Baboons and Periwinkles

At a high school assembly in 1968, I was given a prize from "The English Department and especially from Mr. Williams and Mrs. Stevens" -- it was the new and enlarged edition of Modern American Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer. I am looking at it now, its red cover faded, its spine completely cracked, its pages yellowing with age. I cannot tell you how many times I have pored through this book, opening it at random to be surprised, or intentionally turning to a well-loved favorite poem.

It was through the portal of this book that I entered a world that has given me company and comfort ever since. Even when I didn't understand a poem, I could ride on its images to someplace new, but better yet, when there was that click of recognition, of something I intuitively knew or felt that was now rendered visible and shared, I was suddenly less alone. It was on these pages I first met the likes of Robinson Jeffers, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, and others whose names and words have since become familiar to my heart.

But it is Wallace Stevens who steps up today. He's been on my mind a lot ever since I read an article about him by Dan Chiasson in the N.Y. Review of Books last week. The article includes discussion about the metaphysical nature of his poetry, its philosophical acrobatics and intellectual nuance, its "abstracted abstractions", its creation of realities through imagination, the making of a world. The author defends him against accusations of solipsism and escapism and describes him as the "great poet of the continuity of thought" and "a poet of aloneness, but not loneliness". It's a fascinating article, but my brain hurts. (I'm not that smart.)

I'd sensed Stevens' brilliance long ago without having had such a sophisticated understanding of what he was doing, but all of this spurred me to revisit and re-appreciate his work. I turned first to my old favorites, of course, like The Emperor of Ice Cream, with its celebratory affirmation of illusion and ephemerality, followed by the ugly, undeniable shock of the inevitable, in which be (or non-be, really) is the unequivocal finale of seem.

Then there's Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock, in which -- darn it! -- no one is ever wearing a strange nightgown or dreaming of baboons or periwinkles. And Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which I used with my students for years as a stunning example of viewing something through different perspectives, for there are so many ways to see.

I remember, too, the Anecdote of the Jar, in which a jar placed on a hill in Tennessee "took dominion everywhere" and I began to get a glimmer of where this poet was coming from, a hint of some cerebral power that enabled him to observe until ordinary borders dissolved and understanding was altered.

But here is the thing that still takes my breath away, and it's a section from Esthetique Du Mal that I first read in the introduction to Wallace Stevens in that treasured red book of poetry:

The greatest poverty is not to live

In a physical world, to feel that one's desire

Is too difficult to tell from despair. Perhaps,

After death, the non-physical people, in paradise,

Itself non-physical, may, by chance, observe

The green corn gleaming and experience

The minor of what we feel.

*****

Is that not exquisite? It makes me want to savor the world, and in fact, I am about to go outside where our own version of green corn is gleaming. But I'll be back to continue or wrap this up. I'm prematurely posting here, but I'm excited about how that old friend, poetry, which was always there waiting, is revving me up again.

And I am grateful to the two readers (friends I have never met) of this blog (lately blah-g) who wrote such encouraging comments on that last post, and to anyone else who reads these words, my erratic messages sent in digital bottles across cyber-sea.