I'll Touch Your Children with MY Milk Wand!

"Out of the seagull cries and wind
On this strange shore I build
The virgin. They laugh to hear
How I endow her, standing
Hair mocked by the sea"

from "To Liberty," a fragment

Today is a holiday--I was finally able to pick up a copy of Hart's collected poems, which means that I can post entire strophes and poems now, instead of whatever measly few lines I was able to scrawl on a napkin before they hustled me out of the bookstore.

In this interpretation, I have cast the speaker of the poem as a devil-eyed cow. The cow is "building" a grilled cheese sandwich resembling the Virgin Mary with flamboyant streams of milk--the whole scene is reminiscent of those horrible Kraft commercials where the cow fairy touches children with her milk wand and makes their sandwiches fill up with cheese, except in my version, the cow is gripping her own udders between clumsy hooves and spraying milk directly on the Virgin's face. You will surely laugh to see how she endows her. On the same beach stands Cousin Itt, who stares philosophically across the water while the ocean taunts, "I'm fingering your girlfriend with an octopus RIGHT NOW!"

Thank God for Biblical Clip-Art

Gorillas die--and so do humanists--who keep
Comparisons clear for evolution's non-escape
And man the deathless target, of his own weak sheep...

from "I Have That Sure Enclitic," a fragment

I apologize for the sad delay; this masterpiece took me much longer than I was expecting, what with having to fuse so many disparate elements--gun, sheep, tombstones, Christopher Lambert--into a coherent piece of art. After all is said and done, I am quite pleased with the result. I think you will find the clip-art I used as a background extremely beautiful--I love the way the shepherd's hand has disappeared wholly into that sheep's hungry ass. You'd think this was an ingenious touch of mine, but I can assure you that it was present in the original drawing. Also, I have no idea why one of its hind legs tapers off bloodlessly at the knee.

As for my own subtle embroideries, I have depicted the sheep shooting lasers out of their eyes at the unkillable shepherd; one of the sheep has taken the further measure of arming itself with a gun, which will do it no good. You can tell the sheep are weak because they have lady-breasts and one of them is shouting, "Let me show you my little enclitic, Christopher Lambert!" I arrived at this version after a great deal of trial and error, having first given them parasols and trailing tampon strings between their legs.

Totally Worth the Undereye Rash, I Think You'll Agree

Invariably when wine redeems the sight,
Narrowing the mustard scansions of the eyes,
A leopard ranging always in the brow
Asserts a vision in the slumbering gaze.

from "The Wine Menagerie"

This is the best picture that Elegant Choice managed to take of me in the three seconds after I had applied large gobs of stone-ground mustard to my face and before that same mustard began to burn so, so badly. So badly. So badly that I hardly had the strength to Photoshop a gangling bald man tattooed like a jungle cat onto my forehead--I persevered, though, and I'm so glad I did. I hope to God you people appreciate my daily sacrifices.

There Is a Line You Must Not Cross, but Round These Parts We Generally Ignore It

Cuchulainn has posted a brain-bending interpretation of the last line of "Voyages I" over at his non-blog--go look!

Ana Makes Habitable My Heart with Furniture and Houseplants of Pure Joy

I have been full of moody lousiness for the past few days, which has prevented me from giving birth to any more delicious drawings, but this morning Ana swooped into my inbox with a timely piece of art and rescued me from my doldrums. She writes: "I have attempted an artistic rendering of the first stanza of 'At Melville’s Tomb', albeit with a slightly contemporary, political air. The lines are as follows:

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

In this particular rendering, D. Rumsfeld is the mythical He (Melville won’t mind); he observes the dice of drowned men’s bones (i.e. the vote) as they bequeath the Senate unto the wave, emblematic of Freedom. As he watches, the numbers gleaned from those selfsame dice beat to Playboy upon a dusty shore.

I hope you won’t object to the small liberties taken in the interpretation of Crane’s poem."

