Vignette

rain stains gray veins sheeny scene in gloomy gleam of damp lamps swamps on ramps slurping kicking muttering sputtering stuttering puttering pittering pattering chittering chattering spittering spattering splattering rap happy clap snappy drops plop pop and hop slop mops slog soaking coats floating boats sopping socks wipers slap windows tap stallion clops on rooftops never stops oceans of lotion smoky spokes in motion flares of snares tears the air a mister twister whisper whiskers hush rush wash sauce flash splash plash clash crashing the musty dust a humid humus smell as tires at high tide swell there's wet sets nets of sweat bleeding weeds and feeding reeds neon beams flee free their cells then lickety slick the thunder planes the sight of white in flight against the sky we curve we skid we swerve we slid skip slip slide glide sighing at high cries of heaven flying down like a gown to the ground with a sound of horizons pining the town is brown and rising when will this dimness end the sticky skin wane the frizzy spritz panes the main drains claimed this rain

Tu Fu at a Poetry Workshop

I’m alone with the moon every night

And I hear in the crickets talk my missing place.

Without the prizes given to the worst of poems

How would we know what to value?

Without professional poets

How would we know what can’t be bought?

I’ve lived for 30 years on the outside of the gate

And heard the anxious laughs of those inside,

The aspirations to mediocrity, 

The heartfelt applause when it’s finally achieved -

It sounds so much like my own family

But I’ve found much closer ties to rocks and sticks

And I can no more tell if I’m still ashamed of failure

Or if genius just makes everything corrupt.

The cool evenings of fall will soon arrive

With students trying to lose their innocence as quickly as they can

To finally learn that wisdom can’t be found.

It’s better that I, who learned a few wise phrases the hard way

Must be kept away.

It was like yesterday these courtyards gave me purpose,  

I mastered every art of tribal speech, praised every first brave leap,

Chased the blossoms down most highly prized in court.

But one day I was real, and the bouquet I gathered was not,

And I think about them all most every day.

I wish I hadn’t cared about my poems.

It seems I've spent my whole life drawing peacocks

In a world full of squirrels.

Their song goes on next door while I learn absence,

To lean so close to heaven I’m non-existent.

Their noise drowns out a sparrow’s call

And I ask my son if anyone still writes poems. 

"You do," he replies, and goes back to his game.

I can’t stay here in this heavy air much longer

Knowing I’ll never be summoned.

They sew up every loneliness like winter clothes inside the gate

While still I argue with them, with the moon,

Against what has no defense, and I always lose.

Brand-new scholars have come to argue scripture, give corrections,

And each distinction peels back like an onion

To leave no layer for masters, or distant others,

So it comes to how punctual the tea is served,

How warm the cup when it is poured.

I guess I brush for life, they brush for favor.

The lone wolf’s cry, they say, is beautiful

Because the grief never ends, the call never answers.

The cries of the pack are too soon resolved,

The smallest ink of grief is all that’s required.

Stevens Textplication 9: The Worms at Heaven’s Gate

“The Worms at Heaven’s Gate”* is true rarity among Wallace Stevens’ oeuvre: a poem that's played completely straight, that is, it doesn’t leap beyond its literal meaning. It’s a clearly detailed description of worms devouring a corpse, organ by organ, from the perspective of the worms:

Out of the tomb, we bring Badroulbadour,
Within our bellies, we her chariot.
Here is an eye. And here are, one by one,
The lashes of that eye and its white lid.
Here is the cheek on which that lid declines,
And, finger after finger, here, the hand,
The genius of that cheek. Here are the lips,
The bundle of the body and the feet.
 . . . . . . . . . . . .
Out of the tomb we bring Badroulbadour.

For all the poem’s specificity, Stevens leaves its implications open-ended (Are these worms at heaven's gate angels of god or evidence that god doesn't exist? Do the worms use the body to produce silk or flies?). Why would Stevens write a poem about worms eating a corpse? Two word choices in the line repeated at the beginning and end of the poem offer clues.

The first phrase is “out of the tomb,” which suggests Christian or other (perhaps literary) immortality. It’s the opposite of the way people usually describe the natural process of bodily decay after death. But it makes sense in the context of linking consumption with immortality (similar to the “Cannibalism Manifesto” of Stevens’ contemporary, the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade). The only immortality we can confer is what we can gather of the dead woman’s effects/spirit/work to make a part of ourselves.

The second repeated note is the name of the dead woman, Badroulbadour. Meaning literally “the full moon of full moon’s” in Arabic, she was the princess with whom poor Aladdin in the Arabian Nights stories fell in love and managed with the help of his jinn (genie) to win. The feminine, the exotic, the magic, the literary, the Islamic – all of that is gently alluded to, but the incantatory word sounds too much to me like the word Troubadour, which at the time this was written (1916) was a very popular topic among the poetic avant-garde, thanks largely to Pound’s scholarly studies on the subject. Thus there’s a hint not just of the imagination, but of poetry, a version of it that involved performing in front of an audience. An audience of worms, ready to devour, like at a poetry reading in a coffeehouse? Maybe. Consider the French word for worms, vers, which also means “verse”. And consider the bookworm, epicure of the printed page.** What kind of immortality is this – to have the permanence of books destroyed? It’s hard to know – worms eat everything, and the nature of their transformations are invisible. Stevens didn’t know about the internet – infected with its own kind of worms.***

