Poetry discussion thread!

General Off-Topic Discussion
41

Stevens was an outspoken atheist, and it comes up often in his work. It was his belief that our imaginative powers made life not only meaningful but bearable. I agree that “The Emperor of Ice Cream” is definitely about a wake. Stevens’s trick is to infuse what seems to be a pretty banal scene with extravagant imagery, which is a kind of temporary mastery over death.

I think what baffles a lot of readers are the two figures “the roller of big cigars” and “the emperor of ice cream.” I always thought of the roller as a pretty funny nickname for god (who Stevens didn’t believe in). The emperor, the only real one, is death.

It’s interesting how the poem moves from the extravagant to the bare and plain in the second stanza. Perhaps it suggests that the end of life is the end of imagination? Stevens turns the concept on its head (only temporarily) in “The Plain Sense of Things,” which might be my favorite Stevens poem.

Sorry for the derail! I just heard Stevens and came running.

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42

Ooh, ooh! Let’s do this one for our next poem!

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43

Just to round out the “Emperor” discussion, I’ve always felt this was probably meant as a sexual image. I mean, he’s muscular, he’s supposed to make concupiscent curds, there are wenches, the feet are horny… There’s a LOT of sexual imagery here, which is creepy as hell in a poem about a wake, which I also agree the poem is about.

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44

Sounds good. @kamineko would you mind reposting the full text of this poem today or tmm? then we can make it our next one :slight_smile:

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45

Sure thing!

The Plain Sense of Things
BY WALLACE STEVENS

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

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46

Oh do I love this poem. The structure and syntax echo the theme: a terrible failure of imagination, of creativity, the lack of that vital spark. A kind of death. “A repetition in a repetitiousness” repeats itself, as does “required, as a necessity requires.” Repetition and necessity are words of boredom, of plain sense. But! You can’t even talk about your ennui or your creative block without imagining it, creating it in your mind. There can be no real failure, even as there is. The images may be depressing-- the rat looking, the wasted lilies (Wasted because they’ll die? Wasted because when your imagination slumps, the lilies can’t be adequately appreciated?), but they’re still inevitable.

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47

This is beautiful. I’m sort of imagining a corporeal setting for this, kind of like the garden from the “first” set of games in Identity V, if anyone knows what I’m talking about (a game — and no, I don’t play it, I just saw it in some YouTube walkthroughs / scene snippets), though perhaps with a more “abandoned” sense to it.

Also because I find the theme the poem explores highly relatable.

It’d be interesting to set an “exploration” parser / parser-choice story in, e.g. a setting inspired by this poem — and then attempt to explore the idea of the poem itself. How would you present and unravel an “absence of imagination” for a player … ?

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48

I’m a huge fan of making games from poems, and this is a great idea. You could have some kind of mechanic in which you IMAGINE and create something, and then have it slowly stop functioning? The task is to get it back? Or come to peace with it?

There have been a lot of threads about writer’s block and how you spur your creativity, so obviously this is a topic that resonates with many people.

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49

Not totally topical, and I’m still quite sluggishly sick- but I wanted to share what this brought to mind for me. On our campus, a rat died, suddenly and without warning.

This wasn’t entirely unusual, the old science building is infested, and you can often find them scurrying about the grounds at night after labs. It was very far from the science building, though- had crept silently into the main roads.

What was unusual was how long the rat remained dead for. Usually, maintenance clears the bodies away overnight. It was left on display for days. It was a dreary winter, so it didn’t smell, but it was frozen quite solid and pathetic.

Random people came together and made a little memorial for the rat. There were balloons, and notes, and roses, and candles, and even a framed portrait someone had taken of themselves holding the rat in their fist.

What touched me the most was how someone had wrapped him up in a tea towel, the cheap tatty ones you can get for a dollar twenty five. Not as a shroud, to obscure his face, or the horror of the peeled back lips and broken whiskers. Instead, snuggly wrapping him up in a makeshift blanket, little pointed snout and face peering out sightlessly. To want for the departed to be comforted. To tuck in it’s little frozen corpse like a cherished child.

The contrast of the semi detached irony people poked fun at the city contracted services with, while genuinely taking time and money to memorialize the rat. It was really heartwarming, to see how people came together for the display. People can be unexpectedly good.

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50

My most recent rat story is very, very different than this one.

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51

Before this poem goes away and we choose a new one, and because this poem didn’t get the attention it deserves (IMO), I want to say a little more about it. In my randomly-firing synapses, the Stevens poem started comparing itself to this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, and I think they’re worth reading side-by-side, because they’re about the same thing: despair at a time when your imagination/creativity fails you. I’m not suggesting this be our next poem; I just think they’re instructive to read together. One by an atheist; the other by a priest. One by a founding father of modern poetry, the other embodying what modern poetry would become. I see no evidence that Hopkins was especially an inspiration for Stevens (@kamineko, do you know anything about this?), but it’s hard for me not to draw a line from the Hopkins poem to the Stevens poem. The way each poet approaches the topic is so vastly different: Stevens finds refuge in his belief in the supremacy of the human mind and its endless inventiveness, even when it’s stuck. Hopkins pleads with his God, who giveth and who taketh away. Both breathtakingly beautiful works of art.