Object? Hardly. I wallow in small liberties of interpretation like so many hippos, as you have almost certainly learned by now. I delight in the many layers of this particular contribution: the looming head and crooked finger of the bygone bastard himself, the metaphorical significance of the dice and their numbers, and the obligatory high-minded sexual euphemism. The numbers are beating...off! Well-played, Ana. The hippos of my earlier metaphorical wallowing now tromp in the squealing mud of your brain-power and bask in the rays of your wit.

What This Hart Crane Party Really Needs: Part Two

Where the cedar leaf divides the sky
I heard the sea.
In sapphire arenas of the hills
I was promised an improved infancy.

from "Passage"

Infancy is pretty delightful in the first place, I think we can all agree--what with the continual rubbing of ointments and the angelic hairlessness--but the one thing that might make it slightly nicer is extra breasts. At first I just drew a regular baby rolling in the sapphire hills, but then I realized that I could add another dimension of poignancy if I used Babyfaced Dino instead, whose turbulent friendship with the character Breast Cob is a constant reminder to him that his infancy was a poverty of merely two. The dino body rollicks with anticipation, and the fat-legged baby face screams with excitement at the promise of more.

What This Hart Crane Party Really Needs Is Some Half-Naked Women

Cuchulainn writes: "Here's an ice-breaking eyesore for the "I Heart Hart" party. As you know, I tend to wax pedantic, so you'll surely want to compress the introduction of this masterpiece into your own, pithy words. It's pretty self-explanatory, but here goes:

It is a violent scene, from the first movement of Hart Crane's 'Porphyro in Akron'. The setting is a street in downtown Akron, Ohio, and in this Old World collision, the Greek immigrant is represented by Elizabeth Stamatina Fey, whose heritage is Greek, and about whom I often have somewhat classically Greek thoughts. The Swede is model Victoria Silvstedt, conjuring that memory of her beloved Fjords that dangles within her ample bosom like a locket.

Rising from the street grating, miasma-like, is hip-hop diva Pink. She looks perhaps pensive or impatient, and is imploring us with her formidable, concentrated brainwaves to Get This Party Started.

PORPHYRO IN AKRON

I.

Greeting the dawn,

A shift of rubber workers presses down

South Main.

With the stubbornness of muddy water

It dwindles at each cross-line

Until you feel the weight of many cars

North-bound, and East and West,

Absorbing and conveying weariness, ---

Rumbling over the hills.

Akron, "high place", ---

A bunch of smoke-ridden hills

Among rolling Ohio hills.

The dark-skinned Greeks grin at each other

In the streets and alleys.

The Greek grins and fights with the Swede, ---

And the Fjords and the Aegean are remembered.

The plough, the sword,

The trowel, ---and the monkey wrench!

O City, your axles need not the oil of song.

I will whisper words to myself

And put them in my pockets.

I will go and pitch quoits with old men

In the dust of a road."

To which I responded: "You know how sometimes when you have been making out too long, your teeth start to feel like they are being zapped with joyousness or whatever? That's happening to me right now."

Bless you, Cuchulainn. This party could not have asked for a more ingenious or sweet-smelling foot to start out on.

Crane: His Thoughts Can Kill

Biography:

Modern American Poetry

Poems:

Modern American Poetry

Oldpoetry

Academy of American Poets

The Complete Poems

Articles:

New Yorker

New Criterion

New Yorks Times Archives

Washington Post (In Which a Certain Fucker Asserts That Hart Crane Was a Better Poet Than Wallace Stevens--You Fucking Wish, Merle)

We Will Make Our Meek Adjustments

Cuchulainn has spoken: Hart Crane wants a party! I think this is a truly excellent choice; I have been revisiting the man's work over the past few days and I have a thousand ideas for costumes, drawings, and cartoons. It's already the 3rd, so we had better behave like very fast animals in order to make up for lost time. Hart Crane, your party begins NOW.

