Sit at ease in the dark The voice of a horse comes from afar A horse in the rain This old instrument, glittering with spots like red freckles on a horse's nose, glittering like cotton roses ...blossoming on a treetop startling some robins away The horse in the rain is destined to gallop from my memory like the instrument in hand like a cotton rose opening in a warm night at the end of the corridor I sit at ease as if rain fell all day I sit at ease like a flower blooming all night A horse in the rain A horse in the rain is destined to gallop from my memory I pick up an instrument and casually play a song I want to sing (1985) wild temple Observe, meditate Twenty years in the empty mountain An old monk Bitter pines He hears people talking in the temple A child's voice and a woman's followed by a child's exclamation A new moon drifts on water like thin ice (1981) Translations by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential poems of the 20th century. Inspired by Picasso’s painting The Old Guitarist, ...the poem in turn inspired Michael Tippett’s sonata for solo guitar, “The Blue Guitar” (Tippett 1983) and David Hockney’s The Blue Guitar: Etchings by David Hockney who was inspired by Wallace Stevens who was inspired by Pablo Picasso (Hockney and Stevens 1977). Central to “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” the metaphor of the musical instrument as a transformational symbol of the imagination is common in Stevens’s poems. The structure of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” according to J. Hillis Miller, is the structure of stream-of-consciousness. Stevens’s poem creates what has been called “the deconstructed moment in modern poetry,” “an attempt to project a spatialized time that can be viewed from the privileged position of a timeless, static moment capable of encompassing a life at a glance” (Jackson 1982). This consciousness, which Derrida refers to as the “trace,” Stevens calls “the evasive movement of language.” The trace is the perception of the absence of meaning after the word or perception has passed, the glimpse of a hidden meaning that immediately vanishes. Stevens’s poem influenced not only other poets, artists and composers; references to and echoes of his ideas and techniques can be seen in popular music and culture well into the 21st century.
...because ice cream has been a treat available to virtually anyone in the United States, it is symbolic of democratic happiness, which Americans have a constitutional right to pursue. The ...phenomenological realism of the speaker insists on this. Since some people kill for pleasure, ice cream as symbol of all pleasure must include murder. Because human experience testifies so clearly and continually to the pleasure of aggression, consensus in psychoanalytic circles eventually turned against Freud's antithesis between pleasure and death instincts.6 In writing published after Beyond the Pleasure Principle, even Freud backed away from his strict dualism. ...to see dualism here is to commit a category error by confusing hedonistic possibility with moral approval or mental health.
News and Comments Hodson, Sara S.
The Wallace Stevens journal,
10/2010, Letnik:
34, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Boniiie Costello will serve as book review editor (boncos@bu.edu); James Finnegan, as poetry editor (jforjames@aol.com); and Alexis Serio as art editor (aserio@uttyler.edu). Schilpp's collections ...include The World's Last Night (2001), Laws of My Nature (2005), and Civil Twilight (forthcoming in 2012), all published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. About Stevens' poetry, the announcement notes: "Full of a passionate sensibility that captures the music of the English language and humble reckoning with the world, these poems are a thrill to read aloud and a welcome challenge to ponder."
Stevens credits Freud with the knowledge that animality is not simply a human trait to be mastered, that it is rather a domain of experience and relatedness in which many thoughts and feelings may be ...latent.2 In this essay, I would like to follow the opening into the territory of emotional ambivalence made by "Mountains Covered with Cats" with the purpose of showing that for Stevens animals are not only radically other but also living entities to experience and know with a mixture of positive and negative emotions. Freud transcribed and reflected on perhaps the most well-known dream of a predatory animal in the modernist milieu, the nightmare of his patient, "the wolf man," in which "six or seven wolves" sat perched in a tree outside of his window (From the History of an Infantile Neurosis 29). There is little to suggest that the animal poses a threat to the dejected Ha-ee-me, whereas it does seem that the jaguar's intensity and speed could intimate a transformation that has come over the dreamer's consciousness by the end of the poem - what had seemed meaningless noise comes to be a quickening sound, and the bestiality that the poet had sensed in his surrogate is transformed into a more glorified alien being, "the great jaguar" (CPP 5). The poem that most clearly acknowledges the confluence and tension between these two domains of exposure to the sounds of birds is "Autumn Refrain": The skreak and skritter of evening gone And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun, The sorrows of sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon, The yellow moon of words about the nightingale In measureless measures, not a bird for me But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air I have never - shall never hear.
