“The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens” by Paul Mariani

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) won two National Book Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, along with the Bollingen Prize and the Frost Medal. He was one of the American poets who were considered the high priests of literary modernism, along with T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. He was a presence in poetry for more than four decades and had an enormous impact on poetry’s substance and direction.

Literary studies of his poetry abound. Several biographies of Stevens were written in the 1980s and a few in the 1990s. Twenty years after the last major biography, Paul Mariani has published The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens.

Mariani is especially well-suited for the task. A poet himself, he has published seven collections of poetry and numerous non-fiction works. His biographies include William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (1981); Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman (1990); Lost Puritan: The Life of Robert Lowell (1996); The Broken Tower: A Life of Hart Crane (1999); and Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life (2008).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: Wallace Stevens late in life.

Wallace Stevens and Walking the Landscape

I’m reading, or actually rereading, Living in the Nature Poem by Mary Harwell Sayler, and I’m taken by this poem:

Landscape Loved by Wallace Stevens

If you could fly over \ yards and yards

of green lace lining the Gulf and Space

Coasts, you would see low-lying bands

of land seeding the sea with pockets blue –

beaded with water, and you’d wonder how

one more word could fit into the shell –

shaped pattern, hemmed with canals, and

not unravel beneath the weight of so many

people pushing the delicate fabric, poking

the intricate design, picking at flaws not

found in winter-bound spools of wool.

That landscape is more than familiar; it’s personal. I grew up near the Gulf Coast; I’m familiar with the Space Coast. I’ve flown over area enough to recognize those “low-lying bands of land seeding the sea.” And I know those coastal skies, close cousins to the skies you find in the great Dutch paintings.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetspeakPoetry.

Photograph: One of the hiking trails at Shaw Nature Reserve, southwest of St. Louis.

A Poetry Dare for National Poetry Month

Today is the beginning of National Poetry Month, and we have a poetry dare from Tweetspeak Poetry.

It sounds simple: read a poem a day, preferably from one poet. Easy enough. But then you need to write the poem out to see how it feels, and then (on Wednesdays) go over to Tweetspeak and join in the discussion.

Actually, I think this is a pretty cool idea.

The book of poetry I decided upon for my response to the dare is The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. If I have a favorite poet, it’s Stevens, one of the three greats of modernism (the other two being T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas). My edition is the twentieth, published in 1980. It was first published in 1954. 

And the first poem in the collection is the one I read for today, “Earthy Anecdote:”

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
in a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
to the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

If you’re so inclined, join in the fun. All the information you need for the dare is at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Wallace Stevens and William Faulkner at the presentation of the National Book Award to Faulkner. Photo via Lumpy Pudding.

Take Your Poet to Work Day!

Yes, today, July 17, is the official Take Your Poet to Work Day. The folks over at Tweetspeak Poetry  (which I suppose includes me) created this, and so far it’s caught on in Australia, Holland, the United States and a few places in between. The Atlantic Monthly promoted it. And the Paris Review. And the Rotterdam Poetry Festival.

The idea is to select one of the conveniently created cutouts – Eliot, Dickinson, Poe, Neruda, Teasdale, Rumi or Basho – print it, cut it our and color it, paste to a stick, and then insert your poet somewhere in your work space. And tell a story.

OK, so I don’t do cut-outs. But, as you can see from the photography above, I did bring some poets to work today: Wallace Stevens (a favorite), Billy Collins (close to a favorite), Wendell Berry (a favorite even if he would hate my politics), and Edgar Lee Masters (who has been THE favorite since high school and given the fact he’s lasted this long as my favorite, it’s unlikely he will be dethroned anytime soon).

Oh, yes, that’s the current (July/August) issue of Poetry Magazine. This issue includes three poems by Scott Cairns (I should have brought him to work today, too) and one by James Galvin, among others; an article by the late film critic Roger Ebert; and four remembrances, including one of Richard Wilbur by Donald Hall.

I inserted the four books directly into my work space – the computer screen (yes, that’s Tweetdeck showing on the screen). And in one way or another, all four or these poets, and a few others, have helped me understand the poetry in work – and the poetry at work. That’s the story here. Perhaps that’s always the story here.

So if you’re in the mood for poetic cut-outs, or even if you aren’t, head over to Tweetspeak Poetry and see what’s happening. And it’s not too late to Take Your Poet to Work.

The Poet of the Workplace

When I became part of a company’s speechwriting team, a friend kept pressing on me the need to read poetry if I was really serious about being a speechwriter. He gave me copies of the collected poems of three great modernist poets – T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. It didn’t take much convincing; I could easily see that poetry and speeches – truly fine speeches – have much in common, in terms of form, flow, cadence, voice, rhythm and how they sound to the ear. Differences exist, to be sure, but there is much I could learn, and did learn, about speechwriting from poetry.

I was familiar with Eliot and Thomas from my formal education years. Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955) was something of a revelation. A businessman, with the heart of a poet. A corporate attorney. And one who turned down academic offers from Ivy League universities to stay with the Hartford Insurance Company.

To continue reading, please read my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.