 * Wikipedia suggests that the title “worms at heaven’s gate” comes from the line “hymns at heaven’s gate” in Shakes-peare’s Sonnet 29 (also where TS Eliot copped the line “desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope” for the opening of “Ash Wednesday”) . Sonnet 29, like the sequence in general, concerns, as Hank Whittemore thoroughly documents, the “deal with the devil” the Earl of Oxford (Edward De Vere) made with the British Crown to save his illegitimate son Henry Wriothesley (to whom the sonnets are dedicated) from execution in exchange for hiding (probably forever) De Vere’s authorship of “Shakes-peare’s” works. The “hymns at heaven’s gate” are those that come from Wriothesley, by dint of remaining alive, to the dead, forgotten and disgraced De Vere, a consolation for the loss of his artistic works and legacy that he bemoans earlier in the sonnet. Wriothesley being saved is enough immortality for De Vere, who “scorn(s) to change my state with kings.” The implications for Stevens’ poem are intriguing.
** The lines “Here is an eye. And here are, one by one, / The lashes of that eye and its white lid” do seem to suggest that the eye is the one reading the page, and seeing the lashes of commas on the page, until the white space contains it (see Jacqueline Vaught Brogan).
*** For a more modern, internet-generated view of the significance of worms at heaven’s gate, go to the Church of Euthanasia website.

Sunlight Villanelle

Houses dissolve into the sun
Form is a mourner’s veil

Thoughts live forever, if only for fun
No one can say what you know


The stuff that is said is the useless part
Form is a mourner’s veil

As large as a star is the speaker’s heart
No one can say what you know


The earth is a flower, and you are its seed
Form is a mourner’s veil

The sun beats a code through the passing trees
No one can say what you know


The windows are sky and sky merely windows
Form is a mourner’s veil

Everyone's wearing disguises and clothes
No one can say what you know


You must talk to buildings – there’s no other way
Form is a mourner’s veil

Voices surround you – do you hear what they say?
No one can say what you know


Light is more real than what it uncovers
Form is a mourner’s veil

You are a flower that keeps changing colors
No one can say what you know


It’s not in the thing but inside its song
Form is a mourner’s veil

All that you’ve learned turns out to be wrong
No one can say what you know


The blackest of stones may be dreaming too
Form is a mourner’s veil

In darkness we live to teach light to shine through
No one can say what you know

Afterwords

The world stopped
but you started fresh
you've been preparing to be alone your whole life
you help other people rise again

Day Without Tesla

Powerless
so time stepped aside for us:
to haul ice and read by candles,
slice onions turned translucent under flashlight,
cook food while it's still fresh on fencepost fires,
wake clockless at the break of blue,
fall in sepia to pillows and a moon...
It's like we've been reborn
in antediluvian Wyoming,
where gilded books and simple chores
can't substitute for
photos of a black hole swallowing a star ...

This life doesn't really exist anymore;
it's a scheme of extreme therapy
to take back what maimed us long ago,
when worlds like Machu Picchu
were only teller's jewels,
and we wanted to see through the trees
to words not fleshed out in books—
for lifetimes it was like that, like it is
right now, you and me as lords
scraping at some vista that is closing
to dream ourselves a better place,
one finally suitable,
with just enough to show us what we lack.

Hurricane Song

The best cleanings leave debris -
logs and lawnchairs washing down the street,
the squeal of vacuum cleaners on all sides,
tree boughs picked of toothpicks on the ground,
a power wash at midnight on the sidings...
all sounds have been subsumed, to this,
even the moaning trains are taken out of service
replaced by trains that seethe from other worlds,
with jets released from deep inside the earth
that make the branches channel ocean monsters,
rocking, flailing, screaming, retreating but refusing to yield,
their trunks in a lumbering dance, releasing
leaves to cascade like butterflies to heaven
or chase each other along the lawns
or get glued like eyes to picture windows
or costumed like paper-mache on top of cars,
all to some large sound...
Culverts roar, crickets octaves above...

The wind is like a tea kettle, the rain like bacon frying,
soon they'll come in teams from kitchens in candle-light
and armies of solitary generators will turn on
and sirens running late will chase a world down
unloosened from its bounds.

Signal Transmission

"Someone halfway across the Galaxy could have found the computer program for you and is conversing with you at this very moment." – Stephen Wolfram

A single strand – a singular signal -
touch is binding, but unbelievable

So we jump our separate spools to feel
another surface – the space between the holes

It’s never lonely in the void
silence calls us:

“here” – find who you are
“there” – in what you absorb

All you take in's still inside you
from however faraway it shines

There’s only the hesitant questions:
Who are you? What do you do? How are you feeling today?

In Flight

The strength of the owl is ignoring all she sees,
intent on what she can't.

The green is possibility,
something always gives itself away.

To see an empty field and know
that all that you require is found inside,

—a kind of faith we humans always lack,
stringing traps to hold our thoughts intact
for if they fly away they won't come back.

Morning Ritual of a Monk

I suppose that there are places I can go
to find official protocol today
but out here at the shoreline the truth is not so fixed
and I always must rely on my own sense.

I start the morning praying to the sun
and watching as the birds flow into clouds
to glean the mood I need to represent,
the expression from the one to all its parts

for the village always acts on what I show,
it guides its rhythms by the cloth I call
and I could draw it half-mast on any day
the soldiers who are dying, the way the world's disintegrating,

yet graveyards are but part of how we live
and there is such a thing as too much crying
so I must bravely fly the colors high
most every day, despite the silent we can't honor.

