A perfect Poem

Thirteen Ways of Looking At a Blackbird might not be the best poem ever written, but it’s among a handful of perfect poems. It reveals without explanation, it interprets the world and implies complexity while remaining simple and humble, it has the meter of a jazz drummer.

 

Public schools in the states insist on teaching American literature; they do not teach Wallace Stevens. For the first century or so it’s Nathanial Hawthorne, who, you know, is A-Okay, but he hasn’t put out in a while, and, James Fennimore Fucking Cooper, who, thank the powers that be, is dead. Real Dead. Deader than his vapid work. Then they used to linger on Mark Twain a while, I don’t know, I think Tom and Huck got chucked from several school systems for the N-word.

 

I’m as liberal as the next guy (with my winter weight I might be the next guy too) liberal enough where it smacks of censorship and a kind of racism. The public schools don’t respect the kids enough to try teaching puddin’head Wilson, and the actual puddin’heads would probably bitch anyhow.

 

Then they sort of go to Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, and, in a lot of schools those guys are AP class fodder. Poetry wise I remember in high school Walt Whitman and Robert fucking Frost. Frost is hard to forget. Where Stevens reveals; Frost explains. Where Stevens meter is free; Frost’s sounds like Johnny’s First Poem. I can’t even agree with the premises of that fucking snowy wood poem; I’d go off trail.

 

Whitman, I remember being taught, after a fashion, because of the hag that taught at my high school. She licked her ancient dry lips while reading to teenagers “… limpid livid jets of love …” That and I read Ray Bradbury’s short story collection I Sing The Body Electric when I was like ten and was curious where the reference was from.

 

Public school also taught Dead British guys too. What about private schools? How the fuck would I know? I kind of imagine it’s similar, I don’t think public schools try too, or even want too, suck. It seems like you could pick up the curriculum without being too sneaky. Though most people don’t learn this until college, the quality of your education is really up to you. What mandatory public school does, in theory, is teach the reticent a foundation for seeking an understanding of the world. A case could be made, I suppose, that fiction doesn’t enhance an understanding of the world. Perhaps my only argument would be to the speaker ‘You’re not reading it properly’. I don’t think schools, public or private, teach you how to read it properly, I think it’s a numbers game; enough exposure and you’re bound to find something that speaks to you, though, probably not James Fennimore fucking cooper.

 

There’s a lot of kid’s story about the wonder of reading, being transported to magical realms of the imagination. I mean the Princess Bride is probably dead even with public school teachers on getting kids interested in reading. Yes, the irony is not lost me that it’s a movie, though, it might be a book as well, I don’t know.

 

The best kind of teacher is one that allows you access to whatever you’re curious about. Sure, that poor bastard and/or bitch gets abused by more than half his students, but when it works it works very well. I don’t know how many private schools do that. The Montessori method kind of does that within a framework, but I don’t know that it works quite as well inside a framework. There’s a thrill of conspiracy when a teacher does that for you outside the framework, when you get to make choices from more possibilities than you were aware of. I had a music teacher like that. Reading wise I just lived in a house full of books and music. I was never told not to listen to something or not to read it. Um, realistically I probably should have been.

 

I don’t know that I’m all that smart or well rounded, but I do have a real claim to eclectic. Everybody says their taste in music is eclectic (or, you know, varied, depending on whether they know the word eclectic). With a lot of people that means like Country AND western or Butt Rock AND prog rock, or Rap AND hip hop. Or it means they know a few songs outside their favorite genre that they don’t mind listening too. It’s ok, eclectic doesn’t really have positive or negative connotations, one could even pretend it’s synonymous with Undecided.

 

Again, I had a really good music teacher in public school. I mean, my dad was a musician, we had albums of all three speeds and I was a bit of a prodigy before I even met that teacher. What he did that was so miraculous is actually taught kids music appreciation instead of just playing shit that kids liked at the time. For a year I went to at least one classical show a week ranging from symphonies to four-piece motets and fugues. That in and of itself didn’t teach me much, well, not about music. Writing a short paper of each concert did. It wasn’t for the grade, I was acing the class from the first day. It was relaxing into a critique. I did that with rock concerts, bluegrass festivals and jazz bands too.

 

And that’s why they teach English by having you read shit. The very foundation of critical thought is language, otherwise it’s just thought, like, in your head. Any form of expression you can learn aids you in expressing yourself in any way you have to or want to. As social animals are personal and professional life is a series of asking for what we want or what we can give; it’s not a skill you want to be mediocre. You don’t want to be James Fennimore Fucking Cooper.

 

 

 

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

 

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

 

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

 

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

 

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

 

VI

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.

 

VII

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?

 

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

 

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

 

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

 

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

 

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

 

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

—- Wallace Stevens