Picasso, The Old Guitarist, 1903. In 1977 David Hockney authored a book of etchings called "The Blue Guitar: Etchings By David Hockney Who Was Inspired By Wallace Stevens Who Was Inspired By Pablo Picasso". The book included the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The etchings were inspired by and were meant to represent the themes of Stevens's poem, "The Man With The Blue Guitar", which was inspired by a 1903 painting by Pablo Picasso titled "The Old Guitarist". It was published as a portfolio and as a book in spring 1997 by Petersburg Press.The following can be sourced at no less than seven or eight locations on the Web. What I enjoy so much about Stevens (aside from a lengthy relationship I have with many of his poems) is that he appears to be the most secular of poets, someone who has disposed of the divine to seek the essence of reality. It is as if the divine has subverted our understanding of reality and it is only by disposing of it that we can come to grips with a true reality. Yet the more Stevens demands of his Supreme Fiction and true reality, the closer he brings us to what I see in Fr. Aidan Nichol’s developing the habit of Christian wonder (see the Habit of Theology: Faith Lives In Theology As “Christian Wonder”). The story is that on his death bed he received the last rites of the Catholic Church. See Fr. Arthur Hanley’s recollections here.IThe man bent over his guitar,A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.They said, “You have a blue guitar,You do not play things as they are.”The man replied, “Things as they areAre changed upon the blue guitar.”And they said then, “But play, you must,A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,A tune upon the blue guitarOf things exactly as they are.”III cannot bring a world quite round,Although I patch it as I can.I sing a hero’s head, large eyeAnd bearded bronze, but not a man,Although I patch him as I canAnd reach through him almost to man.If to serenade almost to manIs to miss, by that, things as they are,Say that it is the serenadeOf a man that plays a blue guitar.Stevens is a rare example of a poet whose main output came at a fairly advanced age. His first major publication (four poems from a sequence entitled “Phases” in the November 1914 edition of Poetry Magazine) was written at the age of thirty-five, although as an undergraduate at Harvard, Stevens had written poetry and exchanged sonnets with George Santayana,

with whom he was close through much of his life. Many of his canonical works were written well after he turned fifty. According to the literary critic Harold Bloom, who called Stevens the “best and most representative” American poet of the time, no Western writer since Sophocles has had such a late flowering of artistic genius.Stevens’s first book of poetry, a volume of rococo inventiveness titled Harmonium, was published in 1923. He produced two more major books of poetry during the 1920s and 1930s and three more in the 1940s. He received the National Book Award in 1951 and 1955.Imagination and realityStevens, whose work was meditative and philosophical, is very much a poet of ideas. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” he wrote. Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens’s work “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. We approach reality with a piecemeal understanding, putting together parts of the world in an attempt to make it seem coherent. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination. This is no dry, philosophical activity, but a passionate engagement in finding order and meaning. Thus Stevens would write in The Idea of Order at Key West (my thoughts on the poem here)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.In his book Opus Posthumous, Stevens writes, “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” But as the poet attempts to find a fiction to replace the lost gods, he immediately encounters a problem: a direct knowledge of reality is not possible.Stevens suggests that we live in the tension between the shapes we take as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imagination imposes upon the world. The world influences us in our most normal activities: “The dress of a woman of Lhassa, / In its place, / Is an invisible element of that place / Made visible.” Likewise, were we to place a jar on a hill in Tennessee, we would impose an order onto the landscape.As Stevens says in his essay “Imagination as Value”, “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.The jar is a striking example of an order that does not feel a part of the land, and so seems to violate the existing order: “It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee”. Contrast this to the feeling one gets while looking over the water where boats are anchored in darkness, with lanterns hanging on poles, “Arranging, deepening, enchanting night”. When the imagination is available to reality and does not try to force itself, reality becomes like a bar of sand onto which the imagination naturally washes and recedes.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. And as these worldviews come and go, each person is pulled in his or her normal life between the influence the world has on imagination and the influence imagination has on the way we view the 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.Supreme fictionThe imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real. When it adheres to the unreal and intensifies what is unreal, while its first effect may be extraordinary, that effect is the maximum effect that it will ever have.Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice. His solution might be summarized by the notion of a “Supreme Fiction.” In this example from the satirical “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” Stevens plays with the notions of immediately accessible, but ultimately unsatisfying, notions of reality:Poetry is the supreme Fiction, madame.Take the moral law and make a nave of itAnd from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,The conscience is converted into palmsLike windy citherns, hankering for hymns.We agree in principle. That’s clear. But takeThe opposing law and make a peristyle,And from the peristyle project a masqueBeyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,Is equally converted into palms,Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,Madame, we are where we began.The saxophones squiggle because, as J. Hillis Miller says of Stevens in his book,Poets of Reality, the theme of universal fluctuation is a constant theme throughout Stevens poetry: “A great many of Stevens’ poems show an object or group of objects in aimless oscillation or circling movement.” In the end, reality remains.

The supreme fiction is that conceptualization of reality that seems to resonate in its rightness, so much so that it seems to have captured, if only for a moment, something actual and real.I am the angel of reality,seen for a moment standing in the door.…I am the necessary angel of earth,Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man-locked set,And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic droneRise liquidly in liquid lingerings,Like watery words awash;…an apparition appareled inApparels of such lightest look that a turnOf my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?In one of his last poems, “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour”, Stevens describes the experience of an idea which satisfies the imagination, “This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous. / It is in that thought that we collect ourselves, / Out of all the indifferences, into one thing.” This one thing is “a light, a power, the miraculous influence” wherein we can forget ourselves, sensing a comforting order, “A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous, / within its vital boundary, in the mind.”This knowledge necessarily exists within the mind, since it is an aspect of the imagination which can never attain a direct experience of reality.We say God and the imagination are one . . .How high that highest candle lights the dark.Out of this same light, out of the central mindWe make a dwelling in the evening air,In which being there together is enough.Stevens concludes that God is a human creation, but that feeling of rightness which for so long a time existed with the idea of God may be accessed again. This supreme fiction will be something equally central to our being, but contemporary to our lives, in a way that God can never again be. But with the right idea, we may again find the same sort of solace that we once found in divinity. “[Stevens] finds, too, a definite value in the complete contact with reality. Only, in fact, by this stark knowledge can he attain his own spiritual self that can resist the disintegrating forces of life . . . . Powerful force though the mind is . . . it cannot find the absolutes. Heaven lies about the seeing man in his sensuous apprehension of the world . . .; everything about him is part of the truth.”. . . PoetryExceeding music must take the placeOf empty heaven and its hymns,Ourselves in poetry must take their placeIn this way, Stevens’s poems adopt attitudes that are corollaries to those earlier spiritual longings that persist

in the unconscious currents of the imagination. “The poem refreshes life so that we share, / For a moment, the first idea . . . It satisfies / Belief in an immaculate beginning / And sends us, winged by an unconscious will, / To an immaculate end.” The “first idea” is that essential reality that stands before all others, that essential truth; but since all knowledge is contingent on its time and place, that supreme fiction will surely be transitory. This is the necessary angel of subjective reality — a reality that must always be qualified — and as such, always misses the mark to some degree — always contains elements of unreality.Miller summarizes Stevens’s position: “Though this dissolving of the self is in one way the end of everything, in another way it is the happy liberation. There are only two entities left now that the gods are dead: man and nature, subject and object. Nature is the physical world, visible, audible, tangible, present to all the senses, and man is consciousness, the nothing which receives nature and transforms it into something unreal . . . .”The Role Of PoetryStevens often writes directly about poetry and its human function. The poet “tries by a peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general, / To compound the imagination’s Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima.” Moreover, “The whole race is a poet that writes down / The eccentric propositions of its fate.” In a manner reminiscent of Wordsworth, Stevens saw the poet as one with heightened powers, but one who like all ordinary people continually creates and discards cognitive depictions of the world, not in solitude but in solidarity with other men and women.These cognitive depictions find their outlet and their best and final form as words; and thus Stevens can say, “It is a world of words to the end of it, / In which nothing solid is its solid self.” In a poem called “Men Made out of Words,” he says: “Life / Consists of propositions about life.” Poetry is not about life, it is intimately a part of life. As Stevens wrote elsewhere, “The poem is the cry of its occasion, / Part of the res itself and not about it. / The poet speaks the poem as it is, // Not as it was.” Modern poetry 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 meetThe women of the time. It has to think about warAnd it has to find what will suffice. It hasTo construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,And, like an insatiable actor, slowly andWith meditation, speak words that in the ear,In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the soundOf which, an invisible audience listens,Not to the play, but to itself, expressed

