Reading ‘Harmonium’ (up to page 65) and I’m trying to get a grip on these poems. I’ve devised five categories so far:
i) poems operating according to formal pattern:
Earthy Anecdote
Metaphors of a Magnifico
Anecdote of Men by the Thousand
Domination of Black
ii) poems using poetic cliché which is then interrogated
Invective Against Swans
Ploughing on Sunday
Hibiscus …
Last Look at the Lilacs
Floral Decorations for Bananas
Of the Manner of Addressing Clouds
iii) poems using proper names/ geographic place
In the Carolinas
Earthy Anecodote
Worms at Heaven’s Gate
Anecdote of Canna
iv) Poems based around a female, a journey or the sea
The Paltry Nude
Plot against the Giant
Infanta Marina
The Ordinary Women
Cy Est Pourtraicte
Fabliau of Florida
Another Weeping Woman
Homunuculus …
O, Florida
The Apostrophe to Vincentine
v) ‘Philosophic’ poems
Domination in Black
Snow Man
Le Monocle …
Nuances of a Theme …
The Doctor of Geneva
The Comedian of the Letter C
From … Don Joost
Valley Candle
(inevitably, the categories merge)
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“There is nothing, no, no, never nothing
Like the clashed edges of two words that kill”
(Le Monocle de Mon Oncle)
is this right at the heart of Stevens’ poetry?
Reading poem after poem, I find that sudden juxtaposition of sound and register, or simply a sheer luxuriance of sound:
Over Oklahoma
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
The lilacs wither in the Carolinas
… aspic nipples …
she scuds the glitters
… scullion of fate …
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals
To behold the junipers shagged with ice
From dry catarrhs, and to guitars
Turning, bedizened
Shut to the blather that the water made
In an unburgherly apocalypse
In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks
And on silentious porpoises, whose snouts
O caliper, do you scratch your buttocks
Crochet me this buzzard
Green Vincentine
oozing cantankerous gum
Funest philosophers and ponderers
- how to resist such seductions?
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Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*. I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to ...
2 comments:
Hello Carpenter,
Like the new look, though the writing’s a bit hard to read. There’s something a bit kinky about “heavenly labials”, don’t you think?
Harmonium is such a marvellous collection – and a debut collection, too. And there’s hope for us all in the knowledge that he was 44 when it came out.
I’m not in the Stevens zone right now, so I’m not sure I have any blinding insights to add to your topology. I’ve had Harold Bloom’s commentary on Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (generally regarded as Stevens’s masterpiece) lined up for a long time, but have yet to find the right moment to thoroughly engage. In fact, I’ve yet to find any critic that has really enlightened me as regards Stevens’s work. His famous line (from “Man Carrying Thing”) that “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully” seems to say it all. And, as comes out in his own writing on poetry, he’s such an immensely visual poet. I almost think of him as a painter.
And now, in a very Carpenterish way:
(1) Are you up to date on the travails of Reginald Shepherd (see his blog http://reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/)? Atrocious. Walrus has wished him well. It may be bad taste to say this, but his analysis of his near-death experience reminded me of Blanchot’s writing on death. Esp. this para: “That I could have died and not even known I was dying, not known that anything was happening at all, is terrifying to me, even more than the (quite terrifying in itself) knowledge that I almost died itself. There’s an element of adding primal insult to injury in the thought that my own death wouldn’t even be part of my experience, as if it weren’t mine at all.” There’s something strangely comforting in the idea (Deleuze has it too) that death has nothing to do with us.
(2) This all chimes with some words from Duncan that I found in “From a Notebook” (in The Poetics of the New American Poetry) – on writing & death:
“I am willing to pursue this art in search of itself [a great definition of poetry btw], because for the time I have shaken off the insistent hounds of the critical posse. I have returned to the privacy of my craft and find that if I am my own judge I will allow the full play . . . Then a sense of perspective frees me also – that I am indeed to die, as you are to die, makes life all mine to live. The privacy is absolute and real: none of you, nor your counsels, will stand by me in my dying. And before the fact of the solitude which is my actually being alive – ‘the goods of the intellect’ are clear indeed . . . And a sense of perspective again – that making history, even writing a great poem, is out of the way. I don’t want it. When I turn to my own vein, I see it is all very questionable – but the full joy of dancing there is enough.”
Walrus
Ha ha! Yes - kinky Wallace Stevens.
I think his poems - certainly so far as I've got in 'Harmonium' have all sorts of strange stuff going on. Not at all the high and dry-minded Insurance Salesman I had been expecting. He's another of those poets I have felt awkward about: people I've known have created off-putting expectations (I remember lots of talk about his 'spirituality'). And, yes, quite a lot of the criticism I've read about the work has been misleading.
I'm reading him as a precursor to O'Hara and Ashbery - the verbal pyrotechnics (and camp) of the former, the assumed 'voices' of philosophic argument of the latter. And dripping with clitoral literalism (if you'll pardon the term). All sorts of Barthesian jouissances in gummy edges and lip tickling sound play.
I'm not sure why I decided to pull the book down off the shelf - but I'm pleased I did.
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Concerning your other posts, I'm afraid I'm a little uncomfortable at the moment about such topics - family stuff in England in the month ahead. So if I can come back to this later?
The Duncan is a great quote - time and again he delivers. I've been meaning to put up some extracts from the Levertov 'Essays' you put me onto - the 'Periplum' one is absolutely on target (and has Gizzi resonances).
*
Got Lisa Fishman's first book this morning: 'The Deep Heart's Core is a Suitcase'. Was she the reason I reached for the Stevens? Maybe - a reference to peacocks in her poem 'Midsummer'. That was it.
*
Sonnets seem to have dried up - perhaps I should turn my attention to tightening them up a bit.
Nine weeks of official school holidays beckon towards the end of June. Surely even I ought to be able to put something together before we hit September?
(As you say, WS was 44. Humbling ,,,).
as always
The C.
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