2026-08-10 National Lazy Day

【Anecdote of the Abnormal (1919-1920?)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        He called hydrangeas purple. And they were.

        Not fixed and deadly, (like a curving line

        That merely makes a ring).

        It was a purple changeable to see.

        And so hydrang

2026-08-07 International Beer Day

【Exposition of The Contents of A Cab (1919)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            Victoria Clementina, negress,

            Took seven white dogs

            To ride in a cab.

     &nbs

2026-08-06 National Gossip Day

【Peter Parasol (1919)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            Aux taureaux Dieu cornes donne

            Et sabots durs aux chevaux …

            To bulls God gives horns,

            And hard hooves to horses…

2026-08-04 National Night Out

【An Early Version of "Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks" (1918-1919?)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        In the land of the peacocks, the prince thereof,

        Grown weary of romantics, walked alone,

        In the first of evening, pondering.

2026-03-08 International Women's Day

【Letters of a Soldier-VI

The Surprises of the Superhuman (1918)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

26 novembre

J'ai la ferme espérance; mais surtout j'ai confiance en la justice éternelle, quelque surprise quelle cause a l'humaine idée que nous en avons.

I have firm hope; above all, I have confidence in eternal justice, however surprised the human idea we have of it may be.

        The Palais de justice of cha

2025-10-07 National Inner Beauty Day

【Grey Room (1917)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

    Although you sit in a room that is gray,

    Except for the silver

    Of the straw-paper,

    And pick

    At your pale white gown;

    Or lift one of the green beads

    Of your necklace,

    To let it fall;

    Or gaze at your green

2025-03-22 National Goof Off Day

【An Exercise for Professor X (1913-1915?)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            I see a camel in my mind.

            I do not say to myself, in English,

            "There is a camel."

            I do not talk t

2025-02-26 National Tell A Fairy Tale Day

【Phases·VIII (1914)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        What shall we say to the lovers of freedom,

        Forming their states for new ears to come?

        Say that the fighter is master of men.

        Shall we, then, say to the lovers of freed

2025-03-02 Dr. Seuss Day

【Phases·VII (1914)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        The vaguest line of smoke,(a year ago),

        Wavered in evening air, above the roof,

        As if some Old Man of the Chimney, sick

        Of summer and that unused hearth below,

    &nb

2025-02-01 International Pisco Sour Day

【Carnet de Voyage VIII·On an Old Guitar (1914)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            It was a simple thing

            For her to sit and sing,

                    "Hey nonino!"

2025-01-28 Lunar New Year's Eve

【Carnet de Voyage VII·Chinese Rocket (1914)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            There, a rocket in the Wain

            Brings primeval night again.

            All the startled heavens flare

            From the Shepherd t

2025-01-26 National Green Juice Day

【Carnet de Voyage VI·Man from the Waste Evolved (1914)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            Man from the waste evolved 

            The Cytherean glade,

            Imposed on battering seas

            His keel

2024-12-21 Winter Solstice

【Carnet de Voyage III·Here the Grass Grows (1914)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

                Here the grass grows,

                And the wind blows,

                And in the stream, 

      &n

2024-10-20 National Day on Writing

【The Public Square (1931)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            A slash of angular blacks

            Like a fractured edifice

            That was buttressed by blue slats

            In a coma of the moon.

  &n

2024-09-08 National Ampersand Day

【First Warmth (1947)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life,

        As a questioner about reality,

        A countryman of all the bones in the world?

        Now, here, the warmth I had forgotten becomes

 &nb

2024-05-12 Mother's Day

【Earthy Anecdote (1918)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        Every time the bucks went clattering

        Over Oklahoma

        A firecat bristled in the way.

