August Imaginations

Robert Adams, Longmont, Colorado (1979)

Back from the road. Back to work on our summer series, "Driver's Ed... For Poets," an exploration of the many-sided relationships of poets with cars and driving. I first encountered the Wallace Stevens poem, "Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination," on Tom Clark's blog. Tom paired the poem with fantastic photographs of the Nasr al Mulk mosque at Shiraz, Iran. I strongly recommend you head over there for the experience. As I said in my comments on Tom's post, Stevens offers us an extraordinary rendering of the experience of driving at night in summer. My own pairing, with a Robert Adams photograph from Summer Nights, is a more conventional one, but I think this poem lends itself to many re-imaginations.

Last Friday, in the big light of last Friday night,


We drove home from Cornwall to Hartford, late.


It was not a night blown at a glassworks in Vienna


Or Venice, motionless, gathering time and dust.


There was a crush of strength in a grinding going round,


Under the front of the westward evening star,


The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,


As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,


Either in distance, change or nothingness,


The visible transformations of summer night,


An argentine abstraction approaching form


And suddenly denying itself away.


There was an insolid billowing of the solid.


Night’s moonlight lake was neither water nor air

(Another pairing: Thurber's couple headed home in "A Couple of Hamburgers." Thurber and his wife lived for many years in West Cornwall, Conn., next door to Wallace Stevens' starting place.)