In an emotion as of two people, as of twoEmotions 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 backTo the real: to the hotel instead of the hymnsThat fall upon it out of the wind. We seekThe poem of pure reality, untouchedBy trope or deviation, straight to the word,Straight to the transfixing object, to the objectAt the exactest point at which it is itself,Transfixing by being purely what it isA view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sightOf simple seeing, without reflection. We seekNothing beyond reality.To create a stage is, for Stevens, a metaphor for the need of modern poetry to make its own new arena or realm in which it should be presented and in which it can be understood. Modern poetry is like “an insatiable actor” because it continually must be in “the act of finding what will suffice.” Stevens puns on the meaning of “act.” In one sense, poetry is an act, learning the speech, meeting the women, facing the men, etc. In another sense, it is a dramatic performance meant to be heard by an audience, as it speaks words that echo in the mind of the listener. The audience is “invisible” in the sense that a poet rarely meets his or her readers.The typical reader picks up a book of poems and reads a poem or two, and the author never sees this happening. The reading of poetry is often a conversation between strangers. In this poem the two people are the actor that is the poem and the audience that is the listener, and their emotions should become “one.” The poet should find the words that will speak to the delicatest ear of its modern listeners, echoing what it wants to hear but cannot articulate for itself. The poet, in the act of the poem, finds the sufficing words and for the audience and they allow the listeners to hear what is in their ear, their mind. As a result, the emotions of speaking and listening, of poet as actor and listeners as audience, should become one.Reputation And InfluenceFrom the first, critics and fellow poets praised Stevens. Hart Crane wrote to a friend in 1919, after reading some of the poems that would make up Harmonium, “There is a man whose work makes most of the rest of us quail.” In the 1930s, the critic Yvor Winters criticized Stevens as a decadent hedonist but acknowledged his great talent. Beginning in the 1940s, critics such as Randall Jarrell spoke of Stevens as one of the major living American poets, even if they did so (as Jarrell did) with certain reservations about Stevens’s work. Stevens’s work became even better known after his death. Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode are among the critics who have cemented Stevens’s position in the

canon as a great poet. Many poets — James Merrill and Donald Justice most explicitly — have acknowledged Stevens as a major influence on their work, and his impact may also be seen in John Ashbery, Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, John Hollander, and others.http://payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/05/24/notes-on-the-blue-guitar-of-wallace-stevens/ The Abstract Imagination:Decreating reality in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” For Wallace Stevens, reality is an abstraction with many perspective possibilities.  As a poet, Stevens struggles to create original perspectives of reality.  Wallace Stevens creates a new, modern reality in his poetry.  Actually, Stevens decreates reality in his poetry.  In The Necessary Angel, Stevens paraphrases Simone Weil’s coinage of decreation as the change from created to uncreated or from created to nothingness.  Stevens then defines modern reality as, “a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers”(750).  Stevens relates, through poetry, a destruction of traditional reality leading to a realization that the meaning of a poem is not truth, always recognizing that the poem is the poets perception of reality.  This perception of reality is based on experience, historical context, and poetic skill, among others.  “The Man with the Blue Guitar” is a long poem that allows Stevens to change perspectives and create abstract realities.  Parataxis in such a long poem allows for the decreation of reality and the relation of imagination.  In his book, The long poems of Wallace Stevens: An interpretive study, Rajeev S. Patke describes varied progression within “The Man with the Blue Guitar” as “an indefinite improvisatory series.  In such a series the unitary sections lose their independent status as poems, and their masks and metaphors become stages in the continual play of metamorphosis which is the true life of Stevens’s poetry”(241).  Imbedded in Patke’s description of “the true life of Stevens’s poetry”, is the parataxis that a sectioned poem provides.  Each movement from section to section is both continuous and not continuous.  Each section could be read separately, but that would ignore the overall theme of presenting the abstraction of reality.  Stevens, himself, articulates the goal of poems (and paintings) to be, “sources of our present conception of reality, without asserting that they are the sole sources, and as supports of a kind of life, which it seems to be worth living, with their support, even if doing so is only a stage in the endless study of an existence, which is the heroic subject of all study”(751). In “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, Stevens metaphorically provides the similarities and differences

between musicians and poets.  The guitar serves as an instrument for the musician to relate themes.  “Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar”, this line in first section of the poem conceptualizes the guitar as an instrument of perception.  The guitar does not express reality, but instead creates or decreates a new reality as a perception.  In Adagia, Stevens describes the relation of reality and imagination, “The imagination consumes and exhausts some element of reality.”  The imagination is not reality, but they do share some qualities.  The first section further articulates Stevens’ pressures to recreate reality as, “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves”, and “things exactly as they are”.  Clearly, the listeners do not understand the duality of their own request, especially when Stevens felt that his instrument could only allow him to represent reality, not create reality.  Amongst other things, this first section provides the metaphor for music and poetry, as well as expose the demands of realism on the musician/poet. The next section Stevens clarifies the value of his instrument in revelation.  The second section is presented as the musician speaking, only without the quotation marks.  In typical Stevens fashion, the musician speaking allows for the distinction and realization of similarities and differences between poet and musician.  The musician appeared as a shearsman in the first section, which changes slightly to a tailor like comparison, as the musician now must patch the world.  The section starts with the struggle of presenting reality, then moves to the conversion of shearsman to tailor, “I cannot bring a world quite round,/Although I patch him as I can./I sing a hero’s head, large eye/And bearded bronze, but not a man”.  Reproducing reality is as impossible as drawing a perfect circle.  The patchwork falls inevitably short of the actual aesthetic of the hero.  The head, eye and beard are all parts of the actual hero, but are not the entire reality.  Each section of the poem functions as pieces of reality being patched together.  Whether separate from each other or together, the sections of the poem can only present Stevens’s reality.  As good as the musician’s patchwork is, he can only “serenade almost to man” and that serenade is the guitarist’s creation.  A poem is a poet’s creation based on individual style.  In the first two sections there is a shift from perceiving the musician in the third person to the musician as the speaker. Section VI of “The Man with a Blue Guitar”, addresses “topopoeia” or “the art of constructing an image large enough to enclose its own imager”(Collins 280).  Again Stevens notes the blue guitar as an instrument in relating perception, but he shifts the focus between “A tune beyond us as we are” and “Ourselves in the tune as if in space”.  Stevens has now forced himself and his readers into the poem with the guitarist.  If ourselves are in the

