This month’s Versed in Florida is with poet Jay Hopler, Associate Professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He’s written three books of poems and has been published in American Poetry Review, The New Republic, the New Yorker and SLATE. He tells WGCU’s Amy Tardif though he lives in Tampa, he visits southwest Florida quite often.
ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AT MIAMI: WALLACE STEVENS AND THE DOMESTICATION OF LIGHT
I have no beef with Wallace Stevens
Even if some of his poems do feel like so much tropical slumming.
I only wish he could have lived here, in Florida, instead of simply
Visiting once in a while—; how much more essential his summer-
Minded poems would have been! Not that a poem like “Farewell
To Florida” is solely summer-minded or is, somehow, inessential—
Only, that there exists a difference between the tropical light one
Finds beaming in a Stevens poem and the tropical light one finds
Burning in the tropics. Florida’s light is far more aggressive, far
More violent, than Stevens knew—
It gets inside your head and shreds
Things, dismantles memory, shorts out the will; even now, at six
O’clock of a Friday evening, the light here in Florida is clanging,
Banging, rattling buildings, burning through the park’s green pelt.
This never happens in a Stevens poem.