The sun is like a black and white cookie
and above the lilies dripping on the grass
raindrops and fireflies
desperation as far as the eye can see.
The grinding wheels of garbage barrels,
the cries of domestic animals,
a touch of distant thunder is exhaled
as in a microphone, a sigh no less
than the yellow lamps that dot the close of day.
Dreamers play with engines, liquid sugars, old guitars
unceasing in their never smiling labors
'til enough is added of themselves and they move on
with a hint of satisfaction to the next task
while the seasons change and their children grow
and the living earth murmurs constant song.
It's better than dealing with the people
put inside their lives
so they can learn.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Stevens Textplication 7: Six Significant Landscapes
Humor is always challenging in a great writer. From the lewd asides of Shake-speare to the devilish irony of Kafka, humor in “Literature” baffles readers predisposed to look for serious intent, not playful chaos. The most serious ideas are best served funny, of course, but the play on one’s own seriousness in a great writer prompts the thoughtful reader to re-assess what is really going on – a doubtful proposition when the worlds of these writers are themselves chimeras that dissolve and reappear at the pleasure of something that is not exactly the cognitive facilities.
Something like that is going on in “Six Significant Landscapes” from 1916, where one can almost see Stevens’ Cheshire grin at the word “significant.” The poem is longer than I intended to cover in this series, but it serves as a good example of Stevens’ sly wit – in this case, a subtle satire on the purple tropes of the vapor-eating poetasters with which he as a poetry reader was so familiar.
The poem takes a form Stevens often used: distinct numbered stanzas bound very loosely around a theme that may (“13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”) or may not be (“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”) coherent. I’ll review each section in sequence, and tie the whole together in some closing thoughts. Imagine as you read the poem the occasional drum roll:
I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.
II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.
III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.
IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.
V Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.
VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
Stanza one develops like a prototypical Chinese dynasty poem, say from Li Qingzhao, where wisdom is pulled begrudgingly but naturally out of the stylized landscape. Everything from the rarefied larkspur to the old sage’s beard to the symbolic pine tree starts moving together with the wind, implying a unification of all things, spirit and flesh, time and place, into one. It turns out, though, in the final two lines, that all of that was merely prelude. The wind action was only a way to describe (another Chinese poetic obsession) what water flowing over weeds looked like. The humor – subtle though it is - is in the contrast between the lofty metaphor and the humble image being metaphorized.
Stanza two takes on one of the more pervasive clichés from the Western tradition – that of women compared to night. The speaker does the usual “O unaccountable woman of fragrance” routine (complete with Anglicized “colour”), but the focus of the metaphor is on the likeness of the night to the woman’s arm (to which a logical person might proclaim “duh”). Then night itself is a woman, “concealed” and only seen in a reflecting pool, which is compared to a bracelet that shakes while a woman is dancing. One could read this as tragic or funny or both, for the fact is that the male speaker doesn’t even see the woman, only the bracelet designed to frame her beauty. The sublime female beauty is lost on the mad metaphorizing poet, which kinda defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.
Stanza three takes yet another trope, measuring oneself against a tree, man against nature, but instead of the usual struggle with the immensity of the tree vis a vis the puny human, the speaker here concludes he’s “much taller” than the tree, because he can see to the stars and to the shores. Such a wide scope of definition has its disadvantages, though, for he also endures the indignity of seeing ants crawl across his (presumably hypermagnified) shadow. His petty annoyance at such a small thing is comic when one considers his earlier pretensions of vast size – like a God annoyed by a gnat.
Stanza four is played with an even straighter face. The cliché is the man (or in this case woman) in the moon, with overwrought personifications applied such as a nightgown, “red soles” of feet, and hair jeweled with the blue of stars. The kicker comes when the speaker says “not far off,” applying to both the stars in proximity to the moon, and himself in relation to this imagined moon. Both propositions are absurd. The romantic feeling of unity results in the arrogance of metaphor.