space of the tune, then we must view the tune from all perspectives or “in a final atmosphere”.  This final atmosphere implies a sort of walking around the space of the tune to realize all perceptions.  The perceptive shifts that occur in this section are also significant, for the guitarist simply playing a song in a different place doesn’t change the song.  The song doesn’t change and neither does the theme, but this still doesn’t change the fact that the song is a version of reality and not reality itself.  The final line of this section is “A composing of senses of the guitar”.  The instrument here has senses and the musician’s style relates those senses.  Stevens does not have the guitar compose the senses, instead he gives the instrument senses.  As Patke wrote, “the canvas and the guitar do not remain instruments or means to an end, they themselves create or, rather, are the space in which the end exists”(86). The shift between sections six and seven is an example of drastic perception leaps.  This section changes from the guitarist’s perspective again (until the final line).  Immediately the first line incorporates all artists, “It is the sun that shares our works./The moon shares nothing.  It is a sea.”  The perceptive shift includes the guitarist, but does not separate his work from “our works”.  The mood of this section is disparaging.  Patke interprets the Stevens’s use of the sun and moon, “the moon and the sea have nothing to offer by way of warmth.  Even the sun seems to have failed humanity”(87).  The perception from this section is formed by the cold winter sun; a contrast to section five when, “there are no shadows in our sun”.  Summer and winter perspectives are part of reality, and the experience of this cold reality shapes the tone of this section, which includes “creeping men” as “Mechanical beetles never quite warm”.  The final sentiment of this section is of cold guitar strings.  The dreary winter weather constructs the musician’s perception, which is cold like the guitar strings and the “mechanical beetles”.  Here, weather is one example of how experience can shape perception.  In fact, the eighth section immediately constructs a storm.  The storm leads to “cold chords”, “impassioned choirs”, and “my lazy, leaden twang”.  The “lazy, leaden twang” is the response the storm or “like the reason in a storm”.  The perception that the experience of the storm provides is “lazy” and “leaden”, “And yet it brings the storm to bear./I twang it out and leave it there.”  Stevens recognizes the effect of experience on art, and ends this section leaving the role of the artist/musician/poet to present this reality as it effects him and his art. In the fifteenth section, Stevens even refers to Picasso.  “In this picture of Picasso’s, this “hoard/Of destructions”, a picture of ourselves”.  Stevens comments on Picasso’s quote in The Necessary Angel, “Does not the saying of Picasso that a picture is a horde

of destructions also say that a poem is a horde of destructions?”(741).  Clearly, the opening line of section fifteen compares Picasso’s sentiments on painting to Stevens’s own poetry.  Here is one place where “the other” becomes clear in the poem.  Stevens acknowledges other artistic representations, but maintains his own style and will.  Stevens asks, “Do I sit, deformed, a naked egg,/Catching at Good-bye, harvest moon,/Without seeing the harvest or the moon?”  Stevens' poetry leaves him naked to interpretation, as he presents his deformed reality.  He attempts to present such concepts as a harvest moon without physically presenting the harvest or moon.  This section continues with Stevens’ relation to his thematic representations, “Is my thought a memory, not alive?”  Clearly it is the readers of his poetry who breathe life into his thoughts.  His will is expressed, but merely as a memory; the enjoyment of his poems by others gives his thoughts a new life.  The reference at the end to wine or blood is easily attributed to the idea of transubstantiation, and implies the role of the poet/artist as a saviour.  The force behind this section seems to be destruction, not only Picasso’s reference, but also the line, “Things as they are have been destroyed”.  Also, as a “naked egg” Stevens opens the idea of Humpty Dumpty; which leads to the patchwork of the fragmented egg and the metamorphosis of Humpty himself.  In section XVIII, Stevens again shifts the perception of the poem.  He renames the song as a dream, “A dream (to call it a dream) in which/I can believe, in face of he object,/A dream no longer a dream, a thing,/Of things as they are, as the blue guitar”.  The dream is now a thing just as the guitar is a thing.  Both are instruments in presenting reality, and again the idea that neither is actual reality is present.  This section also relates back to the guitar and the senses, “After long strumming on certain nights/Gives the touch of the senses, not of the hand”.  Here the hand and the guitar give way to the formation of senses realized “after long strumming”.  His poetry too, must serve as the realization of the senses; his language and style being only a part of the larger dream of senses. In the twenty second section Stevens shifts the perception of his poem to the subject of poetry: Poetry is the subject of the poem,From this the poem issues and To this returns.  Between the two,Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality,Things are as they are.  Or so we say. 

I think this relates the poem to the song, and poetry is the dream of the poem.  Again Stevens ties his theme into reality.  The poetry is the subject, but the subject created leaves “an absence in reality”.  This section directly relates the formation of a dream to poetry.  Poems allow for “sun’s green”, “cloud’s red”, “earth feeling”, and a “sky that thinks”.  In poetry Stevens can give reality certain qualities that are otherwise absent, like a thinking sky.  These here, are the senses that the artist’s instrument can relate as a dream of reality.  In this section Stevens even recognizes that a poem must serve to give and take, “From these it takes.  Perhaps it gives”.  Poems take reality and form it into a sensual reproduction, and then gives the representation to readers of the poem.             Section XXVI focuses on the imagination.  The section begins with, “The world washed in his imagination”.  The imagination takes the world and cleans it to allow for the give and take relationship described above.  Stevens returns to the artistic effort to create a Utopian picture in the imagination, “Sand heaped in the clouds, giant that fought/Against the murderous alphabet:/The swarm of thoughts, the swarm of dreams/Of inaccessible Utopia.”  The comparison first drawn here is that the poet must fight against the “murderous alphabet”, much like Ulysses fought against the one-eyed giant.  The alphabet is as much a part of the poet’s arsenal as musical notes are essential to the musician’s song.  Stevens’ dependency on the language of poetry, could limit his ability to create Utopia out of “the swarm of dreams”.  Patke recognizes that Stevens’s battle is against, “the ‘murderous alphabet’ of outmoded languages and their outmoded ways of conceiving the world, ways which have now become worse than useless because to have recourse to their enticements and traps would be ‘murderous’”(104-105).  As magnificent as a poem or song or dream can be it cannot be reality or Utopia.  This section concludes with, “A mountainous music always seemed/To be falling and to be passing away”.  Stevens seems to resolve this issue in his final section.             In section thirty-three, the final section, Stevens attributes a dream to a specific generation.  This gives the dream the fading quality he described in section XXVI.  The dreams seem to fade because the generation that produced it will eventually fade.  The dreamer is not to be blamed for having limited foresight, because, “That’s it, the only dream they knew,/Time in its final block, not time/To come, a wrangling of two dreams”.  The dreamer can only create the dream according to what he/she knows.  There can be no “final block”, because the dream is shard throughout time by readers with different perspectives.  The “wrangling of two dreams” can be translated as the intermingling of

perceptions that forms the give and take relationship of poetry.  The poet has his dream and the reader interprets the dream, but the interpretation will be the readers’ own dream, not the poet’s dream, or even a duplication of reality.             Just as Stevens’s poetry is in constant metamorphoses, this paper has shifted between sections of “The Man with the Blue Guitar”.  The relation of Stevens’s perceptual/conceptual changes may not have been directly evident at all times.  As means of examining this specific poem, leaps in perception and parataxis in this examination are as important as the change between sections of the poem itself.  The technique and presentation of Stevens’s concepts may be confusing and/or contradicting, but the overall presentation allows for the full realization of different perceptions and their comparison and contrast all lead back to Stevens’s purpose for poetry.  This purpose being to relate experience while recognizing that each experience/perception/reality/dream is unique and insightful.  In a long poem with many sections, an overall theme or fiction may not be attainable or seen as contradictory.  The value of this poem lies in the realization and acknowledgment of different perspectives, and the acceptance an evolving world.  http://writing.colostate.edu/gallery/parataxis/callahan.htmWalter Benjamin, One-Way StreetPost No BillsThe Writer's Technique in Thirteen ThesesI. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.III. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable. 

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.VIII. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.IX. Nulla dies sine linea -- but there may well be weeks.X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.XII. Stages of composition: idea -- style -- writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.XIII. The work is the death mask of its conception.The Critic's Technique in Thirteen ThesesI. The critic is the strategist in the literary battle.II. He who cannot take sides should keep silent.III. The critic has nothing in common with the interpreter of past cultural epochs.IV. Criticism must talk the language of artists. For the terms of the cenacle are slogans. And only in slogans is the battle-cry heard.V. "Objectivity" must always be sacrificed to partisanship, if the cause fought for merits this.VI. Criticism is a moral question. If Goethe misjudged Holderlin and Kleist, Beethoven and Jean Paul, his morality and not his artistic discernment was at fault.VII. For the critic his colleagues are the higher authority. Not the public. Still less posterity.VIII. Posterity forgets or acclaims. Only the critic judges in face of the author.IX. Polemics mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studies the better. Only he who can destroy can criticize.X. Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.XI. Artistic enthusiasm is alien to the critic. In his hand the art©work is the shining sword in the battle of the minds.XII. The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.XIII. The public must always be proved wrong, yet always feel represented by the critic. 