As of this very minute, I am accepting Hart Crane submissions at happybirthdaywallace at yahoo dot com, since I see no reason to get a new email address each month. I will post your contributions as they come, starting with a few of my own--and possibly Cuchulainn's, too, if he desires to be a trailblazer. I'll also be posting a ton of Hart Crane links and resources as soon as I can--there has been a great deal of revived interest in him lately, due to the recent publication of his poems and letters by Library of America, so there's a lot to sift through. Note: I was previously unaware of how completely awesome-looking he was. No wonder Cleveland wanted a statue of him looking like a stony dandy!

We Do Not Prove the Existence of the Poem: Day Infinity

Here is a picture of Wallace Stevens giving a total blowjob to the word "weather," as described in the eleventh section of "A Primitive Like an Orb":

Here, then, is an abstraction given head,
A giant on the horizon, given arms,
A massive body and long legs, stretched out,
A definition with an illustration, not
Too exactly labelled, a large among the smalls
Of it, a close, parental magnitude,
At the centre on the horizon, concentrum, grave
And prodigious person, patron of origins.

Do you like his frilled shirt? I do. I wanted to make this drawing extra-classy because the last technical day of the Wallace Stevens Emperor of Ice-Cream Cakes party was two days ago, and I wanted to award our hero one last eyeful of my sumptuous art to propel him through the next hundred years of bored afterliving.

This party is far too majestic to let die, so I have decided that we should devote the rest of our lives to creating artistic desecrapretations of the poems we love. Together we will pick a different poet each month to massage with our collected talents, beginning with three poets that will be chosen by our prizewinners. That's right, my geniuses, I am awarding you Intangible Prizes of Imperial Choice--Cuchulainn will pick a poet for November, Tony will pick a poet for December, and Ana will pick a poet for January. I will, of course, continue to welcome any Wallace Stevens submissions I receive as long as our eternal party here lasts, since we have only managed to scratch the surface of his euphemistic brilliance in the past few weeks, and also because I am kind of disappointed that I never got to dress up like a silentious porpoise.

I anxiously await the decisions of Cuchulainn, Tony, and Ana. I trust the judgment of each of these people implicitly, and though I will be rooting very strongly for James Whitcomb Riley to be the second mastermind to receive my nuanced treatments, I will be delighted to accept whichever poets they choose. More news as it comes, little partygoers--I hope you will stay all night and well into the morning.

HAPPY PONDEROUS AUTUMNAL HALLOWALLACE

Hallowallace! That is what Ana, who is rich in cleverness, named it. She writes: "alright. i thought before October ran out i HAD to contribute in some fashion--here is a PONDEROUS, AUTUMNAL HALLOWALLACE. yes, i'm yelling. with joy!" As did I when I laid my eyes on her creation. I was sadly unable to post this yesterday, seeing as how I was attending many dozens of frightening parties with my wealthy and attractive friends*, but Wallace does not mind, seeing as how he is dead and the concept of days and lateness are so silly to him now. The quote "inanimate in an inert savoir" is taken from "The Plain Sense of Things," which I will reproduce here in its entirety because I love it so much and it is so appropriate for the bygone scary holiday.

The Plain Sense of Things

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

We have not come to the end of the imagination yet, though, my friends. I will make a surprising announcement later today**, when I also announce what prizes I will be awarding the three geniuses who won the contests. Be full of anticipation!

*This is untrue.
**And by "later today," I mean "tomorrow," because my ultimate drawing is not quite finished yet. I think you'll find it worth the wait, though. Extra apologies to my three geniuses who have been waiting for news of their prizes!

I Am Transparent Like Water, and Tony Williams Splashes His Huge Feet in Me

Tony Williams writes: What I like most here is the way the deep-sleeping eel’s steadfast goodness is refusing to get into a slanging match with the perverse marine, presumably because it knows it is ‘That Which Cannot Be Fixed’, so is saving its watery breath. I’m surprised to note there is no golden solvent here, though. Ooh aah.

You are correct, Tony! The line is "Sleep deep, good eel, in your perverse marine" from part one of "Two Versions of the Same Poem."