Stanza five takes another game turn at a hoary theme: the idea that man cannot create art as beautiful as nature’s objects. Stevens handles this deftly, comparing various man-made objects seen in night’s artificial light (lamp-posts, streets, domes, towers) to sculptors’ tools (knives, chisels, mallets), concluding in a grand metaphor that the stars are a better sculptor. Again there’s the hubris, that the human scale is equal to the natural scale, even as the poet makes a point of saying it’s not equal. In this fanciful comparison he’s also created a precise visual image of what shadows distorted by light look like, an easily visualized and satisfying image like the dancing nighttime pond in stanza two.
The sixth “significant” landscape is probably the most famous, in that we’re treated to the delicious image of a philosopher wearing a sombrero, the result of his having been invited to, as they say today, “think outside of the box.” Yes, there are not-so-veiled statements about the fluidity and completeness of irrational poetic thinking versus the rigid rationality that rules our society, but we are also left with a hilarious version of an image Stevens often called upon: the inaptness of Northern thinking in the “alien, point-blank, green and actual” (“Arrival at the Waldorf”) South.
Although this poem has Stevens’ customary preoccupation with the primacy of the imagination over reality, collectively it builds into the Harmonium collection a sense of irony and lightness, much like a painter would throw in an odd ochre as a highlight. Aware of the absurdity of its metaphors, the poem mocks the flights of poets, even as it creates the juiciest of poetic images. In the end it’s a particularly poetic kind of humor, not laughing at man’s foibles or at the absurdity of life but at his own intoxication with the wine of poetry as he’s drinking it. It’s a pure laughter, like the way man in her proximity to God laughs at herself.
Something like that is going on in “Six Significant Landscapes” from 1916, where one can almost see Stevens’ Cheshire grin at the word “significant.” The poem is longer than I intended to cover in this series, but it serves as a good example of Stevens’ sly wit – in this case, a subtle satire on the purple tropes of the vapor-eating poetasters with which he as a poetry reader was so familiar.
The poem takes a form Stevens often used: distinct numbered stanzas bound very loosely around a theme that may (“13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”) or may not be (“Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”) coherent. I’ll review each section in sequence, and tie the whole together in some closing thoughts. Imagine as you read the poem the occasional drum roll:
I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.
II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman's arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.
III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.
IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.
V Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.
VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses --
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon --
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
Stanza one develops like a prototypical Chinese dynasty poem, say from Li Qingzhao, where wisdom is pulled begrudgingly but naturally out of the stylized landscape. Everything from the rarefied larkspur to the old sage’s beard to the symbolic pine tree starts moving together with the wind, implying a unification of all things, spirit and flesh, time and place, into one. It turns out, though, in the final two lines, that all of that was merely prelude. The wind action was only a way to describe (another Chinese poetic obsession) what water flowing over weeds looked like. The humor – subtle though it is - is in the contrast between the lofty metaphor and the humble image being metaphorized.
Stanza two takes on one of the more pervasive clichés from the Western tradition – that of women compared to night. The speaker does the usual “O unaccountable woman of fragrance” routine (complete with Anglicized “colour”), but the focus of the metaphor is on the likeness of the night to the woman’s arm (to which a logical person might proclaim “duh”). Then night itself is a woman, “concealed” and only seen in a reflecting pool, which is compared to a bracelet that shakes while a woman is dancing. One could read this as tragic or funny or both, for the fact is that the male speaker doesn’t even see the woman, only the bracelet designed to frame her beauty. The sublime female beauty is lost on the mad metaphorizing poet, which kinda defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.
Stanza three takes yet another trope, measuring oneself against a tree, man against nature, but instead of the usual struggle with the immensity of the tree vis a vis the puny human, the speaker here concludes he’s “much taller” than the tree, because he can see to the stars and to the shores. Such a wide scope of definition has its disadvantages, though, for he also endures the indignity of seeing ants crawl across his (presumably hypermagnified) shadow. His petty annoyance at such a small thing is comic when one considers his earlier pretensions of vast size – like a God annoyed by a gnat.
Stanza four is played with an even straighter face. The cliché is the man (or in this case woman) in the moon, with overwrought personifications applied such as a nightgown, “red soles” of feet, and hair jeweled with the blue of stars. The kicker comes when the speaker says “not far off,” applying to both the stars in proximity to the moon, and himself in relation to this imagined moon. Both propositions are absurd. The romantic feeling of unity results in the arrogance of metaphor.
