An Ultimatum for Poetry

Wallance Stevens

Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on October 2, 1879, and died at the age of seventy-six in Hartford, Connecticut on August 2, 1955. He attended Harvard as a special student from 1897 to 1900 but did not graduate; he graduated from New York law school in 1903 and was admitted to the New York bar in 1904, the year he met Elsie Kachel, a young woman from Reading, whom he married in 1909. They had one daughter, Holly Bight, born in 1924, conceived on a leisurely ocean voyage California via the Panama Canal that they took to celebrate the publication of his first book.

Stevens became interested in verse-writing at Harvard, submitting material to the Harvard Advocate, but he would be 36 before his first work was published in 1915. He soon was contributing to Poetry (Chicago), and his first book Harmonium was published in 1923 by the distinguished firm of Alfred A. Knopf. Though he was always much admired by his contemporaries ("There is a man whose work," Hart Crane wrote of him in 1919, "makes most the rest of us quail"), Stevens felt that the reviews of his 1923 book were less than they should be, and discouraged, wrote nothing through the 1920s. For a second edition of Harmonium, published in 1931, he added only eight new poems.

If he was not writing in the 1920s, he was steadily advancing in business. After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, he had been hired as a bonding lawyer for an insurance firm in 1908, and by 1914 was hired as the vice-president of the New York Office of the Equitable Surety Co. of St. Louis. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named Vice President of his company.

All his life Stevens collected art from abroad and saw that packages of various gourmet foods were mailed to him regularly. Although he regularly traveled in the South, most notably to Florida and the Florida Keys and Cuba, he never ventured abroad. But his cosmopolitan yearnings were amply satisfied by regular jaunts to New York City. Trains leaving Hartford on a better-than-hourly basis guaranteed that any Saturday he could be on the streets of New York City by 10 a.m. In the 1930s and 1940s, he was welcomed as a member of the exclusive set centered around the artistic and literary devotees Barbara and Henry Church.

When Stevens began to write poems with renewed fluency in the 1930s, he arranged for them to be printed in limited editions at the same time as trade editions were prepared by Knopf. Ideas of Order (1935) and Owl’s Clover (1937) were limited editions by the Alcestis Press, while The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937) and Parts of a World (1942) were printed by Knopf, and Notes toward a Supreme Fiction (1942) and Esthetique du Mal were deluxe volumes issued by the Cummington Press in 1942.

In 1939, Stevens was sixty – an age when most poets are ready to look back on what career they might have made for themselves. But Stevens’s best writing still lay before him in the form of extended meditative sequences, quasi-philosophical in their ruminative wanderings but marked always by a vivid sense of the absurd and a darting, whirling inventiveness that took delight in peculiar anecdotal examples. In the loosely connected stanzas of these sequences, "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" (1942), "Esthetique du Mal" (1945), "The Auroras of Autumn" (1947) and "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" (1950), Stevens perfected what had been, in effect, the work he had been producing all along – a metapoetry that took lavish delight in commenting upon its own making. At the same time, he began to grow interested in putting his thoughts on aesthetics together in prose sentences, essays he collected in 1951 as The Necessary Angel. And there was one final, magnificent turn to his development. Entering his seventies, he began to write a poetry of late old age, in which a sense of the disembodied, the purely mental, gave rise to a discourse that had grown newly austere, solemn, and strange even to its author.

Capturing so exuberantly yet so flawlessly the mind at play with an extravagance most often associated with youthful pleasure, with the sheer delights of the sensual body, Stevens preferred to mask his very great sensual satisfactions by suggesting that his doings were in fact all a highly proper set of speculations on "the imagination." (His prose essays were useful allies in this strategy.) But the sheer verve of local moments, the sumptuous texture of outstanding passages, simply dissolves as pretense the notion that a philosophical enterprise might be underway. Few poets have so fully enjoyed not just their indulgence in their own language but also the game that elaborately insists no such indulgence is occurring.

Heather McHugh (Poet)

I know he's too abstruse for many... and it's true that he's more interested in ideas than many people think is proper for a poet. But he's a stunningly sensual thinker... and that sensuality always wowed me... had the power to move me well before I was as avid for ideas as I am now... As a child I could FEEL the power in lines like "The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down"—those lines were power lines: they thrummed with image and music—they trembled with palpable sensuality.

