"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush"
I never understood what the phrase mentioned by Stevens via Sexson seen in the Adagia which says "A poem is a pheasant." Poetry is as frustrating as "letting the cat out of the bag," so I'm saying if you see what I speak. The moment you think you've found the words that work perfectly the thought escapes and you lose the words which would've fit. Synthesizing and analyzing your thoughts, being the thoughts of your inner-poet, -daimon, -demons, -monologue, -philosophizer and all, is never quite captured. Thoughts caught in your periphery are that very pheasant, which is why words and their meaning are ever-fleeting and never-exceeding ideas. In paraphrasing Stevens, the eyes sees less than the tongue says and the tongue says less than the mind think.
In poetry I see three qualities in a bird; freshness, cleanliness, and flight capabilities. Why? Because the pheasant is a bird. It's hard to explain clearly and without abstraction of...you know, whatever. It's a poetical thing. Anyways, to Wallace Stevens a pheasant is a metaphor, thus a pheasant is a poem. Poetry, being pretty words placed side-by-side in euphonic phraseology with metrical narrative, is the type of bird that flees into a bush, and it takes you several minutes, days, hours, months, to recover it. And when you do recover it seems to flee the mind all too quickly. The bird is a mythological figure and idea that one seldom sees easily, but if seen as it is if one's objective daimonic self sees it as it is then the desire isn't fully satisfied and will never be and should never be. Although the instinctual beings hunt for the birds' migratory patterns. But what if you did take the time to catch it, then what? Well then, there's nothing left to be done. Task absolved and obsolete, and there's no story left to tell...
Wrong. In other words, the perfect poem is always "just out of reach." Sure it's the thought that counts, but the best part is finding the perfect fit. Fleeting thoughts is forgetfulness. Think of it this way, try expressing the same thought with two different sayings. It's harder than it sounds. Then, after some several moments of time has elapsed and the right words have come to pass, try saying the same thing twice.
"...to be aggregated: The Anatomy of Influence"
(unfortunately there's no aggregation, following are only quotes and words that struck me, also see poems on pages: 169, 196, 264, 319, and 323 because "Men think they are better than grass")
Wordswordswrdswerves:
phantasmagoria, clinamen, agonistic, vista, grass, lilac, palinode, misprision, agon, progeny, ennui, ephebe, palpable, squib, quibble, efficacy, erudite, metaphysics, acedia, pliant, solipsism, cadence, capricious, askesis, apophrades, tessera, apothegm,
Quotes:
"Indeed he writes as though no one, including William Shakespeare, ever has written a play before The Tempest. Without precursors, it fathers itself." -75
"Lucretius's one poetic flaw is his tendentiousness, a quality of overpersuasion he shares with Sigmund Freud." -138
The one time I met Wallace Stevens, he startled me by quoting from memory the stanza beginning "Men scarcely know how beautiful fire is," one of the glories of Shelley's most visionary long poem, "The Witch of Atlas." -189
"More complexly, the Meditation is divided in three: the Dreaming Back, the Return, the Phantasmagoria." -192
"Six traditions say, is a "perfect" number, as is twenty-eight. I am unhappy with perfect numbers but cannot evade them." -194
"All cultural past actually was at the erudite sage's back, but he denies that history existed. There was only biography." -209
"Shakespeare is said by Emerson to have "converted the elements, which waited on his command, into entertainments." -215
"Emerson's lifelong obsession was with a poetry yet to be written, and which never could be written. That carries prospectiveness to the border of madness." -217
"Responding to his own challenge, Stevens achieves his American Sublime beyond irony. His Romantic had failed, but a new Romantic replaces an older one." -254
"The strongest adversary for deep reading is...the extraordinary profusion and speed of information." -255
"but even flaws have greatness..." --261
"Eternity is only an abstraction from the actual present. Infinity is only a great reservoir of recollection, or a reservoir of aspiration: man-made." -265
"As Stevens was to formulate this a decade after Crane's death, the final belief is to believe in a fiction while knowing that what you believe is not true." -281
"Leaves of Grass is an atmosphere, a vision, above all an image of voice and of voicing. Perhaps best of all it is what Whitman called a vista." -286
"...the American Religion, our strange fusion of Gnosticism, Orphism, and Self-Reliance." -293
"To read Whitman aright, we have to remain perpetually intransitive, like the vast majority of his middle-voicing verbs, his verbs of sensation, perception, and cognition." -303
"Poetry is not, cannot be therapy, but in a time when all spirituality is tainted by political exploitation, or by the depraved cultural politics of the academy and the media, a few poets can remind us of the possibility of a more authentic spirituality." -333
"There is no way out of the labyrinth of literary influence once you reach the point where it starts reading you more fully than you can encompass other imaginations. That labyrinth is life itself. I cannot finish this book because I hope to go on reading and seeking the blessing of more life." -335
"I'm losing my eyesight but not any focus"
It runs in the family. On another note, to build upon your poetic ellipsis you must, with each individual creation, create a new and reconfigure your inner-critic. Mostly following are inelaborate blurbs and unanswered questions: What's the difference between sensation, perception, and cognition??? Intuition, Empiricism, Impressionism, Aesthetic, Epiphany/Realization, Memory...
