[stylist] So Long, Mr. Stevens?

[William L Houts]

Hi Jackie,

The family members who've read some of my stuff appreciate that it's 
advanced somehow,  but just don't get that the reason for the kind of 
poetry I'm crrently writing.  I am bipolar, though my disorder, if it IS 
a disorder, tends to balance out most of the time.  But I'm afraid that 
these family members think I'm just indulging in some sort of melancholy 
stuffwhich could make me really sad or something.  But the fact is that 
I'm a pretty serene person --even joyful-- and really don't require that 
kind of nannyish concern.  It's like you say, I guess:  I'm using poetry 
to process some really dark stuff, and the lighter stuff will surface 
when I'm done.  I see that indulging in pain is the wrong thing to do 
most of the time.  ON the other hand, though, I've dubbed our society 
the "Culture of Anesthesia".  There's some really sad ugly goings on in 
our lives and in the world, and if we want to be honest, effectual human 
beings we need to cop to that, and to our own relationship to it, 
healthy or otherwise.  What's the alternative?  Celebrity worship, 
illusory relationships with people we don't really know and addictions 
of all sorts.  I guess I see myself as one of the guys on the automatic 
treadmill crying, "Jane, get me off this crazy thing!" --and trying to 
take  with me as many as I can.


--Bill







On 4/18/2014 10:17 AM, Jackie Williams wrote:
> Bill,
> This is an interesting reflection on both Wallace Stevens and your own
> growth. Like you, I have really enjoyed Steven's work, and particularly,
> "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which I patterned one of my poems
> after in a very minimal way.
> I like the concept of finding many ways of looking at something, whether a
> small thing, or a big idea.
> Your poetry does reflect some darkness, but that is the experience you are
> dealing with now. It is part of the reason we write poetry. The release that
> comes from probing into ourselves.
> Your poetry is very "meaty."
>
>
> Jackie Lee
>
> Time is the school in which we learn.
> Time is the fire in which we burn.
> Delmore Schwartz	
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: stylist [mailto:stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of William L
> Houts
> Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:07 PM
> To: Writer's Division Mailing List; kevin haggerty
> Subject: [stylist] 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 infuriating 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