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"In certain moods the horror of a word is the meaning it defends against all comers; so metaphor is the device by which one undermines that defense. In Stevens’ 'Someone Puts a Pineapple Together,' the someone contemplates 'A wholly artificial nature, in which / The profusion of metaphor has been increased.' If you put a pineapple together and see metaphors becoming more profuse, you release yourself from psychological determinations, you become a performative gesture and are happy to find yourself in that state. But then a scruple may assert itself:
Presumably a bad metaphor murders a good one: bad in the sense of telling lies, ignoring the truths that can’t honorably be ignored."
— Denis Donoghue, "The Motive for Metaphor," |
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
A Defense of Meaning
A Geometric Glitter
"In the planes that tilt hard revelations on
The eye, a geometric glitter, tiltings …."
— Wallace Stevens, "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together" (1947)
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Art and Geometry
See "Behind the Glitter" (a recent magazine article
on Oslo artist Josefine Lyche), and the much more
informative web page Contact (from Noplace, Oslo).
From the latter —
"Semiotics is a game of ascribing meaning, or content, to mere surface."
Monday, November 19, 2012
Poetry and Truth
From today's noon post—
"In all his poems with all their enchantments
for the poet himself, there is the final enchantment
that they are true. The significance of the poetic act
then is that it is evidence. It is instance and illustration.
It is an illumination of a surface,
the movement of a self in the rock.
Above all it is a new engagement with life.
It is that miracle to which the true faith of the poet
attaches itself."
— Wallace Stevens at Bard College, March 30, 1951
Stevens also said at Bard that
"When Joan of Arc said:
Have no fear: what I do, I do by command.
My brothers of Paradise tell me what I have to do.
these words were the words of an hallucination.
No matter what her brothers of Paradise drove her to do,
what she did was never a poetic act of faith in reality
because it could not be."
There are those who would dispute this.
Some related material:
"Ageometretos me eisito."—
"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."—
Said to be a saying of Plato, part of the
seal of the American Mathematical Society—
A poetic approach to geometry—
"A surface" and "the rock," from All Saints' Day, 2012—
— and from 1981—
Some mathematical background for poets in Purgatory—
"… the Klein correspondence underlies Conwell's discussion
of eight heptads. These play an important role in another
correspondence, illustrated in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis, that may be used to picture actions
of the large Mathieu group M24."
Speech
Speech by Wallace Stevens upon accepting
an honorary degree from Bard College in 1951—
Transcription of conclusion:
"In all his poems with all their enchantments
for the poet himself, there is the final enchantment
that they are true. The significance of the poetic act
then is that it is evidence. It is instance and illustration.
It is an illumination of a surface,
the movement of a self in the rock.
Above all it is a new engagement with life.
It is that miracle to which the true faith of the poet
attaches itself."
— Wallace Stevens at Bard College, March 30, 1951
Monday, June 18, 2012
Surface
"Poetry is an illumination of a surface…."
— Wallace Stevens
Some poetic remarks related to a different surface, Klein's Quartic—
This link between the Klein map κ and the Mathieu group M24
is a source of great delight to the author. Both objects were
found in the 1870s, but no connection between them was
known. Indeed, the class of maximal subgroups of M24
isomorphic to the simple group of order 168 (often known,
especially to geometers, as the Klein group; see Baker [8])
remained undiscovered until the 1960s. That generators for
the group can be read off so easily from the map is
immensely pleasing.
— R. T. Curtis, Symmetric Generation of Groups ,
Cambridge University Press, 2007, page 39
Other poetic remarks related to the simple group of order 168—
Friday, August 25, 2006
Friday August 25, 2006
Today's birthday:
Sean Connery
"Poetry is an illumination of a surface,
the movement of a self in the rock."
— Wallace Stevens, introduction to
The Necessary Angel, 1951
Welcome.
First edition, 1936