And there, practically jumping into my hand, is E. And right away in the Oxford selections I come to his poem about driving his new car. One day for reasons unknown I was struck with this image of a boy riding with his father along a back country road.
I scrawled the poem in cursive on notebook paper over and over, trying to memorize it, and in memorizing it, it became a part of meβa part of my body, really. I felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of them. Page after lined page of meticulously plotted circular or ovoid geometric forms of various sizes, all arranged symmetrically around a grounding middle field. The forms were laid out first in pencil, probably freehand, then filled in with color from colored pencils or inked pens.
No design was quite like another. The literary critic Stanley Fish has lamented that when poets are not taught in classrooms, they cease to exist. But at his best, Jeffers is a powerful Nature poet. There was a quite extensive exhibit of Caspar David Friedrich paintings at the Albertinum, one of the art museums in Dresden.
One has the feeling that there is always a Caspar David Friedrich exhibit at one of the art museums of Dresden. Nonetheless I was glad for it. I was glad to move slowly from one canvas to the next and to see more Friedrich paintings in one location than I had ever seen before.
Close-reading any poem by Wallace Stevens can look like hard, dizzying work, but it can become a happy romp rather than a baffled slog if you can do it with a friend who loves language as much as you do. Turning: an, if not the, essential act of Jewish life. Teshuvah, we call it. We call it repentance. We call it return. We call it a turning. It is all of these things and none of these things. It is a word that points us to the realm beyond language, the realm of pure motion and form.
