Where you yourself were never quite yourself and did not want nor have to be

You like it under the trees in autumn,
Because everything is half dead.
The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves
And repeats words without meaning.

In the same way, you were happy in spring
With the half colors of quarter-things
The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds,
The single bird, the obscure moon—

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,

The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X

– The Motive for Metaphor, by Wallace Stevens

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NlF-nPHTt8

#articulation #change #WallaceStevens

A Postcard from the Volcano

Namatjira et al, 2025

Prompted by the text of the eponymous Wallace Stevens poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43432/a-postcard-from-the-volcano

Prompts in description

#aiart #stablediffusion #fooocus #surreal #wallacestevens

waiting to finish drinking a cup of coffee to say it

I’m Trying to Become Spirit
John Gallaher

#Poetry #JohnGallaher #SummersetReview #Spirit #Tennessee #WallaceStevens #MasonJar #ArchdukeFranzFerdinand

http://www.summersetreview.org/25spring/gallaher01.html

Ik las de volgende quote:

Literature is the better part of life. To this it seems inevitably necessary to add provided life is the better part of literature.

Wallace Stevens

Of vertaald:

Literatuur is het betere deel van het leven. Hieraan lijkt het onvermijdelijk noodzakelijk om toe te voegen dat het leven het betere deel van de literatuur is.

Het leven is het betere deel van de […]

https://janvandenberg.blog/wallace-stevens-over-literatuur/

I’ve been reading some #WallaceStevens today (An Ordinary Evening in New Haven).

And although some parts read like a description of the ideas behind a poem, and some parts I frankly can’t make full sense of, there are phrases and sections that do I think evoke something unusual, beautiful and true: