I've been trying for months to get some exercise by riding my bicycle the 34 mile roundtrip to the base for work every day, but I've mostly failed miserably. The last few days, though, I've done pretty well. This morning there was about a 12 mph headwind the whole way, adding 20 minutes to the trip, and that meant I got to listen to a lot of Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens — I've got both of their Random House Voice of the Poet CDs ripped and on my iPod, along with a couple of Caedmon miscellanies and the 55th anniversary CD from The Hudson Review.
Until this morning I was just about ready to take the Stevens off. It's been years since I really enjoyed reading him. He lies about "not ideas about the thing but the thing itself" — his poetry seems to me almost allegory, with people and objects presented only to demonstrate the working out of an idea. But I've been reading Chaucer a lot lately, trying to find a way in to a requested poem, and making forays into a few other other medieval poets, and this morning that seemed to have opened something in Stevens for me. But he's not in the same league with Frost. Frost can compete with traffic.
BTW, Greg Perry has posted a good deal lately about Frost. Greg and Henry Gould are the two bloggers that have mattered most to me these last few months, when I've come close to deciding poetry takes a poor second to hard-boiled vampire detective stories.
8:43:11 PM 
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