Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index and Introduction

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ARTIST INDEX

Derik Badman The Plain Sense of Things
Noah Berlatsky This Solitude of Cataracts
Lilli Carré Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock
Warren Craghead The Rabbit As King of the Ghosts
Franklin Einspruch Of Mere Being
Edie Fake Floral Decorations for Bananas
Anja Flower Earthy Anecdote
Anke Feuchtenberger     Depression Before Spring
Shaenon Garrity The Emperor of Ice Cream
Blaise Larmee Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Vom Marlowe Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores
L. Nichols Frogs Eat Butterflies….
Paul Nudd Mud Master
Jason Overby Nomad Exquisite
Sean Michael Robinson    Sunday Morning (I)
James Romberger Madame La Fleurie
Mahendra Singh The Cuban Doctor
Shannon Smith The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man
Edra Soto Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour
Bert Stabler Flyer’s Fall
Marguerite Van Cook A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the Illustrated Wallace Stevens roundtable. For this project, 21 artists have created illustrations and/or artwork based on a range of Wallace Stevens poems. (Update: The roundtable is now complete; all 21 artists with links to their work are listed above.)

Note that comments are closed on individual posts. This is therefore the place where you can comment on the roundtable as a whole or on individual work. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

This roundtable was inspired by this post, which was itself inspired by a discussion of the intersection of visual art and post-structuralism. This roundtable may or may not advance that conversation…but whether or no, it’s certainly been a joy to curate and participate in. I’d like to thank Derik Badman for technical assistance and all the artists for their contributions.

All artwork is copyright by the individual artists. The Wallace Stevens’ poems that are not in the public domain are owned by his heirs.

Here follows “(Pages of Illustrations.)“

68 thoughts on “Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index and Introduction”

  2. Yes it is.

    It’s really interesting how different people dealt with the poems. Anke uses images inspired by the poems but disconnected from each other (at least, as far as I can tell.) Mahendra’s comic makes an effort to get at the (non-narrative) movement of the poem…and does a really nice job of it, I think. The poem starts at a dreamy height and sinks down through the sofa and then even farther….

  3. Those are both incredible. I think you’re right, Noah, that Mahendra’s has taken the non-narrative movement and made it a parallel narrative to the admittedly-loose narrative of the poem itself. It’s very similar to his approach in his Hunting of the Snark book, actually–deepening or expanding the text rather than straight illumination or examination. As for Anke Feuchtenberger’s illustrations, its a striking, elliptical approach, and fits the fragmented nature of the poem.

  4. This is phenomenal project, Noah. Congrats on pulling it together.

    I can already see a split between artists who make the choice to “draw what the words say” (Carré, Garrity) and those who, for lack of a better phrase, “re-imagine what the verse shows” (Feuchtenberger, Flower). As a teacher of poetry (and comics), I definitely prefer the latter approach.

    The Poetry Foundation once made an effort to meld the forms in a short-lived series called “The Poem as Comic Strip.” The visual translators there — even very good comic artists — fell mostly flat.

    (It also reminds me of something I recently heard James Sturm say about the comics form — namely, that comics are less a mix of writing and drawing than of poetry and architecture. Not that all of these efforts bear that definition out, but it’s still one of the more interesting formal definitions I’ve heard recently — one that makes me look differently at pages.)

  5. Thanks Peter! I think it’s maybe interesting to think of it as where people end up on a scale of abstraction, rather than a hard and fast division? With Stevens even drawing what the words say generally doesn’t exactly get you to a narrative…and the words themselves are often kind of metaphors pointing ambiguously. So even the choice to draw what’s there is kind of a choice to draw what isn’t there, and vice versa. Which, watching it again, is really true of Lilli’s animation, where she’s making concrete (though ephemerally passing) all the things Stevens says are not there.

    I really like Lilli’s video too because it reminds me of Sesame Street animations — which are some of my favorite 20th century art ever, first of all, and second of all I think it captures Stevens’ connection to children’s poetry, which I think isn’t acknowledged often enough, and which is one of the thing which I love about him, and which separates him from his many, many imitators. (Lilli hasn’t seen any sesame street videos though, apparently…I was horrified. Everyone should see them!)

