The maker of catastrophe invents the eyeAnd through the eye equates ten thousand deaths
With a single well-tempered apricot, or say,
An egg-plant of good air.
- Extracts from Addresses to the Academy of Fine Ideas, Wallace Stevens
Stevens was always trying to get beyond the artificial to the entirety and immediacy of things - and yet his medium was words. How can these invented containers evoke the intimacy of real life? The poet is a trickster or magician - by recombining words in unexpected ways, his hope is to conjure a world out of thin air by sheer startlement.
Here a tower shining bright
Once stood gleaming in the night
Where now there's just the rubble
In the hole...
- White City, Shane MacGowan
Sometimes, only the container is left - the words are the shell for something vanished, or for something that never quite manifested. It's interesting to compare the typically rollicking song as performed with the quiet lyrics (or at least for those of us who are Shane MacGowan fanatics).
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