        Wherever they went,

        They went clattering,

  &

2024-04-20 Volunteer Recognition Day

【The Poems of Our Climate - II (1942)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        Say even that this complete simplicity

        Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed

        The evilly compounded, vital I

        And made it fresh in a world of white,

       &nb

2024-02-25 Farewell to the God of Plague

【Le Monocle de Mon Oncle-IX (1918)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        In verses wild with motion, full of din,

        Loudened by cries, by clashes, quick and sure

        As the deadly thought of men accomplishing

        Their curious fates in war, come, celebrate

2024-02-13 Lunar Goat Bliss Day

【On the Manner of Addressing Clouds (1921)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,

        Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous,

        Eliciting the still sustaining pomps

        Of speech which are like music so profound

        T

2024-02-10 Lunar New Year

【Theory (1917)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            I am what is around me.

            Women understand this.

            One is not duchess

            A hundre

2024-02-07 National Girls and Women in Sports Day

【Human Arrangement (1947)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        Place-bound and time-bound in evening rain

        And bound by a sound which does not change,

        Except that it begins and ends,

        Begins again and ends again—

 &

2024-02-02 Groundhog Day

【Chaos in Motion and Not in Motion (1947)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

    Oh, that this lashing wind was something more

    Than the spirit of Ludwig Richter …

    The rain is pouring down. It is July.

    There is lightning and the thickest thunder.

    It is a spectacle. Scene 10 becomes 11,

    In

2024-01-28 Natl Daisy Day

【The Beginning (1947)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

    So summer comes in the end to these few stains

    And the rust and rot of the door through which she went.

    The house is empty. But here is where she sat

    To comb her dewy hair, a touchless light,

    Perplexed by its darker iridescences.

    Th

2024-01-28 Global Community Engagement Day

【Adult Epigram (1947)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        The romance of the precise is not the elision

        Of the tired romance of imprecision.

        It is the ever-never-changing same,

        An appearance of Again, the diva-dame.

—— • —— • —— • —— • ——

2024-01-26 National Big Wig Day

【Debris of Life and Mind (1947)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

    There is so little that is close and warm.

    It is as if we were never children.

    Sit in the room. It is true in the moonlight

    That it is as if we had never been young.

    We ought not to be awake. It is from this

    That a b

2024-01-23 National Handwriting Day

【The Good Man Has No Shape (1947)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

    Through centuries he lived in poverty.

    God only was his only elegance.

    Then generation by generation he grew

    Stronger and freer, a little better off.

    He lived each life because, if it was bad,

    He said a good li

2023-11-29 Electronic Greetings Day

Seventy Years Later (1954)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

    It is an illusion that we were ever alive,

    Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves

    By our own motions in a freedom of air.

    Regard the freedom of seventy years ago.

    It is no longer air. The houses still stand,

    Though they are rigid

2023-10-23 9^th Day of the 9^th Lunar Month

【Solitaire under the Oaks (1955)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        In the oblivion of cards

        One exists among pure principles.

        Neither the cards nor the trees nor the air

        Persist as facts. This is an escape

        To principiu

2023-10-19 National Seafood Bisque Day

【Reality is an activity of the most august imagination (1954)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

       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 gr

2023-10-01 Chinese Natl Day

【Two Letters—A Letter To (1954)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        She wanted a holiday

        With someone to speak her dulcied native tongue,

        In the shadows of a wood…

        Shadows, woods…and the two of them in speech,

        In a secrecy of words

  &

2023-09-10 National Grandparents Day

【Children Learn What They Live (1954)】

Dorothy Law Nolte (1924-2005)

       If children live with criticism,

       They learn to condemn.

       If children live with hostility,

       They learn to fight.

       If children live with ridicule,

       They learn to be shy.

       If children live with shame,

    &

2023-07-24 Cousins Day

【A Dish of Peaches in Russia (1942)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        With my whole body I taste these peaches,

        I touch them and smell them. Who speaks?

        I absorb them as the Angevine

        Absorbs Anjou. I see them as a lover sees,

  &nb

2023-07-01 International Joke Day

【The Reader】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            All night I sat reading a book,

            Sat reading as if in a book

            Of sombre pages.