Stanza five takes another game turn at a hoary theme: the idea that man cannot create art as beautiful as nature’s objects. Stevens handles this deftly, comparing various man-made objects seen in night’s artificial light (lamp-posts, streets, domes, towers) to sculptors’ tools (knives, chisels, mallets), concluding in a grand metaphor that the stars are a better sculptor. Again there’s the hubris, that the human scale is equal to the natural scale, even as the poet makes a point of saying it’s not equal. In this fanciful comparison he’s also created a precise visual image of what shadows distorted by light look like, an easily visualized and satisfying image like the dancing nighttime pond in stanza two.
The sixth “significant” landscape is probably the most famous, in that we’re treated to the delicious image of a philosopher wearing a sombrero, the result of his having been invited to, as they say today, “think outside of the box.” Yes, there are not-so-veiled statements about the fluidity and completeness of irrational poetic thinking versus the rigid rationality that rules our society, but we are also left with a hilarious version of an image Stevens often called upon: the inaptness of Northern thinking in the “alien, point-blank, green and actual” (“Arrival at the Waldorf”) South.
Although this poem has Stevens’ customary preoccupation with the primacy of the imagination over reality, collectively it builds into the Harmonium collection a sense of irony and lightness, much like a painter would throw in an odd ochre as a highlight. Aware of the absurdity of its metaphors, the poem mocks the flights of poets, even as it creates the juiciest of poetic images. In the end it’s a particularly poetic kind of humor, not laughing at man’s foibles or at the absurdity of life but at his own intoxication with the wine of poetry as he’s drinking it. It’s a pure laughter, like the way man in her proximity to God laughs at herself.
The Day that Capitalism Died
Time is money, repaid with time and a half
but there is never enough time...
Even a broken clock must eventually be reset
and all the future moments given back.
Would we even know what to do with ourselves
when the alarm we thought was God one morning lets us sleep?
Would we still believe that we are free
or dream of a higher slavery?
but there is never enough time...
Even a broken clock must eventually be reset
and all the future moments given back.
Would we even know what to do with ourselves
when the alarm we thought was God one morning lets us sleep?
Would we still believe that we are free
or dream of a higher slavery?
Thursday, July 21, 2011
No Respite from Ennui
The city still wears black
when it's hot as carburetors
and the people flow like syrup down the street.
From the Halal metal cans to the sad-browed Waldorf lions
nothing breaks from straight face into smile
except some lowly trees, joyously waving.
when it's hot as carburetors
and the people flow like syrup down the street.
From the Halal metal cans to the sad-browed Waldorf lions
nothing breaks from straight face into smile
except some lowly trees, joyously waving.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Kitchen-Sink Reflections
Beautiful
as the East London slums
as depicted by the Great British Playwright:
the birds through shiny smog,
collected into symphonies somewhere
and studied by the scholars who have given all their time
to parsing inter-species harmonetics.
Life is rife with such orderings:
the five fine London dramatists, from five distinct districts,
five religions, five generations, become one -
one oeuvre like the bird song strung in chains,
a writer now greater than the ones who turned
people into characters, ideas into themes, time's patterns into plots.
It only becomes real when it's a fantasy,
for only then a voice is strong enough
to calm the ear that's plangent from the dissonance
of power devouring gems from earth's inseparable whole
because it sees them.
The waste resolves
when names are merged, when all that can be seen is
one would-be person's inexplicable gift.
O turn the individual into style,
experience into genre,
art's illegal tinctures into trope.
Anything but knowing
how slavery goes on, as cruel as ever,
with no one left to say that it is wrong.
as the East London slums
as depicted by the Great British Playwright:
the birds through shiny smog,
collected into symphonies somewhere
and studied by the scholars who have given all their time
to parsing inter-species harmonetics.
Life is rife with such orderings:
the five fine London dramatists, from five distinct districts,
five religions, five generations, become one -
one oeuvre like the bird song strung in chains,
a writer now greater than the ones who turned
people into characters, ideas into themes, time's patterns into plots.
It only becomes real when it's a fantasy,
for only then a voice is strong enough
to calm the ear that's plangent from the dissonance
of power devouring gems from earth's inseparable whole
because it sees them.
