Wallace Stevens: 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

[ananda]

I came across this poem while teaching a class yesterday. It made me think of it as a kind of cohesive group of zen koans with the blackbird as a touchstone, or even as a placeholder for God, taking the reader higher and higher in levels of consciousness.

Then this morning as I was putting my backback in the car, I saw two blackbirds in the yard, one small and kind of drab looking, and the other a really beautiful blue-black one with a shiny coat walking towards me. It felt awesome having that poem in the back of my mind as I watched the two birds for a few seconds before going to work. See:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15746