My presentation

http://prezi.com/8rdbfey6mcjg/untitled-prezi/

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens is one of America's most respected poets. Wallace Stevens never learned to drive, although he did have a day job as an insurance executive, so he would compose poetry walking to and from work. Wallace Steven’s uniqueness as a poet is indisputable, his perpetual brand-newness remains peripheral, always on the outside never able to go back to his poems in the same way one had preceded. He was a chief engineer of language, with an astonishing command and a sublime meticulousness in shaping his words. The extreme procedural and thematic intricacy of his work causes him to be considered a perceptively challenging lyricist. Individually Stevens can harmonize the theorist's exoteric voice with the cryptic voice of the poet as he remains metaphysically demanding nevertheless thorough. He was likewise a truth-seeker of aesthetics, dynamically reconnoitering the concept of lyrics as the absolute synthesis of the inspired imagination and impartial representation. He replaces etymological and philosophical contradictions with a trilateral agreement and drives the ruminating mind to the summit. He was recognized as a renowned abstractionist and an incendiary philosopher, and that status has remained ever since his passing. His word combinations generate eye-blurring, emblematic, quasi-opaque poetry that can effortlessly subdue perception causing his poems to resist the intelligence almost successfully.

http://www.stevenspoetry.org/stevenswalk.htm

The infinitesimal manifestation of intelligence

I am glad to read that not everyone found Solaris completely mind blowing.  Although I am a scyfi-guy I guess I am not a scientific terminology guy.  I like Star Wars but more for the romanticism and power of the force rather than the discovery of new worlds. Similarly I enjoy Solaris and the romanticism of an intellectual eternal blog capable of creating and recreating life.  Is this Lucreation’s imagined god of the universe? Ever learning ever changing accommodating to create and experience the infinite experiences of the universe.  If its abilities were farther reaching I believe it would be his perfect god theory.  Is it that far off from the scriptures intelligent matter unorganized pooled in at once shared consciousness with the ability to experience stimulation away from the amassed consciousness. There are things which act and things which are acted upon. 

I love the power of “The Secret” even if it is only the mind focusing sharpening to gather for itself the desires it has without pulling from the universe.  I for one could you a focus that moves one to action. Is that not faith a belief in something that moves us to action.

I must say I enjoy parts of the book’s concepts like the creation of a human who cannot believe in herself simply because she believes herself not to be unique. I liked of course the idea of the ocean and the mystery of the beings created by the ocean and each person’s subconscious mind which once being objects of great emotional desire became a living horror an awful sublime!

Awful Awesome

The awful awesome Sublime

My thesis is lost as of yet.  I think it could be stated as such; how awful is the splendor of the birth of a fold how gruesome is the cause of freedom won how awesome is the frightful fall how wonderful is the pleasure of experiencing the unknown, is it all sublime? I want first to define the sublime as it is known to many of the noteworthy poets and philosophers (Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer, Victor Hugo).  Then using those philosopher’s incite to draw lines to awful and awesome and then to provide evidence that awful and awesome produce the same results and are essentially can be the same.  Drawing on poems from Wallace Stevens I would like to use his poems (The idea of order in Key West, The American Sublime, ) to defend both positions.  I would like to create my own experience to further demonstrate the sublime in both its beauty and its horror. 

It Must Give Pleasure

I am not sure why but my first thoughts were of Sir Percy Blakeney and his words and the following scene how in the midst of a revolt he insults both the boyfriend of his true love and the revolution and gets away with treason and the girl. The part ends at 3min 20sec or so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKgs7hv9_Kw&feature=relmfu

 Notes Toward A Supreme Fiction: The ------------- after X (pg 351)

I enjoy tring to find meaning in the words or mind of the author but end up placing myself in the words and cross what are my thoughts with the thoughts I might suppose are the thoughts of the poet.  This to me is satisfactory and I find I do not need to know the truth or the real intent of the author; although that would be nice to know too.