The waste resolves
when names are merged, when all that can be seen is
one would-be person's inexplicable gift.
O turn the individual into style,
experience into genre,
art's illegal tinctures into trope.
Anything but knowing
how slavery goes on, as cruel as ever,
with no one left to say that it is wrong.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Hieroglyphs in the Landscape
When she compared poetry in the first person to "torture"
she of course was talking about herself
as I, in recalling what she'd said to mind,
reflect how it applies to me.
The reading that we do, of other people's poems,
how they could be extensions of our own
as easily as nails to seal our coffins;
open or close, what a choice.
This one thing left that's private in a narcissistic world
and we the voyeurs of the hermetic;
even the most discreet sounds grate, turn to questions
that can't be answered in our own words.
she of course was talking about herself
as I, in recalling what she'd said to mind,
reflect how it applies to me.
The reading that we do, of other people's poems,
how they could be extensions of our own
as easily as nails to seal our coffins;
open or close, what a choice.
This one thing left that's private in a narcissistic world
and we the voyeurs of the hermetic;
even the most discreet sounds grate, turn to questions
that can't be answered in our own words.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Days of Pain - 6
It wasn't like getting teeth pulled
- it was getting teeth pulled!
Only clam juice and skyr yogurt
stand between me and mighty relief
like Clint Eastwood convalescing
without the whiskey or the nun.
Lulled by the wires
loosening and tightening.
I dream like a foraging mammal
and rise like a wire spring coil.
- it was getting teeth pulled!
Only clam juice and skyr yogurt
stand between me and mighty relief
like Clint Eastwood convalescing
without the whiskey or the nun.
Lulled by the wires
loosening and tightening.
I dream like a foraging mammal
and rise like a wire spring coil.
Days of Pain - 5
Thoughts on the trip to the Dedham looney bin:
A lone wind turbine in New Haven...
Buzzards hover above Society Road...
Green cliffs below Wickadoxet, Wyoming, Pawtucket...
Sunday at the Peter Pan Bus Terminal...
The Asperger's School in Walpole...
Sunset over Sturbridge green and red...
Howling Wolf cut off in Heroes Tunnel...
A lone wind turbine in New Haven...
Buzzards hover above Society Road...
Green cliffs below Wickadoxet, Wyoming, Pawtucket...
Sunday at the Peter Pan Bus Terminal...
The Asperger's School in Walpole...
Sunset over Sturbridge green and red...
Howling Wolf cut off in Heroes Tunnel...
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The Weight We Cannot Feel
"We're not printing money, we're creating reserves" - Ben Bernanke, 7/13/11
Magicians with their wands
pull rabbits from mere air,
make flowers disappear,
and we so want to believe it all is real.
Thus money is created, like a prayer,
and we pretend the glitter's gold
but we're victims of the trick.
When the flash powder clears
we owe in exponentials
to invisible flesh and blood
that spritzes every spoke
on the chain of the machine
with magic air
to keep the wheels in constant turning
from the labor of the slaves
who pledge their children's dreams to keep it moving
'til more is pledged to debt than does exist:
we must double-down in sacrifice
so that the hand we allow to wave the wand
can continue to believe
that what it conjures with its frail twisting
is not really sleight-of-hand.
Magicians with their wands
pull rabbits from mere air,
make flowers disappear,
and we so want to believe it all is real.
Thus money is created, like a prayer,
and we pretend the glitter's gold
but we're victims of the trick.
When the flash powder clears
we owe in exponentials
to invisible flesh and blood
that spritzes every spoke
on the chain of the machine
with magic air
to keep the wheels in constant turning
from the labor of the slaves
who pledge their children's dreams to keep it moving
'til more is pledged to debt than does exist:
we must double-down in sacrifice
so that the hand we allow to wave the wand
can continue to believe
that what it conjures with its frail twisting
is not really sleight-of-hand.
Sunday, July 10, 2011
Days of Pain - 4
We all share the same brain
but crazy people know it
so they understand each others' salad words
like normal people understand directions -
the discourse of the mad is subtly honed
in here, the sane are the ones confused.
But the patients are so kind, they say
"all you really need to know of God
is on the backside of your dollar bill:
an all-seeing eagle eye
'In God We Trust ONE.'"