I grew to love his cool-eyed poems, too, his drive to see without swamping the seen in gluey attachments. And so he kept pace with my own capacities to love:

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...
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.

(The Snow Man)

I came to love his literalness, his taste for letters and signs; his turning the poem into its own object (blurring of the distinction between object and subject); his sense of the magnetic attraction between word and word, between meaning and means. When I first read him I was dazzled by his audacities.

Who ever ended a poem with a sentence like "The the."? That's how "The Man on the Dump" ends: "Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the." My god, in my teens and early twenties, I couldn't stop re-reading that ending! The astonishingly questionable, downright definiteness of that article! The hammer blows of those grammars!

In my heart (if not in my brain) I understood

...shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The ABC of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.

(lines which are so full of SIGNage, brands, demands, letters, kisses, chromosomes, forges, and forces... ).

What reader wouldn't love a title like "Large Red Man Reading"? It begins "There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases" (an ordinary enough poetic set-up) but ends:

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.

The lines spoke the feeling for them! Take that, o you who do not feel.

Later I grew to love his capacity for balancing high philosophical seeking with low comedy, pure preposterousness, outright hilariousness, and daring artifice:

The Ultimate Poem is Abstract

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 question—here
The particular answer to the particular question
Is not in point—the 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 placid 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 around and dodges to and fro,

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.

Do you notice how he permits himself to have fun with words? "Writhings in wrong" can't help suggesting lurking understudies like "writing" and "right"... and the curved line of the question mark itself, which comes to its point.

If you really want to have some fun, take a look at the pseudo-critical art-history talking points and psychotherapeutic sleights-of-hand, even the ultimate Jimmy Durante lowbrow stage-jokiness at the end of So-and-So Reclining On Her Couch:

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

She floats in air at the level of
The eye, completely anonymous,
Born, as she was, at twenty-one,

Without lineage or language, only
The curving of her hip, as motionless gesture,
Eyes dripping blue, so much to learn.

If just above her heard there hung,
Suspended in air, the slightest crown
Of Gothic prong and practick bright,

The suspension, as in solid space,
The suspending hand withdrawn, would be
An invisible gesture. Let this be called

Projection B. To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final projection, C.

The arrangement contains the desire of
The artist. But one confides in what has no
Concealed creator. One walks easily

The unpainted shore, accepts the world
As anything but sculpture. Good-bye,
Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks.

"What should we be," writes Stevens in "Men Made Out Of Words," "without the sexual myth,/The human revery or poem of death?//Castratos of moon-mash—"

Castratos of moon-mash??? Where else will you find language like that, I ask you???

Add to all of these his wildness and urbanity; his willingness to haul into the comedy of aesthetics a bald-faced outright reference to popular art's sturm und drang and stagey sentiment. Stevens is a stage magician; and always, behind his skepticism about the distortions of nature by human senses, his underlying persistent impulse to return to natural events and objects for his metaphysical reflections:

Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion

Oh, that this lashing wind was something more
Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter....

The rain is pouring down. It is July.
There is lightning and the thickest thunder.

It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,
In Series X, Act IV, et cetera.

People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old,

The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,

Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.

And Ludwig Richter, turbulent Schlemihl,
Has lost the whole in which he was contained,

Knows desire without an object of desire,
All mind and violence and nothing felt.

He knows he has nothing more to think about,
Like the wind that lashes everything at once.

The thunder is thick for the same reason that the eyes were "dripping blue"—because they are painted. This is art made of art: Behind it all is his drive to feel his way, with art, through art: to see THROUGH human senses (doomed enterprise, he knows) to the underlying dilemmas of consciousness; its sayings and seemings; its love affair with fact and foolings around; its heights and downfalls; its farces and foibles; its self-constructions and its self-delusions...

I love him for supplying the best response of all, to those who would tear down the music hall in which he does his études:

Poet, be seated at the piano.
Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo,
Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic,
Its envious cachinnation.

If they throw stones upon the roof
While you practice arpeggios,
It is because they carry down the stairs
A body in rags.
Be seated at the piano.

That lucid souvenir of the past,
The divertimento;
That airy dream of future,
The unclouded concerto...
The snow is falling.
Strike the piercing chord.

That's my boy. He's fiery and icy; he's whacky and wise. I can't say I always understand him, inside out, but I do love him, through and through.

(Please visit http//Englizona.blogspot.com for powerful poems.

