Wallace Stevens

But yeah, very, very difficult man and a difficult poet.

You know, I always tell my students, you know, and they're like, oh, I can't read Wallace Stevens or I can't read this or I can't read that.

And I say, just wait, you know, just try it again.

You know, don't write it off.

He's very difficult.

You know, I read him with a dictionary, you know? I took, I was really, really lucky and I didn't take this class because I couldn't for some reason.

But when I was at the University of Utah doing my PhD, there was a class offered by Larry Levis, who was pretty, deeply into the drugs at that point um but he had been a student of my teacher and so we you know felt a connection and i thought okay this guy's offering a class on wallace stevens i don't really want to read a lot of a lot of wallace stevens voluntarily but i'm not going to miss this class so i sat in on the class and um larry was did either of you know him or

no i just this the work

On now to Jo Ragsdell-Jogin.

The title of the poem Peter Quince at the Clavier by the American modernist poet Wallace Stevens refers to a character from which Shakespeare play?

Twelfth Night?

No. Tom Mead?

Ba-da-da-ba-ba.

Anecdote of Cana by Wallace Stevens Read for LibriVox.org by Alan Davis Drake Huge are the Cana in the dreams of X, The mighty thought, the mighty man, They fill the terrace of his capital.

His thought sleeps not.

Yet thought that wakes in sleep may never meet another thought or thing.

End of poem.

This recording is in the public domain.

Anecdote of Men by the Thousand by Wallace Stevens Read for LibriVox.org by Alan Davis Drake The soul, he said, is composed of the external world.

There are men of the East, he said, who are the East.

Helen Wendler was for several decades a professor of English at Harvard University.

She wrote books on George Herbert, John Keats, Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Seamus Heaney, and many other poets, as well as editing a number of critical editions and anthologies.

Reviewing her book The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets for the LRB in 1998, Tom Paulin wrote that it is Wendler's supreme critical virtue that she can write from inside a poem, as if she is in the workshop witnessing its making.

James Wood, writing in the paper in 1996, called her the most powerful poetry critic in America since Randall Jarrell.

wallace stevens and the question of how to live i recently came across wallace stevens one of the most significant american poets of the twentieth century he was a poet but his main occupation was vice-president of an insurance company he published his first collection at forty-four to considerable acclaim and went on to win the pulitzer prize in nineteen fifty five even then he never left the insurance company At 75, an offer came from Harvard, a professorship.

He turned that down, too.

Accepting it, apparently, would have meant leaving the company where he had worked for so many years.

Of course, we're celebrating another's good conditions, but we know because we've been through equanimity that those come and go, and we just have a heart that's responsive, right? That can celebrate when it's happy and can grieve when it's sad.

So this famous poem by Wallace Stevens is shared a lot in this territory.

I think of it all the time when we're teaching about this.

So Wallace Stevens says, "She who binds herself to a joy Does the winged life destroy.

But she who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in Eternity's sunrise." So it's this, like, openness.

You know, with sense pleasure, we know it's not the whole path.

A book in that book was a story itself.

Was it a Shakespeare play? Was it a poem by Wallace Stevens? Was it a poem by William Carlos Williams or Adrienne Rich? A poem by Sylvia Plath filled with doubt and fire and acid and broken glass? Turns out the poem, the story, the thing, the thing we're talking about, the feeling was not a story after all.

It was not money you could spend.

It was not a wolf who would run all night beneath the trees, hungering for nothing else but to run beneath the trees.