Poems and Their Inspiration: The Room is Quiet and the Words are Free
Malu Sciamarelli, Brazil
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The Room is Quiet and the Words are Free by Malu Sciamarelli
Wallace Stevens wrote, ‘Poetry is the statement of a relation between a man and his world’ (Stalin on Linguistics and Other Essays, Piers Gray, 2002, p.4). In his poem ‘The House Was Quiet and the World was Calm’, one of the relationships is between the reader and the book. There is a sense that the book is only a book because the reader has cause for it to be. The book is not the physical form, but the words that are within it.
Ask your students to write a poem based on Wallace Stevens’ ‘The House Was Quiet and the World was Calm’, but creating a different relationship. After writing the poem, ask them to explain the relationship they found or created. In my poem, the relationship is between the act of writing and words. For me, the words are not the physical form, but the writing itself. I feel like words exist freely all around us, and when I capture them on paper, it is only one of their meanings – the reflection of what is inside of me. The House was Quiet and the World was Calm (Wallace Stevens):
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57607
The room is quiet, and the words are free.
I find in them a stillness, which is
A kind of witnessing, as if time has stopped.
The room is quiet, and the words are free.
I stand at the verge of consciousness,
And past language momentarily comes to an end...
And then, as a gentle breeze wafting
Through the window, it is given back to me.
It is back, because the words open the centre.
The room is quiet because it has to be.
The stillness is part of the process, part of me:
The access of what the words secretly whisper.
And the words are still. The truth in their stillness,
In which they try to show their real meaning,
Is stillness, now resting on paper,
Still, witnessing their own reflection.
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