The poems: “Invective Against Swans” (Harmonium) “The American Sublime” (Ideas of Order) “Oak Leaves Are Hands” (Parts of a World) “Man Carrying Thing” (Transport to Summer) “Saint John and the ...Back-Ache” (The Auroras of Autumn) “The Planet on the Table” (The Rock) “July Mountain” (Late Poems). A few uncommented details, however, would catch our attention: the fact that Lady Lowzen is identified as someone “For whom what is was other things” (CPP 243);9 that “hydaspia” is an insect of the order of lepidoptera; that the linguistic exoticism of the poem reverberates with a Germanic-sounding foreignness verging on a Humpty Dumpty kind of absurd; and that the poem appears immediately before “Examination of the Hero in a Time of War” in Parts of a World, published in 1942, when World War II was raging in Europe.10 What if the name of the Lady suggests parasitism (lousy?) as does the nocturnal moth that revolves around a light? The dialogue between the saint’s preaching and the back-ache’s skeptical stance in Stevens’s poem has a very interesting counterpoint in this passage of the Book, in which the subject meditates on real and imagined aches and on physical and metaphysical pain. “The Planet on the Table”: The Old Poet’s Contentment (It Gives Pleasure) By now my students would have read most writings by Stevens, including the longer poems and essays, and become familiar with major critical interpretations.14 We would discuss imagination and memory; the sun as a metaphor; aging and old age as a motif; Stevens’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s Ariel; poetic making (as in “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together” “On the table” CPP 694); (poetic im)mortality; what suffices and the finding of a satisfaction (CPP 218–19); and Stevens as a reader of Stevens.15 7.
How can we avoid envisioning a poetic development inexorable as the flow of the Mississippi River toward its delta, depositing the alluvium of poetry in the contemporary moment? Since it is ...impossible to escape presentism in evaluating the past century's worth of poetry written and poetics formulated, the "Whose Era" question seems destined to say most about our contemporary moment, the values we hold, and the power structures in which we are currently invested. During the past decade, after the trenchant appraisal of "canontology," or the modes of being and appearance germane to canonicity (Rasula 472), literary scholars have analyzed the institutions of the profession, tracing the "ever-renewed conflict of the faculties" (Guillory, "Sokal" 508) as manifested in the division of disciplines into "isolated fiefdoms" such as literature and sociology in the early part of the twentieth century (Schryer 676); the emergence of "big criticism" among post-World War II institutions of modernism such as philanthropic organizations and little magazines, and the progressive "interweaving of the literary and academic fields" (Kindley 84); the development of creative writing programs during the "Program Era" (McGurl); and the economy of cultural prestige in the "Age of Awards" (English). The rise of Eliot and the New Critics was due in part to the "divorce of literary criticism from other kinds of intellectual inquiry," which developed hand-in-hand with "the emergence of the modem research university, with its formally defined disciplines and its scientistic organization of knowledge production" (Menand 179). ...order scholarship, for its part, can also illuminate how literary scholars render their own historicity through their methods.
In this issue, we are fortunate to welcome a pioneer in readers’ advisory. Duncan Smith has helped shape how we think of readers’ services and how we help our readers find their next good book. But, ...more than that, he has a passion for RA that shines through his presentations, work, and writing. With other pioneers such as Joyce Saricks, Nancy Pearl, and Nancy Brown, we have shaped our RA practices around appeals, the reference interview model and implicit knowledge. In Bill Crowley’s 2014 article “Time to Rethink Readers’ Advisory Education?,” Crowley questions our current practices and provides thoughtful reflection on a new direction for growing RA. This article, written by Duncan Smith, is a response to Crowley’s thoughts. Addressing some of Crowley’s ideas directly, but also reflecting on what it is to be a professional, Smith presents ideas that should start a dialogue within our profession about how we view RA services, who can be a readers’ advisor, and how we push our services into the future.
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