Frank Hecker

Randall Jarrell was a poet, critic, and novelist. He famously wrote, “A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he [sic] is great.” He also feared he would be remembered as a poet only for “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner,” based on his experiences as a pilot instructor in World War 2. I hereby apologize to his shade for making it my selection this Sunday night (CW: implied gore):

I’m back in the new year and ready for more Sunday night poetry.

Sometimes a poem succeeds based on a single striking image expressed in exactly the right way. Such is the case with tonight's poem, “The Forms of Love,” by George Oppen:

This Sunday night’s poet, the last of 2023, is Wallace Stevens, a contemporary and friend of William Carlos Williams. Like Williams he had a fairly demanding day job, in his case as an executive at a life insurance company.

Stevens seems to me someone of an artistic and (perhaps to his contemporaries) “unmasculine” temperament who, led first by his father (who demanded he go to law school in order to be able to earn a living) and then perhaps by his own choice, split himself into two pieces:

On the one hand we have Wallace Stevens the corporate vice president, ensconced in the world of business, living in the upper-middle-class environs of suburban Connecticut, and enjoying manly pursuits like fishing trips to Key West—on one of which of which he got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemingway. (Stevens also shared in the casual racism so prevalent at the time—no one today would think of titling a poem “Like Decorations in a N----r Cemetery,” as Stevens once did.)

On the other hand, there’s the Wallace Stevens who hoped as a youth to make a living as a writer, enjoyed the artistic life of New York City, and wrote and published esoteric poetry that his fellow businessmen could neither understand nor appreciate.

Those who knew Stevens at his work thought him “cold.” Since we’re starting winter here in the northern hemisphere, I thought I’d go with perhaps his coldest poem, “The Snow Man”:

This Sunday night: An upper-middle-class suburban housewife and mother suffers from severe postpartum depression, is hospitalized for it, and as part of her treatment is encouraged by her therapist to write. A not so unusual story, but in this case the writer is Anne Sexton, who became one of the most honored and popular poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, before her death by suicide at the age of 45. She’s best known for her confessional poetry and for Transformations, her arch take on the tales made famous by the Brothers Grimm. However, since it’s Christmas Eve today I thought I’d feature the first poem in her series “The Jesus Papers,” titled “Jesus Suckles”: