[stylist] So Long, Mr. Stevens?

[William L Houts]

Hey Peeps,

So, for many years now I've considered Wallace Stevens to be my favorite 
poet.  If you don't know his work, Stevens's poetry has a baroque and 
dreamlike feel to it.  He uses uncommon words, irregular phrasing and a 
nearly infurating logic to create startling effects in the minds of his 
readers.  But I recently downloaded a Stevens collection from BARD and 
started listening to his poems.  And they still seem delightful in some 
ways, but also unnecessarily dense. And though I'm a fairly well 
educated dude, I found that I don't really get him anymore.  Some poems 
still work wonders for me, like "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks", 
and even "The Emperor of Ice Cream", which I know by heart. But his work 
just doesn't do the magic for me that it used to.  Not surprisingly, 
this revelation comes at a time when my own poetry is changing to a more 
accessible mode.  Last summer, I wrote a number of poems which have a 
lot of rhyme in them and, I like to think, a kind of joy in the language 
itself.  Poems like that, I think, can be delightful, even useful. But 
sometimes when you look into them very deeply, you find that they're a 
kind of Hall of Mirrors, and only reflect themselves. Within the last 
six months or so, though, my work seems to be more serious, more focused 
on suffering, death, human fragility and loss. There's a cost to this 
development, of course.  My mother recently complained that all of my 
poems nowadays seem very dark and full of sadness.  And I had to say to 
her that, well, Mom, my last fifteen years, during which I lost my 
eyesight and several friends, haven't been very easy for me. But the 
upshot is that I feel that my current work is really about something, 
something important, and that I'm now using the craft to arrive at 
deeper truths about Bill Houts and his world, rather than performing 
amusing language tricks --may Mr. Stevens's shade grant me pardon.


--Bill





-- 
"Let's drink a toast now to who we really are."

           --Jane Siberry