According to the Writer’s Almanac today is the birthday of Wallace Stevens, and The Emperor of Ice Cream was the poem du jour:
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.
Which was great coincidence since I’ve spent the last couple commutes listening to the online yale modern poetry teachers talk about Wallace Stevens. Interesting guy, “the dean of surety-claims men in the whole country” according to an insurance company colleague, one of many who didn’t know what he dictated to his secretary upon arriving at work each morning. In the class, the tale was told that he would walk to work, a couple miles each way, composing as he went. He’d arrive at work, dictate, the secretary would type up that day’s poem or poems and he would put them in a desk drawer for a month. He would pull them out, thirty days the cooler, revise and edit and make whatever he felt good part of the current collection he was working on. The rest went in the wastebasket never to be seen again.
Good to have a system.
From: The Man on the Dump
One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail.
One beats and beats for that which one believes.
That’s what one wants to get near. Could it after all
Be merely oneself, as superior as the ear
To a crow’s voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear,
Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear
Solace itself in peevish birds? Is it peace,
Is it a philosopher’s honeymoon, one finds
On the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead,
Bottles, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest eve:
Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say
Invisible priest; is it to eject, to pull
The day to pieces and cry stanza my stone?
Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the.Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump” from Collected Poems.
