happy birthday Wallace Stevens

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The writer Steve Kemper went in search of that well-known will-o’-the-modernist-wisp, Wallace Stevens. Here he is, finding Stevens’ grandson:

“It’s a perfect case of you reap what you sow. He was very private. He was so up in his head all the time that a lot of stuff that I would consider normal, like getting to know people, wasn’t a big feature of his life. He wasn’t a worldly guy, he was an otherworldly guy. Look at the words he uses. My son just memorized ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’ for school, and I mean, ‘concupiscent’? Give me a break. How many guys use words like that?”

This is a really great article. Full of wonderful things; it’s all incredibly vivid, especially to me, as I grew up in Hartford. And every time we ever drove down Westerley Terrace, my mother would say, “Look – there’s Wallace Sevens’ house.”

Here’s something I remember vividly from about that time – the urgency, simplicity, mystery of it:

(from) The Man with the Blue Guitar

I

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

II

I cannot bring a world quite round,
Although I patch it as I can.

I sing a hero’s head, large eye
And bearded bronze, but not a man,

Although I patch him as I can
And reach through him almost to man.

If to serenade almost to man
Is to miss, by that, things as they are,

Say it is the serenade
Of a man that plays a blue guitar.

…

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Tags: arts in hartford, connecticut poets, hartford, wallace stevens