sounds not chosen

If the poetry of X was music,
So that it came to him of its own,
Without understanding, out of the wall

Or in the ceiling, in sounds not chosen...

—Wallace Stevens, "The Creations of Sound"

Tonight was the Twentieth Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash at the Hartford Public Library. Guest speaker Lisa Goldfarb's talk was entitled Accents, Syllables, and Sounds: How Wallace Stevens Transforms Us into Musical Readers.