There's a point in everyone's life
where coincidence becomes crazy,
and there's a point here - every 20 minutes or so -
when someone's put into a straight jacket.
That's just the way it goes
No word no word no word no word no word no word
Word ... One.
The windows and refrigerators are locked
but there are the finest therapists in here:
Jesus born again for 2012,
Pops the homeless sailor down the hall.
A lot of energy in here, too,
A lot of people murdered.
We're free to drink orangeade and play games.
Here's one that they call word association:
Love means learning how your living makes others hurt...
Faith means staying away from artificial connections
like drugs and computers that keep you from the dream...
Hope is the word on the state flag of Rhode Island,
underneath a big and yellow anchor...
Charity means not letting on when we see
that they get lost too just like we do.
but crazy people know it
so they understand each others' salad words
like normal people understand directions -
the discourse of the mad is subtly honed
in here, the sane are the ones confused.
But the patients are so kind, they say
"all you really need to know of God
is on the backside of your dollar bill:
an all-seeing eagle eye
'In God We Trust ONE.'"
There's a point in everyone's life
where coincidence becomes crazy,
and there's a point here - every 20 minutes or so -
when someone's put into a straight jacket.
That's just the way it goes
No word no word no word no word no word no word
Word ... One.
The windows and refrigerators are locked
but there are the finest therapists in here:
Jesus born again for 2012,
Pops the homeless sailor down the hall.
A lot of energy in here, too,
A lot of people murdered.
We're free to drink orangeade and play games.
Here's one that they call word association:
Love means learning how your living makes others hurt...
Faith means staying away from artificial connections
like drugs and computers that keep you from the dream...
Hope is the word on the state flag of Rhode Island,
underneath a big and yellow anchor...
Charity means not letting on when we see
that they get lost too just like we do.
Saturday, July 9, 2011
Days of Pain -3
It simply happened, like one happens
to get pregnant or be president,
Don’t put it all on me for why you keep me in this place,
you promised not to hold me here last night, a dirty trick,
Just because I say I want to jump off of the roof
doesn’t mean I’d actually do it, you should know that,
And just because I sometimes like to trip balls when I’m high
just means I sometimes make some bad decisions.
Don’t you have some people more in need of help
you have to save? I’ll only let you down like I’ve done
Everyone. I ratted out my mother’s boyfriend,
I probably raped the first girl that I loved. What about you
With that embarrassed look, don’t try to fix me,
don’t you have some demons all your own?
Can you tell me 'bout the way things make you feel?
With no one understanding? The world a disappointing nest of greed?
I know what that is like, just talk to me some more,
anything is better than the silence in this room,
I know about the secrets, the stuff you keep from me,
the evidence you’ll use to lock me up,
But I can get away, I’m Harry slick Houdini,
there isn’t any cage I can’t escape,
And I can live inside the woods or in the ghetto,
done that since my mother kicked me out at age 14
That winter night without a suitcase
because she loved me, and I was worthless,
So I had to prove her wrong, that I was strong
so she would take me back. She never would,
Just calling every day because she worried,
the one who bore me, to whom I owe my life.
But that’s not very interesting to you I know,
I know you’re paid to keep me peaceful
But how can I be, when no one sees the shadow people
who live on so much less than spoiled me?
They've lost their minds, their hope, their families,
and no one cares. I don’t deserve your pity
But a cigarette might do me. I hear that
there’s a packie down the street.
Just kiddin’, friend, is your shift about to end?
You remind me of my father, he may come to pick me up,
Maybe you and I can go out fishing, there’s a place that
no one knows, where the fluke and stripers jump onto your line,
The ocean goes a million miles from there,
on a clear day it’s like heaven - boundless, wordless love
And the distance doesn’t seem like it is there.
to get pregnant or be president,
Don’t put it all on me for why you keep me in this place,
you promised not to hold me here last night, a dirty trick,
Just because I say I want to jump off of the roof
doesn’t mean I’d actually do it, you should know that,
And just because I sometimes like to trip balls when I’m high
just means I sometimes make some bad decisions.
