Sunday Morning.
I went to Mass at St. Louis Cathedral this morning. I talked with the Archbishop. His name does not matter. He is the fourteenth bishop of New Orleans in three centuries. There will be a fifteenth, etcetera, etcetera.
I am reading ‘Sunday Morning,’ a poem by Wallace Stevens from 1923. I am reading it because I read a review in the Wall Street Journal. You can make of the contents what you want but you cannot deny the lush language deployed is a thing of beauty, the way the syllables and the words mesh, the reader knows something is going on behind the curtain but they cannot tell what. I have an inkling what Stevens is talking about but I need time to re-read and ponder. This could take a week or so.
Modern poetry is like abstract expressionist painting. You react to it how you do. From what I know about the poetry-industrial complex, most people reject it. Being a poet is a cash-poor profession. The whole shebang went downhill after Rod McKuen.
“Adieu, Papa, please pray for me
I was the black sheep of the family
You tried to teach me right from wrong
Too much wine and too much song
Wonder how I got along”
Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford proudly calls itself the Insurance Capitol of the World. It is the nation’s filing cabinet, a city of actuaries.
Do you know what Des Moines, Iowa is called? It is called the Hartford of the West. That is a moniker that sells hotel rooms. Would you like to meet me in Des Moines?
A beautiful poem, like any other mystery, is rewarding to contemplate. Now, I am going to talk about St. Louis Cathedral.