http://www.english.ucsb.edu/faculty/rraley/research/Benjamin.htmlSusan Buck-Morss, in her preface to The Dialectics of Seeing, quotes Benjamin's description of his own work as a "Copernican revolution" in the practice of history writing.[1] Buck-Morss points out that Benjamin's method intends to uncover the legitimating, ideological function that Western capitalist culture invests in the idea of history seen as a continuum "progress" that affirms the present as its culmination. Thus, Buck- Morss describes Benjamin's aim as an attempt "to destroy the mythic immediacy of the present. . . by discovering that constellation of historical origins which has the power to explode history's 'continuum'".[2]The present essay intends to investigate Benjamin's method concerning the activity of "dialectical thinking". More specifically, the following discussion concentrates on Benjamin's ideas regarding the tasks and aims which he associates with the intellectual figure of the "dialectical critic". The results of this investigation will be analyzed in conjunction with the examination of the ways in which the essay-video on Benjamin, One Way Street (1992, directed by John Hughes), attempts to employ Benjamin's own dialectical method in order to investigate the contemporary reception of Benjamin and to present a possible contemporary reading of his philosophical work.Benjamin, placing himself in a position of marginality as a "left- wing outsider",[3] considers himself to be a dialectical critic whose task, similar to that of the historical materialist, is that of being constantly engaged in deciphering the material and historical conditions of the objects which form our everyday life. Thus, rather than confining his "knowledge" to contexts which are removed from the historical conflict of everyday experience, Benjamin looks at empirical objects in the attempt to create his philosophical argument. The practical elements contained in Benjamin's approach to critical discourse, together with his view of the world seen as a textual construction (which teaches us lessons about ourselves, our consciousness and our society) justify the view which classifies Benjamin as a "hermeneutician". His hermeneutic approach is best exemplified in Paris Capital of the World, where the dialectical critic has the task to discover the "truth" contained in the urban architecture of Paris, which Benjamin believes to be a revealing text or record of historical forces. However, the purpose of interpreting the world (or the urban architecture) as a text is to show the ways in which the social and cultural forms of expression and of organization in the 19th century are, in all of their manifestations, distorted by the basic structure of the capitalist social system.Benjamin believes that the wishes and desires of the collective unconscious are displayed in a mediated manner through images. Thus, according to Benjamin,

the images created by past generations contain the desires of those generations which are still "true" and relevant for us today. As a result, then, the objects of the past are not important for themselves, but for what they stand for, as they can help us to reach an understanding of the world in which our wishes and desires are not distorted by the bourgeois and capitalist society. The basic structure of capitalist society, in fact, distorts objects as it abstracts and, therefore, renders invisible the labor that goes into their making. When the object lacks the mark of the labor which went into its production it bears the mark of commodity, and when distorted desires are projected into the commodified object, this object becomes a fetish. Thus, as the object invested with false desires becomes a phantasmagoria produced by the distorted desires of the collective, the world becomes an aesthetic spectacle of itself.In order to promote their own interests, the ruling classes distort and use the desires of the collective by transforming them from "true" desires into "false" desires. Thus, according to Benjamin, the dialectical critic has to identify the "true" desires of the collective which are contained, in the forms of remnants of "truth", in the images of the past. The images of the past are displayed and presented in a dream-like quality and Benjamin's aim is to interpret for his own generation these dream fetishes in which the traces of history have survived. This interpretation serves the purpose of discovering both the unconscious of the dreaming collective and its utopian dreams. These are the reasons behind Benjamin's concern with the aesthetic dimension present in the commodified object which, as I already pointed out, he sees as the materialization of the unconscious desires of the collective. Thus, according to Benjamin, the aim of the dialectical critic lies in the attempt to uncover the capitalist distortions of the wishes and desires which are contained in the commodity fetish. Moreover, the dialectical critic has also the task of describing and interpreting the process by which the commodity fetish is invested with false desires. Hence, Benjamin's method starts from the particular object and explores the ways in which a dialectical critic can look at the false energies which are invested in the commodity fetish.Benjamin says that we see the march of history in the invisible. The invisible process of the making of the product is shown, by capitalism, as an aesthetic performance. That is why everything is a spectacle and everything is made into an aesthetic visual event. Moreover, as capitalism successfully strives to render human labor invisible, it also produces the scientific, social and ideological discourses that justify the status quo. Thus, the dialectical critic has the responsibility to make the invisible visible, so as to identify the "true" desires of the past and preserve them. In Benjamin's view, this aesthetic understanding of the commodity

fetish may hold the liberating potential for the collective's awakening from the dream of commodity fetishism and for the uncovering of its constituents. As Buck-Morss points out, "this fetishized phantasmagoria is also the form in which the human, socialist potential of industrial nature lies frozen, awaiting the collective political action that could awaken it."[4] Miriam Hansen's explanation of this liberating potential, contained in the fetishized commodity of modernity, takes us a step further as she comments that "as mythical images, the phantasmagoria of modernity were by definition ambiguous, promising a classless society while perpetuating the very opposite; yet as dream images they could be read and transformed into historical images, into strategies of wakening up."[5] Thus, Benjamin's attempt to "read" objects as material expressions of the collective unconscious, adds a sociological dimension to the Nietzschean notion of "life as an aesthetic experience".The tool that has the potential to lead the dreaming collective to the moment of its awakening is to be found in what Benjamin calls "dialectical thinking":The realization of dream elements in waking is the textbook example of dialectical thinking. For this reason dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening. Each epoch not only dreams the next, but also, in dreaming, strives toward the moment of waking. . . . In the convulsion of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled.[6]Central to the dialectical thinking and closely connected with the dream image and the dreaming collective, is the cardinal methodological concept of the "dialectical image". With regards to this, Buck-Morss observes that the dialectical image is "a way of seeing that crystallizes antithetical elements by providing the axes for their alignment . . . the "synthesis" of which is not a movement towards resolution, but the point at which their axes intersect."[7] The dialectical image refers to the use of archaic images to identify what is historically new about the "nature" of commodities.[8] The function served by the dialectical image in the understanding of history is expressed by Benjamin himself, when in Theses on the Philosophy of History, he affirms that "the past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again."[9] The dialectical image, then, can be described as an image of the past which carries the desires of the past generations into the present, and which has the potential to offer the dialectical critic the only vision of historical "truth" we can have access to. The vital and central importance held by this image is captured by Benjamin's own words as he entreats that "every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably."[10]

Benjamin's notion of history, then, rejects the capitalist idea that history comes to us as a chronologically continuous line made of past and present events which inevitably advance and "move with the current" towards their culmination into progress. It is in this conception of history that Benjamin locates the strength of Fascism, as he affirms that "one reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm."[11] Furthermore, the notion of history as a 'natural' progressing moment prevents any liberating political action on the part of the oppressed working classes:Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form.[12]Thus, Benjamin believes that "a critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself."[13] The method by which such a critique can be constructed is to be found in Benjamin's understanding of the principle of montage, whereby the fortuitous juxtaposition of images allows for their elements to remain unreconciled rather than fusing into one "harmonizing perspective".[14] Benjamin's own plan for the Passagen-Werk best exemplifies his interest in the technique of montage:[. . . ] to erect the large construction out of the smallest architectural segments that have been sharply and cuttingly manufactured. Indeed, to discover the crystal of the total event in the analysis of the small, particular moments. This means breaking with vulgar historical naturalism. To grasp the construction of history as such. In the structure of commentary.[15]As Buck-Morss points out, Benjamin's aim (and therefore, the dialectical critic's aim) is not merely to criticize "natural history" as ideology, but to identify "small particular moments" in which the "total historical event" is to be discovered and in which the origin of the present can be found.[16] Thus, as each of this "small, particular moments" is to be identified in an image of the present which contains the dreams of the past, the "commentary", which the dialectical critic needs to provide, is what offers the continuity that allows the fragments to cohere as the philosophical representation of history. Consequently, "history brakes down into images, not into stories";[17] it breaks into dialectical images, into fragments of the dreams of the past.In Paris Capital of the World, Benjamin presents a series of images followed by a discussion on the discourse on modernity. The technique of montage, which presents a collision between images, followed by a discussion,

