the road to hell is paved with good decisions

[schaufemweg]

?. . .

"Union of the weakest develops strength
Not wisdom. Can all men, together, avenge
One of the leaves that have fallen in autumn?
But the wise man avenges by building his city in snow."

-Wallace Stevens, fr. "Like Decorations In A Nigger Cemetery," in "Ideas of Order," 1936."

Comments

[onenightinstars]

the only thing i've paid any attention to by wallace stevens is the red wheelbarrow...

enlighten me sometime with more? i know so many people who love him, i think i've just read the wrong lines

(i have a good friend in cleveland that i was thinking of visiting if time allowed - i must say you being close gives much added incentive ;)

13 ways

[schaufemweg]

Here's a Stevens poem that scared the crap out of me the first time I read it, about a decade ago. It shredded my notion of the relationship between perception and "reality," which for me at that time was some onerous thing i thought i had to impose upon myself in order to be understood - a task i never seemed able to accomplish. i tried for a long time afterwards to write poems in this manner, which itself seems questionable to me now, the poems all the more so. regardless of the general crumminess of these ditties, however, the process initiated in me by Stevens' poem freed up a whole lotta F-U-N. i stopped cursing myself for seeing everything from a thousand (tiny) sides, and learned to instead hold each fleeting image up to the light and just love it, the way one would admire Christmas tree ornaments while hanging them one by one on the velvety aqua-colored branches of the tree

[millingroark]

i was wondering how you were doing!