Timothy Donnelly on Wallace Stevens

With Stevens, even before understanding any of his poems, I just felt that my thoughts wanted desperately to sound like his poems, at least on special occasions—those cadences, that composure. Even just the example of the tercet alone, actually, was important to me when writing these two poems you mention, and many of the others in the new book, too. The fall of thoughts through tercets the way he does it has always seemed just so right to me. They’re dynamic enough to keep things feeling always like they’re moving forward and yet they convey something of a solidity, a groundedness considerably greater than the couplet’s, yet not so very stable as the quatrain’s.

from Coldfront » spotlight: Timothy Donnelly.