Don’t you have some people more in need of help
you have to save? I’ll only let you down like I’ve done
Everyone. I ratted out my mother’s boyfriend,
I probably raped the first girl that I loved. What about you
With that embarrassed look, don’t try to fix me,
don’t you have some demons all your own?
Can you tell me 'bout the way things make you feel?
With no one understanding? The world a disappointing nest of greed?
I know what that is like, just talk to me some more,
anything is better than the silence in this room,
I know about the secrets, the stuff you keep from me,
the evidence you’ll use to lock me up,
But I can get away, I’m Harry slick Houdini,
there isn’t any cage I can’t escape,
And I can live inside the woods or in the ghetto,
done that since my mother kicked me out at age 14
That winter night without a suitcase
because she loved me, and I was worthless,
So I had to prove her wrong, that I was strong
so she would take me back. She never would,
Just calling every day because she worried,
the one who bore me, to whom I owe my life.
But that’s not very interesting to you I know,
I know you’re paid to keep me peaceful
But how can I be, when no one sees the shadow people
who live on so much less than spoiled me?
They've lost their minds, their hope, their families,
and no one cares. I don’t deserve your pity
But a cigarette might do me. I hear that
there’s a packie down the street.
Just kiddin’, friend, is your shift about to end?
You remind me of my father, he may come to pick me up,
Maybe you and I can go out fishing, there’s a place that
no one knows, where the fluke and stripers jump onto your line,
The ocean goes a million miles from there,
on a clear day it’s like heaven - boundless, wordless love
And the distance doesn’t seem like it is there.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Stevens Textplication 6: Domination of Black
Wallace Stevens chose “Domination of Black” from 1916 as his own favorite poem for the 1942 anthology America’s 93 Greatest Living Authors Present This Is My Best… (Dial Press) with the following statement (p. 652):
The themes of life are the themes of poetry. It seems to be, so clearly, that what is the end of life for the politician or the philosopher, say, ought to be the end of life for the poet, and that his important poems ought to be the poems of the achievement of that end. But poetry is neither politics nor philosophy. Poetry is poetry, and one's objective as a poet is to achieve poetry, precisely as one's objective in music is to achieve music. There are poets who would regard that as a scandal and who would say that a poem that had no importance except its importance as poetry had no importance at all, and that a poet who had no objective except to achieve poetry was a fribble and something less than a man of reason.This lawyerly masterpiece of circular reasoning (poetry is good – unlike other areas of life – because it is good poetry), inasmuch as it means anything beyond the customary come-hither smokescreen of the artist, suggests that the worth of poetry lies in qualities beyond logical explanation, beyond formal concerns, as inaccessible to laymen as to poets themselves. “The themes of life” are the themes of poetry, but its value lies in something different that is unique to poetry. Let’s see if we can unravel this differance. Here is the poem:
At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?
Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
This poem, read aloud, is a great example of the way Stevens creates his stately yet dynamic rhythms through repetition. The same word emphasized in different ways, in different accentual structures, brings with it an eerie weight that, in this case, where multiple words are carried throughout the whole poem, unifies the whole with a stillness and grandeur. In the 190 words of the poem, the words "wind", "cry", "leaves", "hemlocks", "peacocks", "themselves" and "I" are all repeated five times, while the words "turning" (6), "turned"(3), "fire"(3), "remembered", "loud", "heavy", "tails", "room", "twilight", "striding" (2 times each) are also repeated. The phrases "like the leaves themselves" and "the cry of the peacocks" are each repeated three times (four if you count minor variations). It’s as if Stevens has invented his own style, the mournful villanelle wrought to an extreme. The repetitions encompass the elements (earth/leaves, fire, air/wind), a rare use of the first person (interesting in that context that Stevens chose this as his personal favorite), and a number of words rich in symbolic meanings, most notably the rhyming "peacocks" and "hemlocks."
Dramatically, the poem moves through an extended comparison of a flickering fireplace fire with first the autumn leaves literally reflected from the outside into the room, then to the colors of peacocks tails (and the encroaching night to the dark green of hemlock trees). Then the noise the fire makes is compared to the noises of both peacocks and hemlocks (with some questioning of who is talking and listening to whom), and finally the planets in the sky seem like the same turning of the leaves, the changing of the seasons, a holistic sense of relatedness that soon resolves both in the fireplace and outside to darkness. This encroachment of night scares the speaker, but he remembers the cry of the peacock and feels better.
