NP Wallace Stevens

[alice wellintown]

I was amazed when a kid, yes a kid, very bright and imaginative,
"unlocked" the "meaning" of one of my favorite poems, The Snowman. I
teach the poem with To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel, the kids
build a snowman of mud and snow and dress it up in blended gender.
Folks tend to remember, or mis-remember Lee's classic as a young adult
fiction that was made into a nice film starring Gregory Peck. But the
novel, though set in the Great Depression South, is a feminist work
about the civil rights movement and it tackles issues like incest and
miscegenation, homosexual love (Capote or Dill), parental oppression,
the law and prisons ...much the same landscape of issues Pynchon
explores in his latest attempt to write a novel for a young audience.
One of the themes P has been addressing since he wrote his Young adult
classic, The Secret Integration (a Twain parody of sorts), is how book
learning (the racist Tom Swift boy books) and Film learning
(Spartacus) often reflect ironic meanings when, to use Paul
Nightingale's term, we read them as readings of each other. In any
event, one can have the mind of a snowman or the mind full of snow.

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5031535


This is an excellent online start:

http://faculty.millikin.edu/~rbrooks/MApoetry/stevens.html


On Sun, Jan 31, 2010 at 12:51 PM, Toby Levy <tobyglevy at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am attempting to read Wallace Stevens, which I have not done since college
> some 40 years ago.  Does anyone have a good web site or reference work that
> explains the foreign terms, obscure words and historical references in
> Wallace's work.
>
> Some people think that Pynchon is difficult. But I find Stevens almost
> impenetrable.
>
> Toby
>