Lee Sandlin
Reification - Belles Lettres
Reification - Belles Lettres
our motto.

There is no antidote against the opium of Time. — sir thomas browne, urn burial

Manifesto
of this Site

♦♦♦

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek

The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object

At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is,
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,

The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,

Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana
included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,

The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air.

-- Wallace Stevens
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (ix)

 

 

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American Poetry

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