I am reading a book by the poet Ben Lerner entitled The Hatred of Poetry. I'll probably have more to say about it another time, but he takes on the resistance most of us feel when we see lines of verse on the page. It's a resistance I feel, as I'm sure most of you do, because it makes demands of us that we'd rather not deal with. Too much else going on, and too often too little payoff.
But I'm convinced that the hatred or poetry is really one of the chief symptoms of our being captured by the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, which has no patience with such nonsense. In coming months, at least a part of what I want to do here is to try to make the effort to overcome that resistance. So from time to time I'm going to suggest more or less accessible poems that are worth a few minutes of your time.
I read this poem by Wallace Stevens this morning in today's Atlantic. It was first published in the April 1955 issue:
July Mountain
by Wallace Stevens
WE LIVE in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry —
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.
Later this morning I was reading Taylor's Cosmic Connections and I came upon this passage exerpted below. It struck me that the two interpret one another:
“Depth”[as a metaphor] applied to experience concerns “underlying” conditions of our “immediate” perceptions, of which we are not necessarily aware.
This allows us to make sense of “deep time.” Consider the following scene. I stand at the edge of the forest at dusk in late summer; I hear the wind shaking the branches as it moves through the trees; suddenly I feel a contact not just with this immediate scene, but with the whole cycle of the seasons, how the wind in winter sounds so muffled, because only the evergreens are responding, but this rich sound will recur, next year and in all subsequent years. I am carried beyond the immediate experience to a sense of the whole cyclical movement of the seasons which is the condition of life on our planet. I am in touch with a movement at a much greater depth, and I rejoice at this connection. I am not talking simply of my knowing the fact that this rustling of the wind in the trees is part of a larger process; or even of my bringing the fact to mind. Sensing the deeper process is something more; it involves being moved by this awareness, feeling joy at the contact. As far as I can tell, a condition of my being moved by this underlying movement is that it has important human significance, which cannot be denied of this basic condition not just of my life, but of all the lives which nourish me, biologically and spiritually. (pp. 331-332).
I am trying to give snapshots here and there about what Taylor is up to. Later a more integrated interpretation. Taylor has almost nothing to say about Stevens in this book, but Stevens seems to be popping up for me lately in such a way as to mirror what Taylor is doing.