JUMP TO EXAMPLES OF “THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING” POEMS
It’s possible (likely?) that lit magazine editors are tired of reading poems after “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. However, I’m not tired of reading them. How about you?
Like a game of telephone, I love it when poets use the device to riff on (and transform) the well known poem. And even if using the model limits your chances of publication (I imagine you’ll have to be VERY creative at this point to get one of these noticed), so what. Copying Stevens is a terrific generative writing exercise.
About “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens
If you’re not familiar with the poem, you can read it at the Poetry Foundation, linked above and here. Love it or hate it, it’s very popular with both readers and poets, who are keen to borrow some of its magic.
Famously, the poem is in 13 short sections, what Stevens called “sensations,” and if experience was his intention, I think the poem succeeds.
You can, for example, feel the stillness. For me, it opens with some of the most memorable language about stillness, and it achieve that — ironically — by noticing movement:
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Here are some other qualities that attract me to this poem:
- It’s haunted.
- It’s fragile.
- It’s alive — and watching/waiting.
- It’s both vast (20 mountains!) and intimate/small (“the eye of a blackbird”).
And finally, Stevens closes with some of the most memorable language I’ve read about ongoingness:
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
That “sensation” captures a moment by freezing it, another kind of stillness, which circles back to the beginning of the poem.
22 Poems Written After “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens
These poems vary drastically in how close they stay (or how far they stray) from Stevens’ original, in the topics/themes they examine and the form they take.
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Noisy Parrot” by Rukhsana Afridi
- “Thirteen Ways of Talking About a Volcano” by Gina Balibrera
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Saltine” by Nickole Brown
- “Thirteen ways of dreaming the Glossy Black Cockatoo” by Michelle Cahill
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking” by Ama Codjoe
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Being a Mother and a Poet” by Nicole Cooley
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Dead Fish” by Marissa Davis
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Present Tense” by Sarah Felder
- “thirteen ways of looking at the f*gg*t” by Richard Haney-Jardine
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking At My Mother’s Radio” by Taiwo Hassan
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Poetry Reading” by Miriam Kotzin
- “Thirteen Ways of Being Looked At by a Possum” by Everette Maddox
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at America” by Michael McKimm
- “13 Ways of Looking at a Black Girl” by Morgan Parker
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Glacier” by Craig Santos Perez
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Wildfire” by Craig Santos Perez
- “13 Ways of Knowing Her” by Sasha Pimentel
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackboy” by Dylan Richmond
- “thirteen ways of looking at the towers: a 9/11 poem ten years later” by Evie Shockley
- “13 Ways of Looking at 13” by Patricia Smith
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Love” by William Trowbridge
- “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Bubble Wrap” by Matthew Tuckner
I’m happy to continue adding to this collection of “Thirteen Ways” poems. Got one that I’ve missed? Let me know, and I’ll take a look. Also, be sure to check out other popular lists published at this blog:
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