Anyway, just thought I’d throw that out there as a way to look at the Stevens poem in a broader context.

52

I had been meaning to write about it but I didn’t, whoops!

It’s interesting how many end-stopped lines there are in the first 3 stanzas, which makes sense because the poem has a morose feeling to it, a sort of sad simplicity. However, starting in the 4th stanza when the turn happens, the descriptions of ‘The great pond’ and so on are full of enjambment, even crossing into the next stanza and only end stopping on the final line. I think this gives the poem an uplifting flow by the end, a sort of revitalizing.

I didn’t read it close enough at first and thought it was describing a deserted physical house, but it’s clearly a metaphor, one which I like a lot! I enjoyed turns of phrase like “silence of a rat come out to see”, “no turban walks”–this one seems like a synechdoche for a brain?–and of course, the description of writer’s block as “the plain sense of things”.

It feels so resonant to my experiences. Everything coming out cliche, unimaginative, bland. Oh, people have said this before, I’m bringing nothing new to the table, why can’t I see any unique aspects other than the plain, boring, obvious ones? It’s definitely more necessary for poets to have a new, creative, vivid ‘sense of things’, right?

And yet, most of the language to describe the dearth is very simple: for ex, you might very well see “The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side” in the notes of a house appraiser or idk, insurance adjuster. The poem says, even these images, boring and plain as they are, were conjured up in your head, right? Maybe instead of looking for answers in the great structure of before, you should check in the shabby house, the dirty pond. There’s something there, too.

53

I hadn’t noticed this, but you’re entirely right. And this follows the theme, too-- the imagination is halted. It’s stopped. It’s deserted. But is it? No, it’s not, it’s still flowing and creating images, spilling them out, populated by unlovely things, but populated.

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54

Yeah I started paying more attention to end-stops vs enjambments when my friend critiqued a poem of mine and the effect of its end-stops, and I was like man I did not even do that intentionally

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55

I’ve never seen/read a discussion of Hopkins and Stevens, but I cannot imagine Stevens not engaging with Hopkins’s work, whether he loved it or hated it.

I think Callie still has access to the library databases, maybe I’ll try a search if I can.

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56

I’ve just discovered poet Siham Karami from a June 2017 ed. of The Orchards Poetry Journal. Pages 30 to 36 — interview, while pages 37 to 49 showcase 11 of her poems. I liked the interview because I like learning how people think creatively, with their own craft, and I liked her writing because it’s so familiar. My favorites of the poems by her shown in the journal are Czechoslovakia and Labor Day, probably because they evoke a strong sense of place / displacement, and also because they (along with the rest of her prose) keep giving me ideas for interactive fiction.

I’ve attached the Journal file for easy viewing, if that’s something you want to do. (There’s also a lot more poems in there to check out if you’re interested!)

The Orchards Poetry Journal, June 2017.pdf (1.5 MB)

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57

Well, it’s time for a new poem. Maybe you should decide on one of Karami’s for us? Anybody else have an opinion on that?

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58

If you wanna post the text of one of the two you mentioned @Juuves that would be cool!

59

Okay! Here’s one of her more abstract works for this week:

Siham Karami
Lawnmowing in America

Morning aria, oil magic
in a lawnmower craw—
a growing omm …

Come, iron clang, come,
lowing wail.
I’m a cowgirl gone geomancer
along Magnolia Lane.

An angle, arc, or line
can winnow an acre
on inner glimmer.
No more corn-mangler,
acorn-wrangler.

We wager grace on loam
no crow-caw can ace
nor worm lace,
a warm clime
no ice-claw can maim.

Mow carnal logic.
We win a larger realm:
wine, romance, an elm
awning, a miracle mile-long
lime wing aglow
in new rain.
Crown me, angel—aim low.

This author-invented form utilizes only the letters in the title for the entire poem. No single word may use any letter in a frequency greater than it is used in the title. (Variation on a Lipogram) First published in The Comstock Review, Spring/Summer 2015, Volume 29:1.

The author's comments on this poem

“Lawnmowing in America” is written in a form I took from word scramble-type games, restricting the letters used in the poem to those in the title, an “oulipo” type form. The subject matter, then, is determined by the title, and its interpretation will be strongly influenced by the letters. That increases the power of the words themselves over the poet, creating a poem outside the bounds of the poet’s own experience. I went through what I call my “strangled alphabet” period during which I wrote this. My best friend and college roommate met a guy who sat next to her on a train who had changed his name to Lawnmowing in America, which is the title’s source. Then I worked with the form which guided me to these results, the challenge being to use such restricted language to express something meaningful about the title.

Hope you enjoyed! :grinning:

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60

This kind of poetry, with author-imposed writing rules, is really fun. I’m not sure how much sense I can make of it, but I dig the concept. A few things that stand out immediately: The “acorn-wrangler” is spot on-- if you ever run over a bunch of acorns with a lawnmower, things can get hairy. And I think in the last stanza, the “miracle mile-long lime wing” is a new-cut lawn? I adore the last line, but can’t make heads or tails of it.

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