Well, this is kind of genuis . . .

You probably want to check out ol' Peg Leg's (count 'em) two pastiches of Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. They're pretty damn good.

Also, you may also what to consider the painting above, Juan Gris's "Violin and Playing Cards," an example of Cubism. This movement in art heavily influenced Stevens, especially in "Blackbirds."

"The greatest poverty is not to live in a physcial world"

If you've read any Wallace Stevens, the above quote doesn't sound like something he's say (though he did). The guy wrote "The Emperor of Ice Cream," for cryin' out loud.

But one way to think about Steven's poetry is through the lens of our relationship with the physical world, how human perception shapes our experience of our world.

If you're having trouble with Stevens, you're not alone. I spend my 20's trying to read him, failing to connect with any of his poems, and writing him off as some abstract/surrealist that didn't share any of my concerns, poetry and otherwise.

But then I found this poem:

Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow...
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache...
The sun was coming from the outside.

That scrawny cry--It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

I won't go into too much detail here, but I will say that after hearing Stevens read this, a lot of his other poems that had spent years baffling me just sorta clicked. Stevens is certainly a poet of ideas. And this idea fits in fairly comfortably with "Modernist" poetry. William Carlos Williams, who we'll get to in a bit, expressed a similar sentiment when he said "No ideas but in things."

In this poem, Stevens is very concerned with a thing, but it doesn't try to communicate a description--that would contradict the idea that's he's working with. We'll talk about about Stevens and this poem in class, but I wanted to get it to you here in case it helps you like it helped me.

Idealism versus Pragmatism

In light of last week's discussion about the pragmatism of Booker T. Washington's approach to racial equality in American versus W.E.B DeBois's more idealistic critique of Washington's philosophy, this WaPo story by Dana Milbank seems awfully relevant.

The story argues that Obama needs ditch some of the idealism that emanates from his White House staff and heed the advice of his uber-pragmatic chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel. Obama faces a question much like that one we wrestled with last class.

Obama chose the profane former Clinton adviser for a reason. Where the president is airy and idealistic, Rahm is earthy and calculating. One thinks big; the other, a former House Democratic Caucus chair, understands the congressional mind, in which small stuff counts for more than broad strokes.

In my view, this is a question central to the idea of America, a political experiment that has its roots in the radical idea that "all men are created equal." Our reality does not match our ideals. So how do we begin to change--this is a debate that continues on and on.

Washington v. DeBois

There were some great posts on the Washington / DeBois question. I really like this comparison at "Lines upon the page of life":

Washington in his time was smart enough to know that Mary Poppin's medication worked best. If he had a theme song it would be," A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down!" Du Bois would be more like Beastie Boy's hit,"You've got to fight for your right, to Party."(not to make light of the subject) . Both Washington and Du Bois were valuable writers, and both were well written intelligent men.

Where do you get your ideas?

This is one of the most common questions asked of writers and poets. The more disingenuous writers try to convince readers that their ideas appear out of thin air. The more honest among us fess up--the best ideas for stories and poems are often stolen.

Just ask William Faulkner, whose seems to have drawn his inspiration for some of the best novels written in the last century from the diaries of a wealthy plantation owner:

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.

Paul Constant of The Stranger says it best:

Some will probably take this as an excuse to bash Faulkner for a vague kind of plagiarism. I think it's just proof that ideas don't come to people whole, and novelists are no exception.

Crossposted at ENGL291

On reading and blogging

Some interesting thoughts on the two subject as they collide by Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of my favorite writers:

Without getting into specifics, last month was the best month this blog has had since the election high. But the posts that do the best, in terms of traffic and comments, aren't quick hit, off the cuff, witty observations (Crash-bashing excluded) but the dense, long-ish stuff that usually comes from reading books. A couple of weeks ago, we had 100plus comment discussing whether slave should be considered as assets, labor, or both.

On Trickster-ism

Here's a past post about the Trickster figure we talked about in class. "The Signifying Monkey" is a classic Trickster Figure:

The toast itself usually is a narrative about deception, hustling, or someone getting over on someone else. But one of the essential elements of this story is that the trickster/bandit/hustler is almost always in a position of lesser power than the victim. The classic example here is the Signifying Monkey.

Here's nice site that explains the concept of the Signifying Monkey a little bit more and provides examples. Let's do a little quoting from the site, yes?

. . . a trickster figure such as the Signifying Monkey enjoys stirring up trouble for its own sake. All trickster figures, however, are rather wise too. Perhaps they know that laughing at trouble (and even creating trouble just to laugh) has a special kind of transformative power. Tricksters can level the playing field in a flash and make it possible for burdened and uptight people to suddenly feel lighthearted and playful. Tricksters show up in the folklore and creation myths of a number of cultures worldwide, including African, Haitian, Native American (or American Indian) and African American.

Another way to think about the Signifying Monkey as it relates to the toast is in terms of social power. Signifying, then, is a way to not only speak truth to power without getting killed (court jester) but also to indirectly attack it not through force but through intelligence and manipulation. Check out this video of Doug Hammond reciting on of the Signifying Monkey toasts.

If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it might be because the toast is more than indirectly related to the beginnings of hip-hop in both form and theme. The hip-hop line is, for the most part, accentual--four beats a line. It follows a definite rhyme scheme. And good bit of the canon tells the stories of an anti-hero--the drug dealer. Like the toast, it is full of braggadocio, insult, and verbal ingenuity and dexterity (e.g. the first three Wu joints).

There is a book that is a wonderful, wonderful collection of toasts by Bruce Jackson, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me.