According to a popular online bookseller’s order history, I purchased The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens on January 10, 2007, just over a semester into my graduate studies, soon to discover how the deep, persistent chill of an Ann Arbor winter sets it apart from Chicago’s mere bluster.  Perhaps, then, it’s not too surprising that I was drawn to Wallace’s fourth volume of poetry, Transport to Summer.  (Mini-review:  Transport, yes; summer, not so much.)  Tucked inside are 14  lines I’ve returned to often:

MAN CARRYING THING

The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully.  Illustration:

A brune figure in winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he carries resists

The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived

Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt,

Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow
Out of a storm we must endure all night,

Out of a storm of secondary things),
A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.

We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

And thus — having resisted intelligence long enough –, a blog title was born.[1]

I hope to accumulate a number of things here:  pictures and commentary on trips and runs I’ve enjoyed or find notable, mathematical musings (especially those less-suited to formal publication), perhaps even a few objets d’art (if I ever make anything I’m not too embarrassed to display).  And, perhaps most importantly, I plan to write.  I like writing, and I like reading writing, so I may even write about my reading.  (Currently on my nightstand:  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet.)

Welcome!

[1] It might be curious to note that I’m not the first mathematician attracted to Stevens’s poetry. When one adopts an academic advisor, one frequently combs through said advisor’s bibliography searching for ideas and insights.  In just such a search, I found “Mixed Tate motives” by Bloch and Kriz, which begins with the epigraph

As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized
–Wallace Stevens, “To An Old Philosopher in Rome”

I later asked Igor about it and he said Spencer was to blame. [Back to text]