Following up and for now concluding the exercise of the last two posts, let me show, and also tell a bit, about what happened to the early versions of the poem on Wallace Stevens.
The nonce stanzaic forms, or no-forms, that appeared above struck me as being in need of shaping. The first stanza went, remember, like this:
Yet what he said who knew? He was poet,
after all, not executive, not poohbah
of the boardroom. He wrote,
he did not underwrite. He took,
he did not undertake. He was
focused, not schizwit.
And the second stanza drizzled down in very skinny lines to what I’d wanted to be a resounding ending.
Better, I thought, to achieve some sort of equity, or equal apportioning, of lines among the stanzas. And to slow down the motion — and leave more room for rest and contemplation, even in going, on the reader’s part. So I divided the content into more or less equal-length stanzas, and eliminated a few of the promising but misleading ideas of the original (the “shizwit,” for example).
And came up, for now, with this:
Hartford
Yet what he said who
knew in the insurance
company? He was poet,
apart, not executive
of the boardroom,
sitting godlike, throwing
thunderbolts, decreeing
policy: simply legally
enforce it. He would write
not underwrite, take
not undertake, the letter
of the law, and when he left
the office for his home,
walking back the three
miles he had trod that
very morning, the letters
forming in glory, in words
that effloresced, he wore
them like the casque
of the sungod that he was.
So we have three stanzas, in order: seven lines, six lines, seven lines. A nice symmetry, easier on the eye, the tongue, the ear. And more compact in the pursuit of theme. Though Stevens had a job in business, and was in fact an executive of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity company, he exercised his power not in Jovian thunderbolts but Apollonian splendor.
Which is certainly one way to make your mark.