Speakeasy, one of the acts at the February 3rd show here at the Mill!
Eboard Meeting
First meeting of the semester! Come chat with the eboard and start this semester off right!
Sunday 29th January, the Mill, 6pm.
Be there.
Remember when this happened?? Well Girl-Talk is back with his new album “All Day”
You can download the album FO FREE here: http://freshnewtracks.com/?s=Girl+Talk
Tickets go on sale Tomorrow!
http://www.myspace.com/flosstradamus
http://www.myspace.com/cutoffyourhands
http://www.myspace.com/bigdigit
Be sure to check out the Facebook event page!
Why Wallace Stevens (Deceased Hartford Resident) Would Dig The Mill
Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879-August 2, 1955) was a resident of our beloved Hartford from 1916 until his death, and made his living as an insurance lawyer. He’s also one of the great poets in the American literary tradition. Insurance lawyer: Boring. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: Sweet.
Weird, right? An insurance lawyer and…a poet? His first volume of poetry—Harmonium—wasn’t published until 1922, when he was thirty-six. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1955. He woke up one day, realized he was a little bored down at the insurance firm, decided to spend his free-time writing some poems, ended up reshaping the state of American poetry, and became a stand-out figure in Modernism. I think they call that “Bringing it On” in the cheer-leading world.
So, what does Wallace Stevens’ life have to do with The Mill? Why would he dig The Mill? This sounds cliché, but most clichés start as truths—that’s why they’re used so often—so screw it: No matter what your label is—in Stevens’ case, his label was “insurance-lawyer”—there’s always space to defy the expectations that your label implies. Oh, and he was from Hartford so, like, he probably would have come by one of our shows or something.
Here’s a poem that gets at what Wallace Stevens thought poetry (or, maybe, a place like The mill) could do for someone like, say, a bored man in an insurance firm who wanted to shed the expectations of his “label”:
“The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain”
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
