Wallace Stevens encapsulated the poetry’s strength. It recognizes each person’s artistry and fuels the rhythm of life. Life is a creative process. Our creations anchor us as we sense our way through life with no visible path and markers. We are adventurers in an uncharted space. No one else has lived this before or afterward. In this way, life is a work of art and takes the place of a mountain. We experience it as a deeply sensual, intimate, and creative voyage that comes from deep within our souls.
There is 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 the 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.
About ivonprefontaine
In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms.
I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders.
I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs.
I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry.
I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry.
I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope, nonviolence and its anticipatory relationship with the future, as essential elements to teaching and learning.
Academic publications can be found at Ivon Gile Prefontaine on ResearchGate
ivonprefontaine
Teacher as Transformer 
Love Steven’s. Don’t always know what he is saying but he sure says it well.>KB
The beauty and power of poetry is we get reflect and apply some of our meaning to the words. Leonard Cohen has refused, until recently, to explain the song/poem Suzanne. It led to considerable interpretation.
Umberto Eco wrote:”Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said.” >KB
Much of the time I don’t know what it is I’m pondering until it comes out in a poem and then it can go through so many permutations that I am always surprised by it. At times if I’ve written something and am not so, I think it is either a badly written piece or boring.
Well said.
I love this! Thanks for posting it.
You are welcome.
Well said. Hugs, Barbara
Thank you Barbara.
Reblogged this on Blog of an e-marketer by Main Uddin.
Thank you for the re-blog.
I’m not a big poetry buff but Stevens is one of my three faves (Emily Dickinson and ee cummings). Enjoyed this.
That is a great poetry trifecta.
Meine WPadresse hat sich geändert….
http://andreasch51.wordpress.com/
HERZlichst ANDREA
Love this poem!!! Sending to my son in India!!!!! He’s teaching there for 2 years!!!!
That sounds like a great experience. I am glad you enjoyed.
Truly a poem for me…there is a familiarity. Thanks for sharing.
You are welcome.
So many reasons to love and be thankful for the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Thanks for reminding me of this one.
You are welcome David.