Hard for the word to travel from blood to poem.
—Yannis Ritsos, Monochords (Tavern Books, 2017), translated by Paul Merchant.
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label travel. Show all posts
5.18.2022
11.05.2017
inner travel
Outer travel becomes the setting of inner travel, but if the mood is somewhat that of the Odyssey, the travelers are less able and confident than Odysseus, and the world less viable to purpose. The width of things and the isolation of the characters look forward to much in the Hellenistic Age, and even in the Aeneid, rather than back to the sureness of the Odyssey. Of the classical Greek writers, Euripides notably created a language for privacy of experience, and he paradoxically did so by pressing intellectually farther than other poets and finding no solution in it.
—John H. Finlay, Jr., “The Theoretical Mind,” Four Stages of Greek Thought (Stanford U. Press, 1966)
—John H. Finlay, Jr., “The Theoretical Mind,” Four Stages of Greek Thought (Stanford U. Press, 1966)
8.17.2016
11.04.2013
alien point-blank green
ARRIVAL AT THE WALDORF
Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.
You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say “The world in a verse,
A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,”
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.
— Wallace Stevens, Parts Of A World (1942)
Yesterday afternoon was the 18th Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash at Hartford Public Library. Guest speaker Bonnie Costello featured this poem in her talk entitled "Traveling with Wallace Stevens." In his work as a surety bond lawyer for the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co., Stevens traveled extensively in the U.S. for a time, but he never traveled farther than Key West.
Home from Guatemala, back at the Waldorf.
This arrival in the wild country of the soul,
All approaches gone, being completely there,
Where the wild poem is a substitute
For the woman one loves or ought to love,
One wild rhapsody a fake for another.
You touch the hotel the way you touch moonlight
Or sunlight and you hum and the orchestra
Hums and you say “The world in a verse,
A generation sealed, men remoter than mountains,
Women invisible in music and motion and color,”
After that alien, point-blank, green and actual Guatemala.
— Wallace Stevens, Parts Of A World (1942)
Yesterday afternoon was the 18th Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash at Hartford Public Library. Guest speaker Bonnie Costello featured this poem in her talk entitled "Traveling with Wallace Stevens." In his work as a surety bond lawyer for the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Co., Stevens traveled extensively in the U.S. for a time, but he never traveled farther than Key West.
1.26.2007
a poem that travels light
I dream of a poem so brief and memorable, so engaging and spirited, that it will forever elude print—it will travel light from mouth to mind, mind to mouth, without ever being pinned to a page as text.
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