results in an understanding of history. This understanding of history involves the mediation of the "author's imagination", as the cognitive experience of history requires the active intervention of the thinking subject. However, although Benjamin himself may been seen as the "author" whose "imagination" is required to provide the unifying commentary to the fragmented dialectical images, the liberating potential inherent in his method of "dialectical thinking" can be appropriated by anyone who is willing to be a dialectical critic. Our contemporary interest in Benjamin lies in the potential held by the aestheticism which is connected to his conceptualization of the experience of the world. This means that the Benjaminian aesthetic experience of the world promises to offer the possibility to produce an immediate understanding of the world. It also provides the means to find the critical potential which might allow us to construct an affirmative understanding of the fragmented images of post-modernism.The video-essay on Benjamin, One Way Street attempts to (re)create both the 'history' of Benjamin as "the author", and to employ Benjamin's own dialectical method in order to present the potentially affirmative elements of his thinking that can be used in our contemporary post-modern experience of the world.One way Street's (re)creation of the history of Benjamin as "the author" is concerned with exploring the way in which he died, the reasons for his death, his life and his writing. However, in the attempt to (re)create Benjamin as "the author", the video also constructs the aura of Benjamin. Yet, any attempt to fix 'the author' and his aura remains doubtful, as "the artist" never appears to be the same. The video, in fact, undoes its own (re)creation of Benjamin as the unified historical author. It presents Benjamin, his philosophical method and the ways in which we can now use such method, by using the juxtaposition of two different (verbal and visual) representational systems. The character "Benjamin", as a human being and as a philosopher, is portrayed through many different media and voices. "Benjamin" is played by one male and two female actors, and one of the two female actors also plays Asja, shows us photographs of him and talks about him. In addition, Benjamin's philosophical argument is presented by means of written quotations, and by four experts talking about him and his writings. Moreover, we also, presumably, see his "real" image through several photographs of himself and his family. Thus, Benjamin himself, as well as his "history" are fragmented into images, not into stories.In this sense, we could possibly argue that the video expresses a feeling of nostalgia which may be associated to its mourning for the lost (or impossible) opportunity to believe in the possibility of finding the moment of absolute signification that will reveal the "truth" about Benjamin (and ourselves). Consequently, the ending of the video can be interpreted as both a paradoxical and

overt melodramatic recreation of the scene of dying, as well as an attempt to recuperate the suicidal scene in the form of a crystal image containing the desire for the primal scene; the moment of absolute signification which, however, is forever lost.Moreover, as the video is also concerned with the contemporary reception of Benjamin's writing, it attempts to construct in visual terms the Benjaminian vision of history as fragmented. Thus, the video, intentionally in the mode of Benjamin, attempts to visualize Benjamin's dictum "history brakes down into images, not into stories" by visually presenting fragmented images which are juxtaposed in ways which do not, necessarily, relate to each other. Within this framework, the video has didactic and pedagogic intents as it attempts to show "how" to read images by using Benjamin's conceptualization of dialectical images. Consequently, the multiplicity of voices and images are connected in dialectical tension in order to stimulate the viewers to use the Benjaminian method of "dialectical thinking" as a way to engage themselves in the understanding of the video itself. Hence, the video, following Benjamin's advocacy of montage, questions the notion of inevitability which is connected with the classical narrative style and contrasts it with the technique of montage whereby the significance of the images has to be found in their gap.The title One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin contains the first example of the video's attempt to express Benjamin's idea of fragmented history in Benjaminian visual terms.An early didactic exercise which invites the viewer to apply Benjamin's method to the images presented by the video, and to find the gap between their juxtaposition, is offered when Anson Rabinbach, editor of the New German Critique, talks about the role of fragments in Benjamin's critical discourse. As Rabinbach speaks, the image is simultaneously fragmented and repeated, while, in the bottom left hand corner of the screen, appears the image of a piece of paper containing Benjamin's' signature (another image of Benjamin) and other papers (perhaps containing Benjamin's own writing?) and a hand attempting to grab them. In looking at this image of the hand grabbing these sheets of paper, I ask myself whether the image is visually trying to convey the idea of the possibility to (re)discover and appropriate the remnants of "truth" which Benjamin believes dialectical images contain. However, we are not sure if these papers "really" contain Benjamin's words (or his lost great masterpiece), and this uncertainty reveals the video's attempt to disrupt the idea of the possibility to believe in a transparent relationship with "reality", as well as the attempt to disrupt the investment in the "divinity of the masterpiece".[18]Another example of an exercise for the viewer is to be found in the image of the bicycle. This image presents a

man on a bicycle carrying a radio and riding his bicycle among what I would define as a post-modernist landscape. The video calls the viewer's attention to the image as it presents a change of color of the image's background, which is turned into an unsettling light blue. The image is introduced through the technique of montage, as it is randomly positioned between Susan Buck-Morss talking about her book on Benjamin and images of PortBou in September 1990. Thus, the video is presenting the viewer with an exercise in finding the gap established by the juxtaposing technique of montage, and in attempting to capture what may be a practical example of Benjamin's dialectical image. This image may possibly be an example of "an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again".[19]A further example of an exercise in attempting to understand Benjamin's investment in the idea of the trace of "truth", present in the images of the past, is contained in the image of the gramophone. Once again, the video selects an image which "flashes up at the instant" and asks the viewer to think about it in terms of its ability to offer us a glance into the possibility of a dialectical uncovering of the "true" desires of the past generation.The video's visual attempt to present central parts of Benjamin's writing is best exemplified in the image of the arcade that becomes a department store. Within Benjamin's critical discourse, the image of the arcade occupies a central position. As Buck-Morss explains in the video, the arcade was the first international building style, and it contains the ambivalence of being simultaneously half dream world, commodity and market place. More specifically, the arcade was central to Benjamin as it contained the embryo of the elements of mass-culture such as fashion, the flâneur and the prostitute. Benjamin sees the flâneur and the prostitute as emblematic figures of modernity and he argues that they both have their origins in this space. Furthermore, according to Benjamin, the arcade is the space in which both the images that capitalism creates about itself and its commodity fetish are brought together. Hence, if we want to understand the movement and development of modernity we need to identify these images which are contained in this privileged site. The video juxtaposes the image of the arcade that becomes a department store with images of people in an underground passage of a subway station. As the arcade can be seen as the best representative image of modernity, and therefore the key to its understanding, the underground passage of the subway may be interpreted as a central image of post-modernity. As the flneur and the prostitute are seen as emblematic figures of modernity, both having their origins in the arcade, the people playing instruments, who are a familiar site of the subway underground passage and have their origins in this space, may be seen as emblematic figures of post-modernity. Thus, it may

be suggested that the video is proposing a corresponding central image of post-modernity, in the form of the subway underground passage, to that of modernity in the form of the arcade. Perhaps, Benjamin's analysis of the arcade, which has the purpose of being a tool for his understanding of modernity, can be applied to the subway underground passage (which, by the way, serves similar functions as those served by the arcade) in order to possibly reach an understanding of post-modernity.In this sense, the video seems to be calling for a recuperation of Benjamin's aestheticism of the experience of the world as a possibility to produce some instances of resistance against the hegemony of the capitalist society of the spectacle. Similarly, the utopian dimension of Benjamin's critical discourse may be recuperated in the attempt to find an affirmative critical potential in the post-modernist understanding of history as having ended and collapsed into fragments. It is within this understanding that the video has Lindsay Waters saying that "may be he [Benjamin] does have a key that will help me to understand more about modernity than what people are telling us about post-modernism and so on." Moreover, Benjamin's appeal to contemporary intellectual lies in the appreciation of the ways in which he was able to combine his understanding of visual art and his expertise of literary an philosophic issues, and to use them all together in his comprehension of the world.In conclusion, One Way Street offers us a human aspect of Benjamin's writing and it attempts to (re)create a historical image of Benjamin as "the author". It also questions the very possibility for "the author" to even appear to be unified, as his image is constantly fragmented and conveyed through contrasting media and voices. Conversely, the video investigates the contemporary reception of Benjamin in its attempt to employ his dialectical aestheticism in order to find the critical potential that can allow us, today, to cast a less negative light on the post-modernist society of the spectacle.http://www.otago.ac.nz/DeepSouth/vol1no2/scarparo_issue2.htmlAlphabetInger Christensen, Author, Susanna Nied, Translator New Directions Publishing One of Scandinavia's most honored poets, veteran Danish writer Christensen originally published her book-length Alphabet 20 years ago to great acclaim; this translation by former San Diego State Univ. English instructor Susanna Nied is the first in English and was awarded the American-Scandinavian PEN translation prize. The lengths in lines of each of this slim volume's 14 poems from ""[a]"" to ""[n]"" are based on the Fibonacci sequence. Beginning with zero and one, the sequence runs 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 600; ""[a]"" begins where (0 + 1 = 1). One

