Slate magazine celebrates National Poetry Month in their typically and amusingly perverse way with this interesting piece, “In Praise of Difficult Poetry” by Robert Pinsky.
I was waiting for Wallace Stevens to come up in the article (though I found his poem one of the most accessible of those mentioned). I want to include an allusion to one of his poems in my novel-in-progress, Prodigal Daughters, but, frankly, I am afraid to, terrified I’ve misinterpreted the poem in some significant, embarrassing, humiliating-for-life way. Freshman poetry class all over again where someone (not me!) thought that "Leda and the Swan" by William Butler Yeats was about a pet bird.
Smart people are welcome to explain Wallace Stevens to me, so I can use the allusion (which is actually the title) with confidence: “Not ideas about the thing but the thing itself.” Doesn’t it sound Very Important?
