My autumn auroras

 Professional photo of the same northern lights I saw about 45 minutes away in anchorage Alaska. 

 My personal photo done in Palmer Alaska on October 13 2012 

I had not actually gotten around to reading Stevens poem called the Auroras of Autumn until after seeing the northern lights on my recent trip to Alaska. 

Stevens calls them snakes in the open sky 

“This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless.

His head is air. Beneath his tip at night

Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg,

Another image at the end of the cave,

Another bodiless for the body’s slough?

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest,

These fields, these hills, these tinted distances,

And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

This is form gulping after formlessness,

Skin flashing to wished-for disappearances

And the serpent body flashing without the skin.

This is the height emerging and its base

These lights may finally attain a pole

In the midmost midnight and find the serpent there,

In another nest, the master of the maze

Of body and air and forms and images,

Relentlessly in possession of happiness.

This is his poison: that we should disbelieve

Even that. His meditations in the ferns,

When he moved so slightly to make sure of sun,

Made us no less as sure. We saw in his head,

Black beaded on the rock, the flecked animal,

The moving grass, the Indian in his glade.”

I was disappointed to find that my camera as fancy as it is didn't capture the imagine I have in my head of what I saw, but the professional did at least. But after reading Stevens poem I envisioned it all over again bringing my photograph to life in my mind. Stevens imagination recreated my reality :) 

I may have actually found a poem that ill always look back upon now. 

http://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=-vm3TiNOIhohttp://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=related&v=-vm3TiNOIho

Unnecessary red

“A lasting visage in a lasting bush,
A face of stone in an unending red,
Red-emerald, red-slitted-blue, a face of slate,

An ancient forehead hung with heavy hair,
The channel slots of rain, the red-rose-red
And weathered and the ruby-water-worn,
The vines around the throat, the shapeless lips,
The frown like serpents basking on the brow,
The spent feeling leaving nothing of itself,
Red-in-red repetitions never going
Away, a little rusty, a little rouged,
A little roughened and ruder, a crown
The eye could not escape, a red renown
Blowing itself upon the tedious ear.
An effulgence faded, dull cornelian
Too venerably used. That might have been.
It might and might have been. But as it was,
A dead shepherd brought tremendous chords from hell
And bade the sheep carouse. Or so they said.
Children in love with them brought early flowers
And scattered them about, no two alike.”

What an interesting and blunt way to describe a redhead...

I thought there was to much use of blue and green in Wallace Stevens poems and that he couldn't top them... Wrong. I highly dislike the color red, I even highly dislike my hair because its red. And yet here Stevens uses the repetition of red and a redheaded woman just one too many times for me to start liking this stanza. It's exactly how he describes it... "Red-in-red repetitions never going away"

Sensuality dependancy

To lose sensibility, to see what one sees,
As if sight had not its own miraculous thrift,
To hear only what one hears, one meaning alone,
As if the paradise of meaning ceased- Wallace Stevens

At the start of this class I thought the whole point was to analyze and interpret the meaning of Wallace Stevens poems, to a point yes we are, but I've learned through this course that it's much more than that. Each of us use our own abilities to interpret between reality and imagination. We do this any way we wish to do so by whatever definitions we choose. But more importantly we interpret his crazy poems, and yes I believe they are crazy sometimes. His poems make us visualize things, our visualizations are done through eye sight. Stevens makes us hear things with our own ears. Not always are these sounds and visualizations real, the physical presence real, but they are real in our mind. Our imagination, but real.

Sexson asked me to explain my improved eye sight over the loss of my hearing. It simply is that because I could not hear much of anything that i relied on anything I could see. Examples from class that were hands on, books (I read the dictionary as a child because I felt left out playing with kids), and I also learned to read lips even from far distances just because I could see lips moving but not hear the sounds that were being made. Since I used my eye sight so much more dependably, it improved at the same rate my hearing decreased. By the time I was 16 I no longer needed large biofocal lenses but could wear low impact contacts. I debated for a while about whether or not I would include a photo from when I was younger to basically give a "visualization" of how large my glasses were. You cannot see the depth of them but there were usually about 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick.

 

As we talked in class today about the poem stanza IV:

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulers, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come.

Music falls on the silence like a sense,
A passion that we feel, not understand.
Morning and afternoon are clasped together

And North and South are an intrinsic couple
And sun and rain a plural, like two lovers
That walk away as one in the greenest body.