At the same time, why let death get in the way
when birds can fly past bones in search of worms?
The living have secured a sacred space
and death must keep its messengers at bay,

except when I am tasked with days like this,
when the circles within circles turn around
and cannot shake the loss of what's familiar,
something even now we have forgotten,

but that is what our grief becomes at last
knowing that we never saw what once was there.

Plugged Ear Serenade

Where does the leaf rattle end
and cicada begin?
I feel it on my face
and within, it's even louder
where the chime completes its tone.

Thirst for Water

The only things here,
two seagulls
mad beaks
on a black rock
at the surface of the river.

I recognize that taste,
it's what I am that foams there,
the need to find it
on the other side.

A curly guy is smiling
as he holds a paper bag
to drink from
and loses himself
in talk.

St. Barts

God delivers to the Hamptons,
stands in spirit with the doormen,
speaks German, admires Ming porcelain
as much as pewter chopsticks pinning hair buns dyed Mets orange,
brings sunflowers to black steel towers
and opens up the crypt-like doors of neighborly cathedrals
and it’s always right on time.

God believes in heaven and knows what hell is like
but prefers, when all is said and done, the salad
with balsamic vinaigrette (and a sparkling Prosecco to go with it)
at the outdoor church café with boy’s choir under parasols
to maybe steal a peek between bites at the gift store book
on the great chain of being, while the talk delights and shocks
and the same thing never comes down Park Avenue twice.

God knows Power Point,
has the most amazing eyes you never saw,
blacks out Rhianna’s teeth on billboards for fun,
will always dress ‘em up to dress 'em down
the way that bums and businessmen change identities with their eyes
and guys and gals leap on each other
at the pretense of a smile.

God weaves the word “ingress” in the seams of city streets
as if it has some meaning for that day,
and takes away the apple-pretzel vendor
as if you’d really miss him
and the day, too, gone on too long, glows somber when it’s almost done
but God keeps lit his devil shop, with fictions in the windows
to keep the whole mess moving, so that she can stop and look.

Theme Revisited

I know you like I know death

With the faith of the deaf

All you say grows in my head

Stevens Textplication 8: Inscription for a Monument

“Inscription for a Monument,” first published in the March 1916 issue of Others magazine, is one of the few uncollected poems in Stevens’ selected poems. It’s a ten-line free-verse fantasy:

To the imagined lives
Evoked by music,
Creatures of horns, flutes, drums,
Violins, bassoons, cymbals--
Nude porters that glistened in Burma
Defiling from sight;
Island philosophers spent
By long thought beside fountains;
Big-bellied ogres curled up in the sunlight,
Stuttering dreams. . . . . .

The title calls to mind the “inscription for a monument at [insert church here]” elegy poems to other poets that were common in British poetry (for example, Wordsworth to Robert Southey, Henry Kirk White to Cowper, everyone to Shakes-peare). Such poems were invariably ponderous and pious, as they took stock of the poet’s achievement and/or tragic unfulfillment of potential, and sought to articulate the impact the poet had on the later poet (without of course all the modern-day Freudian disrespect towards fathers).

Stevens isn’t playing by that set of rules. Even the seeming fanfare of the first four lines is exceedingly strange: the inscription is to someone known by imagination, not in real life, “evoked by music,” not from reflecting on the person, who is a “creature” of musical instruments, created as much by the martial music of celebration as by actual flesh and blood achievements. Stevens is noting, of course, that the only way one knows anything of a literary (or other famous) personage is by the imaginative effect of reading, but we also see here what I call the irony of statues, a theme Stevens returned to time and time again, where an actual person is lost in his artistic rendering.

By the fifth line, the poem leaves behind any pretense of Western poetical (or monumental) tradition to venture deep into modernist primitivism: “nude porters that glistened in Burma.” The image is vivid, the associations rich (think of the subjugated help of the British empire freed of the all-important imperial uniform). What statues are there of the servants? Monuments depict naked Angels at the gates of heaven (porters are gatekeepers not bag carriers in the British tradition), but few people beyond Margaret Mead and opium addicts would consider Burma to be paradise. It gets even stranger with the oddly-phrased next line: “defiling from sight.” It’s an interesting double entendre, the nude porters marching single file across the mountain passes (the secondary meaning of defile from the French defiler - marching away in columns) and also taking their shameful nudity away from prudish eyes (the sense of defile from the Old English defoulen - to trample on, abuse, pollute). This becomes truly subversive when one remembers that during the golden age of monuments in which Stevens lived, statues were almost always of military heroes or religious figures; what seems to be a forced military evacuation of natives fits all too neatly into the basic Christian notion of sinners defiled in God’s sight. It’s not a fit subject for statues, but the imagination, in truly pondering the governing philosophy of Western civilization to ask how that guy got on the pedestal, might think of such things.

The second imagined statue is of “Island philosophers spent / By long thought beside fountains.” Again, there is the odd phrasing, implying these philosophers don’t have much to show for all their thinking (and thus are not appropriate personages for a statue). What island is this? Is it Japan – as the phrasing suggests? Is it the tropics, a place not usually associated with either philosophers or statues, but where such mental lassitude might be explicable? Or is it one of the more philosophical islands, such as England or Greece? The ambiguity highlights the degree to which the mind can hijack the physical image; the statue of a thinker could lead wherever the person contemplating would care to go.

