naviarhaiku171 – Among twenty snowy mountains

The author of the week is Wallace Stevens, one of the most well-known and respected poets of the 20th century. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird“ is probably his best-known poem, and this week’s assignment is its first stanza.

“Thirteen  Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is a sequence of thirteen Imagist poems written in variable syllabic verse. Line length varies from two to ten syllables, but the norm is four to eight syllables per line, thus approximating in English the line lengths of Japanese forms such as the haiku, the senryu, and the tanka,  all of which utilize five- and seven-syllable lines. In effect, Wallace Stevens’s series is a sequence of Japanese-style Zen poems. The unifying factor in the series is the image of the blackbird, which appears in each of the numbered sections of the set; each poem otherwise stands on its own and offers an insight either into “the nature of the universe,” as does the haiku, or into  "the nature of mankind,“ as does the senryu.  (from Terebess)

Read the whole poem at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45236

Poem by Wallace Stevens https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/wallace-stevens

Picture by Jan Erik Waiderhttps://unsplash.com/@northlandscapes?photo=Kc3meWFta9w