one Asian under a groove

Harmonium (1923/1931): Some like Stevens’s sensual poems, like “Sunday Morning”, which begins by invoking the “Complacencies of the peignoir”. Others prefer Stevens the theorist who enumerates six or thirteen ways of looking at a concept. But as befits the greatest English-language poetry book of its era, the physical poems are metaphysical and the metaphysical poems are physical. “Sunday Morning” asserts that Jesus’ grave is just a grave, the earth merely “an old chaos of the sun.” “Thirteen Ways” finds beauty in the innuendoes of blackbirds’ shadows and “lucid, inescapable rhythms”. Stevens explicates the individual’s perceptions of the world, and the world’s perceptions of the individual.

Macbeth (1606?): The play’s brevity means that it’s action-packed, but also that suspension of disbelief is required to buy Macbeth’s rapid degeneration, though with all the witches and prophetic quibbling I don’t why that would be the backbreaker. Anyway, as Sarah Siddons knew a couple of centuries ago, Lady Mac is the key character for the way she exercises power through her femininity: in soliloquy she asks hell to unsex her, but she never let’s her husband forget it’s a woman taunting him.