Two Versions of the Same Poem

That Which Cannot Be Fixed
I.
Once more he turned to that which could not be
fixed.
By the sea, insolid rock, stentor, and said:

Lascar, is there a body, turbulent
With time, in wavering water lies, swollen

With thought, through which it cannot see? Does it
Lie lengthwise like the cloud of sleep, not quite

Reposed? And does it have a puissant heart
To toll its pulses, vigors of its self?

Lascar, and water-carcass never-named,
These vigors make, thrice-triple-syllabled,

The difficult images of possible shapes,
That cannot now be fixed. Only there is

A beating and a beating in the centre of
The sea, a strength that tumbles everywhere,

Like more and more becoming less and less,
Like space dividing its blue and by division

Being changed from space to the sailor's metier,
Or say from that which was conceived to that

Which was realized, like reason's constant ruin.
Sleep deep, good eel, in your perverse marine.

II.
The human ocean beats against this rock
Of earth, rises against it, tide by tide,

Continually. And old John Zeller stands
On his hill, watching the rising and falling, and
says:

Of what are these the creatures, what element
Or--yes: what elements, unreconciled

Because there is no golden solvent here?
If they were creatures of the sea alone,

But singular, they would, like water, scale
The uptopping top and tip of things, borne up

By the cadaver of these caverns, half-asleep.
But if they are of sea, earth, sky--water

And fire and air and things not discomposed
From ignorance, not an undivided whole,

It is an ocean of watery images
And shapes of fire, and wind that bears them
down.

Perhaps these forms are seeking to escape
Cadaverous ululations. Rest, old mould...

Ana Bozicevic-Bowling, who is my sister in haircuts, wrote in with the correct answer a very short while after Tony, so I am making her the runner-up and she will get a prize as well. I finally decided what the prizes will be: they are valuable beyond comprehension, I'll say that much, and I'll announce them tomorrow.

Where's Your Ham Radio Now, Cuchulainn: Day Soupy-Trom

I had originally planned to post this picture as a regular entry, but when I finished it I saw it would make a fantastic contest entry, so I'm throwing caution to the wind and doing TWO contests this month. Your job is to whip out your collected Wallace Stevens and hunt wildly to discover which line of which poem is depicted in this extraordinarily professional-looking drawing. Hint: the poem in question was originally included in the book Transport to Summer. As usual, send your guesses to happybirthdaywallace at yahoo dot com, and the first person who guesses correctly will get a life-changing prize. Cuchulainn won the first contest handily, so the rest of you must rise up and piss artistically on the fire of his victory.

You Don't Hear the Word Jagoff Much These Days: Day Warny Fob

How to Live. What to Do

Last evening the moon rose above this rock
Impure upon a world unpurged.
The man and his companion stopped
To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them
In many majesties of sound:
They that had left the flame-freaked sun
To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock
Massively rising high and bare
Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown
Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor crested image,
No chorister, nor priest. There was
Only the great height of the rock
And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound
It made, away from the muck of the land
That they had left, heroic sound
Joyous and jubilant and sure.

The sun is freaked because she is on fire! I decided to make her face like a pig's because pigs are the animals that most want to be set on fire-- all day, every day--because they know they smell so fucking fine when they are burning up like that.

Rebecca Loudon Has a Brain Full of Honey: Day Noofter-Fo

Rebecca Loudon proves herself once again to be an indefatigable perpetrator of loveliness. From The Comedian as the Letter C:

Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex.

If anybody around these parts is a musician of pears, it is certainly Rebecca. For that matter, if anybody around these parts is a Socrates of snails, it is certainly me, in the sense that I like to touch my students with them.

P.S. Rebecca writes: "The blue music is the Bach partita III for unaccompanied violin. I had to play it for an audition. If you look closely you can see my fingerings and the date of the audition on top of the music. The reason it is blue is because I dropped the book in the bath tub 2 days before my audition and had to dry it with a hair dryer." She's telling the truth--go see for yourselves!

Cuchulainn Can Read My Mind

Not half an hour had passed after posting the last entry when I received an email from the formidable Cuchulainn, who is apparently listening to all my thoughts with a primitive ham radio.

