TUESDAY EVENING POETRY, PROSE, TELEVISION AND...SECOND LIFE!

By Debbie Bulloch



Since its inception on June 23, 2003, Second Life has become deeply entrenched (or is that embedded) into our popular culture. Several television shows have featured elements from Second Life. On October 24, 2007, Second Life was featured prominently, and used as a tool to locate a suspect, in the CSI:NY episode "Down the Rabbit Hole." Second Life was also featured in the CSI:NY episode "DOA for a Day" (air date: April 2, 2008).

In an instance of virtual reality being stranger than television fiction, the show featured an interactive component. The CSI:NY Virtual Experience encouraged viewers to continue the hunt for the killer avatar. A separate Second Life region was created by The Electric Sheep Company (those of you who have read the book on which the movie “Blade Runner” is based will understand the reference to “electric sheep”) to act as a gateway for the episode viewers. The Electric Sheep Company created its own Second Life viewer called OnRez.



Other television programs have featured Second Life in the show’s plotline. Law & Order: Special Victims Unit parodied Second Life in its episode "Avatar.” Dwight Schrute from the television series The Office is an avid Second Life resident; this was featured prominently in the October 25, 2007 episode "Local Ad." In that episode, Dwight has an avatar named 'Dwight Shelford' who is able to fly, and Dwight creates a virtual world within Second Life named Second Second Life. And in an episode of the CBS drama Ghost Whisperer, Melinda Gordon experiences a similar online world, at one point pulling an avatar out of her computer at the shop as the user's ghost.

Second Life has also been featured in popular literature. The Darkest Evening of the Year is a novel by Dean Koontz (one of my favorite mystery writers) released on November 27, 2007. In the novel, one of the characters is a private detective by the name of Vern Lesley; Vern lives vicariously through his Second Life avatar, Von Longwood. Koontz himself has “attended” several Second Life writers’ forums. His portrayal of Vern and his fixation with Second Life is less than flattering, however. Perhaps as expected, Koontz reserves his best treatment for the novel’s principal protagonists - Amy Redwing, her boyfriend Brian McCarthy and a rescued Golden Retriever named “Nickie.” In the novel, Koontz shows the reader how Amy takes great personal risks on behalf of abandoned Golden Retrievers; he also learn how Brian must overcome his past in order to become a better person; and, finally, we see how “Nickie” touches the lives of every human (and animal) she meets.

In the novel, we learn that Amy is being pursued by those who wish to harm her, Brian, and her dogs. As the novel rushes headlong towards its exciting conclusion, Amy and Brian work past their respective dark pasts in order to save each other, their dogs and the lives of other innocents caught in the mess.



Incidentally, the novel’s title is a reference to a poem by one of our past featured poets, Robert Frost and his poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. In Chapter 13 of the novel, Amy goes back to a recurrent dream (no, I am not going to give away the novel's plot here) where she is walking through the woods. In remembering her dark dreams, Amy also remembers how Frost's poem had sustained her during those earlier days. Koontz also refers to Frost’s poem at the beginning of Parts One, Two and Three of the book.

Even though Koontz’s portrayal of a Second Life resident is less than flattering, The Darkest Evening of the Year is one of Koontz’s best recent novels. If you love a good mystery novel, if you believe that good will eventually trump evil and if you have a keen appreciation for the innate nobility and kind heart of all dogs, you will enjoy reading this novel.

For those of you who are counting, this is our blog's post #99. Stay tuned for post #100 and learn a thing or two, that you may not already know, about Between Homes. Coincidentally, we are also coming up on BH’s one-year anniversary; this is indeed a very exciting time for all of us.

Enjoy!

NOTE: The artwork for the cover of the two books referred on this post is copyrighted and it is the property of its respective owners. All rights reserved.

FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER

FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER
By Debbie bulloch



The fifth poet in our FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER series is Wallace Stevens. I discovered Wallace Stevens while I was still in high school. I was attracted to Stevens’ view of the role of man’s creative imagination in bringing order to a chaotic world. Stevens’ poetry offered me a safe haven during a very troubled time in my life. After reading “The Idea of Order at Key West” I was hooked for life!

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds



If Robert Frost is the modern poet most admired by the general public and William Carlos Williams the favorite of younger poets, the Stevens was the darling of the academic world. Stevens was preoccupied with “ideas of order” and was convinced that the imagination can discover “the opposite of chaos in chaos.”

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was a American Modernist poet. He was born of German-Dutch ancestry in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for an insurance company in Connecticut.

Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel;, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems. The marriage reputedly became increasingly distant, but the Stevenses never divorced.

After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, Stevens was hired on January 13, 1908, as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company/ By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named vice-president of the company. After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice-presidency of The Hartford.

Stevens’ business associates were apparently not aware of his status as a major literary figure – he just went about his work without making a fuss about his work as a poet. The most remarkable thing about Stevens, apart from his large body, was that there was nothing really remarkable about him outside of his immense talent as a writer. Like William Carlos Williams (who was a successful physician as well as a renown poet) Stevens was a successful lawyer who “just happened” to write great poetry.