    I liked the way Shaenon’s made that connection to children’s verse too, and to Day of the Dead, which seems very apropos. I mean, her piece could really *be* in a period children’s book. I also enjoyed how she used the two stanzas of the poem to visually get at the split between childhood/death which is the poem’s theme

    And I agree that Anja’s piece is pretty amazing. Stevens as gothic scratchy twisty thundercloud…

  6. I love love LOVE Lilli Carre’s video! Of course, I also like old Sesame Street animation.

    I based my piece on old memento mori art, because I like that stuff, and because the poem seemed inspired by the same tradition. I also wanted to make it more lighthearted and less cynical than the tone of the poem; Stevens often rags pretty hard on the unwashed masses and their dull little lives. I prefer the Day of the Dead approach where death is an excuse to party. (Coming from an Irish Catholic background, this feels more natural to me; my family always holds a big drunken wake when somebody dies.)

    Now, however, I’m cowed by the other contributors and their amazing interpretations. This project has turned out so awesome.

  7. “Stevens often rags pretty hard on the unwashed masses and their dull little lives.”

    You think so? I think both Emperor and Disillusionment can be seen as much as a celebration of everyday folks’ imagination as a sneer at them. He kind of does the same thing with the snooty intellectuals, poking fun at them for their dullness, but in such an engaging way that their dullness stops being dull…

    I could just be indulging in Stevens idolatry though. I really love him.

  8. Hi Noah and Shaenon,

    I hope I didn’t come across too much as dividing the words into some rather clumsy and unforgiving categories. It’s just that I tend to see Stevens’ poetry as ultimately dissolving its own imagery, making it either “unimaginable” or working on scales that bust your mind at the seems. (Noah, your work with “Blackbird” touches on these issues. Another classic example of such a self-consuming imagery — out of so many — would be “The Snow Man.”)

    That said, both of your comments made me go back to look at all the works. And you helped me to see how the images are working against the text in productive and important ways — theatrically, emotionally, even literally. Thanks.

    And last — just to join the chorus — it’s hard for me to watch old Sesame Street animation and not cry at their beauty. (And just maybe nostalgia has a bit to do with it!)

    Here’s the Sesame Street short that Lilli’s animation brought to mind (“E-magination”):
    http://bit.ly/ct6r1N

    And this one reminds me of Shaenon’s pages (“Daddy Dear”):
    http://bit.ly/Ps6g6

  9. Typo alert:
    For “words,” read works.
    For “seems,” read seams.

    But for Stevens, “seems” probably works just as well.

  10. Holy god those animations are amazing. I don’t think I’d seen either of them. They blow my mind.

    I agree about Stevens dissolving his own imagery, absolutely. It’s part of why it seemed so interesting to have people try to illustrate it; the words and the images in the poems collapse into each other and scoop each other out; it makes it really challenging to figure out how actual pictures can intersect with that.

  11. Glad you liked the toons, Noah. That first one aired during the inaugural episode, the second sometime in the early 70s. (And when I was a kid, they both made me a bit nervous.)

  12. Great stuff so far everyone. I very much like Singh’s piece. I hope everyone clicks to enlarge it and then zooms again to really see all the subtle weaving going on there with the colors and the hatching. Great!

  13. Wow, these are terrific and such a creative idea. I have enjoyed them all, but I can’t stop thinking about Flower’s rendition of “Earthy Anecdote” which I must have clicked on and enlarged and squinted at about a half dozen times this morning! I really like the way this illustration and the placement of the text moves (or falls)… it’s both panicky and ordered, dense and fragmented. I also like the fact that I can’t quite make out what the figures are, but even so, the abstracts forms and wispy lines (and flags?) nicely reflect the “clattering” and “bristling” of the verse. Thanks also for introducing me to Wallace Stevens poem that I’ve never encountered before! Looking forward to the rest.

