Ep. 6 : “The Motive for Metaphor” by Wallace Stevens Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Today, I’ll be reading “The Motive for Metaphor,” by Wallace Stevens, which is a poem about poetry itself. Wallace Stevens was born on October 2, 1879, in Reading, Pennsylvania. He was both a lawyer and an insurance executive, but above all, he was an amazing poet. Some of his most well-known poems are the haunting, “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “The Snow Man,” and, one of my personal favorites, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” which is based off of Picasso’s painting, “The Old Guitarist.” Wallace Stevens went to Harvard and then the New York Law School, from which he graduated with a law degree. In 1909, he married Elsie Viola Kachel. The two had a daughter named Holly Stevens. Wallace Stevens won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the National Book Award for Poetry for his books “The Auroras of Autumn” and “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens,” the Frost Medal, and only after he died did he receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He didn’t publish his first collection of poetry, “Harmonium,” until he was 43 years old! “The Motive for Metaphor” is only one of the many poems in which Stevens talks about writing poetry. Another example is his poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” This could be called his ars poetica — a poem which talks about why we write poetry, how we do it, and what poetry really is. Stevens’s poems often also focus on what reality is and how we separate or mix it with our image of the world, which is influenced and formed by our imagination. Now I’m going to read “The Motive for Metaphor,” a poem about the tensions between reality and imagination. You like it under the trees in autumn, Because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves And repeats words without meaning. In the same way, you were happy in spring, With the half colors of quarter-things, The slightly brighter sky, the melting clouds, The single bird, the obscure moon– The obscure moon lighting an obscure world Of things that would never be quite expressed, Where you yourself were not quite yourself, And did not want nor have to be, Desiring the exhilarations of changes: The motive for metaphor, shrinking from The weight of primary noon, The A B C of being, The ruddy temper, the hammer Of red and blue, the hard sound– Steel against intimation–the sharp flash, The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X. “The Motive for Metaphor” is about how we experience the world compared to how the world really is. Wallace Stevens is obsessed with this idea, and it comes up in much of his work. For example, in Stevens’s poem, “The Snow Man,” he writes, “For the listener, who listens in the snow,/ And, nothing himself, beholds/Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Stevens proposes two ideas here, which are reality and imagination. He is interested in the difficulty of really being able to know things. One example of this could be religion. Stevens asks himself what we do without God. What can we do to fill this void that appears when we no longer have a greater deity to rely on? In Stevens’s case, the answer is art. Metaphor, poetry, and many other things can fill the emptiness of the void, which, in this poem, is symbolized by the “X” mentioned at the end. Stevens also talks to a “you” in the poem. This “you” could be any regular person — the reader, a lover, a friend — but, as Stevens does in many of his poems, he could also be talking to himself. He tells himself that there is some sort of in between space which must be made use of. Stevens also refers to “primary noon,” which is reality. We shrink away from it, seemingly afraid of it or uncomfortable with facing it. Another way that he refers to this concept is “the ABC of being.” It is the very base of all life. The entire poem asks if we can live well without language, art, and metaphor. It shows that they are important and beautiful — we need them to make reality, in a way, bearable. To Wallace Stevens, the best way to capture this idea was in a poem — one of the very things he is talking about. Stevens shows the contrast between reality and the in between space in the beginning of his poem. Autumn and spring could be considered in between seasons, spring not being as hot and bright as summer, autumn not being as cold and barren as winter. Summer and winter feel so clear, while autumn and spring are wavering, unsure of how they are supposed to be. Stevens likes these spaces — they are spaces of possibility. Many of the colors Stevens uses in his poetry have meanings — for example, “the hammer of red and blue.” Red symbolizes reality, while blue stands for imagination. These two colors blend together to create poetry. To accompany this image, the last stanza includes phrases like, “the hard sound” and “the sharp flash.” Wallace Stevens uses stressed syllables — he makes the poem itself sound powerful and even slightly angry, like a hammer banging against something else. The “X” that Stevens talks about also, in a way, contradicts itself. However, it isn’t because of clashing colors. It is because “X” turns out to be both good and bad. We need it but we also need to fill the empty space that hovers all around us. “X” is a horrible necessity. Stevens uses sound and language to show us what the “motive for metaphor” — and poetry in general — really is. We need these things to survive, to sustain ourselves. But, of course, we also need Stevens’s “X.” However, Stevens
Young Bloggers
Illuminae, Reviewed by Nova, 11
