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
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Poetry Soup Ep. 5 – “Banjo Dog Variations” by Donald Justice
Ep. 5: “Banjo Dog Variations” by Donald Justice Transcript Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Each episode, I’ll discuss a different poem and poet. Today I’ll be talking about one of my favorite poets, Donald Justice, and his amazing poem, “Banjo Dog Variations.” Donald Justice was born on August 12, 1925, in Miami, Florida. He studied music at the University of Miami, but he ended up graduating with an English literature degree. He taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Syracuse University, the University of California at Irvine, Princeton University, and several other colleges. One of my other favorite poets, Mark Strand, was a student of Donald Justice. Justice is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and his first poetry collection, titled “The Summer Anniversaries,” was the winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize, which is given by the Academy of American Poets. Justice died on August 6, 2004, in Iowa City, Iowa. I’ve been reading a lot of Donald Justice lately, and I think his poems are really beautiful. His use of rhyme is amazing and everything he writes is very interesting! I especially love his poems, “The Poet at Seven,” which has beautiful imagery, and “Ladies by Their Windows,” which has very strong lines (for example, “so ladies by their windows live and die.”) Every line in his poetry is tight (everything is smooth and important — nothing is extra) and contributes to the deeper meaning — he takes ordinary things, people and places he sees, memories, paintings, and turns them into something bigger, using another perspective to look at them. He also does this in “Banjo Dog Variations,” talking about one large topic using many small pictures and stories. Now I’m going to read “Banjo Dog Variations,” a poem set during the Great Depression. “Tramps on the road: floating clouds” — Old Chinese poem 1 Agriculture and Industry Embraced in public on a wall- Heroes in shirt-sleeves! Next to them The average man felt small. 2 I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, By Vassar girls surrounded. They harmonized expertly; oh, Their little true hearts pounded. Joe went on smiling. 3 I thought I saw what Trotsky saw, A friendly cossack wink; And then his friends brought down their clubs. Christ, what would Trotsky think! 4 Train had just slowed for the crossing when Out from the bushes jumped a hundred men. With baseball bats and iron bars They persuaded us back onto the cars. 5 And out of dirty fists sometimes Would bloom the melancholy harp. Then low-low-low on the gon-doh-lah We swayed beneath our tarp. And far lights moving in and out of rain. 6 What you do with the Sunday news Oh, citizens of the great riffraff, Is you put the funny papers in your shoes. It gives the feet a laugh. 7 We read our brothers’ shirts for lice And moved around with the fruit, Went north to Billings for the beets And had three good days in the jail at Butte. 8 We chalked our names on red cliffsides, High up, where only eagles dwelled. Each time a big truck went by below, The earth trembled like a woman held. 9 And we passed fields of smoking stumps Where goats sometimes or ponies grazed. Abandoned tractors stood against the sky Like giant fists upraised. 10 But if we bent our knees it was To drink from a creek’s rust-colored slime, And splash our chests with it, and rub our eyes, And wake into another world and time. 11 Let us go then, you and me, While the neon bubbles upward ceaselessly To lure us down back streets and alleyways, Where we may wander and be lost for days. Many days and many hours. 12 I miss the smell of the ratty furs And saturday night cologne and beer, And I miss the juke and the sign that read: NO POLICE SERVED HERE. 13 Off Mission, wasn’t it? The old White Angel Breadline, where we met? You had just come west from Arkansas, But the rest of it I forget. A cup of coffee; afterwards a hymn. 14 Once we stood on a high bluff, Lights fanning out across the bay. A little ragged band of Christs we were, And tempted-but we turned away. 15 And didn’t I see you Saturday night, After the paycheck from the mill, Bearing a pot of store-bought lilies home, One budding still? Ah, oh, my banjo dog! This poem is prefaced by a line from an old Chinese poem. It reads, “tramps on the road: floating clouds.” This is fitting, seeing as “Banjo Dog Variations” is about traveling on the road during the Great Depression. Another one of Justice’s poems, “Pantoum of the Great Depression,” is also about — you guessed it — that devastating time period. It’s also a very interesting poem with a cool form! In “Banjo Dog Variations,” Justice has a very strict stanza form. There are fifteen numbered stanzas, each with four lines and its own story. The only time he breaks this form is when he has an italicized line, like in several of the stanzas. Donald Justice talks about how hard it was for working people during the Great Depression. Joe Hill, who he mentions in the second stanza, was a labor organizer. He also mentions Trotsky, a Russian Revolutionary. In “A History of the Russian Revolution,” Trotsky writes that when the Cossack soldiers were called in to fight the workers, they refused — a worker even saw a soldier wink at him! When Justice says, “I thought I saw what Trotsky saw, a friendly Cossack wink,” he means that he thinks that the police aren’t going to hurt him — they are going to be kind. However, immediately after, the police attack him — “but then their friends brought down their clubs.” In other