What similar qualities do progression, digression, and regression have??? Retrogression...
"What the Adagia found"
"Authors are actors, books are theatres."
"A new meaning is the equivalent of a new word."
"Weather is a sense of nature. Poetry is a sense."
"It is the belief and not the god that counts."
"Not all objects are equal."
"Sentimentality is a failure of feeling."
"As the reason destroys, the poet must create."
"Money is a kind of poetry."
"The death of one god is the death of all."
"Realism is a corruption of reality."
"When one is young everything is physical; when one is old everything is psychic."
"Reality is a vacuum."
"All men are murderers."
"There must be something of the peasant in every poet."
"The body is the great poem."
"Society is a sea."
"The acquisitions of poetry are fortuitous: trouvailles. (Hence, its disorder)."
"The eye sees less than the tongue says. The tongue says less than the mind thinks."
"Since man made the world, the inevitable god is the beggar."
"The romantic is the first phase of (non-pejorative) lunacy."
"The Bowl, Cat, & Broomstick, & Of Modern Poetry"
Memorable quotes:
Broomstick: ...man and mountains, women and waves, and so on, are undefined, so the relations of eyes and legs, lips and cheeks, and that kind of thing, are equally undefined. It is all part of the universal comedy, which the poets ignore, because they continue to believe in tragedy.
See 631-32
Broomstick: A man with so firm a faith in the meaning of words should not listen to poetry.
Bowl: What a fool I have been!
Cat: What does it say about the portrait? (Broomstick reads) Oh, red, red! Acutely red! Damn all portraits of poets and poetesses!
Broomstick: One should always read a preface first.
One of my personal favorites of Stevens:
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.
Removed from our play's script:
A story itself is proof of its flawed design. Artistic
construction will be deconstructed, but its fate is determined before being
incepted into critical nature. In [unfallen and critical] nature the whole of composition
continually decomposes; as criticism in time becomes creation; or, as art is
earth’s lingual core as much as it’s merely a face of earth’s surface; or, as
dust is us.
What troubles the poet most is the
difference between the act of beginning a composition and their envisioned act of
composing. Deciding is desirous and desire is suffering [because all desire,
from knowledge to love, is fleeting], but without the fleeting entity of things
suffering would be omnipresent and never-leaving. Fortunately it doesn't, suffering and desire are both creations as is anxiety, and because of the fleeting nature of
entities the poet has to decide between…the rise and fall, the daemon and the
demon, and doing and dreaming….
The thing the poet must understand
is the rule of three. For examples, in the tune of trinitarianism:
-
Density – dirt, clouds, sky (Intellectual
entities)
-
Physicality – Night, Dawn/Dusk, Light (Natural
entities)
-
Psychoanalytically – Daemon, Person, Demon
(Personal entities)
-
Demographically – Critical, Content, Creative
(Passionate entities)
-
Morally – Good, Moderate, Evil (Philosophical
entities)
-
Existentially – Imaginatively, Stoically,
Realistically (WHAT?)