assumes the 977 lines ""[o]"" would have required finally overwhelmed the poet and forced her to stop at [""n""]; Ron Silliman's similar alphabetic project makes no such allowances. As used here with controlled repetitions, the sequence gives the whole an almost medieval sense of restriction, as in the last four lines of ""[e]"": ""afterglow exists; oaks, elms,/ junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;/ eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar/ exist, and the future, the future."" Abstracted cold war fears and post-'70s ecological concern and alienation give way to litanies of real world outrages ""chemical ghetto guns exist/ with their old-fashioned, peaceable precision// guns and wailing women, full as/ greedy owls exist; the scene of the crime exists"" which culminate in a post-nuclear holocaust nightmare, with birds and children somehow having survived in caves. The scenario may seem dated, but the threats remain very real, and Christensen's poetic appeal for sanity and humanity remains an abstracted call to action. (Apr.)http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8112-1477-3Christensen often used mathematical models to structure her poetry. In Alfabet, Christensen used an alphabetical sequence where each section begins with a successive letter of the alphabet, along with the Fibonacci mathematical sequence. 

"the first poem has one line, the second poem two, the third three, the fourth five, each number in the sequence being the sum of the previous two (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34). The work stops with the letter n, itself a mathematical symbol, which, as the 14th letter of the alphabet, generates a poem of 610 lines."

Her reasons for using the Fibonacci sequence were that "numerical ratios exist in nature: the way a leek wraps around itself from the inside, and the head of a snowdrop, are both based on this series" and Alfabet is primarily concerned with nature, our relationship with it and impact on it. The poem starts as a celebration of the natural world but the threats to it soon become apparent and whilst 'apricot trees exist' so do 'atom bombs exist'. Repetition is used throughout and far from being annoying it acts as an echo as the tension of the poem builds. Much of Christensen’s work makes use of “systematic” structures on which she hangs her words, as in Alfabet.Here she used the Fibonacci sequence (where the first number is 0, the second is 1 and the subsequent numbers are the sum of the previous two) to stipulate the number of lines for each stanza of this poem. “The numerical ratios exist in nature,” Christensen explained. “The way a leek wraps around itself from the inside, and the head of a sunflower, are both based on this series”. In short, Christensen sought in her poetry the mathematical representation of perfection in the natural world.

While one might ordinarily assume that such self-imposed and artificial constraints would restrict creativity Christensen’s poetry thrives on a playful interaction between the formalised structure and the text. After all, she viewed poetry as being just “a game, maybe a tragic game – the game we play with a world that plays its own game with us.”http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/inger-christensen-experimental-poet-who-used-mathematical-structures-in-her-work-1523088.htmlalphabet begins at the intersection of two systems: the Fibonacci sequence and the Latin alphabet. Like these systems, the poem maps both language and the material world—but rather than organizing the world, alphabetreveals its vitality, discovering freedom just under the surface of constraint. It is entirely appropriate that the governing patterns of alphabet come in the form of numbers and letters. These are human symbols that carry meaning on the most minute level, which, in the case of Christiansen’s poetry, is also the most profound level.http://circumferencemag.org/?p=1012The paper begins with a brief mapping of the local feminist ideals and how it manifests itself through the influx of literary journals/publications dedicated to women and women writers. It acknowledges that Philippine society is (or at least when this paper was published, c.1991) patriarchal, and moves on to critique it in accordance to certain schools of thought. The oppressive nature of a patriarchal society is defined and the traits of the marginalization of women expressed. The woman (as well as the man, although not the focus of the marginalization) in such a society is subject to biases and preconceptions that aren’t, in essence, there to begin with. It goes even deeper and regards these characteristics as removed from the words – and consequently the concepts, used to describe them; as these things are merely social constructs not really reflecting the nature of what it truly is. From the discourse of feminism, the focus moves on to Ms. Marjorie Evasco’s poem: “Dreamweavers”, and a feminist reading of her work. In this interpretation, it looks into the content and structure of the work and challenges the social construct by emphasizing the relationship of language and words to power and oppression, which is a clear trait of a patriarchal society. It is evident how this ideology affects the use of language by either man or woman, the way some words are attributed or identified with a particular gender. “Dreamweavers” plays with these terms and presents an alternative view that transcends and calls for change in context with the Philippine society.David Bayot’s article explains three main things. (1) To familiarize the readers on the how the Philippine society has a patriarchal structure; (2) to explain the different issues regarding concept of feminism plus an overview

of women’s status in the society; and (3) to further understand feminism and the social structure of women with the use of Marjorie Evasco’s poem “Dreamweavers”.

Gender ideology – society’s general thinking (ideas that guide society) towards a certain norm. Philippines’ gender ideology is described to be a patriarchal one, patriarchal meaning the male is being considered as the dominant gender over the female.  The patriarchal system also includes the thinking in terms of binary opposites (woman as the counterpart of man) – women are viewed as weaker than man. The concept of Feminism emerges as a way to repel the issues of patriarchy. Sex role socialization makes it possible for a person to accept patriarchy; girls are more exposed to feminine-inclined work and boys are more likely to do masculine work. The home, school, as well as society serves as agents of sex role socialization. The article mentions issues (few female vocations/professions offered oppressive economic practices and gender discrimination) that further emphasize the role of women and presence of patriarchy.

Marjorie Evasco’s poem opens the idea of patriarchy in society and how women are related to language/ words (relationship between the signified and signifier). Various poststructionalists point out how women are attached to language and how different qualities of women are normally etched into the mind of society.I know only this: that the materials of the imagination are taken from the haphazard paddies of dreams and memories, and that each poem feeds on whatever it needs,’ says Marjorie M. Evasco, a Filipino poet born and raised in Bohol. For Evasco, the creation of poetry is an act of faith and is concerned with the world as those who live presently in it, which thus explains the references towards the origins of certain matter, as well as the elements that make up the earth, which are evident in a majority of her poems. Versatile in terms of language fluency, Marjorie M. Evasco writes in both English and Cebuano. Her first collection of prize-winning poems was about origins, entitled “Dreamweavers.” Poems from this book, such as “To A Child Contortionist Performing at the NPC” and “Sampaguita Song (for a suki at Quirino Highway), provide images of youthful folk experiencing the difficulties of life and arriving at certain realizations about his or her situation or ideas in the poem; hence, the word origins.Her second, which provides Cebuano translations, is entitled “Ochre Tones”, which the poet describes as “a book of changes anchored upon the primary elements of earth, fire, water, and air.” References to creatures—whether inanimate or not—and to the desert and sea are just a few images painted in the other poems from the

