The Blue Guitar

The Blue Guitar is you. It shapes you, as surprise, by surprising you. You collaborate and lay hands on this guitar, sometimes reject it but cannot escape the delicacy of its riffs and affirmations. Whether it comes from Picasso, Michael Tippett, Derek Bailey, Rilke or Jacques Derrida, the blue guitar is a thing affirmed, a yes played over a final no. This book is a book of comical roots: super-roots, radishes, beetroots, gooseberries, booby dazzlers, and seabows. It is a prison book, a book of legend and song, a picture book, a book of the same, of affirmations as colours. It is a book of the freshly rooted and radically surpriseful in poetry, figured out here by Wallace Stevens and his poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar.’