 Everyone who believes there is conflict between perceptions

And heaven between ideas and truth and deception.  It is

Because of this the seeker of knowledge draws from the source of truth

 

Confines the deceiver to darkness

To his Lord Krishna steps, Porphyrius the Charioteer, up down,

Up down. It is a conflict that ends with the end of thought

 

Yet it depends on yours. The deception and truth are one

They are plural, inescapably both within us,

Two that meet only to repel each other

 

The meeting to push against the other, or that meet

By chance like knowledge given to the foot-soldier, ---

You think you find peace of mind, and after it you return to confusion

 I had to stop at this point for the loss of understanding and words to describe that loss, but I wanted to finish with the last lines.

 How simply our thoughts become real;

How gladly with proper knowledge we stop fighting to find truth,

If you must give up, or in other words just live simply in ignorance

 

I guess for me Steven is wrestling once again with the conflict between truth and perception.   Neither one winning the war yet both just as real. I love the line where they meet “The meeting of their shadows” The image of the sun fighting against the shade never able to actually fight but never ending the pushing match over the world.  The creators of shadows being us because as the sun shines on one side the other side is in the shadows.

I have been writing down ideas to post as blogs for this class drawing on the interruptions in thoughts that come whilst the words flow in our class of prophetic poets.  The struggle inside is the actual and the need to have no actuality.

Do words make a difference can poems take the place of mountains are men made out of words? "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" Is God a word or is it the words that God uses to assemble all things. 

We know from Lucretius that everything already existed. Is it impossible to believe that words are power; the power that controls the universe and beyond?  The firstlings existed and can never be destroyed yet there are those that act and those that are acted upon.  In this life created by our own perception of reality we say or think and things happen.

Motion is created by thoughts or words and must be so for we can not turn on the light with out thinking to do so first.  Someone discovered in the infinite infinity to act upon those things that can be acted upon and formed them and shaped them through the use of words or commands or knowledge or thoughts, for it is all the same. Those combining firstlings in combinations of meticulous design to create the simplest of organisms precisely compelled to regenerate and replicate itself.


The Role Of PoetryStevens often writes directly about poetry and its human function. The poet “tries by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general, / To compound the imagination’s Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima.” Moreover, “The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.” In a manner reminiscent of Wordsworth, Stevens saw the poet as one with heightened powers, but one who like all ordinary people continually creates and discards cognitive depictions of the world, not in solitude but in solidarity with other men and women.
These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words; and thus Stevens can say, “It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.” In a poem called “Men Made out of Words,” he says: “Life / Consists of propositions about life.” Poetry is not about life, it is intimately a part of life. As Stevens wrote elsewhere, “The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it. / The poet speaks the poem as it is, // Not as it was.” Modern poetry is “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”

http://payingattentiontothesky.com/category/wallace-stevens/

A power of poetry is its words that make thoughts that create action, thoughts move elements together with purpose and direction.

As my eyes skimmed through the Adagia a couple of lines captured my thoughts.  My eyes became more focused as I returned to the Adagia and searched one by one for further light and knowledge that seemed to resonate with my mind:

Thought is an infection. In the case of certain thoughts it becomes and epidemic.

The earth is not a building but a body.
That part of the truth of the world that has its origin in the feelings.
As the reason destroys, the poet must create.
We live in the mind
Everything tends to become real; or everything moves in the direction of reality.
The word must be the thing it represents otherwise it is a symbol. It is a question of identity.

 I had to stop because at this point my mind is ringing and hardly managing the thoughts swimming around in my head.  I had to start writing notes in my book for fear of loss, loss of those ideas, which would surely make me sad.  My mind then returned to Ashley’s blog. How is it that loss seems to trump both past and present? Having lost an adopted brother, I never forget his dorky ways or his annoyingly great stealing of my cheese. Although it has been 15 years my thoughts of him are always a mix of tears and smiles.  Sometimes I wonder what his life would have been like and in the same thought how that would have changed me. 

But he has changed me and I am happy for his time with me and in his absence am happy that I know him; because as words are thoughts and thoughts create feelings, we live in the mind, where reason cannot destroy what our poet creates, and this infection moves us to our epidemic of happiness. “The word must be the thing it represents otherwise it is a symbol.” and so are we, “It is a question of identity.” Who do we want to be?