            It wa

2023-06-30 World Social Media Day

【A Quiet Normal Life (1954)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

         His place, as he sat and as he thought, was not

         In anything that he constructed, so frail,

         So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,

         As, for example, a world in which, like snow,

         He b

2023-06-06  National Yo-Yo Day

【Sketch of the Ultimate Politician (1947)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

         He is the final builder of the total building,

         The final dreamer of the total dream,

         Or will be. Building and dream are one.

         There is a total building and there is

         A total dream. There are words of this,

2023-05-04 National Orange Juice Day

【Sunday Morning·VII (1923)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        Supple and turbulent, a ring of men

        Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn

        Their boisterous devotion to the sun,

        Not as a god, but as a god might be,

        Naked among them, l

2023-04-15 World Art Day

【Sunday Morning·IV (1923)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        She says, “I am content when wakened birds,

        Before they fly, test the reality

        Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;

        But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields

        Retur

2023-04-08 National All is Ours Day

【Sunday Morning·III (1923)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.

        No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave

        Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.

        He moved among us, as a muttering king,

        Ma

2023-03-30 National Doctors Day

【Sunday Morning·II (1923)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        Why should she give her bounty to the dead?

        What is divinity if it can come

        Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

        Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

        In pungent fruit

2023-02-05 Lantern Festival Symbolic of Good Luck & Hope

【A Rabbit as the King of Ghosts (1940)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

       The difficulty to think at the end of day, 

       When the shapeless shadow covers the sun 

       And nothing is left except light on your fur? 

       There was the cat slopping its milk all day, 

    &n

2023-01-29 National Carnation Day

【Eight Significant Landscapes·II (1916)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

            The night is of the colour

            Of a woman's arm:

            Night, the female,

            Obscure,

     &n

2022-12-19 National Emo Day

【Esthétique du Mal·VII (1945)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

       How red the rose that is the soldier's wound,

       The wounds of many soldiers, the wounds of all

       The soldiers that have fallen, red in blood,

       The soldier of time grown deathless in great size.

       A mountain in which no ease is

2022-12-02 World Futures Day

【Esthétique du Mal·V (1945)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        Softly let all true sympathizers come,

        Without the inventions of sorrow or the sob

        Beyond invention. Within what we permit,

        Within the actual, the warm, the near,

        So great a

2022-10-16 World Food Day

【The Auroras of Autumn·V (1948)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

       The mother invites humanity to her house

       And table. The father fetches tellers of tales

       And musicians who mute much, muse much, on the tales.

       The father fetches negresses to dance,

       Among the children, like curious ripenesses

  &nbs

2022-09-11 Never-Forget Day

【Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction—It Must Give Pleasure·V (1942)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

         We drank Meursault, ate lobster Bombay with mango

         Chutney. Then the Canon Aspirin declaimed

         Of his sister, in what a sensible ecstasy

         She lived in her house. She had two daughters, one

    &n

2022-06-28 the Stonewall Uprising of 1969

【Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction——To Henry Church (1942)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        And for what, except for you, do I feel love?

        Do I press the extremest book of the wisest man

        Close to me, hidden in me day and night?

        In the uncertain light of single, certain truth,

&n

2022-04-15 Good Friday——2022-06-17 Juneteenth Weekend

【The Man with the Blue Guitar·XXXII (1937)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        Throw away the lights, the definitions,

        And say of what you see in the dark

        That it is this or that it is that,

        But do not use the ro

2022-06-05 World Environment Day

【The Man with the Blue Guitar·XXXI (1937)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

        How long and late the pheasant sleeps …

        The employer and employee contend,

        Combat, compose their droll affair.

        The bubbling sun will bubble up,

2022-05-15 National Chocolate Chip Day

【The Man with the Blue Guitar·XXVI (1937)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

             The world washed in his imagination,

             The world was a shore, whether sound or form

             Or light, the relic of farewells,

             Rock, of

2022-05-15 National Straw Hat Day

【The Man with the Blue Guitar·XXV (1937)】

Wallace Stevens (1879—1955)

         He held the world upon his nose

         And this-a-way he gave a fling.

         His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi —

         And that-a-way he twirled the thing.

        &