REEL TIME: Helen Vendler on the Recordings of Wallace Stevens - Woodberry Poetry Room
In this informal talk and audio presentation, Professor Helen Vendler reflects on what did and did not draw her to Wallace Stevens when she first encountered his work in her twenties. She asks why Stevens, in his seventies, was drawn to a plainness of style not present in his first book, Harmonium (1923). Specific attention is paid to the following poems: "Bantams in Pine Woods," "To the One of Fictive Music," "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour," and "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself."
Date: Wednesday, February 22, 2012, at the Edison-Newman Room, Houghton Library, Harvard University.
hcl.harvard.edu/poetryroom
Пікірлер: 13
Loads of thanks! I wish for uploading of Vendler's video. She is such a great reader of poetry!
Thank you, this has been added to a playlist...
Enjoyed your reading and poems that kept mr engaged throughout. I’m also a poet specializing in Japanese forms: haiku, tanka, haibun, kyoka, senryu. I hope you don’t mind me sharing a tanka and my haiku tribute poem to Bashō’s frog with commentary by the late AHA founder and poet Jane Reichhold who considered my haiku among her 10 favorite haiku of all time! What an honor. Here’s the Bashō poem with Jane Reichhold’s Insightful commentary: Bashō’s frog four hundred years of ripples At first the idea of picking only 10 of my favorite haiku seemed a rather daunting task. How could I review all the haiku I have read in my life and decide that there were only 10 that were outstanding? Then realized I was already getting a steady stream of excellent haiku day by day through the AHA forum. The puns and write-offs based on Basho's most famous haiku are so numerous I would have said that nothing new could be said with this method, but here Al Fogel proved me wrong. Perhaps part of my delight in this haiku lies in the fact that I agree with him. Here he is saying one thing about realism-ripples are on a pond after a frog jumps in, but because it refers back to Basho and his famous haiku, he is also saying something about the haiku and authors who have followed him. We, and our work, are just ripples while Basho holds the honor of inventing the idea of the sound of a frog leaping is the sound of water As haiku spreads around the world, making ripples in more and larger ponds, its ripples are wider-including us all. But his last word reminds us that we are ripples and our lives ephemeral. It will be the frogs that will remain. ~~ And my tanka: returning home from a Jackson Pollock exhibition I smear my face with paint and turn into art ~~ -All love in isolation from Miami Beach, Florida, Al
from Reading Pennsylvania.....live just less than 6 blocks from where the Wallace's lived...and in my youth, had met several people who personally knew him, and his family....they all asserted that he was a rather decent man in manner and voice. Friendly.
I have not yet read the video but i can advancely say this is a very interessant one since Wallace was one of the greatest american poet.
"Poetry begins in the senses and continues in the mind." HV
The personal is what's large, and in its largeness more universal in what it apprehends. Stevens was not identifying with the bantam rooster, but ventriloquizing voices hostile to personality on the grand or epic scale: It was written in a somewhat bitter, and in my view also deliciously haughty, and a bit naughty, mood of reaction against people who proselytize against grand tone and encyclopedic range in art. I have often felt that way about music and pejoratives that repudiate the sublime, but never dwell on it enough to satirize the smallness of that point-of-view. Much as I enjoy Vendler for her clarity and almost unbelievable analytical acumen, sometimes she can't, so to speak, hear the music for the notes, and while not tone-deaf, there are some tones that are out of range to her ear of feeling, perhaps those that drive eloquence, and are felt only by those who on occasion are eloquent themselves. In this regard Stevens is often more aggressive, and a poet's poet, like Milton or Dante, than is noticed by people who are not poets.
@jasongrimes4131
7 жыл бұрын
So it's a paean to the Universal Cock? I can absolutely see your interpretation. Vendler has another, more focused, video around these parts where she elaborates on her theory tying this poem directly to a sense of national identity, etc. But you know the Universal is tired of the morsels making noises. Carl from the Simpsons said it best "Oh, uh, I concur!"
@popesinbengal
3 жыл бұрын
Jesus
no wonder people flee this poetry with alacrity
@danielmaryanovsky6946
3 жыл бұрын
Back to your agrammatical 'prose pieces' in League of Legends.
@humblecharlie4383
3 жыл бұрын
@@danielmaryanovsky6946 HULK SMASH!