[stylist] So Long, Mr. Stevens?

[William L Houts]

So Long, Mr. Stevens?

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













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

           --Jane Siberry