Don't Think and drive...

I have been told I think to much. Maybe I even have a thinking problem. When you become engrossed in thought it is hard to emerge from within yourself and devote your brain to what you are actually doing, like say riding a bike. The last two installments of class have given me much to think about. The poems by Wallace Stevens and his ideas of reality and perception, his focus on the magic of nature had me reeling after we left class on monday. The contemplation of the sonnet had a similiar effect on me. As I was leaving class today to find a computer to type this on I was riding my bike through campus as I oft do after class, I was however not thinking about the ride, I was thinking about poems and crazy stuff. I didn't notice the incongruous relationship between the concrete and the grass, after my tire found it I did. My feet slipped from the perch of my pedals, another part of my body did however make contact with the bike's frame. As this happened I very loudly yelled a monosyllabic profanity, catching the attention of a few bystanders who watched as I hung from the cross bar of my still moving bike only to be relieved from my misery as it, and I toppled down. I than dusted myself and rode on, this time paying more mind of what was in front of me. So remember don't think and drive, it's dangerous.

The Poet is the drunken sailor
The Poet is the pensive man
The Poet is the metaphysicist

"Death is the mother of Beauty"- Stevens had made us realize that the finite nature of life is what creates beauty, for if something is not permanent we learn to cling to it and cherish it, for we know that its beauty is fleeting.

"The exhilarations of changes the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X"

"What is there here but the weather? What spirit have I except it that comes from the sun"

The pear is a pear. The pear is not a nude, bottle or viol. But if it were a nude it could be the Venus of Villendorf. We learned that in the Study of Two Pears, or a pare of pears.

Religion, god, culture has destroyed nature's importance to the daily experience of life. Through Stevens poetry we find the religion of nature. What is here but the weather?

Chaos theory-Basically a form of order we have yet to understand, nothing in the natural order of the universe is random.

Miss Alfred Urugauy- I percieved myself to be pretty fancy today, until that is I wracked myself on my own bike.

To an Old Philospher in Rome-"Two parallels one, perspective of which men are part both in the inch and the mile." A poem about the death of his old teacher in Rome.

More themes of seasons, more weather, and more birds.

Poetry is not trying to communicate a point, obscurity is ok. Stevens is a Poet not a philsopher and therefore not subject to absolutes. He has given us "a new knowledge of reality".