For me my eye sight depended on my hearing, my silence created my sight.

Expressions and suction!

We were asked on class Friday two find two things from Adagia that sticks out to us. I had to skim a bit to find two that I really ever agreed with or disagreed with. The one I disagreed with completely is that "poetry is not a personal matter" (pg 903) and the one I do agree with is "reality is a vacuum" (pg 907).

To me poetry is nothing but personal (unless your Stevens of course who could possible be writing poetry randomly). Every poem I've ever written as been based off how I feel or what I think or even what I. Going through. I don't just decide that today ill write about that gold and brown leaf hanging from the tree outside my window. In fact I think a poem by me about that would be blantly boring. Even poems ice read from other people or online hole looking at other things almost always show some sort of emotion or express. And from my point of view even Stevens writes with emotions or expressions because in harmonium his first poems were about beyond death, and that death is painless and means nothing to us, that could be his emotion and view on it.

The second thing, oh yeah I agree with that! Reality is a vacuum because there is so little Time in our lives for the thinks we think or dream about doing. The dream is (at least for me) to go off and travel the world never having to pay for bills etc. but I cannot so that with ought having ,ones which requires me to have a job that leads to needing to stay in one place, to needing a home, and all the unnecessary things I choose to have as well. Reality is, we cannot play as much as we'd like and reality is not as beautifully put or simply minded as the poems we read with imagination and imagery we'd like to see.

Stevens from afar

Earlier this week I randomly chose a poem from Stevens collection to write about, but I have not had the chance to do so yet, midterm a you see. So I thought I would ponder upon it some more until tomorrow morning. But alas, I cannot. I opened my email today and received an email from a dear friend of mine in china who I just met this summer. Sometimes our conversations get a little weird and out of order because she is still learning English and its full use while I am (as technological as I am) disastrously horrible at responding to emails or even posting as frequently as my mind thinks about things. Half way through her email she talked about her brothers wedding recently and how it made her think and feel... Here is an excerpt from the email (I will not correct any spelling or sentence structure)

These days, I am in a lose, without knowing clealy what is it that I really want in my furture. this time of coming back home, I saw my exhausted parents and my brother-in-law. It occurs to me that my brother has found his soul mate in his life, but he is not the premite brother of us. After all, he will be a father later, supporting a new family of his. But, how about me?
The queation haunches in my brain all the tome, without a concreat answer. Now, it seems more clearly before me.Now, I am alone in the dorm, as it is all the time. No matter when, in the future, I will be alone , aren't I？ to persuit the happiness of mine.

But this is how my mind played it out... 

These days, I am at loss
Without knowing clearly what I want...
What is in my future
Coming home, I saw my parents
Their exhausted selves, my brother in law
My own brother, he has found his soulmate 
He is no longer only one of us, 
Now he too will be a father someday
Now what of me?
This thought haunts my mind
Never is there an answer
Nothing concrete
Yet now, more clearly than ever
I am alone
Alone in my dorm
Alone everywhere
Will I always be alone
I now pursuit the happiness

And in the midst of all this, after doing a double take of her email... Stevens flashed in my mind. I literally had to say "are you kidding me?!" I felt a strong connection and awe for the feelings both my dear friend Dori provided me with in her email and Stevens poem "Girl in a nightgown"

Lights out. Shades up. A look at the weather. There, has been a booming all the spring, A refrain from the end of the boulevards. This is the silence of night, This is what could not be shaken, Full of stars and the images of stars- And that booming wintry and dull, Like a tottering, a failing Again and an end, Again and again, always there, Massive drums and leaden trumpets, Perceived by feeling instead of sense, A revolution of things colliding. Phrases! But of fear and of fate. The night should be warm and fluters'fortune Should play in the trees when morning comes. Once it was, the repose of night, Was a place, strong place, in which to sleep. It is shaken now. It will burst into flames, Either now or tomorrow or the day after that.

Although they may seem like nothing of sort, Dori simply is... The girl in the nightgown! Her fear and rate of being alone forever, like she is now haunts her mind. It's a revolution colliding in her that her dreams are not what she is working for. She is bursting with flames wondering of what it is she fears, her future. I ache for Dori because I know her exact feeling, but I must thank her for her email because it brought beauty and light in the world of Stevens!