The third and final statue image is of “Big-bellied ogres curled up in the sunlight, / Stuttering dreams.” The sense is of a tyrant who has every need and wish fulfilled, but still insists on dreaming of more, even when ridiculously sated already. But it’s another ambiguous image – are the ogres the savages or the civilizers? Obviously if it’s a monument it would be the civilizer, but is that any kind of moral superiority to celebrate? Stevens as usual veers away from the strictly political here, but there is clearly a subterranean questioning of how the judgments of honor were arrived at, as one today would speak of asking how the sausage is made.

The poem abruptly ends with an ellipse, like a lazy thought that has petered out in mid-stream. The sense left behind, beyond the shocking dislocation of one’s normal sense of monuments and inscriptions, is how the mind can reshape what one sees into something else entirely, something wholly unexpected that is, at the same time, perhaps more true to reality, for being imagined. These imagined shades of monuments may have more truth and vibrancy than do the strictly realistic depictions common across the world.

Bluff

The green is either gold or black, depending on the sun
Trees endure this mystery, without moving
But my mind will spin forever at the bluster, like a top
It's not in reason to find certainty, only pomp

Paper Wall: A Reprise

Sometimes 30 year old songs seem like they were written yesterday. With sincerest respect and apologies to The Clash, here's an update on "London Calling" for all the obvious and less-than-obvious reasons.

Zombies calling all the unemployed towns
Feed us your babies, your houses, your rounds
Zombies calling from their robot machines
That drill like vampires, hiss like wolverines
Zombies calling still hungry for flesh
Phony Tulipmania has just been refreshed
Zombies calling from an earth lain to waste
We know that you too have that bloodthirsty taste

The reset is coming, the crowd gathering
Debt can’t stop growing, deceptions running thin
A nuclear terror, but still there’s no fear
‘Cos Wall Street is drowning and I live by the river

Zombies calling to the propaganda zone
You better believe us or you’re on your own
Zombies calling out the terrormobile
We hack your thoughts and your genitals we feel
Zombies calling with their red, blue and green
On every street corner empty and clean
Zombies calling, but you can’t see their eyes
And you’d never believe how they loaded the dies

Ascension is coming, the crowd gathering
Vibration keeps rising, the lies are wearing thin
We turn off their time-bomb and turn back our fear
‘Cos Wall Street is drowning and I live by the river

Zombies calling, yeah I laughed at them too
That movie from Pittsburgh turned out to be true!
Zombies calling from the torments of hell
One look between us and the paper wall fell!

We never knew we are one before before before

Rail Spirits

Everything painful turns beautiful:
barfly light, the ashtrays webbed with resin,

The faces that remind you that you're empty,
the scenes that you must always rearrange,

The fact you tell me your dreams
but I never understand them, or believe that they're your own

And not stolen like black change from the words some hustler used
that kept you from boredom for a moment, laughing nervous.

There're no words for the longing that you feel
just the hopeful thought that someone else can feel it,

Someone you don't even know, except that they have suffered
and appear to live a life not quite as meaningless as your own.

If it darkened enough that you ceased to exist
what difference if you wasted your whole life?

The silver gleam of gin becomes an aura round your face,
a glow of God from broken seals, but at least He can be seen.

You get happy enough to insult me, with a smile
like it's got nothing whatsoever to do with you.

We punch with words, debate with fists, no referee could stop our blows,
no damage and no victory, just the whine of being a victim,

The only wine worth drinking on this stinky, mouse-brown rail,
the world reduced to olives you can stab

And full of people leaning, sleeping in their shells
that at least tonight will not be thrown away,

Laconic as the condemned, content now with the world inside,
not crying 'cos no one can understand them through their tears,

But kind to other prisoners, they share matches and white napkins
with the cigarettes and swizzle sticks in a line of sticky stools

And no one really notices the jukebox plays the blues,
and the mirrors always lie about your age.

Because we have no reason to, we congregate like packs of wolves
and stumble through the city like there's something we can't find

It's in disguise as the same drink under different beer-brand light,
with the same words and teeth of the inconceivable being

Who's followed us all night, looking for the missing word
that hadn't been misplaced in its apartment.

One almost enters someone's world when the dizziness begins,
the fervent urge to sleep with the unknown, to give up all

Left of yourself, when there's nothing left over to give,
you surrender to visions, turned to bile inside your brain.

Waiting for the Wide-Eyed Smile

The free shamble aimlessly
the prisoners are bored between arraignments
- there's not enough coffee for the magistrate
to speed up his decision on fates
- justice pleasantly dispensed
with an eye toward future leisure.

Truth is a friend
before the pleadings
- to harmonize versions of events
is divine - but at trial
truth disappears
behind the adversarial veil.

The locust tree
- invisible to those outside
- but all that there is
to those behind
steel windows.

Along the Eastern Shore

In cities of the golden age
the past is slow replaced
like curtains staying in the house
through layered shades of paint –

The filling station skeletons
play next to living children
gyring hula-hoop hallucinations.

The present is a funny thing
and one can’t really say
those aren’t new milkman bottles
or shiny whitewall tires, amid the
galvanized eaves and asbestos tiles.

A local butcher trims a cut of fat off for a boy
as trophies are displayed inside the stationary store;
vacuum cleaners need repair –
time is never linear,

The world that some thought ended never died,
it just went unreported and unrecognized,

The deaf men from the factories
go to their bowling leagues
while kids eat paper candy
from a truck called Mister Softee.

