FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER

FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER
By Debbie bulloch



The fifth poet in our FRIDAY MORNING POETRY CORNER series is Wallace Stevens. I discovered Wallace Stevens while I was still in high school. I was attracted to Stevens’ view of the role of man’s creative imagination in bringing order to a chaotic world. Stevens’ poetry offered me a safe haven during a very troubled time in my life. After reading “The Idea of Order at Key West” I was hooked for life!

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds



If Robert Frost is the modern poet most admired by the general public and William Carlos Williams the favorite of younger poets, the Stevens was the darling of the academic world. Stevens was preoccupied with “ideas of order” and was convinced that the imagination can discover “the opposite of chaos in chaos.”

Wallace Stevens (October 2, 1879 – August 2, 1955) was a American Modernist poet. He was born of German-Dutch ancestry in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for an insurance company in Connecticut.

Stevens attended Harvard as a non-degree special student, after which he moved to New York City and briefly worked as a journalist. He then attended New York Law School, graduating in 1903. On a trip back to Reading in 1904 Stevens met Elsie Viola Kachel;, he married her in 1909. In 1913, the young couple rented a New York City apartment from sculptor Adolph A. Weinman, who made a bust of Elsie. A daughter, Holly, was born in 1924. She later edited her father's letters and a collection of his poems. The marriage reputedly became increasingly distant, but the Stevenses never divorced.

After working for several New York law firms from 1904 to 1907, Stevens was hired on January 13, 1908, as a lawyer for the American Bonding Company/ By 1914 he had become the vice-president of the New York office of the Equitable Surety Company of St. Louis, Missouri. When this job was abolished as a result of mergers in 1916, he joined the home office of Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company and left New York City to live in Hartford, where he would remain the rest of his life. By 1934, he had been named vice-president of the company. After he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, he was offered a faculty position at Harvard but declined since it would have required him to give up his vice-presidency of The Hartford.

Stevens’ business associates were apparently not aware of his status as a major literary figure – he just went about his work without making a fuss about his work as a poet. The most remarkable thing about Stevens, apart from his large body, was that there was nothing really remarkable about him outside of his immense talent as a writer. Like William Carlos Williams (who was a successful physician as well as a renown poet) Stevens was a successful lawyer who “just happened” to write great poetry.

Stevens was the rare American artist of his time who never traveled to Europe. Stevens chose to experience the “heaven of Europe” second-hand, through letters, post cards, art catalogs, wines and other “authentic food for a starved imagination.” Stevens enjoyed trips to Key West, where he allegedly broke a hand in a fistfight with Ernest Hemingway (I would have loved to see them fighting), rare beefs, strong martinis, risqué jokes and the occasional Greta Garbo (in other words, he was a man’s man).



For Stevens, poetry is “the supreme fiction,” the single essence that can replace a lost belief in God as a source of life’s redemption. Stevens was very much a poet of ideas. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” wrote Stevens. He was obsessed with the relationship between reality and imagination; he insisted that we must turn to art – shaped by the imagination – for a “freshening of life.”

Concerning the relation between consciousness and the world, in Stevens’ words "imagination" is not equivalent to consciousness nor is "reality" equivalent to the world as it exists outside our minds. Reality is the product of the imagination as it shapes the world. Because it is constantly changing as we attempt to find imaginatively satisfying ways to perceive the world, reality is an activity, not a static object. To make sense of the world is to construct a worldview through an active exercise of the imagination.

Further on the subject of “imagination” Stevens wrote, “The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them.” The imagination is the mechanism by which we unconsciously conceptualize the normal patterns of life, while reason is the way we consciously conceptualize these patterns.

According to Stevens, the imagination can only conceive of a world for a moment--a particular time, place and culture--and so must continually revise its conception to align with the changing world. For this reason, the best we can hope for is a well-conceived fiction, satisfying for the moment, but sure to lapse into obsolescence as new imaginings wash over the world.

Modern poetry, Stevens wrote, is “the poem of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice.”

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one.

His poem An Ordinary Evening in New Haven is a self-conscious digression about the creation of poetry.

We keep coming back and coming back
To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns
That fall upon it out of the wind. We seek
The poem of pure reality, untouched
By trope or deviation, straight to the word,
Straight to the transfixing object, to the object
At the exactest point at which it is itself,
Transfixing by being purely what it is
A view of New Haven, say, through the certain eye,
The eye made clear of uncertainty, with the sight
Of simple seeing, without reflection. We seek
Nothing beyond reality.

Here then, for your reading pleasure this Friday morning, are some of my favorite Stevens’ poems.

NOT IDEAS ABOUT THE THING, BUT THE THING ITSELF

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

POETRY IS A DESTRUCTIVE FORCE

That's what misery is,
Nothing to have at heart.
It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,
A lion, an ox in his breast,
To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,
Young ox, bow-legged bear,
He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man
In the body of a violent beast.
Its muscles are his own . . .

The lion sleeps in the sun.
Its nose is on its paws.
It can kill a man.

THE EMPEROR OF ICE CREAM

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

And, finally, THIRTEEN WAYS TO LOOK AT A BLACKBIRD.

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.



Take Stevens with you this weekend and journey with him in magical, mystery tour of the imagination.

Enjoy!

Before I go, here are images of the French 1938 Peugeot 402BL Eclipse Decapotable. The retractable hardtop in this Peugeot predates the retractable hardtops now common in many models of Mercedes, Volvo, VW and Audi, by almost six decades. This Peugeot was designed and built at a time when car designers were allowed to use their power of imagination to create cars that were not only highly functional but also beautiful to behold. Compare this Peugeot to the current crop of cookie-cutter cars (my beloved Benzes included) and you will see how truly beautiful and magnificent the cars from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s truly were.

(For a full image, please click on the photos, thanks.)















Happy motoring!