From: "Aristotelos" <Gulio-AT-sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: Riders on the Storm
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2002 14:01:25 -0800


Allen,

I only meet the people you mention while reading. Still have my notes from
reading A Rhetoric of Motives from years ago. They are worth looking at once
in a while. Some day I'l have to finish the book. You can make too much of
Stevens or lots of writers. I remember reading an interview of Borges one
time and he more or less admits of being, in his younger writing, difficult
and strange on purpose without knowing why and only to give his writing an
air profound mystery. There is moments of,  I would say, genuine gnosis in
Stevens but he doesn't take it too seriously. At least it's not an obsessive
task that can be seen carried from poem to poem. Sometimes you can put a
couple poems together and get something clever that suggests more than a
talent to use words in a weird way. For instance Crispin's north western
perspective through "artic moonlight" that gives an ummediated relation to
his environment makes him the character of Stevens' poem "The Snow Man"
whose mind of winter can see the junipers and spruces as they are for he is
a listener that "listens in the snow, And, nothing himself, beholds/ Nothing
that is not there and the nothing that is." There is a tendency to a sort of
direct and straight forward seeing in his collected poems, a non-inquisitive
acceptance of superficial appearance but it's not a primary concern.

Gulio



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