Ghosts of fins and ticker tape
go floating in the sky
while workshops full of motor parts
stanch the slow march of decline.

To love the frayed and rusted into shape,
to dust Venetian blinds,
to call the worn and dingy home -
there’s no peace with the new,
there's only holding on.

Entrance to Stone Harbor

A place
so afraid of hell
it denies God
allows no poems.

Seagulls disappear
after only a moment,
corn liquor of prose
is always served.

Intoxication
is here the highest high
but they go as low as they want
because they can.

Trying to steal from perfection
deals the soul,
makes the cards a game to lose,
no more a prophecy of heaven.

An Evening in Stamford

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Stevens Textplication 6: Domination of Black

"The cry of the peacock" as practiced by Lord Krishna

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.

Babylonia and Ancient Persia were full of peacock thrones where one gathered around the Tree of Life. Egyptians, Greeks and Romans viewed the “eye” on the peacocks tail as the all-seeing eye that is the higher human nature, aligned with the Gods. In China and Japan, the great Buddha of compassion Quan-Yin always carried a peacock feather, while in Mexico tribes like the Toltecs worshipped peacocks as keys to inner gnosis. The Sufis believed the original spirit was in the shape of a peacock. The great mystic Pythagoras wrote that the soul of Homer moved into a peacock. The Hindus believed peacocks slayed serpents and had their gods Brahma, Laksmi and Lama ride on them.

Christians believed that peacock flesh did not decay after death, and Christianity is full of peacock imagery symbolizing the resurrection of Christ, from annuciation and manger scenes to tomes by Origen and Augustine to stations on the cross to Easter Rituals to the pine cone (signifying the pineal gland, the inner gate) decorated with peacock feathers outside the Vatican.

The Gnostics (and later the Knights Templar) cultivated “Cauda Pavoris” (peacocks tail) as the way to transmute body/matter into spirit, a practice that later become the alchemical transformation of base metals into gold. Peacocks guarded the Muslim gates of heaven. To this day Dzog Chen Buddhists (like the Dalai Lama) wear peacock feathers to signify their true nature and potentiality beyond the maya of suffering/veil of tears.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Stevens Textplication 5: Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock

Photo: colinpuddephatt

Stevens once wrote, in a letter the details of which escape me, that he was a pure poet, or at least more of one than in his prolific later years, during his youth, before he wrote any verse to speak of, because he was "all feeling." I think of that when I read "Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock" from 1915, the first of his short poems to be heavily anthologized. It's easy to see why, for the poem is crystal clear compared to most of Stevens' work, and adds humor to the usual elegance for an intoxicating effect. Here's the poem:

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

The literal meaning of this is fairly easy to dispense with. The speaker is disillusioned at his ten o'clock bedtime by the (for want of a better term) bourgeois lack of imagination in the people going to sleep with him at that customary time. Their final rituals before falling asleep, the donning of plain and uniform white nightgowns, do not give them a place to go to in their dreams, for their lack of imagination, represented by the exotic colors and frills they emphatically do not have, denies them the inspiration from which to construct the dreams that make life interesting (visions of baboons and periwinkles). This sense of "normal" people's ghost-like "quiet desperation" is contrasted with the old sailor, who has no ritual of social propriety at all being "drunk and asleep in his boots," but at least through his willingness to travel the world and derange his senses lives an exciting life in his dreams, one that "catches tigers in red weather."

We all can relate to that feeling of unease when all that's left of the day is to fall asleep. The comfortable and familiar surroundings sometimes remind us that life's excitement has passed us by in another busy day of working, and perhaps we wonder if this is all there is to life, if there's something else we could be doing. It's what Stevens does with this feeling that is so striking here. He doesn't pick up a book to maybe get lost in the fantasy of it, he looks coldly around at what is actually happening. His account of it, though, is, to say the least, ironic. Houses being haunted by white night gowns is anything but an unimaginative image - it's hilarious and creepy at the same time, like the best horror movies. And these colors of the night-gowns that aren't there, purple and green, green and yellow, yellow and blue; those are really not that hard to imagine, even with rings, in fact it's pretty easy to conceive of someone going to the store to buy them if it's so important, isn't it? And why are socks with lace and belts with beads ("beaded ceintures") considered "strange" in a middle-class boudoir circa 1915? Meanwhile, in contrast to all the colors and things presented as being so impossible, unattainable, "red weather," a virtually unintelligible concept, is presented as a tangible fact, plain as night.

Clearly Stevens has some of his usual bags of tricks up his sleeve. The critique of the sleeping-wear is not a complaint about the conventionality of his neighbors or himself so much as a personal cry about the bareness of life when stripped down to its essentials. Even when imaginatively re-created with ghost-story metaphors and conjured alternatives, reality just does not suffice, its dreams seem like death. The speaker longs for a world of pure imagination, where he can be that old sailor with dreams like Jack London stories who is "here and there" (implying that there is more than one sailor, or at least that he is a state of mind, maybe a dream himself). There is a glimmer in this, in something the speaker does not know like he knows his bedtime accouterments - the thing unknown, that must be imagined, is the only thing that matters, the only thing that seems real.