  14. Speaking of old Sesame Street animations…. Edie Freaking Fake!!! Certainly the “1 2 3 4 5…” pinball game, but there was another alliterative counting cartoon involving a king and/or queen that had some of that crystalline psychedelic rococo iconic splendour. Women emerging from fruit in an ebullience of smoke and pearls…. I gasp in helpless awe.

  15. More terrific entries! I really liked James Romberger’s today and the influence of Caniff’s style.

  16. James’ is lovely. I like the different ways the posts today integrated the text with the pictures. James turns the poem into comics text, which both elliptically inspires the imagery and fits incongruously into it, similar to that famous Chris Ware strip (though more abstract.) Paul makes the text part of the visual glop; it almost turns into a muddy abstraction itself. And Jason breaks the text into a grid, which gives it an almost robotic rhythm, like it’s a machine generating imagery. All of which gets at the way Stevens’ poems are about their own language creating pictures, or pictures deconstructed into language.

    I think Bert and VM and Marguerite yesterday played with that too as they all sort of worked with collage or different registers of images; imagery which is more or less “real.”

  17. It’s so neat to see all of the different ways people have approached the poems. Single images and comics and panels and all sorts of things. Really wonderful stuff.

    I’m still awestruck by Lilli’s video. Holy shit.

  18. Kudos to Derik Badman’s tonal handling in the posts today. So many interesting responses.

  19. I may be forgetting something, but I believe Derik’s the only one who didn’t use the entire text of the poem.

    I love the beginning of Franklin’s, especially on the screen. At least on mine, you only see the palm there, and then as you scroll down you see it’s not on a desert but on a block of text, which is just so Stevens. Also, I adore the poem he picked. (I love “Rabbit As King of the Ghosts” too…as well as Warren’s ideogram approach to it.)

  20. Thanks, Marguerite.

    I am, of course, biased, but today’s selection of posts was wonderful.

    Franklin and Warren: The randomness of alphabetizing couldn’t have put me in better company today. Both of your pieces are really lovely.

  21. After the poetry.org illustrated poem fiasco, I didn’t want to just add pictures to the existing text. One thing that attracted me to the “Plain Sense of Things” was the imagery, so I figured I’d try to replace Stevens textual imagery with my visual imagery, leaving the text for the stuff that doesn’t show so well.

  26. HI Noah,

    The poetry.org comics are the same as the one’s I mentioned in Comment 4 — the ones that fueled my initial anti-illustration gripe.

    I’ll send you the entries — mostly unfortunate, one disastrous — by David Heatley, Gabrielle Bell, Paul Hornschemeier, and Jeffrey Brown. Maybe there’s a meta-project post to be had.

  27. Thanks for sending me those, Peter. I agree with you and Derik that those are problematic, even though I’ve liked work by all of those cartoonists in different contexts. I like the Gabrielle Bell one okay (mostly because I’m a sucker for the Goreyesque), but they’re all very literal, pretty much straightforwardly taking the poem’s imagery and drawing little boxed pictures to illustrate it. Jeff Brown’s seems to maybe be an exception, but I find his drawing style so offputting….

    I wonder if it was in part an editorial problem? That is, they seemed to want to have poetry as comics, so people may have felt constrained to do something that was recognizably comics? I think Stevens’ poems also are especially fun to work with in terms of illustration, while some of the poems that were chosen there (like the Wakoski) seem like they maybe wouldn’t work as well no matter who was doing the illustrating.

  28. Today’s entries are, for me, some of the most through-provoking of the bunch. (Indeed, the entire project has been good for thinking — for thinking about comics, poetry, words, metaphor, image, and feeling.)

    And yet I’ve found it easier to just sit back and enjoy them, as opposed to inserting those thoughts into the comments thread. It’s much harder to be one’s usual critical grumpus when people are delivering wonderful artistic endeavors to your virtual doorstep.

    Still, I wonder if some of the artists might engage in the critical or self-critical enterprise for me, like Derik did in his brief comments (and Shaenon before him).

