My friend was talking about Wallace Stevens the other day, and I realized that I don't know much about Wallace Stevens, I'd always avoided him because I didn't understand his aesthetic. But. If you are talking about poems to be comitted to memory, then it's the Stevens poems that pop up: "Emperor of Ice Cream" (the corpulent one, the roller of fat cigars)--why? Maybe he was working on the problem of how to turn the psyche (the privatemost of utterings) into a civic utterance, a public utterance. Whereas someone like Ashbery is concerned with the psyche's utterings, but not necessarily turning them into something civic.

So while I was thumbing through my Stevens book I found this, which seems applicable to the recent posts. I don't think he intended it as a poem. Anyway, I'd never seen it before, so I will post it.

[Prose statement on the poetry of war]

The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things. In the presence of the violent reality of war, consciousness takes the place of the imagination. And consciousness of an immense war is a consciousness of fact. If that is true, it follows that the poetry of war as a consciousness of the victories and defeats of nations, is a consciousness of fact, but of heroic fact, of fact on such a scale that the mere consciousness of it affects the scale of one's thinking and constitutes a participating in the heroic. It has been easy to say in recent times that everything tends to become real, or, rather, that everything moves in the direction of reality, that is to say, in the direction of fact. We leave fact and come back to it, come back to what we wanted fact to be, not to what it was, not to what it has too often remained. The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact. It goes on everywhere, even in the periods that we call peace. But in war, the desire to move in the direction of fact as we want it to be and to move quickly is overwhelming.
Nothing will ever appease this desire except a consciousness of fact as everyone is at least satisfied to have it be.
_____

Back to Lucia: I'm still chewing on this. There is of course a problem with fact right now, that is has, in a flash almost, become so fluid that fact doesn't exist. At least in its "represented" forms. If fact was in opposition to the imagination in the WWII days of Stevens' writing, the fluidness of the new non-facts still aren't equivalent to the imagination. Or are they? Your imagination can create a cyber reality where you fly around on a pterodactyl. (Dactyl!) Or you quit typing and go outside to stare at the trees, so that's what I'm going to do.