Patterns and Metaphors

Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout was born in 1947 in Vallejo near San Francisco. While she was studying in Berkeley and San Francisco she was very active on the literary scene from which the group of "Language Poets" emerged. She participated in the establishment of many different cultural projects in the California Bay Area, and she has been teaching literature and writing for more than 20 years at the University of California, San Diego.

The "Language Poets" are considered to be the most prominent group of American post-modern poets, with Armantrout as their most lyric representative. Her poems deal with the phrasal nature of the symbolic system of language, which she encounters with cautious suspicion because it reproduces and confirms a morally dubious reality.

"I think that if I didn't write against norms, I wouldn't be writing", says Armantrout, who also describes her work as a "focus on the interventions of capitalism into consciousness".

At the same time the poet scrutinises her own language and thereby performs a deconstructive process. In her short and meticulously combined poems she mixes different levels of language, alienates quotations, stages provocative coincidences as well as linguistic accidents, and composes very obvious punchlines.

As a result of this style, her texts are jolty, heterogeneous and opaque. The surprising changes in the short lines of the poems, which are written in everyday speech, also inhibit the readibility and lead to a challenging ambiguity. Her first volume of poems "Extremities" (1978) has so far been followed up by seven further collections concerned with the construction of femininity and the question of beauty, and the themes of time and memory.

In 1998 her prose memoir "True", which demonstrates Armantrout's narrative talent, was published. In "Veil" (2001) new poems are combined with poems from previous collections such as "The Invention of Hunger" (1979), "Precedence" (1985), "Made to Seem" (1995) and "The Pretext" (2001).

Armantrout has been awarded the Fund for Poetry Award twice. She was given a California Arts Council Fellowship and was Writer in Residence at Bard College, and at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland. Her poems have been published in numerous anthologies including: "Best American Poetry" in the years 1989, 2001 and 2002, "Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology" (1994) and "Poems for the Millennium" (1998).

Rae Armantrout

" Many teachers see poetry as containing specific ingredients -- deeper meanings, symbolic meanings, they can ask questions like "Here's a symbol, what does the symbol mean?" Many teachers want their students to be able to identify known literary devices and ask how those known literary devices are working in the poem. And that's understandable, because it's something that we all know how to do -- we've been trained to do that.

"Poetry like mine maybe doesn't contain those expected literary devices. While I think my own poetry contains a lot of metaphor, it tends to be as much anti-metaphor as metaphor. It's kind of like I'm setting two metaphors off against each other, or just seeing how far you can stretch a metaphor before it breaks. When I teach a more experimental work, I ask the question "What is it doing?" more than "What does it mean?"

"I ask "What patterns do you see?" I think that's a good way to begin, with anything unknown. When I give my students a text, especially a more experimental text, I start by asking "What do you notice?" Avant-garde doesn't have to be scary -- it can even be populist. Think about Ron Silliman, who would chant his poems on the public bus system in San Francisco...nothing snobby or inaccessible about that!

Honararium:1

Gregory Orr

Gregory Orr was born in 1947 in Albany, New York, and grew up in the rural Hudson Valley, and for a year, in a hospital in the hinterlands of Haiti. He received a B.A. degree from Antioch College, and an M.F.A. from Columbia University.

He is the author of nine collections of poetry, including How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved (2005); The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems (2002); Orpheus and Eurydice (2001); Burning the Empty Nests (1997); City of Salt (1995), which was a finalist for the L.A. Times Poetry Prize; and Gathering the Bones Together (1975).

He is also the author of a memoir, The Blessing (Council Oak Books, 2002), which was chosen by Publisher's Weekly as one of the fifty best non-fiction books the year, and three books of essays, including Poetry As Survival (2002) and Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry (1985).

He is considered by many to be a master of short, lyric free verse. Much of his early work is concerned with seminal events from his childhood, including a hunting accident when he was twelve in which he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother, followed shortly by his mother's unexpected death, and his father's later addiction to amphetamines

In the opening of his essay, "The Making of Poems," broadcast on National Public Radio's All Things Considered, Orr said, "I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive."

In a review of Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved from the Virginia Quarterly Review, Ted Genoways writes: "Sure, the trappings of modern life appear at the edges of these poems, but their focus is so unwaveringly aimed toward the transcendent—not God, but the beloved—that we seem to slip into a less cluttered time. It's an experience usually reserved for reading the ancients, and clearly that was partly Orr's inspiration."