    Can they map out what they see as the territory between what a poem shows and does not show, between illustrating and re-imagining, between translating the poem and creating (perhaps) a parallel piece of visual verse?

    I ask this particularly after seeing the entry of Warren Craghead, whose work I absolutely adore. (I think Derik was even the person who led me to him.)

    But I have to admit that I am both taken and stymied — that is, honestly puzzled — by Warren’s “rebus” method with this comic, maintaining the piece-by-piece (word=image) content of “Rabbit,” complete with punctuation and a general formal equation of strip=line and page=stanza. (A correspondence theory of comics, taken almost to ts limit!)

    Craghead’s piece does seem to wiggle its way progressively out of these equivalencies as one approaches the end. But I would love to hear more from the artist himself on his sense of this experiment.

    How does one get from showing “the difficulty to think at the end of the day” with an empty thought bubble and a setting sun – or a “cat slopping its milk all day” with a cats tongue bracketed by yet another setting sun — to the far more abstract pieces of anti-image in the final pages?

    Or is that the point? To watch a comic collapse under the weight of a poem in all its linguistic density?

  29. Im traveling right now and can’t really comment ( I’m on my phone in an aquarium filled with kids) but I will say thanks for the close reading and I’ll comment more when I get to a real computer. I tried to draw the poem….

  31. Thanks, Warren. I look forward to hearing more about it, particularly in relation to your works in which you do not seem as interested in “draw[ing] the poem.”

    (I could be way off in my assumptions about these different approaches. Probably am.)

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  33. Try #2 (or 3) to give shape to my ideas above:

    Perhaps the power and strangeness in Warren Craghead’s attempt to “draw [this] poem” reside in his attempt, literally, to “draw” its content *without* illustrating that content.

    What he draws, then, is the abstract content that corresponds to the words and phrases, but refuses to give those images anything other than equally abstract embodiment. No real cat or tongue, no real day or shadow — only the minimal mental representations hovering behind the text (which, appropriately, appears as a blur — almost a palimpsest).

    Rebus-like, this technique turns the poem into something more like an series of equations (X + Y – Z). The mathematical or typographical symbols — like brackets, vectors, ellipses — also point in this direction. The drawings work in the same way that a drawing of a triangle helps to establish a proof.

    Again, by the end of the comic, it seems that this desire to draw-and-not-draw — to imagine-without-imagery — seems either to explode or to collapse upon itself in a particularly satisfying way.

    I wrote offlist to Noah, wondering if it might be profitable to see this work as a parody of sorts — a parody of the idea of illustration, or a parody of the idea of comics as iconographic (picture-writing).

    That might not be a bad thing.

    Thank you, Warren, for giving me so much to think about. Your comics are always an inspiration.

    My best,
    Peter

  34. Perhaps we all should have shown the poems as they were originally arranged, in type on the page, by the poet. I had to make decisions in choosing how to separate the lines within the grid structure of Caniff’s Terry template and my own sequential (and exponential) visualizations within that, and others here faced the same challenge.

  35. I thought about including the poem in its original form for all the poems; in fact, Warren and I went back and forth about including typed text with his piece.

    In the end, though, I think I prefer thinking of the final products as collaborations…it’s artists working with Stevens, which means that Stevens’ artistic vision is important, but not solely determinative. Artists can rethink his rhythms, or even leave out words (as Derik does.) It’s not Stevens telling artists what to do, but a conversation.

    I think it’s interesting that even when all the words are there in print, the images still can change the experience of the poem. Edra’s piece for example, I think makes you go back to the poem to find out exactly what she’s illustrating. Bert’s drawing goes even further away from the original poem, so there’s a back and forth to figure out what the relationship between the two is, what themse he’s picking up on….

  36. These wondrous marriages of poetry and image enchant me, but they also have a quirky indirect effect.

    I’d originally been signed up to render the first 2 stanzas of “The Man with the Blue Guitar”; after my break with HU I ripped and burnt my artwork for that and was bitter.

    But seeing these interpretations I actually am grateful at the break-up: I could never have come up with anything as fitting, as right as this.