And what of the "red weather"? Now's as good a time as any to discuss Stevens' frequent use of color during this period. The place to start in this is to recall the color revolution in painting from the late 19th century to about the time this poem was written. The Fauves and then the Expressionists took colors out of their realistic context and amplified them on the canvas, as a way to express personal emotional states, move away from representation toward abstract pictorial qualities, or simply show what something really looked liked in a confluence of light and perspective. Poets like Stein and Apollinaire struggled to find a verbal equivalent to this disjointing of reality from expression. To a poet like Stevens, whose muse dictated a strict separation of reality, perception and expression, the use of colors must have seemed an opportunity to move away from meaning itself as painters moved away from their customary role of representation. Colors like white, red and green, freighted with an agreed-upon (or not agreed-upon) symbolism, don't actually "mean" anything, they, like dream images, take on the qualities the reader comes to them with. Colors are the perfect example, in fact, of subjective meaning. They don't express the point of view of the writer, but of the reader.

Symbolist poets prized colors for the way they revealed primordial ideals behind the surface of things for writer and reader to share,* but Stevens found no such comfort in any objective shared reality beyond the power of individual imagination. In this poem, for all of these reasons, colors become the unnameable, the tao between subject and object. The green nightgowns and red weather represent qualities that can't be expressed and can't be understood, but nevertheless are expressed and understood across incommunicable poles. Meaning is created, in other words, not communicated, and the means of the creation is the imaginative faculties. "Music is feeling then, not sound" Stevens wrote in another poem from 1915, "Peter Quince at the Clavier" (which also uses lots of inexplicable color). This use of color, and this expression of the distance between consciousnesses, is something that will continue and grow in Stevens' work.

*"A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu : voyelles" (A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels) - Rimbaud, Voyelles

The Back Pages of the News

We live in interesting times, all I can do amid the daily onslaught of apocalyptic events is to collect phrases and fragments from news stories and try to make it not make sense

Earth is in the birth canal
mob robbery on the rise
dissent is sterilized
by preemptive percussive grenades
at anarchistic hooligans on a debt jubilee parade
from their hidey-holes of preps, guns and gold
to evade the diktats of tribute for the carbon-cargo-cult
or the agitsmut of the illuminazis
and their fetish parasites
by debunking with mass junks
the brain-wrongery of the kleptocracy
and their plans of claustrophobic austerity
for the lemmingarati
with systematic mayhem
psychotronic mind control
meanwhile Iowa tsunamis
Chinese earless rabbits
sandbags on nuke silos
mass coronal comet/planet x ejection extinction events
radioactive wildfires
radioactive urine
radioactive whales

Black-Tipped City

All artists are criminals
but some make the world their gallery.
Where everyone's an outlaw
the artists' must do more.

Spontaneous Mountain Verse

Translation of Wei Wang, based on this exchange with Stephen Pentz

寂寞掩柴扉，　
蒼茫對落暉。　
鶴巢松樹遍，　
人訪蓽門稀。　
嫩竹含新粉，
紅蓮落故衣。
渡頭燈火起，
處處采菱歸。

Lonely quiet closing firewood gate,
Facing vague and ashen falling sun.
Cranes in lazy nests on top of pines,
People rarely visit wicker door.
Soft bamboo dusted with new powder,
Old red lotus clothes fallen away.
Lantern fires on jetty cast a light,
Water chestnut pickers everywhere.

Found Image

The Boom Lounge
by the elevated trains
colors leak through the cracks

In Thick Air

Enormity of Summer
the chainsaw finally broke
the Pontiac
that hauls the boat
sags with a flat -
Hydrangea
and Hibiscus
have replaced your family -
you cannot see
the neighbors through the weeds -
insanely happy
chickadees
as you battle giant trees
the shears keep slipping off
your grip
of sweat -
the books don’t look so clear
this time of year
the figures
are a blur
the briefs are longer
than they need to be –
the trains
are running late
but everyone would miss them
otherwise -
someone came at night to paint the whole town phosphorescent
but we are blinded
in our living rooms
where cats are
glaciers
shoes imbued with jewels
faces with that weariness
before they let it go -
a leaf floats off the dock into the pool

Days of Pain - 2

upside-down mushrooms green bricks
forceps must rip out some parts of me
the vines have wound round too thick
as hard to extract as a lover
but this pill like a lunar eclipse
keeps me nodding agreement in sleep

Days of Pain - 1

blue coffee green fly
companions for my journey
I'd rather be walking through Mongolia
but being present now must suffice:
I must learn how to hear my own screaming
how to let the world ride by

Stevens Textplication 4: The Silver Plough-Boy

Ezra Pound has so well trained us to view images as pictures and not as symbols – the lily, say, as sensuous flower and not harbinger of death – that poems written in the “high modernist” style – clipped, that is, of the purple Victorian moralizing (along with the marching orders of meter and rhyme) – can be challenging to read when they utilize traditional forms of allegory. "The Silver Plough-Boy" from 1915 (along with others from Stevens such as "Earthy Anecdote", "Anecdote of a Jar" and "Life is Motion") uses stripped-down images and plain phrasing to dramatize through the dynamism of its poetic action a kind of philosophical musing on the metaphysical relationship between man and reality. One of three poems excluded from the 2nd edition of Harmonium (and thus from the Collected Poems), "The Silver Plough-Boy" was resuscitated for The Palm at the End of the Mind selection by Holly Stevens, the poet’s daughter, and it's a fine poem:

A black figure dances in a black field.
It seizes a sheet, from the ground, from a bush, as if spread there by
some wash-woman for the night.
It wraps the sheet around its body, until the black figure is silver.
It dances down a furrow, in the early light, back of a crazy plough, the
green blades following.
How soon the silver fades in the dust! How soon the black figure slips
from the wrinkled sheet! How softly the sheet falls to the ground!