Orr has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2003, he was presented the Award in Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, where he worked on a study of the political and social dimension of the lyric in early Greek poetry.

He teaches at the University of Virginia, where he founded the MFA Program in Writing in 1975, and served from 1978 to 2003 as Poetry Editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives with his wife, the painter Trisha Orr, and their two daughters in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Asked about recent inspirations and sources, he owns up to an "eclectic grab-bag of reading. I've always read six books at a time, seldom finishing any. Reckless and restless searching of the sort you'd expect from the short attention-span of a lyric poet."

That "reckless and restless" genius has demanded expression beyond writing poetry. Orr is also a Professor of Literature at the University of Virginia; he was the 2000 Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute of Culture and Violence; he edits Sacred Bearings, A Journal on Violence and Spiritual Life.

I can't see any real reason why we'd have to associate the project of the personal lyric with a human time-line for several reasons. When I was young, they used to mention lyric poets when they discussed a notion of how certain 'professions' peaked early-in their late adolescence, early twenties-they used theoretical mathematicians and physicists, athletes, and lyric poets.

I think we lyric poets have been removed from that dubious list, but who knows? The association might have had to do with intensity of passion, and passion is one of the human forms of disorder. So, when you are young the disordering and vitalizing passions are stronger, and you could argue that the poems are therefore more exciting or whatever.

On the other hand, as you get older as a poet, you learn more about what disturbs you in a way that leads to poems, and what was passion in your youth might become theme in your maturity. As long as it's still authentic, still real to you.

My thinking about disorder and order has to do with a feeling for the two forces and their interplay in our consciousness and on the page. And remember that 'disorder' can be vitalizing as well, a positive quality like 'joy' or 'freedom'; likewise, 'order' can be oppressive as it is felt by Blake in the form of state and organized religion; or by Whitman as the constraints of civilization, the tight collar and tie. So, I guess I'd say I don't accept any notions of timeline.

"To me poetry is both Quest and Craft. The quest aspect: what poetry means to you as an individual who has decided to orient her life in relation to this thing called 'poetry'—no one can really solve that for you. You search for guides and poetic forebears, but it's a personal search and struggle. Craft is easier than quest and less lonely.

"You can learn craft; you can improve, you can utilize your intelligence to master it. Why not call poetry Craft and forget Quest, or give the quest aspect short-shrift? That's the temptation that workshops breed. We know that. I guess the main defense would be to be forewarned. To tell yourself, "yes, this workshop response matters, but what is it that I personally need to learn or understand that poetry is trying to teach me?" An anecdote, about sources.

" When I was eighteen, I had worked briefly in Mississippi for the Civil Rights Movement as a volunteer in the summer of 1965. I'd been jailed and beaten in Mississippi, then kidnapped at gunpoint in Alabama and held in solitary in a rural jail for a bit over a week.

That political activism was aberrant for an introvert like myself and many of the experiences I had there were violent and traumatic, life-threatening. The upshot was that I knew these things had happened, but I never talked about them and gradually some of the odder facts began to seem as if, perhaps, since I was the only one who knew about them, maybe they hadn't happened in the real world.

Specifically, the two vigilantes who kidnapped me outside Selma—one of them, two months after I was there, killed a Rights worker in broad daylight with a shotgun.

" By then, I was living in New York City, feeling a bit fragile, but functional. One afternoon, I opened the New York Times and saw a photograph of this guy who had held a pistol to my head by a highway not two months before, was the killer. I was totally stunned.

"Cut to thirty-five years later, when I decide to see if this could possibly be accurate and I'm in a library basement scrolling through an old microfiche of the newspaper from that summer and suddenly, there is the photograph and the story and it's all true, just as remembered. Obviously, it's not always that way. Memory is notoriously unreliable, though traumatic memory less so. Hazy also. The more you work on memoir, the more you remember."

Courtesy: Poets.org& Folio(Magazine)

Visit the site http//Englizona.Blogspot.Com for Topical poems

Honarariums

Alice Oswald


As commented by a reviewer,"The freshness and rhythm of Alice Oswald 's work is captivating and wholly new", she is one of the very few exciting and original poets working in the English language today.

