Finally a President who can read poetry.

Cross-Post with Wallace Stevens Encounters

As I previously wrote here, I intend to follow up on the ideas I wrote about in the Introduction to Wallace Stevens Encounters. This is that post.

In that post, I mentioned that Pattiann Rogers expands Stevens’ ideas in her essay “Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation”; however, although her ideas line up and extend Stevens’, she does not specifically mention his name. Perhaps Stevens’ theory has become so ingrained as to be an accepted part of the modern condition of humanity; in Rogers’ words, a piece of our contemporary cosmology.

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A New Blog – Poetry Thesis Musings

I know not everyone cares about hearing someone else talk about their thesis – that was so twenty years ago. So, I forked off a new blog, Poetry Thesis Musings, in which I’ll talk about everything thesis related as it occurs to me. I did want to note the first reflective entry on Pattiann Rogers’ essay “Twentieth-Century Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation,” which has an interesting segment related to the Wallace Stevens Encounters project. It has to do with Stevens’ conception of pressure as a measure of history. More on that to come.

Wallace Steven Encounters the New Solitaire

In the oblivion of screens

One exists among pure virtual.

Wallace Stevens Encounters Hyper-Connected World

Seventy years ago, I addressed the pressure

History applies to creativity and society,

Let us say, news more pretentious than

Any description of it, but that pressure

Introduction

As Part of a class in my MFA program titled Literature for Writers, Professor Janet Peery asked for a final project interrogating our semester-long study of our choice of writer. At the beginning of the seminar, I chose Wallace Stevens as a poet I should probably know more about, as my encounters with him have been few and far between.

After attempting several different projects, including a couple of essays, I decided to go a little more playful: bring Stevens into contemporary America and see what happens. The posts included under this category are the results.