Stevens was the rare American artist of his time who never traveled to Europe. Stevens chose to experience the “heaven of Europe” second-hand, through letters, post cards, art catalogs, wines and other “authentic food for a starved imagination.” Stevens enjoyed trips to Key West, where he allegedly broke a hand in a fistfight with Ernest Hemingway (I would have loved to see them fighting), rare beefs, strong martinis, risqué jokes and the occasional Greta Garbo (in other words, he was a man’s man).



For Stevens, poetry is “the supreme fiction,” the single essence that can replace a lost belief in God as a source of life’s redemption. Stevens was very much a poet of ideas. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” wrote Stevens. He was obsessed with the relationship between reality and imagination; he insisted that we must turn to art – shaped by the imagination – for a “freshening of life.”

Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens’ words "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination.

Further on the subject of “imagination” Stevens wrote, “The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them.” The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns.

According to Stevens, the imagination can only conceive of a world for a moment--a particular time, place and culture--and so must continually revise its conception to align with the changing world. For this reason, the best we can hope for is a well-conceived fiction, satisfying for the moment, but sure to lapse into obsolescence as new imaginings wash over the world.

Modern poetry, Stevens wrote, is “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.

His poem An Ordinary Evening in New Haven is a self-conscious digression about the creation of poetry.

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality.

Here then, for your reading pleasure this Friday morning, are some of my favorite Stevens’ poems.

NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING, BUT THE THING ITSELF

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

POETRY IS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own . . .

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

THE EMPEROR OF ICE CREAM

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

And, finally, THIRTEEN WAYS TO LOOK 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.



Take Stevens with you this weekend and journey with him in magical, mystery tour of the imagination.

Enjoy!

Before I go, here are images of the French 1938 Peugeot 402BL Eclipse Decapotable. The retractable hardtop in this Peugeot predates the retractable hardtops now common in many models of Mercedes, Volvo, VW and Audi, by almost six decades. This Peugeot was designed and built at a time when car designers were allowed to use their power of imagination to create cars that were not only highly functional but also beautiful to behold. Compare this Peugeot to the current crop of cookie-cutter cars (my beloved Benzes included) and you will see how truly beautiful and magnificent the cars from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s truly were.

(For a full image, please click on the photos, thanks.)















Happy motoring!

FRIDAY POETRY CORNER - ROBERT FROST

By Debbie Bulloch







Today’s featured poet has been called “America’s Poet Laureate.” In an overcast morning in 20, January, 1961, Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) stood next to the newly elected President, John F. Kennedy and delivered the following lines:





The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, Still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely; realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

At the age of 86 years, when he read this poem at Kennedy’s Inauguration, Robert Frost was already well-established as a reknown poet and playwright; he is one of America’s brightest literary star.



Frost was born in San Francisco, California. Frost’s father was a journalist, William Prescott Frost, Jr. His mother, Isabelle Moodie, was of Scottish descent. After his father's death in May 5, 1885, Frost’s family moved across-country to Lawrence, Massachusetts. There, they lived under the patronage of Robert's grandfather, William Frost, Sr., who was an overseer at a New England mill. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School in 1892.

From the beginning, Frost’s work showed the unmistakable stamp of the great British literary tradition – Milton, Spenser, Keats, Shelley and Browning. Frost’s poetry harked back to an earlier time; he often remarked that he was content with “old ways to be new.”

Frost is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech. His work frequently employed themes from the early 1900s rural life in New England, using the setting to examine complex social and philosophical themes. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry.

Perhaps Frost’s best known poem is "The Road Not Taken.” This is the one poem that nearly all high school students memorize line by line. It is easy to see the appeal of this poem, especially to young people who see in the poem’s title and last line, an appeal to the rugged individualist.

Most readers often read the poem literally, as an expression of individualism. Literary critics, however, typically view the poem as ironic. According to Katherine Kearns, a Frost critic, “The Road Not Taken” is the most famous example of Frost's own claims to conscious irony and “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep's clothing." Frost himself warned "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem – very tricky."

The poem's last lines, where the narrator declares that taking the road "less traveled by" has "made all the difference," can be seen as a declaration of the importance of independence and personal freedom.

The ironic interpretation is that the poem is about regret and rationalizing our decisions.

In this interpretation, the final two lines of the poem…

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

…are ironic – the choice made little or no difference at all, the speaker's protestations to the contrary. The speaker admits in the second and third stanzas that both paths may be equally worn and equally leaf-covered, and it is only in his future recollection that he will call one road "less traveled by.”

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.



Another of Frost’s poem, “Mending Wall,” is perhaps best known for its last line spoken by the neighbor: "Good fences make good neighbors." The poem's narrator displays a disdain for that expression and the walls erected between people - yet he also shows a grudging acceptance, perhaps sadly, of the line's truth in its application to human relationships.

MENDING WALL

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'



The last poem that I will discuss, “Acquainted with the Night,” is Frost’s most personally haunting poems. This poem is widely regarded as the poet’s admission of having experienced depression and a vivid description of what that experience feels like. In this poem, "the night" is a metaphor for depression itself, and the poet describes how he views the world around him in this state of mind. As he aimlessly roams the city streets, he brags about walking back and forth in the rain and of having "outwalked the furthest city light" to remain in darkness.

ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.



Thank you for joining me on this journey through the poetry of America’s Poet Laureate. I hope you enjoy his poetry as much as I do.

Have a wonderful weekend.