    Noah, make this an annual event; I suggest e.e.cummings and John Donne!

  37. I really dislike e.e. cummings, alas. Donne I love, but it would be weird to do contemporary illustrations for him….

    I’m not ready to start planning the next one of these, anyway! We’ve got the best comics poll coming up…I can’t think much beyond that!

  38. Hi Peter,

    I just wanted to address you question about the illustration process. One of the things I found so interesting about seeing them all up is that different artists went in completely new directions (approaches that hadn’t occurred to me).

    My own piece was intended as an attempt to get at the feelings and imagery that the poem evoked in me, and to get at that from a different medium and instill the sense of wonder/peace in others.

    I didn’t include the words in my drawings–I was really enchanted to see how other artists had added them and how effective it was. I’d probably do mine differently if I could do it again, incorporate the words more maybe.

    The blog space itself created some artistic barriers–I don’t think I imagined the finished result (being on the blog, with the header and the sidebar, etc) as well as I should have. The originals are nearly 10×17, so again, next time I’d try keeping my canvas (so to speak) smaller. That’s probably way more technical than you wanted to know…..

  40. Hi Vom,

    Thank for the insights — not at all too detailed! — into your artwork and approach. I really appreciate the perspective.

    Peter

    P.S. Regarding future poets, it’s hard not to want to see what people would do with W.C. Willams — a poet who pushed so hard against the visual, and pushed so explicitly against the “plagiarism” of what one might call illustration. How might artists push back?

  41. I just wanted to address you question about the illustration process. One of the things I found so interesting about seeing them all up is that different artists went in completely new directions (approaches that hadn’t occurred to me).

    I wanted to play with the idea of a Fummetti/fotoromanzi because my Fine Art work is concerned with narrative as produced by juxtaposed images, especially stills from films and this seems to operate in Stevens poems, where the stanzas are often translucent projections. This of course is not to say that they exist on a scale of clear to opaque, I am speaking of the odd qualities of density which which he deals with light.
    The photographs in my piece use James Romberger, Crosby Romberger and me as models. Some are stills from film I shot for a larger project. I have long been fascinated by the qualities of an image taken from a film as opposed to a deliberately posed still.
    With Stevens one works by “rabbit-light” and I thought it would be interesting to draw attention (indirectly) to this quality in his work, several of my images reference light.
    Just for interest: The floral image is from a photograph I took in a garden that I grew over several years to film and in this case the initial image is not tampered with in terms of light and shade, just reconfigured with one single lighter band through the center.

  42. You’ve read Barthes on stills, right Marguerite? I think he argues that stills are more filmic than film, for reasons I can’t exactly remember….

  43. Lets face it, I am a child of Barthes, or at least a doting niece. Having said that, in his numerous commentaries about the cinema and its relation to stills, I know I must have read something explicitly about this, but for the moment I can only think of oppositional comments to film and about posters, or how the still image operates. (Semiotically, symbolically and everything else that is surplus). Barthes famously had some ambivalence to cinema and its lulling ideology.
    I’d be thrilled if someone can locate those passages about still images.

  45. One other point of commendation– how many of the contributions use the Web’s idiosyncratic possibilities and constraints.

    I think of Franklin’s scrolling, or of Derik and Edie’s “click-through”…

  46. To answer Alex’s question about use of the web: I post my own comics in a blog. I actually prefer the scrolling down style of a blog to webcomics that use pages or screens. I’m way to lazy to click an arrow. So, I was comfortable with what I thought Noah was going to do with the poems from the start. I also wanted to take advantage of the web scrolling to create one long piece where each image would flow to the next. I was thinking, “not infinite canvas but annoyingly long canvas”. Not something I would have done for a print project. So, that was fun for me. I’ve got a picture somewhere of the original art all laid out on my kitchen floor. I’ll post it on my website when I find the time.

  47. And no offense to the posts that are “click through”. I thought it worked well for the pacing on those. Sometimes you want that pause. The digital version of turning the page. Sometimes you need that.