The literal movement of the poem – a "plough-boy" dancing at night, wrapping himself in an available sheet of laundry, plowing playfully (and perhaps backwards), and then sloughing off the sheet as morning comes, all the while dancing – is rendered so abstractly we are invited to view the presentation as something else entirely. “A black figure dances in a black field” it begins ominously, and never is the “person” in the title identified beyond the geometrical description. There are virtually no adjectives to qualify this strange scene, and the ones that are there (the “crazy plough”, its “green blades”, the suddenly “wrinkled sheet”) seem imaginative to the point of perversity. One is tempted to view the figure not as a person at all but as a metaphoric description of the way moonlight moves across the ground at night, dancing like a sheet, flowing into furrows, reflecting light on the blades that are green with the grass they have mowed, and dissolving all-too-perfectly as the morning sun rises. Why then is the figure black, the plough crazy, the sheet wrinkled?

Then there’s the elegiac quality to this scene despite its playfulness; the associations with death (burial sheets, black figures, the plough that could dig a grave, the dust), the “how soon” repetition at the end and its cadence of mourning. But the mourning is for the sheet, not for the presumably human figure, who dances away very much alive and unrecognized by the reader.

I think the key to “elucidating” this poem lies in first understanding that Stevens, no matter what images he uses, is typically only concerned with one topic, the dichotomy between reality and imagination. Bernard Heringman, in his essay “Wallace Stevens: The Use of Poetry” (English Literary History XVI, Dec. 1949, pp. 325-336), puts it this way:

“The world of Wallace Stevens’ poetry has always been two, ‘things as they are’ and ‘things imagined.’ The dichotomy has been so constant that certain terms are stock symbols of the two realms. The moon, blue, the polar north, winter, music, poetry and all art: these consistently refer to the realm of imagination, order, the ideal. The sun, yellow, the tropic south, summer, physical nature; these refer to, or symbolize, the realm of reality, disorder, the actual.”

Getting back to the symbolic or allegorical nature of this poem, we can easily substitute night for winter, silver for blue, dancing for music, the mysterious sheet for writing/poetry, plowing at night for creating/cultivating art, to see the actions of the black figure as acts of imagination. Accentuating this is the fact that the seven brightest stars in the Ursa Major constellation, called the Big Dipper in the U.S., is called the Plough in England and other parts of the English-speaking world (it’s elsewhere called the Big Bear and the Handle, among other imagined pictures). In other words, the star group that wheels about Polaris the North Star, reliably helping us locate it, is in this poem as well, identified as “crazy” (yet another term for the imaginative mindset).

Thus this short poem is full of touchstones to Stevens’ conception of the imagination, which as usual for Stevens goes beyond merely creating a work of art to creating oneself and what is all around one through the transformative powers of imagination. Let’s now follow with this in mind the dynamic of the poem. First, the black figure who is dancing in a black field feels the need to grab a sheet, to distinguish itself from the blackness it had become absorbed into, to shield itself, to take on the nature of something else. There is a need, in short, to be separate. The sheet that provides the separation, that turns the figure silver, also allows the figure to be visible. It allows everything it touches, in fact – the furrow, the plough and its blades – to be visible, like an aura around its dance. It’s like the black figure, by assuming the mask of the sheet, creates its own light, one that reveals beauty that would otherwise be unseen.

What is created here is a new self behind the gauze of silver, an imaginatively transformed self, like Stevens’ later “major man.” It is this new figure we mourn when the sunlight comes, the silver becomes invisible, the figure, still black, throws off the sheet like the poet would toss a crumpled/wrinkled piece of paper, and it falls to the ground so softly it’s like it was never there in the first place. There is no place in reality – “the light of day” – for the imagination. Its products never existed at all. Yet they did – something magical and inexplicable, like a vision of a mystic truth beyond our understanding. The contradiction is one that Stevens will come back to wrestle with time and time again.

The Connector Gods

The party lines have died, that flickered like thieves,
trees come out in time like teeth, homes get eaten,
yards sublimate to weed, but these outlast the Parthenon,
the hanging looms that thread through all the driveways
still vibrate black and taut, like strings for birds to pluck
when they're not singing, their barrels of electric charge up high,
bolts swaddled down in tar, to glow the hearths and cool
the roofs, bring multi-colored lamps across the neighborhoods
through strings as thin as jumpropes, that hold the homes like puppets
and we the audience can never see, although they block the sky
from here to China, as if they are the filaments that bind the cosmos,
that yarn that holds the moving light in place, that keeps it safe
to leap from islands of itself, to the self that's somewhere else,
ecstatic to discover that there is no space or time, just like they thought.

Not saying what cannot be said by saying it

Gertrude Stein of Bryant Park
slouches on her pedestal like Buddha
eyes down, inward turned, more serious
than you can possibly imagine, more serious than all
the serious people in the park, oblivious to the straw hatted
pianist playing 1920’s jazz, to the French girls making chit chat
sound like poetry, to the film crew and lunch-hungry throng, the world
in packed microcosm, to the great books of history on a kiosk by the bar.

