Over the weekend I was having a poetry jones. Of course, all my books are packed away nice & tight (we’ve been trying to make the house look neater and more appealing in the chance that we actually get a move on with putting it on the market)… what was I thinking? I’m going to have to head to the storage place one day and dig out some poetry. I don’t have a lot of poetry books, maybe three dozen poets have made my hardcopy list over my lifetime.  Those are the poets whom I keep close to me as if their works were some sort of force field against whatever worry or problem is trying to peck into my skull.

Wallace Stevens is on the list. I know I’ve said in the past (not on this blog), but Stevens is the poet equivalent of Batman. Not that he was a playboy, but he was an insurance exec by day and a poet in his off time. Gives me hope that one day I can pull off a balancing act like that myself. Should I get a cowl?

Let’s start with something by Stevens that is likely to be  familiar, you know, the poem about looking at a blackbird. I first read this in high school, don’t remember talking about it in college at all. It gets pushed out of the way for other works like Sunday Morning or* The Comedian as the Letter C*.  Don’t get me wrong, those are awesome poems, but I’ve always thought of Blackbird as something that really stands apart.  This is the poem that, for me, really defines what modern poetry can be.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird #

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

** II**

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

** III**

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

** IV**

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

** V**

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

** VI**

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

** VII**

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

** VIII**

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

** IX**

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

** X**

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

** XI**

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

** XII**

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

** XIII**

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.