Poetry Soup Ep. 4 – “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop
Ep. 4: “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop Transcript: Hello, and welcome to Poetry Soup! I’m your host, Emma Catherine Hoff. Each episode, I’ll discuss a different poem and poet. Today, I’ll be talking about Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle, “One Art,” which is about losing things — and people. Have you ever lost something? A favorite pen, maybe, or a precious stuffed animal? That can be hard, but losing someone you love can be even harder. This is the subject of Bishop’s poem. Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Wooster, Massachusetts. She was an American poet who wrote many poems that I love, such as “In the Waiting Room” and “Crusoe in England.” They’re all worth checking out! In 1956, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and in 1970, she was the National Book Award winner. She had an extremely complicated childhood. Her father died when Bishop was only eight months old, and her mother was institutionalized when she was a child, so she went to live with one pair of grandparents, and from them to her other pair, and, eventually, from them to her aunt. She got very little formal schooling. When she got accepted to a high school for her sophomore year, she was not allowed to attend because she did not have all of the required vaccinations. Eventually, she went to Vassar college, which is extraordinary, seeing that she had very little schooling and Vassar is a pretty prestigious school. Elizabeth Bishop’s aunt introduced her to many Victorian writers like Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barret Browning, and Thomas Caryle. She was deeply influenced by the poet Marianne Moore and was friends with Robert Lowell. Robert Lowell said that his famous poem, “Skunk Hour,” was “modeled on” Bishop’s “The Armadillo.” One of the last poems that Bishop ever published, called “North Haven,” was in memory of Lowell. This is interesting, considering that the poem I’ll be reading is also about loss. Now I’m going to read “One Art,” a poem about losing and longing. The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. In “One Art,” Elizabeth Bishop uses the structure of a villanelle to capture the feeling of the poem. The refrain is really powerful! A villanelle is a poem with nineteen lines — five triplets (stanzas with three lines) and a sixth stanza with four lines. On top of that, there are two lines that repeat every other stanza throughout the poem. The first line of the first stanza becomes the last line of the second stanza, and the last line of the first stanza becomes the last line of the third stanza, and so on. In the last stanza, the two lines follow each other. Though these lines are traditionally supposed to be the same each time, Bishop changes them a bit.. She repeats “The art of losing’s not too hard to master,” but “to be lost that their loss is no disaster” changes by the end of the poem, when it becomes “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” However, she always uses the word disaster. There is also often a A-B-A-B rhyme scheme in a villanelle, too, which Bishop also plays around with. Her end words don’t always rhyme, like “or and master,” but she also uses a lot of slant rhymes, like “gesture and master.” Besides the structure, there is more to Bishop’s poem — which the form, in fact, emphasizes. It is about losing things — small and big alike. Bishop starts with keys and misused time. Then she moves onto houses, cities, and continents. Finally, she talks about losing a person — in this case, a friend or someone Bishop really cared about. This loss means a lot to Bishop, she writes “(the joking voice, a gesture I love).” This is why she must force herself to believe it doesn’t matter: “though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.” It is hard for her to put pen to paper and write the refrain. This poem represents Bishop’s feelings so much because she breaks the form. She feels the need to continue to repeat the lines — both in the poem and in her head. Like a lot of great poetry, this poem is very beautiful and elegant. The words and the form are all amazing. But there is also meaning in the poem — it isn’t just a collection of metaphors, descriptors, or pretty lines. Though I have never really experienced loss, I can imagine what it feels like when reading this poem. I think that that’s the point of “One Art” — to let the reader go with new knowledge and perspective. Though this is a very serious and sad poem, it is also very inspiring — it shows you that messing around with a structure and making it your own can turn out really well! I hope you enjoyed this episode of Poetry Soup, and I’ll see you soon with the next one.
