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ENG 351 Lecture 15 1 Before We Go to William Carlos Williams, We Have ENG 351 Lecture 15 1 Before we go to William Carlos Williams, we have one important poem of Robert Frost that we didn’t — not Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens — that we didn’t talk about and I’d like for you to look at that for just a minute. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” This is a strange assemblage, very modern, very experimental. I’ve given you a couple of quotes from Wallace Stevens such as “The greatest poverty is not to live in the physical world” or another one — I want to get it right — “Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.” Well, here’s another one. “All poetry is experimental.” That seems kind of easy at first glance. But when you think about it, that doesn’t refer just to modern poetry but all poetry is experimental. It’s interesting to me to think of it that way when I think about older poets or poets, you know, from the Romantic period or Shakespeare. They’re all experimenting with what they could say in the forms they were using. This — these thirteen little bits are all variations on the way the imagination works. A series of examples. The blackbird doesn’t really stand for anything. This thing isn’t assembled. Well, perhaps within each one of the things the bird may have some meaning, but he doesn’t have a universal meaning. Just has meaning within the context of the individual little verses, I guess you can call these things. I call them bits, bites, verses, images. Some of them are images. Most of them are images. But it’s not like Ted Hughes’ “Crow” which stands for an awful lot of things, has a lot of symbolic weight with it. Just a blackbird. Not even a blackbird. It’s an abstraction of a blackbird. So now that we’ve confused the issues totally, let’s look at some of these. Number I, one of the ways to look at a blackbird. ENG 351 Lecture 15 2 Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird. You do see something, don’t you? Don’t you have some kind of visual response to that? I don’t count out 20 mountains, but I do see the snowy mountains and the blackbird and the eye move. It’s like the jar — like Stevens’ jar on that hill in Tennessee. Eye of the blackbird. Its motion gives order to these twenty snowy mountains. At least that’s the way I see it. There are 13 different ways of looking at this blackbird and there are probably 42 different ways to look at this little poem. Number II, I think — I think my response is as good as anybody’s. I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds. People ordinarily say not I was of three minds, but I was of two minds, right? They’re trying to decide, “Well, I was of two minds about that. Well, I was of three minds.” Okay. And the image of a tree with three blackbirds in it just — I’ve felt that way. Haven’t you felt that way? I have no idea what number III means. Let’s go to IV. A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman an d a blackbird Are one. ENG 351 Lecture 15 3 Here’s another quote from Wallace Stevens. “All poetry is irrational.” I like to think about that, too. A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird and a chocolate soda are one. All part of the same thing. Number V: I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. The beauty of inflections of sounds or the beauty of innuendoes of suggestions. Remember John Keats was one of Wallace Stevens’ favorite poets. And in the “Ode on the Grecian Urn” it says “heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.” Talking about imagining the sound that the pipes on the urn might make on those engraved figures. Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard — the melodies of the mind are sweeter because they are perfect. You know, you’re gonna sound a sour note sooner or later in real music. Tennyson has a line about “dear is remembered kisses after death and [inaudible] and sweet is those by hopeless fancy feign on lips that are ENG 351 Lecture 15 4 for others.” How sweet are hopeless fancy feign kisses? Imaginary kisses, feign kisses, are sweeter than kisses that are not imaginary. And you’re — “Well, I don’t believe in that.” You don’t click glasses and bang teeth together in your imagination. It’s a perfect thing. Everybody’s lined up right, all right? A little piece of spinach in -- The blackbird whistling. The song of the bird or just after, the memory of it. Some of these have quite eerie tones like number VI. I do want to get to Carlos Williams, but — number IX. When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge Of one of many circles. I knew an art professor one time who attempted to do a series of engravings on a stone press of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and he had plotted out 13 prints. He didn’t get very far. He tried the ones that he thought were most visual first, like the three birds in a tree, and it just kind of wound up with being three birds in a tree. This one was the most successful of the ones that he did try to do. He had — it looked kind of like if you throw a stone in the lake and you get all the little ripples. Or we used to reproduce music with vinyl, with these round disks that we put on a turntable, and it had little grooves. And it kind of looked like that. And the blackbird is — a different spot on there. And once again we’ve got order and nature, right? At the sight of blackbirds flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony ENG 351 Lecture 15 5 Would cry out sharply. Well, I don’t know. I like the idea of blackbirds flying in a green light. That’s very pretty. And what a bawd of euphony might be — euphony just means harmony, a beautiful sound, pleasing sounds. But even those producers of pleasing sounds would cry out sharply at the sound of the blackbirds -- at the sight of the blackbirds in a green light. I have no idea. It’s all experimental and irrational. No more do I know what on earth this means about riding over Connecticut in a glass coach, except isn’t that scary? Now, number XII I think I understand. The river is moving The blackbird must be flying. And that could just as well be — the blackbird is flying, the river must be moving. Couldn’t it? There’s a little bit of — oh, what was that terrible television show with — I shouldn’t try to think of these things. Kung Fu — the guy wanders the earth. It’s called “Kung Fu”? Is that the name of it? Carradine. Well, you know, he had a Zen master who was always telling him these things — you know, “Take the fettle from my hand, Grasshopper.” And then he would say something like, “The river is moving, the blackbird must be flying,” and we all — I don’t understand any of that. Beat somebody up. This is why we’re watching this. But number XIII I think is my favorite. I don’t particularly like it if the weather is bad, but -- It was evening all afternoon. ENG 351 Lecture 15 6 It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs. You ever felt that way? It was snowing and it was going to snow? It was evening all afternoon? Meanwhile, the blackbird. One more quote from Stevens. Another reason I wanted to do this poem was I like to throw a few more at you. He said, “Poetry increases the feeling for reality.” The feeling for reality. “Poetry makes the real more real.” I refer you to the first poem that we looked at, “The Snow Man.” Keats talked about the feel of not to feel, and that’s sort of what “The Snow Man” is about. But I think if you try to have a mind of winter and be cold for a long time, and look at the snow that is in the snow, and try to behold — to observe the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is, the reality of it might become a little more real. Part of this thing of Stevens’ stance of often having an observer observing nature, observing the situation, is if you do observe, if you do regard, you do take care to pay attention, the real becomes more real. That’s a good way to get into William Carlos Williams because I think he pretty much would agree with that. In his note — very beginning: “Carlos Williams thought of himself as the most underrated poet of his generation.” And he did complain about that. There’s some similarities between Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, but they’re two extremely different poets.
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