Monday, January 14, 2008
Unreal, give back to us what once you gave
Whatever else the internet does, it does this and, for that, I am grateful. While holding on the phone waiting for a BT human being to talk to me, I vaguely browsed. Some echo in my mind took me to this glorious poem by Wallace Stevens. I read and reread for 20 minutes, the phone between my shoulder and my ear. BT never answered. Their incompetence and the wonderful web had provided me with a little holiday in paradise.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
The Internet is, of course, also largely responsible for the ongoing destruction of the focus and concentration required to appreciate fully such poetry. A monitor screen remains a poor substitute for pleasure in the printed word.
ReplyDeleteVery few modern poets could manage that simplicity, and yet to write of something so 'difficult'...
ReplyDelete"No crown is simpler than the simple hair"
It's like a Medieval poem, something from the Harley manuscript, but so much going on under such a simple surface. i guess WS's power - like Yeats' - comes from that ability to take an immensely tricky & complicated mental & emotional moment, and then pour it into such graspable, limpid words.