-
Material, Divinity, Infinity
-
Rock, Sun, Space
-
Germ, Thinking, Void
-
Allegorically – (Cat, Bowl, Broomstick)
Although all exists in groups of three, paradoxically, all is
one, and I’m you and you’ll do what I want to if I do what you want to do
because you’re me. But it all depends on the perspective the poet chooses
first, given three choices, and how the first decision leads to the second and
third levels. The weak poet chooses one side and doesn’t examine the other two;
the strong poet examines all three sides from one side’s eyes. The poem, by the
end, must move up the three and down through back to a martyred one.
A poem has a longer lasting life
than its poet. A poem that’s good enough that is: because once It’s placed precisely
[i.e. contextually ironic, consistently on an offbeat, strangely believable,
imaginatively, awkwardly romantic, experimentally strong, and most of all
morally poor] in a linear continuum the composition exists en abyme, inarticulately, inanimately, imaginatively and amongst
other things until naught and abruptly extinct. Composition is a thing and a
natural entity. Thereafter, an act of composition that is completed, like a
poem, has nothing to do with its composer, like a poet, hereafter. What
troubles the poet most is his lack of potency. Without potency a poet hasn’t a
pack, a bag of tricks hidden in a book of conspiracies and hopes within a
knapsack of schemes being held back by his lacking dreams.
With the correct quirkiness and
divine luck of the day, a composition’s mind will make its way off the shelves
and germinate others. Primal art’s downfall is its ineffective temporality.
Lines:
"Carlos - The earthy
sheen deflects the moonshine to my eyes, through the dew’s misprision into two
pupils, as if I’d examine the sun so blissfully with such an ignorant earthly
sheen coating mine own eyes. The saying is true. It is, but I’ve been either
overlooking and understating this so-called bliss or losing my thread too
quickly and missing out on it altogether…Who could I ask, what do I see; so I
can get to where I’m going? The Bible? Hah! No. How about, the book! But first…"
"Carlos – The moon is the blue ocean’s biggest island in the violet
abyss. The northern green glitter and aural prisms slice as green serpents in
the vaporous night sky abysm."
-
Yeats…page 196, The Anatomy of Influence
o
Every discolouration of the stone, Every
accidental crack or dent, Seems a water-course or an avalanche, Or loft slope
where it still snows; Though the doubtless plum or cherry-branch; Sweetens the
little half-way house; Those Chinamen climb towards, and I; Delight to imagine
them seated there; There, on the mountain and the sky, On all the tragic scene
they stare. One asks for mournful melodies; Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes, Their ancient, glittering eyes, are
gay.
Character traits:
-
---actively participant and willfully ignorant
-
synesthetic themes:
o ---"The ocean's
largest island is the moon"
o ---ouroboros -
self-indulgent serpent, DNA, medicinal symbol, solipsism
The thwarting for desire matters far more than the name and nature of the desire. It was Yeats who wrote: "The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire." -247
The thwarting for desire matters far more than the name and nature of the desire. It was Yeats who wrote: "The desire that is satisfied is not a great desire." -247
"A Conversation:"
A: I can’t tell you what to do or what to say or
how to live, but I can ask you to listen. If you can't do that for me then move
along, but do remember that you’ll have this conversation again and again with whoever you happen to have it with until
the time comes that you’re going to stick with it. Point is, all I’m asking
from you is a small portion of your time and, for that time if you choose to
accept my offer now, all of your attention.
Z: Why are you asking?
A: I want to tell you a story.
Z: What do you think I’ll learn from this story?
A: I don’t know and don’t want to know unless
you know and want to tell me after I’m done.
Z: What makes you think I’ll get it?
Z: What makes you think I’ll get it?
A: You don’t have to get it. You don't have to think so hard. You shouldn't have to because it’s my story.
Z: You conceded solipsist. What if I’m willing and worthy of being a participant?
A: Well imagine I asked you this first, is one
bird in both hand is as valuable as two birds in a single bush?
Z: What do you mean?
Z: What do you mean?
