Process 1

Reasons for writing these essays:

1. To see if I can write a literary essay. It's a form of reaching for the stars, to try to create the type of essay that appears in the New York Times Review of Books, rangy, erudite.


2. My WriteGirl mentee is always writing essays for English class. Would my essays exhibit the same issues to be addressed that hers do. Is it even possible to write an essay in response to a literary work that says anything new?


3. To serve as evidence that I have done the reading and learned something from it.


My notes for the first essay on Stevens seemed, to quote Pollyanna in an old movie, "Scathingly brilliant." When typed up they were less than half a page long. After another week of work I think it has become overedited. And I seriously doubt that I have added anything new to a reader's understanding of Wallace Stevens. Trying to grasp his complex poems is like scratching for nits in a child's hair. There's always something else scuttling around or nesting in there that I can't reach.

Each poem is so finely worked that it resembles the paradise where the fruit never becomes overly ripe, never falls from the tree. As a gardener forever picking up moldy and bug infested
tangerines and grapefruits from the lawn, I envy that. I am suspicious of it. And I've got enough to worry about in trying to figure out the flight habits of local seagulls without also considering "ambiguous undulations" of pigeons.