  48. Now that mine’s up I thought I’d respond briefly to Peter’s question….

    The poem I picked (This Solitude of Cataracts) is fascinated with time and immobility, and with the idea of repetition as stillness. Turning time into a series of frozen moments is sort of how comics works. (I’ve thought about this before here — in fact, in light of that essay, you could say that the speaker of Steven’s poem is wishing he could be Dr. Manhattan.)

  49. Awesome. What an interesting and inspiring group of work! Thanks for letting me be part of this, Noah.

  50. Pingback: Wallace Stevens: Illustrated! « Bat Terrier

  51. Noah,
    I am a big fan of systems and diagrams, I really enjoyed your piece. Congratulations to all. I have really enjoyed looking at the different resolutions in what has been a truly pleasurable experience.
    Thanks for all.

  52. I also really liked a lot of these pieces. As for me… after printing out the arm holding the severed head, I drew the rest of my image while commuting on the train, which is why it’s folded. After printing out the image, all the empty space could be outside the body, internal, whatever I associated with the frozen spatial experience of dying as conveyed in “Flyer’s Fall.”

  53. I most enjoyed the work of Anke Feuctenberger, Lilli Carré, and Edie Fake because of their top notch illustration skills.

  54. It’s amazing how few similarities there ended up being between the pieces. My faves are probably from Badman, Robinson, Romberg and Singh.

  56. Hello, sorry for the delay in my response, I hope people haven’t moved on… The aquarium was ok and we made it home safely.

    First, thanks for a great project Noah and all there. I was consistently and happily surprised by people’s pieces especially because I know what it was like to grapple with Stevens and his towering text. So well done all. I wish we could publish an anthology…

    As for the future, I am morally bound to suggest Guillaume Apollinaire, but maybe Walt Whitman would be even better. Out of copyright so we can print them later, the old uncle of American poetry and full of so many images and craziness.

    Thanks also for the close reading, esp. Peter. You hit things dead on Peter – I was trying to substitute images for words here. For a long time I’ve kept a daily diary where I “draw” the day and everything I do using pictographic symbols – you can see some examples on my Flickr feed. I’ve also tried a couple times to “draw” a text – a short story, an artists biography I was reading – but it never really worked. So I was determined to try here to use that rebus-like drawing to “redraw” (or “rewrite” with pictures) the poem without illustrating it. For a long time I’ve been very interested in pictographic notational systems (hieroglyphs, pre-columbian lienzos, medieval picture stories, Cubist iconography) and I think they have some untapped potential for us comics makers.

    Like some of you I also dislike mere illustration when making comics of an existing text. The delicious and exciting friction one can make is wasted that way. The poetry.org project was so so bad (I think they picked the wrong people to participate). So though I wanted to somehow show Stevens’ imagery, I didn’t want to just draw it. So yes, a tongue, a setting sun, and empty thought balloon – I had to somehow show what he showed. An earlier draft had them all very pictographic and symbol-like and I may have gone a little too crazy drawing them (it was too fun). I worry that I made them too rendered and lost that sense of WORD. Still, they are drawings and should be able to use all that drawing can do. That extra rendering can maybe fill in for the language nuances lost. Things did start to fall apart at the end and melt into just drawing as the Stevens poem gets bigger and bigger and/or my pencil just took over.

    In other things like HOW TO BE EVERYWHERE I could pick and choose chunks to match up with images. I do that (most of the time) with my own writing/drawing too, mixing and matching until things work. With this I had the solid and inflexible armature of the poem and I had to do what I could with it. I guess I could have been as creative as Derik and done some editing!

    I’m really glad you saw that the structure I set up: page=stanza, image line=text line, adding in all punctuation, dots on each line to represent syllables, pieces of text pulled out to show particular rhymes and alliterations I really liked. I did all that to show the other side of Stevens’ brilliance, his formal chops. An important part of the code.