Illuminae, by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff, is the first book of a young adult series titled The Illuminae Files. The story is set in the year 2575 and most of it takes place in space. The two main characters are Kady Grant and Ezra Mason. Kady, a seventeen-year-old girl with dyed pink hair, who is also a secret hacker, is aboard the spaceship Hypatia. Ezra, who is Kady’s ex-boyfriend, is also seventeen, enjoys playing a sport called geeball, and travels on the spaceship Alexander. The reason that Kady and Ezra are on two spaceships is that a corporation called BeiTech attacked their planet, Kerenza IV. Another important character is AIDAN, an AI (artificial intelligence) who runs the Alexander. The story takes off when refugees from a ship called Copernicus, who are infected with a manmade virus created by BeiTech, try to board the Alexander. This virus was designed to attack the part of the brain that controls fear, and to make the infected people very scared. But because the virus has mutated, people who get sick turn into psychopathic murderers. To make things even worse, AIDAN, the AI, has also gone insane. Releasing the infected refugees into the Alexander and watching the ensuing bloodshed, AIDAN thinks, “Am I not merciful?” Kady and Ezra switch places as first-person narrators for most of the story, in more-or-less alternating chapters called files. Occasionally, a file is inserted from a random character’s point of view. Later, AIDAN’s perspective comes to replace Ezra’s—for reasons that I can’t explain without spoiling a major plot point. One thing that makes Illuminae different from most other books I have read is the formatting, which is both unique and beautiful. When AIDAN comes under attack and begins to glitch, this is shown in an ingenious fashion by random capital letters appearing in AIDAN’s sentences. Curse words are blacked out. Text is interpolated with diagrams, lists, hand-written annotations, and all sorts of schematics. Just by removing my hardcover’s dust jacket, I found so many easter eggs and hidden surprises underneath. Even though Illuminae is a horror sci-fi story, there is quite a bit of humor too, even in the serious parts. At one point, when Ezra sends a drunken text to Kady, it sounds like a drunken teen, complete with horrible punctuation, grammar, and capitalization. I also liked that when Ezra texts his friend James, it seems like a conversation between two immature teens. The characters’ personalities are rich and varied. Some people are silly, some are loving, and AIDAN specifically is sophisticated and poetic, even in its thoughts: “If I breathed, I would sigh. I would scream. I would cry.” This particular phrase appears twice in the book, two “chapters” apart. The second time I read it, it gave me chills. Reading Illuminae I had the strange sense of watching an AI gain human emotions when it used to have none, and develop empathy without being reprogrammed. I was glued to the story, but I felt I was a bit young for the gory parts and graphic descriptions of murder. I would recommend this book for readers thirteen and up. Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. Ember, 2017. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
Keeper of the Lost Cities Book 1, Reviewed by Nova, 11
I first read Keeper of the Lost Cities on October of 2020, for the Stone Soup Book Club. I had nothing to read, and the book was in my favorite genre: adventure fantasy. I had previously enjoyed many fantasy series: Harry Potter, Wings of Fire, How to Train Your Dragon, Artemis Fowl, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Percy Jackson, of course. Basically, 90% of my personal library is just adventure fantasy. And so I thought, Well, why not? It’s not like anything bad could come of trying out a new fantasy book. Little did I know I was not only right, but I would develop a massive obsession with every aspect of Keeper of the Lost Cities. The protagonist of Keeper of the Lost Cities is a girl named Sophie. At the start of the story, Sophie is an outsider, amazingly smart with a photographic memory, and she has just been invited to Yale University at twelve years old—but she has a secret. Sophie can read minds. She always knew she was strange, but soon finds out that she is an elf in a human world. Another elf, an older boy named Fitz, introduces Sophie to the Elvin world. Sophie has to come to grips with the fact that her human parents and little sister cannot be her real family, because she is an elf. Worse, she must leave her human family and her pet behind when she goes live with the elves. Sophie has many adventures in the scattered estates and cities the elves call The Lost Cities. She finds out more about her powers of telepathy, meets a goblin and lots of gnomes, learns to use a “leaping crystal,” and even fights against kidnappers. Keeper of the Lost Cities is the first book in a series of ten. One odd detail about the numbering of the series is that the tenth book is labeled “Book 9,” because the ninth book is labeled “Book 8.5.” All other books have regular numbers. I have just finished Book 9, and it is a major rollercoaster of emotions, overflowing with revelations that tie into previous books. Every time a question is answered, ten more are raised—but more on that later. I would probably recommend Keeper of the Lost Cities to ten-year-olds and up, because there is plenty of blood, gore, pain, and cruelty. I would not recommend it to people who throw up or have nightmares easily. To be honest, on the outside, you would not think of Keeper of the Lost Cities as much different from any other fantasy book, complete with goblins, trolls, ogres, dwarves, gnomes—and elves, of course. But what makes Keeper of the Lost Cities different from most other fantasy series is its riveting plot. It shows you what you are supposed to think, then says it just in case you missed it, and two chapters later, when you are positive you know what is going on, it reveals that the total opposite is true. Shannon Messenger does not just tell you the story, she makes you feel like you are experiencing it, without holding anything back. Keeper of the Lost Cities is emotional, and jarring, and soothing, and chock-full of sadness, and joy, and anger, and love, and the best part is that when you read the book, you can feel the main character’s emotions as well as sensations. Keeper of the Lost Cities is deep, yet light, and humorous, yet tear-jerking, and this might just be me, but flipping through its pages, lost in the story’s embrace, Keeper of the Lost Cities feels like an old friend, there to comfort me and help me through whatever I’m going through, or just make me laugh, or put a smile on my face. That’s why Keeper of the Lost Cities is my favorite book series of all. Keeper of the Lost Cities by Shannon Messenger. Aladdin Paperbacks, 2013. Buy the book here and help support Stone Soup in the process!