collection, such as “Origami” and “Is It the Kingfisher?” Evasco also has a number of other published works that vary in theme and content. The two poems that will be tackled in this paper hail from two different collections: “Ochre Tones” from Marjorie Evasco’s prize-winning collection, Ochre Tones: Poems in English and Cebuano (1999), and “Origin” from her recently published book, Skin of Water: Selected Poems.While Evasco’s primary collection, Dreamweavers, was what she deemed a book of origins, Ochre Tones is, meanwhile, a book of changes. The poems included are thematically enjoined by the elements earth, wind, fire and water. Skin of Water, which consists of English-Spanish translations of Evasco’s most famed poems and includes both old and fresh poetry is, thematically and generally, on the concept of water. Evasco writes her poetry in free verse—verse in which lines are of different widths (Vendler, 2002)—with very humanly, worldly themes. Writing in such a way can be an obstacle, with the need of justifying the presence of a break in a line of a particular poem just one of its many textual courses; that is the beauty in Evasco’s poems, for the presence of every line and break is thoroughly justified in each of her poems through the images she captures and paints for the reader. She provides a certain personification for even the dullest desert creatures in her poems, bringing them to life and making their certain personas seem much more real. Evasco incorporates a number of speech acts in her poems. In “Ochre Tones”, there is the presence of a short narrative, as well as a rhetorical question. “Origin”, meanwhile, is a mere painting of a particular scene. Both poems, as will be discussed in the body of this paper, have particular line spaces, breaks and pauses that are necessary in keeping the tone and mood of either poem—bringing the words to life by mere sound and the formation of words on paper—and in which Evasco is successful at capturing an image. Marjorie Evasco relates both existing and new human experiences to that of natural phenomena (i.e. the rippling of water and kissing of the earth), as well as a certain fluidity of movement to the form and theme of her poems, which are brought to life through sound, taste, texture and shape in the text.“Ochre Tones” by Marjorie Evasco begins on a regal, pious note: “The benediction in the air”—which gives the audience the feeling of the presence of a blessing of some sort. The poem is about new life brought upon the world. That is the specific blessing that the poem refers to. The lizard is the character in the poem. When lizards are born, they take form in a color of semi-opaqueness (“A lizard, translucent and newly-broken”), and proceed to swarm the earth in quick, slithering paces. They are let loose from their shells like fresh, newborn babies, and

welcomed into the world (“kisses the earth”). Lizards move with abrupt speed, making it difficult for them to be held down or captured. The images seen in the line “repeating the ritual dance of marsh and cloud dragons” refer to the sun beating down (in the previous word “sundown”) at the end of the day, where the sun “kisses the earth”, leaving day behind and introducing night. It is a “ritual” because it is a natural occurrence. The sun sets and rises everyday, which is a cycle. With this said, the poem speaks of new life being brought upon the world each day, everyday kissing the earth because it blesses the world with its presence. The beautiful image of “marsh and cloud dragons” is painted clearly by Evasco, allowing the audience to see the clouds hang lower and lower as the day wears on, eventually letting sky and marsh (or wetlands) meet briefly, edges meeting, almost lip-to-lip in a metaphorical kiss. The second stanza of the poem introduces, with subtlety, the persona’s “best friend Grace.” This certain Grace brings upon the representation of the relatives and friends who gather by a new mother’s bedside at the hospital after labor. Grace is the symbol of the visitors who, along with the new mother, welcome the child into the world. These visitors usually sit and converse with the mother and with one another, who provide the mother with advice, or muse on certain topics of conversation. Here, the persona’s friend Grace speaks to her about the importance of newborn babies. In the lines “baby lizards are messengers, presaging heat or rain. She believes in omens” shows her friend’s beliefs and musings about a new child, likening a baby lizard (or a newborn, in general) to a messenger, one who brings a prophecy of some significance about the world and what it will bring. In general, there is the belief that new children—having just been brought out into the world and have not experienced a single thing—are those who will determine what the world will be. It is the youth, or the young, who try out new experiences in the world and who will eventually be the ones to come up with their own inventions: “earth calling the littlest creatures to drink the first mists of evening.” The imagery set by Evasco in terms of drinking the “first mists of evening” is a metaphor for the act of consuming the beauties of life as a newborn child, or as a youth. It refers to the mists of evening because when evening falls daily, the air turns cold and there is certain freshness in the atmosphere. Thus, these new children are those who get a fresh “taste” of the world, having not experienced the realities and hardships that consume life and the world.In the third stanza, a rhetorical question is given:“Who is to say it is instinct, merelyOr moisture-need that makes usCrawl or bend our lizard lipsUnto the ground?....”

The metaphor “lizard lips” refers to the dry, hardened feel of chapped lips due to a certain level of humidity or coolness in the weather. A lizard’s lips are nonexistent, just a thin, hard line of a mouth that is rock-hard and void of movement, except for the routinely opening and closing. With this, the persona is asking the rhetorical question about what it really is that makes us “kiss the earth,” or makes us enjoy life and appreciate the elements that the world has to offer. The question is: is it mere instinct (something people do out of natural habit or because they feel that they must do it) or “moisture-need” (a daily need due to the lack of moisture on our “lizard lips” that inclines us to keep applying it) that lets people “kiss the earth”? The beauty of these metaphors lies in the image of kissing, something done in intimacy or out of love. The persona is asking the audience: do we appreciate life and the world out of mere instinct—doing good because we are afraid of consequences—or because we truly, genuinely love life and appreciate the world that was created for us?“Dusk cools our feversAnd there is joy in this surrender.”

Again, there is the reference to dusk or evening having just fallen, which the poem implies is a time when all is peaceful, not a soul is busy working, and where our sickness (“fevers”) of being oblivious to the beauty of life is “cooled”, dissolved. The reference to “this surrender” is a beautiful metaphor brought out by Evasco, which brings out the irony of surrender and the free beauty of life. Why is there a need to surrender our problems unto the world, when the simplistic beauty of life does not require a problematic system, in the first place? The reality of life is showcased here, where crime and hatred and other forms of negativity encapsulate life, when in fact, the world was created in beauty and out of love. Thus, we find “joy in this surrender”, allowing us to finally realize the beauty of life. In the last stanza:“Even now, the tips of bamboo leavesHold watergems. In the early evening airI remember Grace, and somewhere,An old gecko clicks its rhythmicYes yes yes.”

“Even now” refers to the changing times, the more contemporary present world. It says that despite all of the inventions of technology and the world that people have succumbed to, there are still natural beauties, like “watergems” on the “tips of bamboo leaves.” The last stanza, once again, makes a reference to the peaceful, fresh feel of early evening (“in the early evening air”). The persona remembers the musings of her friend Grace about instincts of man towards appreciating life, and

“somewhere, an old gecko clicks its rhythmic yes yes yes.” The old gecko (another word for a lizard) is the metaphorical image for that newborn lizard who is finally an adult, but who still appreciates the beauty of life, encouraging the audience to do the same with a yes yes yes. The three yeses are repeated for emphasis, a parroted encouragement for adults to appreciate the world as a newborn baby, or a young person, does. Ochre is a pale, brownish-yellow color, which the poet possibly used in her title to describe barren earth, presumably on a desert, or a metaphor for the earth as a whole. Lizards mostly inhabit the desert, which is dry and free of life, but that is the beautiful image brought out in the poem: there is beauty in every part of the earth. The poem brings to life an infamous creature who creeps through the earth, but done beautifully so with the use of the lizard as an objective correlative. It is a poem about appreciating the world and life in the eyes of a new child or a person of youth, even in the dry, barren wasteland that describe the routinely practices in our lives. The poem “Origin”, meanwhile, begins with the recurrence of a dream: “The dream recurs”—which is stated matter-of-factly. But it is highly possible that this dream is not of any ordinariness, for it refers to, “the dream.” There is a sudden line break, followed by a space, before the next lines appear. This line break could possibly be the division between the “dream world” (which expresses the act of dreaming, as a speech act) and the “real world.” The persona states, “The dream recurs”, then the scene shifts from that statement to the persona being in another world. The line breaks in the poem are frequent, some lines consisting of just one word. In the first stanza, the persona refers to him or herself, along with someone else:“In another world, weWakeGod’s first creaturesAliveTo sudden light.”

The persona is in the company of another. The line breaks to highlight an act of movement or doing (“Wake” and “Alive”). These two words refer to movement, that the persona and whoever is in his/her company are engaged in an act of doing something. In this “other world”, the persona wakes and is illuminated by light. This light signifies something new, or possibly a revelation. It can also be said that these “first creatures” are also just being introduced to this new world that they have chanced upon, which brings them to light. The second verse welcomes and acknowledges the presence of the persona and his/her companion:“Pure and slender as dawn

RisingOur bodies exploreThe touch and feel Of worlds.”

