Friday, October 03, 2008

in my mind I'm going

I suppose I'm a bit stuck on Stevens this time of year--seeing him everywhere. Because it's the season of his birthday? (The day itself was yesterday, October 2.) The author of In My Mind I'm Going is (you guessed it) in North Carolina, where she's a "professor" (otherwise unidentified) and blogs about once per week on cooking and writing. The latest of these is "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Squid" and it begins this way:

I
Among snowy cephalopods
The only moving thing
Was the blade of my cleaver.

And here's the 12th:

XII
The water is moving.
The kraken must be swimming.

There's an awful lot of bad Stevens out there. Do we do this to Pound or Williams or Stein? Well, yes--I think--Stein.

By the way, about section one ("Among twenty snowy mountains, / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird.") a fellow who goes by "Pseudo Intellectual" at the "everything2" site writes: "This is very likely a verse about necrophilia." Okay, I think I prefer the squidified version.