bright star

An image that could blot the sun.

poet in the sun

Last night was the Seventeenth Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash at Hartford Public Library. Jay Parini delivered a vibrant and flowing talk taking us through about six of Stevens' poems, making a case for how Stevens uses a poetic 'code', with certain words representing maker/poet, reality, imagination. Parini traced how this poetic code was present in Stevens' poetry since the very beginning.

A poem Parini made note of was the concluding section of "Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction," in which these lines appear...

    Soldier, there is a war between the mind
    And sky, between thought and day and night. It is
    For that the poet is always in the sun,

    Patches the moon together in his room
    To his Virgilian cadences, up down,
    Up down. It is a war that never ends.

imperial interference

Haiku eschews metaphor, simile, or personification. Nothing is like something else in most well-realized haiku. As Bashô said, “Learn of a pine from a pine.” Learn, that is, what a pine tree is, not what it is like—one supposes this is what Bashô meant. This avoidance of metaphor or simile arises, I feel, from the poet’s need to render directly and concretely the vision he has had, and only that vision. Almost he seems to aim at the paring down of his medium to the absolute minimum, so that the least words stand between the reader and the experience! The result can be what Babette Deutsch has called a “naked poem” as she noted in speaking of the art of William Carlos Williams: “Not merely rhyme and metre but sometimes metaphor itself became an imperial interference between him and the sun.”

—Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku (Chas. L. Tuttle & Co, 1957)