Living in south Devon, a few hours of journey from a suburban London in the modest cottage where the poet lives with her husband (the playwright Peter Oswald) and their three children.. Trays of seedlings on the window-sills filled with trays of seedlings and, outside, a hazy blue sky, wood pigeons, garden allotments clustered on a slope where the Oswald children are playing with friends, and the hills beyond.

It's another world "I really think there are," Oswald says that she really thinks there are spirits in a place that you have to accommodate. It is a surprisingly tranquil setting for a writer whose work is both complex and forthright, dazzling and tense with linguistic energy.

Three of her four collections have been Poetry Book Society Choices; her second book, Dart, won theTS Eliot Prize; her third, Woods etc., won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize in 2007. Her fans include Carol Ann Duffy and Jeanette Winterson. Last year, she was one of only five poets in a list, compiled by a newspaper's book critics, of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945; she was the youngest writer included.

Alice Oswald is charismatic, like anyone with an intense focus on their art. Diffident, clear-eyed and intelligent, she is prone to insecurity, and her reserve could be mistaken for aloofness.

It might have been tempting to produce variations on Dart, the book-length poem about the Devon river and the people on its margins which incorporated material gathered from interviews. Dart is a counterblast to the linguistically conservative vignette trimmed with images and closing with a wee epiphany, which has dominated British poetry for the past half-century.

Oswald doesn't put pen to paper until the poem has formed in her mind – "I like the body to take part in writing a poem" – and she believes in "a whole poem which I just can't quite hear. It's a question of trying to take down by dictation what's already there. I'm not making something, I'm trying to hear it." In that spirit, why not read aloud the following lines:

'you can hear water
cooped up in moss and moving
slowly uphill through lean-to trees
where every day the sun gets twisted and shut
with the weak sound of the wind
rubbing one indolent twig upon another'

Sound is fundamental to Oswald's poetry, though never, she hopes, at the cost of sense. Negative reviews trouble her, especially if they question her meaning. "I hate not managing to speak clearly," she says, as agitated as she gets during our al fresco conversation. "I really hate it. I get a feeling of claustrophobia – like I'm locked in my own head – if what I've said hasn't reached someone."

Nevertheless, Oswald would rather risk unintelligibility while being true to her inspiration.

"People are so used to reading novels now, they just read a poem straight through to get the meaning. And that's something totally different from the slow way you read something if it's a tune; which to me a poem has to be."

While Wyatt has influenced her thinking on versification, the writer to whom she feels most indebted is Homer. Still grateful to the teacher at a secondary school where she was the only pupil studying Greek, Oswald went on to take a degree in Classics at Oxford, avoiding the more obvious route for the aspiring writer of an English degree. Ted Hughes, a poet with whom she is routinely compared, was a relatively late (Courtesy:The Guardian)

(This post and the forthcoming ones are dedicated to the makers and modifyers of modern English to retain its beauty and grandeur. So the forthcoming posts would get numbered as Honararium .1 and so..so )

Zones

In general, a zone is an area of administration. The meaning is similar to that of domain. Specific networking environments use the term to mean somewhat different things:
In the domain name system (DNS) environment, a zone is the name space allocated for a particular server. A zone file maintains instructions for resolving specified Internet domain names to the appropriate number form of an Internet Protocol address (an IP address).
In an H.323 multimedia network, a zone is a group of terminals, multipoint control units (MCUs), and gateways within a particular domain. A zone may be a relatively permanent configuration of devices, or just a runtime entity established for a particular event. An administrative tool called a gatekeeper controls interactions for each zone. In Apple computers, a zone is a logical group of network devices using AppleTalk
And there are some other meanings for zones

*a circumscribed geographical region characterized by some distinctive features
*any of the regions of the surface of the Earth loosely divided according to latitude or longitude
*an area or region distinguished from adjacent parts by a distinctive feature or characteristic
* any encircling or beltlike structureSynonyms: zona
*regulate housing in; of certain areas of townsSynonyms: districtseparate or apportion into *sections; "partition a room off"
island
Panama Canal Zone, Canal Zone
climatic zone
time zone
transit zone
combat zone, combat area
danger zone
demilitarized zone, DMZ
drop zone, dropping zone
kill zone, killing zone
tidal zone
zona pellucida
zonule, zonula
And now comes out our zone with a separate universe of itself. Zuzzazonia.
Zones get immersed into this greater zone of zuzzaz. Let's come closer and expand later