13 Ways of Blegging About a Poem
I
Among twenty glowing iBooks,
The only moving things
Were the hands of the bloggers.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a post
On which there are three comments.
III
The blogger fisked in righteous rage.
It was a small part of the blogosphere.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and their blogroll
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of invective
Or the beauty of innuendo,
A blogpost by Malkin
Or on Kausfiles.
VI
Bicycles filled the parking lot
At the blog expo.
The conference attendees
Crossed it for a smoke.
The mood
Traced by the bloggers
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O pale men of Starbucks,
Why do you imagine Pulitzers?
Do you not see how your blog posts
Obviate the need
For the main-stream media?
VIII
I know novel writing
And screenplays, even musical lyrics;
But I know, too,
That my blogging has usurped
All else I know.
IX
When the blogger turned off his Treo,
He felt teh suck
To be off-line all evening.
X
At the sight of bloggers
Typing in the green room,
Even the head of CNN
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Washington
In a black limo.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
An email from his girlfriend
For commentspam.
XII
The internet is up.
A blogger must be blogging.
XIII
It was nighttime at half-past noon.
He was blogging
And he was going to blog.
The blogger sat
In his comfy chair.
So . . . at the beginning of this year I resolved that I was finally ready to start suffering and write that symphony, or, rather, novel, or, rather, odd-shaped thing that probably shouldn’t be called a novel but it isn’t factual and it doesn’t rhyme, so . . .
Anyhow, I need to understand Wallace Stevens’ famous poem better because it features in several places. Any suggestions for where to turn? Ideal would be a short, erudite and not-impenetrable book that treats Stevens’ work generally but has a good discussion of “Thirteen Ways” somewhere within.
Suggestions?
Among twenty glowing iMacs now becomes twenty glowing iBooks. Did you change this or am I going crazy?
— Fred · Apr 9, 02:13 AM · #
Forgive me if this is an obvious suggestion, but I’d have to go with Helen Vendler, particularly her piece in Teaching Wallace Stevens. (The name of the article escapes me.) Also I think Lee Jenkins discusses it frequently in Rage for Order.
— Freddie · Apr 9, 04:12 AM · #
Fred: I changed it. I intended iBooks in the first place.
Freddie: Thanks! No suggestions are obvious – this is not my area.
— Noah Millman · Apr 9, 10:27 AM · #
Wiping the tears from my eyes, I pause to agree with Freddie. Vendler is the way to go. Her book on Stevens’s longer poems, On Extended Wings, is a classic, but it says little about the shorter ones.
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 9, 02:05 PM · #