Loneliness in Jersey City

The deer and the dachshund are one.
Well, the gods grow out of the weather.
The people grow out of the weather;
The gods grow out of the people.
Encore, encore, encore les dieux...

The distance between the dark steeple
And cobble ten thousand and three
Is more than a seven-foot inchworm
Could measure by moonlight in June.

Kiss, cats: for the deer and the dachshund
Are one. My window is twenty-nine three
And plenty of window for me.
The steeples are empty and so are the people,
There's nothing whatever to see
Except Polacks that pass in their motors
And play concertinas all night.
They think that things are all right,
Since the deer and the dachshund are one.

First of all, what gave it away, Cuchu? Was it the cats sucking face in the bottom corner, or the hideous fused hell-harbinger in the upper right? Either way, congratulations--you are the total dominating winner! And second of all, is that true about Polacks? If so, I would like to meet a few of them.

It Is Possible That Not Even God Would Be Able to Guess This: Day Efty Narn

The game is this: you cast your eyes on this masterful piece of art that I created earlier this afternoon; you guess which line from which poem the picture is depicting; you send your guesses to happybirthdaywallace at yahoo dot com. The first person who sends me an email containing the correct line from the correct poem will win a sexy prize. Got it? Here's a hint: the poem was originally included in Parts of a World, and later reprinted in The Collected Poems. That's all I'll say for now.

The full poem can be found on the internet, but you have to dig for it. More hints tomorrow if no one has guessed correctly by then. Good luck!

Are You Ready For This?: Day Twenty-Mmmrph

I'm very sorry for the lack of pictorial updates in the last two days--I have been rolling naked in a pile of gems. You cannot be angry at me, however, because I am here to inform you that I will be posting a CONTEST entry tomorrow, since I promised you a contest at the beginning of this whole shindig and I will not let Wallace Stevens make a liar out of me.

I'll post the picture sometime in the afternoon or early evening, so gird your loins. I'll give you a hint or two to make the whole guessing game a little less daunting, and I will send a spectacular prize of my own choosing to the person who first sends me a correct identification of the lines my drawing depicts to happybirthdaywallace at yahoo dot com. It is going to be very difficult; it is going to be very pervy; it will blow your minds.

This Pretty Much Speaks for Itself: Day Twenty-One

Admiral Farragut weighs in with another brilliant submission, one that casts our hero Wallace Stevens as a discarnate speech bubble moving toward the ear of one Sir John Suckling. The text of the picture reads:

"This is Sir John Suckling, an English Poet who lived from 1609-1642. He was best known as the author of 'Ballad Upon a Wedding' and as the inventor of the game of cribbage. He is not costumed as a line of Wallace Stevens' verse as he was dead long before Wallace Stevens composed any verse. I believe, however, that Mr. Stevens would have been delighted to have Sir John attend his birthday party if only so that Mr. Stevens could come up behind Sir John as he stood at the bar, slap Sir John roundly on the back and declaim loudly so that all and sundry could hear, 'Having a nip, Suckling?' Okay, such humor was probably beneath Mr. Stevens, but I would have liked to have seen that, anyway."

As would I, Admiral. As would I, and any other right-thinking person currently walking the face of this earth.

Aren’t You Glad Alan Thicke Decided to Show Up: Day Twenty

I consider this my masterpiece, and I have little doubt that you will as well. Without further ado, here is my depiction of a line from "The Auroras of Autumn":

The father fetches his unherded herds,
Of barbarous tongue, slavered and panting halves
Of breath, obedient to his trumpet's touch.

This all makes a little more sense if you omit the comma from the first line, as I have recklessly done. The father of the poem is here pictured as Alan Thicke, between whose solid legs protrudes a sexual trumpet. Herds of barbarous tongue-animals gather round him. One of these tongue animals has inserted his pink self into the mouth of Alan’s trumpet and is exclaiming, “I love your blatty taste, Daddy!” as well you would if you had the chance to lick that instrument.