English 123 Notes (7/14/2008)

Today was the day when the Wallace Stevens poems were presented. Here is a summary from each of the poems that were read today. The rest of the poems will be read on Wednesday.

Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu

• the theme is that life is not guaranteed and every day should be lived to its fullest
• Wallace Stevens is saying that there is no other life beyond the one we are living right now so make every moment count.
• He uses repetition, illiteration, and internal rhyme scheme to convey the message that the final farewells are inevitable and every person should live their life with no regrets.

Anecdote of the Jar

• Jar represents humans, Tennessee represents nature
• people rely on nature to function
• people are boring, yet unique in their own way
• there always seems to exist the clash between nature and humans

The Snowman

• everything we see is subject to our perception
• does anyone ever see anything as it is?
• we see things as we expect to see them, not as how they truly are
• people need to develop a cold mind that sees things as how they truly are, not as how they are perceived to be by us and our preconceived notions.

A Postcard from the Volcano

• people do not know about death, you will not be here for long and the people after you will not know about you unless you make something that is memorable
• the stories you tell should be written down and passed on so that in a way you are being passed down even if you have died.
  
• Important line "And what we said of it became/ A part of what it is" this line is like the quote by W.H Auden. " How do i know what I think until I see what I say?"

Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock

• people are boring and ordinary (everyone in Bozeman drives a Subaru)
• but there exists a person that comes along and makes life a little more exciting; they are the curve ball of life.
• These people make the world stranger than it already is
• The weather is all we have

The Motive for Metaphor

• "you" in the first line is likely to mean metaphor; things that are not connected
• autumn is a time of change; Wallace Stevens connects metaphor and autumn
• the change from life to death is illustrated in the poem
• the clouds are always changing
• to desire the exhilarations of changes- METAPHORS MOTIVE
• last stanza is about a blacksmith beating out the changes and putting his mark on his work

Study of Two Pears

• artists use their interpretation of something and then we turn around and interpret their interpretation
• the poem says what we all do; we observe
• We use our imaginations to make sense of reality
• we see things as they are perceived to be by us not how they truly are

Of Modern Poetry

• the modern poetry is what an individual has not written yet
• "it" relates to poetry as a whole with both men and women writers
• you write about what makes you happy as opposed to what another individual may write about
• culture has changed drastically; we are not entranced by ordinary things such as a woman combing her hair or a man ice skating
• the question becomes What will suffice (satisfy) us now???

Connoisseur of Chaos

• chaos does not exist just in the same way that coincidences do not exist
• chaos theory- if you study the smallest party of something, you can obtain information on the bigger picture because everything in this world is connected by something.
• we call a form of order that we are unfamiliar with and do not understand- CHAOS

The World as Meditation

• A woman is waiting for her lover who happens to be Ulysses
  
• The story is that it took Ulysses 20 years to return home after the war in Greece. In this poem he is a symbol of sun and the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Therefore, the woman feels him when she feels the sun on her pillow in the morning.
• It was Ulysses and it was not Ulysses
  

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

• perceptions and weather are again central themes in this poem
• during the mid-evil time period blackbirds symbolized change and the seasons change
• this ties into our perceptions of different things as pictures of how they should be according to us
• "The beauty of inflections or the beauty of innuendoes, the blackbird whistling or just after"
• the poem says people have incorrect perceptions of higher powers
• the last line is a simple, declarative statement about what is, and not what it is not.