I should have known when I began this quixotic series of explications that this day would arrive. For we’ve come to “In the Carolinas,” the first poem I really ever read by Wallace Stevens. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to say:
• I don’t have any idea at all of what it means
• I don’t want to have any idea at all of what it means
• It’s fair to say my own poetic career depends on not knowing what it means
Perhaps I should back up a bit and explain. I was in my first year of law school, and one of the techniques I employed to counter the mind-numbing boredom of that experience was to borrow poetry volumes essentially at random from the tiny branch library in Towson, Maryland near where I lived. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens came, if I recall, after The Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, though, in truth, a teacher in college had tried to introduce me to “The Idea of Order at Key West” but it didn’t take (as academic introductions so rarely do). I remembered nothing of that poem when I decided on the book, but I did recall the exotic fact that Stevens was a lawyer, and I suppose that made me look at this volume a bit more longingly than I would that of, say, Susan Schutz or Horace Gregory.
I don’t remember checking it out except as a book among many, but I remember vividly, later, sitting in the laundry room, reading “In the Carolinas” for the first time. This was poetry as I’d never seen it before. For starters, it was so short, leaving one hungry and hanging. It had no recognizable form or logic or even point (other than perhaps how wonderful spring is). It put words together that had no business being together (lilacs and Carolina, butterflies and cabins, aspic and nipples, breasts venting honey, pine trees sweetening bodies as if one could daub on pine-sol as a cologne). And yet. And yet – there was something so magical and miraculous about the poem. This was what they said poetry was all about but what I’d never before experienced. Every association I had about lilacs, the Carolinas, butterflies, cabins, children, love and mothers swirled together and became magnified. The gelatinous bitterness of aspic – the peculiarly sweet scent of pine – recollections of Japanese prints of women framed by irises – all of these impressions poured out of me with hallucinatory fervor as I watched the laundry tumble and saw the golden light outside of fall (a day much like today).
Here was something I wanted in my movie.
I began to carry the library book around as a kind of talisman, renewing it countless times before I finally found a copy of my own. The closest thing I can find to describe the feeling – the pulsing life – dancing between my mind and this poem comes from Stevens himself, in his 1951 “Two or Three Ideas” lecture at Mt. Holyoke College (reprinted in Opus Posthumous), where he tries to describe the effect of Baudelaire’s line “J'ai longtemps habité sous de vastes portiques” [I have lived a long time under vast porticos] from “La Vie Anterieure.” Encountering this line, “the familiar experience is made unfamiliar and from that time on, whenever we think of that particular scene, we remember how we held our breath and how the hungry doves of another world rose out of nothingness and whistled away.”
Engagement with something as elusive as all that, needless to say, presented certain challenges. The world Stevens punctured in his poems was the world I lived in, the dissatisfactions I felt growing like grapes on a vine were in his hands miraculously time-lapsed and resolved, and the harvested fruits served in rich panoply of flavors. And what of my own nascent poems? How could I be free to pursue an individual vision with such hot jewels in my pockets? It was so close to what I was trying to say, yet it shone from another planet, a place obtained after years of complete solitude and total contemplation.
The only alternative was to learn the delicate art of not reading Stevens. Years later, when I got around to actually reading Stevens again, the goblins had vanished: his take was so individual it offered freedom, not constraint, but in my delusion of youth I’d been programmed to think that those with similar feelings were threats to survival, so I viewed him as some long-lost older brother who always got to the secret passageway under the stairs or the brandy in the wine cellar before I did. The thought he was a teacher, an ancestor, one of the great poets of the English language, didn’t much occur. And so, the tones of “In the Carolinas” went wafting, unexplored.
Perhaps it’s best to take the advice of Dr. Macksey, the same professor that tried to introduce me to Stevens, who once told me “words don’t fail you soon enough,” and just let the poem speak, if not for itself, for me:
In the Carolinas
The lilacs wither in the Carolinas.
Already the butterflies flutter above the cabins.
Already new-born children interpret love
In the voices of mothers.
Timeless mother,
How is it your aspic nipples
For once vent honey?
The pine-tree sweetens my body.
The white iris beautifies me.
