"The Course of a Particular" by Wallace Stevens

Note: I apologize for the shuffling of papers in the audio. Clearly I need a stapler.

Mea culpa: "In a dark time" is a pyrrhic-spondee motion, not an anapest-trochee one.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

-The multifarious talent of Wallace Stevens -Stevens' theory of a "Supreme Fiction" -The incoherence of this theory -From subjectivism to objectivism -Stevens's poem, "The Snow Man" -Clutch your pearls, this is free verse! -Accentual vs. Accentual-Syllabic meter -How to write with the "ghost of meter." -Anglo-Saxon verse is no slouch -It's cold outside = nihilism? -The fallacy most pathetic -Maybe things DO exist independent of my mind. Huh. -Less fantasizing, more listening. -A part apart from parts cannot be whole. Take that, mysticism. -Anaphora, the catnip of free verse poets and Roman rhetoricians alike. -It's God! It's ghosts! It's people! It's... just leaves. -Destruction of the self vs. destruction of self-centeredness -The particulars of this particular particular, and the course, of course.

Text of the poem:

The Course of a Particular Today the leaves cry, hanging on branches swept by wind, Yet the nothingness of winter becomes a little less. It is still full of icy shades and shapen snow.

The leaves cry . . . One holds off and merely hears the cry. It is a busy cry, concerning someone else. And though one says that one is part of everything,

There is a conflict, there is a resistance involved; And being part is an exertion that declines: One feels the life of that which gives life as it is.

The leaves cry. It is not a cry of divine attention, Nor the smoke-drift of puffed-out heroes, nor human cry. It is the cry of leaves that do not transcend themselves,

In the absence of fantasia, without meaning more Than they are in the final finding of the ear, in the thing Itself, until, at last, the cry concerns no one at all.

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Art by David Anthony Klug

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My favorite poetry podcasts for: Sharp thoughts and cutting truths (Matthew): Sleerickets Lovely introspection and sensitive reflection (Alice): Poetry Says The landscape of Ohioan poetry (Jeremy): Poetry Spotlight

Supported in part by The Ohio Poetry Association Art by David Anthony Klug

List of the most common metrical feet: Iamb: weak-STRONG (u /) Trochee: STRONG-weak (/ u) Anapest: weak-weak-STRONG (u u /) Amphibrach: weak-STRONG-weak (u / u) Dactyl: STRONG-weak-weak (/ u u) Cretic: STRONG-weak-STRONG (/ u /) Pyrrhic: weak-weak (u u) Spondee: STRONG-STRONG (/ /)