Recorded while I was unwilling to hike any further up the snowcovered and avalanche-prone Mount Timpanogos. I love the trail, but I don't want to get caught in a avalanche, and I've seen them from too close up there in the past. So I recorded this podcast about a great modernist poem.
TEXT OF POEM:“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
by Wallace Stevens
1
Among twenty snowy mountains
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
2
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds
3
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
4
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
5
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
6
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
7
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
8
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
9
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
10
At the sight of the blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
11
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds
12
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
13
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Episode 4.17 Kay Ryan’s “This Life”
Episode 4.16 Three Poems by Stephen Crane
Episode 4.15 Wordsworth's "Lines Written in Early Spring"
Episode 4.14 Walter Scott’s “Innominatus”
Episode 4.13 Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain"
Episode 4.12 W. H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Episode 4.11 Jim Harrison’s “I Believe”
Episode 4.10 E. E. Cummings “sweet spring is your,” “old mr ly,” and “pity this busy monster,manunkind”
Episode 4.09 An Easter reading of Rudyard Kipling’s “A Nativity”
Episode 4.08 Mark Gibbons’s “My Life as a Capitalist”
Episode 4.07 John Donne’s “Good Friday 1613, Riding Westward”
Episode 4.06 Dylan Thomas’s “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower”
Episode 4.05 Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art”
Episode 4.04 The anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem “The Battle of Brunanburh”
Episode 4.03 John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
Episode 4.02 Czeslaw Milosz’s “And Yet The Books”
Episode 4.01 John Ashbery’s “Just Walking Around”
Episode 3.11: Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Preacher Ruminates Behind the Sermon"
Episode 310: Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude"
Episode 309: Karl Shapiro's "Interlude III"
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