Adagia

When we began class we first looked at the poem "How to Live, What to Do" and we pondered why it was not a list of instructions. I feel as though we have finally found that list in Wallace Steven's "Adagia" Line after line is a list of things to keep in mind as we go about our day, thinking about poetry, living poetry, being poetry. All of our questions, and all of the answers are contained within the lines of this particular work. 

"The poet makes silk dresses out of worms" (900). Sure we can understand that this means that poets and poetry have the ability to spin the most mundane and ugly thing into something beautiful and precious. But perhaps he is saying more. Silk comes from the silk worm, from their very cocoon, from that which they use to change. Perhaps we should be looking at this less as a metaphor for making poetry and should instead consider this line in a more literal sense. Maybe we should be like the worms, willing to change and literally transform so as to become something other, not necessarily more beautiful, but rather something other than what we have always been....sacrificing all that is familiar, because to you it is now unimportant, and perhaps for someone else it can become their silk dress

"Poetry is a search for the inexplicable" (911). Just as Tanner proved to us last week, we use poetry in a variety of ways. It can work as a healing process, or perhaps as the way to express an emotion. What seems most about this is that poetry is produced out of the desire to explain some idea with which we are grappling.  I find it fascinating to think of poetry as a way for us to express something that we may not have the actual words for. Additionally, poetry very rarely tells you exactly what you need to assume. Even with words on the page, we do not receive an exact explanation for how we are to interpret the information in front of us. 

If we can look at Adagia once a day, I firmly believe we can learn something new everyday. Though it seems so simple on the surface, there is so much more going on, that it has quite become my favorite part of Steven's work so far. How fascinating that we can learn something from a piece every time we look at it anew.