    You mentioned parody, and I didn’t think of it that way consciously, but I can see how that fits. I knew that simple illustration could make junk so I was like, “Ok, you want me to draw the poem and just the poem?!? Well, here is what craziness you get!” As if I pushed the idea of illustration too far, beyond comprehensibility. I guess I should submit this to poetry.org and see if they want it ;)

    I just tried to make something new that could hopefully stand on its own. Like if you could read it and decode it you could get to Stevens’ poem, though that’s silly and foolish. I was attacking a windmill!

    Sorry for the self-centered rambling. Thanks again for the close reading and for all the work from everyone involved.

  58. Apollinaire! How could any of us compete with Warren’s work on same.

    My suggestion: Sappho. I love the fragments. Between that and the multitude of translations, there would be a lot of room for interpretation/improvisation/adaptation.

  59. ” I guess I could have been as creative as Derik and done some editing!”

    Since I had no real feelings about Stevens work (having probably only read a poem or two if his in my life), I didn’t find it hard to edit him. I might feel differently if I were dealing with a poem/poet I had some lasting feeling for.

  60. Sappho! Good idea. She’s pretty sassy too – there’s a lot we could do with it.

    I didn’t have strong feeling for Stevens either at first, but the rabbit poem really grew on me. I also liked his personal story – insurance executive by day, Modernist poet by night. As a desk-worker it gives me hope

  61. Wow, I can’t believe you all hadn’t read Stevens before. He’s so great.

    I think I need a break before I start contemplating follow-up projects! This was extremely rewarding, but a lot of time and energy. I’ll definitely think about it since there seems to be such interest, though.

  62. “…insurance executive by day, Modernist poet by night. As a desk-worker it gives me hope”

    That is the one thing I knew/know about him.

  63. Sappho was the first poet that popped into my head! Completely agree with Derik re: the fragmentary nature of the surviving poems–could be a really interesting event. Sign me up ;)

    As for Peter’s question, I realize it wasn’t addressed to me necessarily, but I thought I’d address it anyway. As most of the comics work I’ve done in the past few years has been narrative, I thought it would be a fun exercise to take a poem with a very elliptical narrative and make it into a literal one visually, just discarding the text completely. My main interest was to see what such a thing might look like, what a W. Stevens poem, or single stanza in my case, might look like if it was as literal as possible. A woman is literally sitting in a chair on a Sunday morning watching her cockatoo and falling asleep to nightmares of the crucifixion, literally watching oranges and her cockatoo parade across suddenly stilled water. It is, after all, the technique of the poem itself. Although certainly the images can me evoking a large range of other ideas, they are presented in a concrete way, so I thought I would, in the absence of the text, attempt to replicate those images and see how different they might feel from the words themselves. No attempt to decode or decipher. I’m not sure how effective I was, or what it would look like with all the stanza of the poem involved, but it was certainly an enjoyable exercise for me.

  64. —————————–
    Warren Craghead says:

    …I didn’t have strong feeling for Stevens either at first, but the rabbit poem really grew on me. I also liked his personal story – insurance executive by day, Modernist poet by night. As a desk-worker it gives me hope.
    ——————————-

    More hope:

    ——————————-
    Charles Edward Ives…was an American modernist composer. He is one of the first American composers of international renown…Ives combined the American popular and church-music traditions of his youth with European art music, and was among the first composers to engage in a systematic program of experimental music, with musical techniques including polytonality, polyrhythm, tone clusters, aleatoric elements, and quarter tones, foreshadowing many musical innovations of the 20th century.

    This photo from around 1913 shows Ives in his “day job”. He was the director of a successful insurance agency…
    ———————————-
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ives

    ———————————-
    Born in Danbury, Connecticut on 20 October 1874, Charles Ives pursued what is perhaps one of the most extraordinary and paradoxical careers in American music history. Businessman by day and composer by night, Ives’s vast output has gradually brought him recognition as the most original and significant American composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, Ives sought a highly personalized musical expression through the most innovative and radical technical means possible…
    ———————————–
    http://www.schirmer.com/default.aspx?TabId=2419&State_2872=2&ComposerId_2872=764

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