One of the fun things about poking through the Quarto archives is that, like in a lot of literature studies, you can come up with unique little intersections over time and space.  I was going through the Fall 1954 issue, trying to see if anything caught my interest, when I was stopped momentarily by a what looked like a block print of a still life.  We’ve been debating for a couple of years now whether or not we would include art or whether it would distract too much from the content, so I looked at the facing page to see how it matched up and found this little poem by one Winifred Hunt.  It’s not exactly appropriate for the season, but recalls a little bit of the warmth of earlier months.

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Taking a quick glance at this, I was reminded in the opening lines of Wallace Stevens’ “The Plain Sense of Things”, for the way the poem is quiet, but self-assured and declarative.  Realizing when this poem was published, I felt I had to cross check with my the Norton Anthology of American Literature I had sitting in front of me.  And Stevens’ poem?  Also 1954.  How about that?

While not organized into neat little quatrains, Hunt’s poem has its own kind of progression and revisiting.   The “windfall” and “downfall” evoke something of the season before it is even mentioned.  The thrum of the local sounds goes from falling apples, to cider presses creaking, to “over the anvil month no melody wings”, which allows the katydids their place later in the poem.  The use of repetition too gives us a sense of the sound before we fully become conscious of what it is we’re listening to, but even then, the experience of listening proves ultimately more important than what it is we are hearing, as the poem makes clear in the last stanza.

It’s an intriguing piece that makes me curious as to whether or not there are other poems by this author floating around the internet.  For our part, all we can do is bring a few of them to light now and then and see what people make of it.

This is a little piece I wrote on my 18 hour flight home.

I look at my hands
The same, who built it all,
The same, who broke it all.
I had the clay in my fist
Started molding and shaping it
What it became,
I never could see
How beautiful was it
I never could tell
As it changed
From the piece of clay
To the beautiful sculpture,
It was meant to be ,
It did weaken a few hundred times
Only to be reinforced
By these very hands
The belief I had
Made it stay.
As it grew,
It was weighed down
By these same hands.
Slowly but surely
The clay began to change.
From a part of the lovely figure,
To the sand which flowed
Right through
My very hands.
I never could see
What my hands held for me.
Still cant see
What the future has for me
Yet
I strive to try again
Knowing I would hold it strong
Only this time
It would not be a sculpture
Waiting to pass into emptiness
But become and stay
What its meant to be.
No, its just not my belief
I’ll make it and show
How perfect
It will be
How everlasting
Its meant to be
My hands will make it
As amazing as it can be
As beautiful as it should be

– Prateek Mehta