July 14, 2004

I delivered my first featured reading on the anniversary of Wallace Stevens’ birth. I like to think that bears some significance for my writing career, since Stevens was one of two poets I consciously emulated during the prolific, experimental, drivel-spewing years when I was forging my writing style (Frost was the other). I was attracted to Stevens not only because he produced extraordinary poetry despite a lifetime in a career of amazingly unpoetic character (which was important to me in engineering school). He also looks just a little like I remember my grandfather who died when I was 18; not coincidentally the same time period I was doing that forging.

But beyond happenstance and large ears, what I appreciated most about Stevens is his music. When I look at my own writing, I find the dominant musical elements I employ are the iambic line and almost compulsive alliteration. I can trace this without question to Stevens, and more specifically to my favorites among his work. “The Emperor of Ice Cream” begins

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

The cacophony of Cs is right there on the surface. Notice also the buried repeating Ps, the assonance of I-sounds in “bid him whip in kitchen” and the underlying iambic (da DA da DA) beat.  Note especially how the end of the short-I phrase overlaps the start of the hard Cs. It’s brilliant use of sound in a way that does not detract from the serious reality he is describing and it makes compelling opening to a short poem.

My other favorite Stevens poem smacks you right away with its title, then goes on to apply the Stevens music. “A High Toned Old Christian Woman” directs the character of the title to consider that poetry is a vital part of the world, a world that exists well outside her narrow worldview, and it uses his characteristic music to emphasize his points. He begs her to open her mind with:

…Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
…

Feel that mouthful of Fs, the simple sounds of “tink and tank…” that provide rhythmic rim shots at this woman’s simplistic attitude and help the reader feel Stevens’ opinion of the “jovial hullabaloo” of her universe.

Another element I appreciate about Wallace Stevens is the whole other mood and style he could apply, as in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. The sparse construction and simpler language might seem unrelated to the complicated Latinate-laden constructs above, but the wisdom of Stevens’ ear for music is still there, as in the first section of “Blackbird”

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

Say it aloud, and feel how the Ms and Ys of the first line slow you down, to feel the stillness of that winter landscape, help the presence of the blackbird, as phonetically startling as the blackbird must be visually startling. There has been much written about this poem and its symbols and references and deeper meanings – thousands of times as many words as the poem itself contains – but I prefer to experience it in ignorance. I prefer to allow the carefully assembled music to take me to its scenes, to images I can only see with a blindfold over my eyes and poems in my ears.

Before you go, check out these excellent references, and form your own opinions of Wallace Stevens:

• The Academy of American Poets Stevens Exhibit
• Modern American Poetry’s Stevens Exhibit.