Stevens read as if he were reading to himself. He read calmly, smoothly,
but as the text he wrote might read itself, if it were given its own wee
voice. He read as if he were meditating on the significance of what he
read in the back room of that grand house he owned, with absolutely no
one else around. At Harvard he made no concessions to the packed house
that turned out to hear him and many of them left at the break, but
Wallace Stevens was not a slam poet, and he read on, knowing that he was
already judged and weighed and elvaluated, and would be talked about on
uselists like this one in the future, and in other, even stranger venues
in the 22nd, 23rd, and 24th centuries, when all those Harvardites were
long turned to dust. One fellow in the audience that evening was Cid
Corman, who wrote about it.
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