There is a movement in the line break to the word “Rising.” Once again, the act of doing something is implied. In the beautiful simile that Evasco has portrayed in the first line, “Pure and slender as dawn”, there is the image of two unharmed, untouched human figures. They are likened to “dawn”, for in the earliest hours of the morning, only a sliver of slender light appears, serving as the announcement of the coming of the morning. In the line “Our bodies explore”, the persona and his/her companion are presumably moving about, exploring the environment that surrounds them, as well as each other. They are introduced to touch and their other senses (“The touch and feel”) of each other, two beings who seem strange and still alienated from one another (“of worlds”). There is also the underlying search for meaning and truth in the presence of the other. The two are still isolated in their own worlds, and the use of the senses they did not know they possessed is being ignited in this stanza. In the third stanza, the concept of the natural and un-processed is clear:“No past intrudesAll lifetimes MergeTo this particleOf timeOnly.”

In the line “No past intrudes”, it is implied that these two creatures are brand new to the world in which they have arisen. They both have no past life that demarcates their beings from the other; they have not yet been marked, labeled, or stereotyped. The word “Merge” denotes, this time, the subtle movement of situation or scene. The two characters (the persona and his/her companion) are thus seen as finally being able to understand one another and recognize the other as a creature very much similar to him/her. In the lines “To this particle/Of time/Only”, the image carried out is that of simplistic movement. It is putting a spotlight on the realization of the two creatures being able to comprehend the situation and world that they are in. The line breaks are evident in order to allow that realization between the two characters to form. It is in that one moment (“this particle/Of time”) that the creatures acknowledge their human form. The presence of a generalization (Vendler, 2002) is evident (“All lifetimes/Merge), in that one particular, simple moment of epiphany.

In the last stanza, the presence of an emotion is already at hand:“Love speeds us toMoveNow.”

After discovering the senses that they possess, as well as the movements of their bodies, the two characters find feeling and emotion within themselves, which slowly allows them to become more and more human. The line break between the words “Move” and “Now” suggest abruptness in the act of love. Also, “Love” here is personified—an abstraction made into a person (Vendler, 2002)—since the concept of love is the controller and commander of an act of speed. The idea of intellect has not yet been introduced, as well; thus, the two characters act on impulse. “In this gardenGod whispers:Come.”

The presence of the word garden that the poet bestows upon the text is a beautiful metaphor for the freshness of a brand new life. In a garden, new flowers, plants, and even some vegetables grow, providing its owner with fresh possessions. The garden symbolizes the setting of the creation and discovery of man since it holds those that are brand new and fresh. It’s owner, therefore, is its creator—God. The last word, “Come”, is featured as another movement, as seen in the line break. In this case, however, there is the presence of a command (Vendler, 2002), by the creator and owner of the world.This poem by Marjorie Evasco is, without a doubt, a piece of literary work that describes with movement and simple detail the creation of man. The first line (“The dream recurs”), broken and apart from the rest of the text, presents the image of a dream as a cherished ideal or aspiration. This dream is the image of the ideal world, of man and woman (or creatures) who never let go of the pureness and innocence that God first bestowed on them upon creation. In this dream world, there is no hatred, no judgments due to past experiences that shape a person, and no inequality (“No past intrudes/All lifetimes/Merge”). But that, in itself, is a only dream (“To this particle/Of time/Only), for only when man was created was he able to follow God and all of His commands (“God whispers:/Come). The poem “Origin” is simply written in free verse, with the tone being that of awe and mesmerization at a world that is our ideal, our want. The creation of man is painted perfectly by Evasco in the gradual progression of man’s realizations: awakening, exploring, realizing, and calling. Marjorie M. Evasco was a poet with worldly, humanly ideas. Whether it was about the origin of man or the beauty of the earth, all of the images she portrayed in her

poems were done so using unlikely juxtapositions (i.e. a lizard to a newborn, human baby) and authoritative figures (i.e. friends, God). The significance of the two poems by Marjorie Evasco, “Ochre Tones” and “Origin”, is their ability to enhance the beauty of the world and the importance of new life. Both poems are thematic in terms of the pureness of man and the world (“Origin”) and the importance of appreciating life in the eyes of a newborn child or a youth (“Ochre Tones”). Both poems, thus, give importance to the meaning of life, as well as the concept of what is new. New, in a sense, signifies life or birth. In the two poems, life comes in the forms of both ideal human beings already in adult form, as well as a newborn creature, be it a human being or a lizard. It can be said that Marjorie Evasco wanted to highlight the beauty of life and the world. Through her poems, written with fluidity in free verse, the unique images she captures about the world and creation give justice to the importance of the new. In general, there is the belief that new children or new creations—having just been brought out into the world and have not experienced a single thing—are those who will determine what the world will be. They are not necessarily those who experience the first of everything in the world, since the world had been populated long ago, but they are those who experience life for the first time, without any judgments or speculations that will hinder the joyful experience of life. There is the absence of hatred against a person, for exploration and discovery are ongoing. There is the absence of resentment, complaint, and disgust, for everything is new to these brand new worldly creations, and there is no sense of and comparison between what is necessarily good or bad yet. It is through these poems by Marjorie Evasco that the misdeeds and sinfulness of a person or creature (and of the world) are plainly forgotten. She is a poet who chooses to implore the goodness of a person, creature or of the world as a whole, and who honors them through the fluidity of movement to the form and theme of her poems, which are brought to life through sound, taste, texture and shape in the text.Verse 1.You are all entitled to your experiences that determine how things appear to you. Each of us might see the same thing differently, but in the end an apple is still an apple.

Verse 2. This is pretty well explains itself. Earth= Somewhere to stay. Water well= We carry the water. We have to tend a fire. Air song=The wind, and Ether that which our spirits rise up to heaven upon.

Verse 3. Poets use a combination of new words to gain power to express themselves in ways they have never done before.

Verse 4.A fire will always sing to you if you listen. A stove under water cannot be lit and a well filled with earth cannot hold water, they are as dead.

Verse 5. The words we use and how they are spelled, are clearly translatable and easy to read if one uses the power of ones brain. Ocular =Of or relating to or resembling the eye.

Verse 6. Women from distant lands from all over the world, are far more knowledgeable than just one. Like a coil of rope which is made up of single strands. As a single strand it is easily broken, but bind a thousand together and it is far more difficult to break.

Verse 7. Brings the whole poem together. It is a poem about women for women. Though they may have their differences, once they band together they are invincible. Not only that, it tells of the strength of any woman, both physically, spiritually and mentally.We are entitled to our owndefinition of worldswe have in common:

We have the right to see our reality differently even though it's constant.

earth house (stay)................your reality is on earth, solid and strong (stable), then stay

water well (carry).................Your reality is on water, flowing and indefinite (uncertain, full of doubt), you should support yourself (carry)

fire stove (tend)...............Your reality is on a stove (ticking bomb), you should be cautious (tend)

air song (sigh)..................Your reality is on air, with no support,(you do not who you are, who you want to be) so you exhale inevitable disappointment (sigh)

ether dream (die).................Your reality is your dreamworld, and you're completely dazed in it. (you are lying to yourself) so you die (not the physical death but more of your principle death)

and try out new combinationswith key wordsunlocking power

You could modify your beliefs for the better or for worst,

houses on fire sing!.....you are in solid ground and you have a dose of excitement and risk. (sing can pertain to rejoice)

stove under water stay.....your uncertain of your own demons, don't rush yourself and be sure of it, analyze (stay)

earth filled well die.....you solid belief is flooded by doubt (die may be your crumbling principle)

the spells and spellingsof our vocabulariesare ocularin translation

The different aspects of our beliefs are perceptible if understood.

one woman in Pagnito-ananother in Solentinamestill another in Harxheimand many other womennaminghalf of the world together

Solentiname, Pagnito-an, Harxheim are really just names.

and many other womennaminghalf of the world together

successful women who has made a name for themselves.

can move their earth............they can shake their stabilitymust house their fire...........stabilize their anger/imperfectionsbe water to their song..........support to their lifewill their dream well..........Want their reality in the clouds be a dream and not a nightmare.