The central poem is the poem of the whole, The poem of the composition of the whole, The composition of blue sea and of green, Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems, And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems, Not merely into a whole, but a poem of The whole, the essential compact of the parts, The roundness that pulls tight the final ring VIII And that which in an altitude would soar, A vis, a principle or, it may be, The meditation of a principle, Or else an inherent order active to be Itself, a nature to its natives all Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose, The muscles of a magnet aptly felt, A giant, on the horizon, glistening, Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens A Primitive Like an Orb IX An in bright excellence adorned, crested With every prodigal, familiar fire, And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos And scintillant sizzlings such as children like, Vested in the serious folds of majesty, Moving around and behind, a following, A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye, A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear. X It is a giant, always, that is evolved, To be in scale, unless virtue cuts him, snips Both size and solitude or thinks it does, As in a signed photograph on a mantelpiece. But the virtuoso never leaves his shape, Still on the horizon elongates his cuts, And still angelic and still plenteous, Imposes power by the power of his form. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens A Primitive Like an Orb XI Here, then, is an abstraction given head, A giant on the horizon, given arms, A massive body and long legs, stretched out, A definition with an illustration, not Too exactly labeled, a large among the smalls Of it, a close, parental magnitude, At the center of the horizon, concentrum, grave And prodigious person, patron of origins. XII That's it. The lover writes, the believer hears, The poet mumbles and the painter sees, Each one, his fated eccentricity, As a part, but part, but tenacious particle, Of the skeleton of the ether, the total Of letters, prophecies, perceptions, clods Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one And the giant ever changing, living in change. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Metaphor as Degeneration (381) If there is a man white as marble Sits in a wood, in the greenest part, Brooding sounds of the images of death, So there is a man in black space Sits in nothing that we know, Brooding sounds of river noises; And these images, these reverberations, And others, make certain how being Includes death and the imagination. The marble man remains himself in space. The man in the black wood descends unchanged. It is certain that the river Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Metaphor as Degeneration Is not Swatara. The swarthy water That flows round the earth and through the skies, Twisting among the universal spaces, Is not Swatara. It is being. That is the flock-flecked river, the water, The blown sheenor is it air? How, then, is metaphor degeneration, When Swatara becomes this undulant river And the river becomes landless, waterless ocean? Here the black violets grow down to its banks And the memorial mosses hang their green Upon it, as it flows ahead. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens What We See is What We Think (392) At twelve, the disintegration of afternoon Began, the return of phantomerei, if not To phantoms. Till then it had been the other way: One imagined the violet trees but the trees stood green, At twelve, as green as ever they would be. The sky was blue beyond the vaultiest phrase. Twelve meant as much as: the end of normal time, Straight up, an elan without harrowing, The imprescriptible zenith, free of harangue, Twelve and the first gray second after, a kind Of violet gray, a green violet, a thread To weave a shadow's leg or sleeve, a scrawl Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens What We See is What We Think On the pedestal, an ambitious page dog-eared At the upper right, a pyramid with one side Like a spectral cut in its perception, a tilt And its tawny caricature and tawny life, Another thought, the paramount ado... Since what we think is never what we see. Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Angel Surrounded by Paysans (423) One of the countrymen: There is A welcome at the door to which no one comes? The angel: I am the angel of reality, Seen for the moment standing in the door. I have neither ashen wing nor wear of ore And live without a tepid aureole, Or stars that follow me, not to attend, But, of my being and its knowing, part. I am one of you and being one of you Is being and knowing what I am and know. Yet I am the necessary angel of earth, Since, in my sight, you see the earth again, Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Angel Surrounded by Paysans Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set, And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings Like watery words awash; like meanings said By repetitions of half meanings. Am I not, Myself, only half of a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a man Of the mind, an apparition apparelled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turn Of my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone? Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens Major Poem: The Auroras of Autumn (355) Harold Bloom on Auroras Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn