Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Fascinating.

Kurt remembers the heady days in Coach Stevens' history class ...

Roosevelt Junior High School was fortunate enough to have Bob Stevens as an 8th grade history teacher. Mr. Stevens would spend each history period walking between the desks of students bringing to life the history of this country. Hands behind his back he would walk and tell the stories of the country.

Occasionally, he would grab the chalk and draw out a battle scheme on the chalkboard, supplementing the drawing with gory and fascinating details.

Several friends and I even decided to bring our own history books into class to “check” Mr. Stevens on his facts. No way could he just roll these details out without at least some exaggeration.

Imagine an 8th grade class with at least four young students feverishly flipping through a stack of books as the teacher told the lesson from memory.

My family moved to Ohio from Michigan in 1977.  On my first day of school at Roosevelt, I had the bright idea to wear a Michigan jersey to school. Coach Stevens noticed it within minutes. He picked me up (in my chair), carried me to his room, placed me in my chair atop his desk and proclaimed to his class, “Look what I found!”

Thirty years later, after a pretty drastic career change, I was blessed to spend time with him in his third-floor classroom as he mentored me through my student-teaching experience.

Through those Roosevelt years, Coach Stevens told amazing stories to engage his students, he maintained the highest standards to set an example for his students, and he carried himself in a way that I still remember today.  I knew he believed in me and all his students.  He was a model of what it was to be not just a good teacher, but a great man.  His sincerity and authenticity were such that you didn't want to let him down.  That responsibility was transformative to a young punk like me.

I’m beginning my twenty-second year as a teacher and there isn’t a day that goes by that doesn’t catch me feeling grateful that I was his student. What a fine teacher. What a great man.

Technique.

van Gogh, Landscape at Saint-Rémy (detail),1889

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens (thanks, Steve)

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Winter-Sound.

NO POSSUM, NO SOP, NO TATERS

He is not here, the old sun,

As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.

Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks

Have arms without hands. They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.

They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.

Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.

The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,

Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,

The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach

The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.

Bright is the malice in his eye...

One joins him there for company,

But at a distance, in another tree.

Wallace Stevens

Beholds.

Wyeth, N.C., Winter, Bringer of Cold, 1909

SNOW MAN

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Wallace Stevens

Proof.

ARTS

It's better to start walking before you're born.

As with dancing you have to learn the steps first.

Stevens said technique is the proof of your seriousness,

though the grace of a Maserati is limited to itself.

There is a human wildness held beneath the skin

that finds all barriers brutishly unbearable.

I can't walk in the shoes cobbled for me.

They weren't devised by poets but by shoemakers.

Jim Harrison

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Découpe.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Invisible.

van Eyck, Man in a Red Turban, 1433

The MAN on the DUMP

Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up.

The sun is a corbeil of flowers the moon Blanche   

Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho ... The dump is full   

Of images. Days pass like papers from a press.   

The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun,   

And so the moon, both come, and the janitor’s poems   

Of every day, the wrapper on the can of pears,   

The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box

From Esthonia: the tiger chest, for tea.

The freshness of night has been fresh a long time.

The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says   

That it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs   

More than, less than or it puffs like this or that.   

The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green   

Smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea

On a cocoanut—how many men have copied dew   

For buttons, how many women have covered themselves

With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads   

Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.   

One grows to hate these things except on the dump.

Now, in the time of spring (azaleas, trilliums,   

Myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox),   

Between that disgust and this, between the things   

That are on the dump (azaleas and so on)   

And those that will be (azaleas and so on),   

One feels the purifying change. One rejects   

The trash.

               That’s the moment when the moon creeps up   

To the bubbling of bassoons. That’s the time

One looks at the elephant-colorings of tires.   

Everything is shed; and the moon comes up as the moon   

(All its images are in the dump) and you see

As a man (not like an image of a man),

You see the moon rise in the empty sky.

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,   

Peck 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

Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens

It is the unknown that excites the ardor of scholars, 

Who, in the known alone, 

Would shrivel up with boredom.

The way through the world

Is more difficult to find than the way beyond it.

Wallace Stevens, born on this day in 1879

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Listening.

Stepping over the threshold into the sounds and scents, I find myself in a small room with a red tiled floor. I am surrounded on three sides by floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves, all holding a row of neatly arranged wheels of cheese, each roughly 14 inches wide and three inches tall, some vacuum wrapped in plastic, others naked. 

All of them are listening to Vivaldi.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens

Winter-Sound.

Koppitz, In The Vienna Woods, 1910

The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.

The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,

Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,

The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

Wallace Stevens, from "No Possum, No Sop, No Taters"

Required.

Wyeth, N.C., Crows in Winter, 1941

THE PLAIN SENSE of THINGS

After the leaves have fallen, we return

To a plain sense of things. It is as if

We had come to an end of the imagination,

Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective

For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.

The great structure has become a minor house.

No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.

The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.

A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition

In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had

Itself to be imagined. The great pond,

The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,

Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,

The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this

Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,

Required, as a necessity requires.

Wallace Stevens

Eye.

Larsen, A Blackbird, 1870

THIRTEEN WAYS of LOOKING at a BLACKBIRD

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,   

The only moving thing   

Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II

I was of three minds,   

Like a tree   

In which there are three blackbirds.   

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   

It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV

A man and a woman   

Are one.   

A man and a woman and a blackbird   

Are one.   

V

I do not know which to prefer,   

The beauty of inflections   

Or the beauty of innuendoes,   

The blackbird whistling   

Or just after.   

VI

Icicles filled the long window   

With barbaric glass.   

The shadow of the blackbird   

Crossed it, to and fro.   

The mood   

Traced in the shadow   

An indecipherable cause.   

VII

O thin men of Haddam,   

Why do you imagine golden birds?   

Do you not see how the blackbird   

Walks around the feet   

Of the women about you?   

VIII

I know noble accents   

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   

But I know, too,   

That the blackbird is involved   

In what I know.   

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,   

It marked the edge   

Of one of many circles.   

X

At the sight of blackbirds   

Flying in a green light,   

Even the bawds of euphony   

Would cry out sharply.   

XI

He rode over Connecticut   

In a glass coach.   

Once, a fear pierced him,   

In that he mistook   

The shadow of his equipage   

For blackbirds.   

XII

The river is moving.   

The blackbird must be flying.   

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.   

It was snowing   

And it was going to snow.   

The blackbird sat   

In the cedar-limbs.

Wallace Stevens

Accuracy.

Accuracy of observation is the equivalent of accuracy of thinking.  In poetry, what our eyes behold may well be the text of life but one’s meditations on the text and the disclosures of these meditations are no less a part of the structure of reality.

Wallace Stevens

Technique.

Technique is the proof of your seriousness.

Wallace Stevens