13 Ways of Looking at 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Wallace Stevens : 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I.
Long haikus about blackbirds

II.
A metaphor for racism

III.
False starts and fragments from an unfinished blackbird poem.

IV.
An outline for an epic poem about Woden travelling by train the East coast in winter.

V.
Premodern tweets.

VI.
A creative writing assignment from high school.

VII.
An elliptic, though devastating critique of Edgar A. Poe’s “The Raven”.

VIII.
13 failed pick-up lines.

IX.
His philosophical text expressing skepticism that the existence of the world requires the existence of a description that is true from every possible point of view, a description that would depict it in itself as it really is.

X.
A peyote fueled phantasmagoria.

XI.
Lyrics to his indie folk rap.

XII.
A spec screenplay for Groucho Marx.

XIII.
The Kuma Sutra of Connecticut.

The Poem Must Resist the Intelligence Almost Successfully

Man Carrying Thing

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

–Wallace Stevens

Nanowrimo : Novel Update : Source Material

I’m at 45,007 words today. Close enough to finish tomorrow.

The title to my novel is : Wounded Cast Down

Here’s a couple of poems by Wallace Stevens used as inspiration:

The Snow Man

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,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same 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 Wind Shifts

This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.

The Plot Against the Giant : Wallace Stevens

First Girl
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

Second Girl
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

Third Girl
Oh, la…le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.