Week 11 | 4/17/16
Poet(s) of the Week: Robert Lowell and Frank O’Hara
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 (1917-1977) and Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Poet(s) of the Week: Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
For The Union Dead
Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.
The
in a
The
The
old South Boston Aquarium stands
Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
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 (1917-1977)
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 (1917-1977)
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 diewhen 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 yearwasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
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
(1917-1977)
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 illwe'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 (1917-1977)
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 (1917-1977)
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 aira 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 (1917-1977)
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 (1917-1977)
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 (1917-1977)
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? It’s 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:
There’s no long struggle, no desire
To get up on its feet and fly
It stretches out its feet
And dies. This is the sinner’s 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 (1917-1977)
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 (1917-1977)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Poet(s) of the Week: Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
The New York School of
Poets
“It’s wonderful to have three good friends
you think are geniuses.”—Kenneth Koch
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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 Ashbery’s 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.”
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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.
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.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
“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 nation’s 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).
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
“Substitute Frank O’Hara 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
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
“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)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
“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 don’t steer.”—
James Schuyler (Lehman 2).
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Jackson Pollack, “Number 1”
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Jackson Pollack,
“Number
8” (detail)
Major American
Writers:
Wallace
Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Jackson Pollack, “Convergence: 10”
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Robert Motherwell, Razor’s Edge
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Robert Motherwell, Untitled
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
DeKooning, Whose Name was Writ in
Water
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Willem DeKooning, Fire Island
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
“From Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, they learned that it was
okay for a poem to chronicle the history of its own making—that 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).
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
“Like painting, writing was properly understood to be an activity, a presenttense 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.”
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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 Picasso’s phrase” (Lehman
6)
“[M]odern poetry gave the poet the license to be strange.”
—John Ashbery
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
“Unlike the Beats, however, the
poets of the New York School
pursued an aesthetic agenda that
was deliberately apolitical, even
antipolitical” (Lehman 9).
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
“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)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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.”
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Personism: A Manifesto
That's for the writing poems part. As for their reception,
suppose you're in love and somebody's mistreating (mal aimé)
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.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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.”
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank
(1926-1966)
The
NewO’Hara
York School
of Poets
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
Mallarmé).
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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
poési pure was to Béranger. 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
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank
(1926-1966)
The
NewO’Hara
York School
of Poets
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
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
“For Those Who Think Young,” 8:46 & 47:00
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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."
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
Larry Rivers, “Washington Crossing the Delaware”
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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 O’Hara (1926-1966)
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,
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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!
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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?”
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 Mike’s painting, called
SARDINES.
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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 don’t 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)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
The Day Lady Died
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, 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 Wallace
Poets
Major American
Writers:
Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
The Day Frank O’Hara Died, July 25th, 1966
Willem DeKooning, Fire Island
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
The Day Frank O’Hara Died, July 25th, 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 O’Hara” (1974)
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)
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
Discussion led
by Kenna Day
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
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens
δὶς ἐς τὸν αὐτὸν ποταμὸν οὐκ
ἂν ἐμβαίης.
You could not step twice
into the same river.—
Haraclitus
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 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 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
Discussion led
by Yan Yin
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 mind’s
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 one’s 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 sheen–or 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
Major American Writers: Wallace Stevens