The attentive reader will notice that I have completed the thought at the end of the poem that most if not all commentators on this poem leave ambiguous, in their apparent desire to have this poem be simply about death and annihilation. The reason why is simple. On the most basic symbolic level, hemlocks are evergreen trees that never change with the seasons, while peacocks replace their feathers annually. Thus, it’s quite easy to see a contrast between the elegant and artistic peacock and her strange cry signaling a continuation of life and the hemlock (also the name of the elixir which suicided the great philosopher Socrates) signaling the “domination of black” – the constant presence of death in our lives due to its unresolvable mystery.
If that’s all there was to it, we’d say “how nice, the voice of the imagination achieves a kind of immortality” and move on, secretly thinking that death has an even bigger hold than the somber lines give it credit for. But I believe part of the reason for Stevens’ reticence about saying anything about his supposed favorite poem comes from the fact that in the word “peacock” he chose one of the oldest and most powerful religious symbols for immortality and direct experience of the divine there is, one that reaches across virtually all spiritual traditions.
The “cry of the peacock” is, in other words, a mystical call, a direct perception of the divine that can’t be named or defined, but in our experience of it shows us our perpetual and incorruptible souls. So a single poetic image can yield transcendence.
Doesn’t that make this poem a lot less depressing?
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Lon Chaney in the Afternoon
How can we have a common language
when every person is a different species?
Though truth trumps style at times
and companionship can soften many vices
we still stand out like snakes on Shiva's arms
(though we act like it's our jewelry sets us apart).
Oh what a clever masquerade:
that we're homogenized like milk
on a factory floor of clones and typecast tools
to be expunged of passion and of hair
just waiting for the hive to take our souls,
pretending meanwhile we can't see
the red hair, green eyes, missing limbs, crooked teeth
(forget about what's in there underneath!)
"Agreement or the void," it said
in picture books with diagrams and smiles
to earn us eagle badges let us get inside the buildings.
Still we slip the bounds of form in every moment,
conversing like chameleons, how deep we go to understand
the mirror of a million faces.
when every person is a different species?
Though truth trumps style at times
and companionship can soften many vices
we still stand out like snakes on Shiva's arms
(though we act like it's our jewelry sets us apart).
Oh what a clever masquerade:
that we're homogenized like milk
on a factory floor of clones and typecast tools
to be expunged of passion and of hair
just waiting for the hive to take our souls,
pretending meanwhile we can't see
the red hair, green eyes, missing limbs, crooked teeth
(forget about what's in there underneath!)
"Agreement or the void," it said
in picture books with diagrams and smiles
to earn us eagle badges let us get inside the buildings.
Still we slip the bounds of form in every moment,
conversing like chameleons, how deep we go to understand
the mirror of a million faces.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Poem Made out of Landscape
The green has no need to prove it exists
but we think so as we pray to ripe-red berries we chop down.
It's as oblivious to this as young girls tracking hedgehogs are
to the advances of old men.
It's tuned to nuances of sun and rain
while we shiver under branches sans umbrellas.
but we think so as we pray to ripe-red berries we chop down.
It's as oblivious to this as young girls tracking hedgehogs are
to the advances of old men.
It's tuned to nuances of sun and rain
while we shiver under branches sans umbrellas.
A Day with Robert Kelly
It’s when I notice language poems
anonymous as sonnets
I think of Homer, that collective no one knew,
of “Beowulf” and “Shakes-peare,” the avatars
invisible at the start.
Words fly from separate hands
to tattoo all the bulletin boards
with a palimpsest of tacks –
so much easier to see them when they’re independent dreamers
like green birds as they sing to summer dogs and firecrackers
than be awestruck by the one, the poet who lays everything low.
anonymous as sonnets
I think of Homer, that collective no one knew,
of “Beowulf” and “Shakes-peare,” the avatars
invisible at the start.
Words fly from separate hands
to tattoo all the bulletin boards
with a palimpsest of tacks –
so much easier to see them when they’re independent dreamers
like green birds as they sing to summer dogs and firecrackers
than be awestruck by the one, the poet who lays everything low.
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