为答谢版主大人的不吝指教，兹以下列抄写役工支付版大的心血， 敬请笑纳：） S is for something that supplies a vacancy, which I might fill. It has a verbal presence that my own immediate appetite or ambition subverts, misreads, or makes into an appealing void, a space only I can elaborate on. I begin with something as if it were nothing (or nothing as if it were something) because, often, what I have chosen as my starting point makes no sense to others, as when, say, I open up my Wallace Stevens and my eye alights upon "shaken sleep" or "pearled" or "later reason." S is also for Stevens. I have always turned to his poems, reading parts of them, skipping on to others, finding them congenial despite my fickleness, my impatience. I admire Stevens and Frost equally among American poets, but I read them differently. Stevens influences me, but I do not think that Frost does. Frost's diction is given over to voice, a continuous sound that tempers verbal color. In a Frost poem, it is its spokenness that counts, that overrides even those periodic passages of vatic emphasis. Words are submerged into clusters of sense, so that some tonal character can assert itself -- an argument, an extended gesture that relies on the order and direction of what is said. In Stevens, argument tends to be discontinuous, hidden, mysterious, or simply not there. More often, what we experience is the power of the world or the phrase to enchant. The rhetorical design of his poems points to explanation or annunciation. But there is no urgency that constructs "nextness" -- what comes next is a possibility, a choice, another invitation to imagine. (to be continued, if it is permissible) --

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