No one should mistake my offhand comments as substantial, though I found it interesting to be the superstratum of a kerfuffle transpiring several layers below me, since the sad fact is...I do not look much at this cyberspatial nooklet. But I did look a little.

Modernism especially lobbied for the imagination's privacy, which I suppose all artists guard (maybe my imagination's not so private because my real life is, now that I don't much go out.) But that privacy hangs balanced against the reader's privacy when he-she sits down with the poem--there are strings that do the hanging, make the balance, and to cut the strings (=disdain the act of communication) was modernism's great disservice. Or so sez me/said me.

Of course, I in turn used to disdain Wallace Stevens. That pompous obscurant whose poems, especially that one about a jar, really twisted my panties. But wait: so how come his are the poems that stick in the mind? Those ones we don't understand? Sticking in the mind would seem to be the best evidence of a populist aesthetic.

These thoughts I thank while sitting on the back porch with my baby sitter (and it's me who must be baby-sat in case calamity strikes) one afternoon of late. It was lovely, though it sounds so phony-baloney, to read Stevens out loud on a fine day. She called my attention to this poem, which I didn't know, and which seems like an elegy to the self, though I don't know whether Stevens wrote it when he was old. It is the last poem in the edition of his selected poems that I own. The meanings and the imagination behind the meanings remain private, though it communicates openly in terms of its simple language and its appeal to the brain's capacity for memorizing:

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

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The poem makes a better statement about imagination and privacy than I could make. The poem is also of a piece with his prose statement about the poetry of war.