No one wants a thing to do with her.
Even the pigeons offer her a wide berth.
All she has to show for all those years so serious
is the detritus of trees in between her downward hands.
It is enough.

Recursion Crenellations of the Schizophrenic Wolfangels

Edited texts of Hakim Bey, Jacques Derrida and Dan Winter (the three weirdest – and most radical – writers I could think of) combined and randomized multiple times, with resulting phrases selected and arranged as lines

Useless corpse-eaters energies
So-called welfare chaos
Flowers rotten of desiccate hologram
Striate a nostalgia astral
A Babylon milk of chaos-bearing architecture
Brilliant gods of lingam
Escaping of slice censorship labels
Theatre explicit of power
Apocryphal chthonic mechanics grimoires
A deranged sub-reptilian stabilizing bestiary
All of the spinout be unsheathed
The skulls sometimes lucid
First materials at daggers
For jerkwater crimes
Bloated slit-windowed ninja
Usage of invulnerability
Prescience burning
The Me Secret
In every quotidian skyrockets Tara
Paleolithic electricities
Turtles bleeding
Banal with the attributed China
The fedayeen immanence
What courses of sorcery
Blood-astral pornography of propaganda
Independent fractals of ducks
Bombs without evidentality
Writing of octaves implementation regimes
Pewter rebellion
Radical sensually of space and death
Wave polemical of unity anamnesis
Dusk ennui shaft the less sent
Ochre morphology
Denizens of Shiva’s bicyclists
Salacious aesthetic death beautiful
Schizophrenic metaphor agents presence
Your crimes of archaic evil
Fractal for pubescent sea-goddess
Punk desert
Organization ratholes
Artificial burning glances of DNA
Queer oasis crimes
Golden Javanese sultan hags
Forced metalinguistics
Speculative postal time
Rubber Tzara the perfected a
Paradigm words of dimpling dog
Licking heavy poetics
The stars brains books charge
Conjugating ratio eyes
Moses of Worm symbols
The infinite as dragons spoon-bending
Superluminal religion
Immortal cubes
Nothing profane outside statistical
Golden oblivion signatum
Death of God mass
Narrow being essence
Dream cells self-veiling upon satori silk only
bluegrey stupid correcting beauty through double skin conjugating
Oblivion
Fever crimes
Epicurian feral skulls
Feral Babylon Lion majority
Howling Avatars
Rotten time
Slit-windowed artificial depresentation
Moonlight mail-order empire
The sunlight sunflowers become them catalogues
Poetry syntax first horizon
Possible reggae in audience
Victorian astrolabes succubi
Elephant head bathtub Dr. of East
Dodeca star-politics
Sea-serpent on phase-lock
Dimpling of smutty the bluestar grandmother's death golden children
Earth Consensus
Obsolete Antinomians orgone-blue
Independent fractal banking
Full sepia reinterpretation
The break-dancer’s nostalgia weapons
Scotus Pancho
Temporary punk Sybarites
Railroad mind aesthetic
Jasper-green memory Ganesh
Duns Grammatica
Whole violet wave
Attic spies
Love Thunder polemical of playground center blue
And of vorticity by lost otherness
Mad flat pain
Root-system towns
Belated name-wave children desiring dragon dream heart soap
Self-veiling books
Hairless bleeding poetry flowers
Your umber totems of opposition
Flunk-outs surreptitiously atonal
The bloated abbreviation
From tepid communion
Sheltered punk science
Lucid disappeared dreambooks
Dawn Grammatica
Lion changes an infinite mind
Sex linguistics shit-for-brains annihilation
A usage tongue
Alleged chthonic animist between the saboteurs
Trace chain sepia metaphysics
Great implosive to smash
The immortal terror
Flowers messianicity
Anyone serve dreambooks here
Queer waveform theatre
The moonlight immanence censorship
Books will take instructions bleeding
Ennui butterflies
Become quotidian without theory
Postal turtles
The root-system details horoscopy scholars
Secret jasper-green
Polychrome mythopoesis forest
Spoon-bending HooDoo in police-ghosts
Astral Kali the snakes linguistic
Futuristic wormhole class
Implosion octaves
Woven of signatum violet
Javanese feux symbolo bay every There and When
Personal eidolons
The poems wet totalitarian thing
D’artifice violet longing
Thunder mirror of cause
Waste sea-goddess death
Embeds alembics what exemplary dissemination
Logocentric cosmos of playground
Symmetry cubes in oblivion
Stupid Hermes poets
Fails books religion through shaft worm

Champions

For Jesse and all the clan

Fuckin' A a happy day
It's time to bank this power play
The Bruins won

Let's blow the ay-ah hahn nice and loud
And throw some pup-cahn show we're proud
The Bruins won

We won't be drinkin' in the bahs
We won't be honkin' in our cahs
The Bruins won

Let's Irish punks and dum canucks
Meet midnight at the church of Dunks
The Bruins won

No unifahm with fuckin Shahks
The cup's back where the ice is hahd
The Bruins won

The gahden's furled with gold and black
They're never gonna take this back
The Bruins won

I got your only real spaht he-ah
I'll drown in Narragansett be-ah
The Bruins won

As victors, we must not be crass
Canadiens: kiss my fucking ass
The Bruins won

A toast to double-checks in June
A total eclipse of the moon
The Bruins won

From Worcester to Scituate, Lowell to Lynn
A wicked good cup is comin' - drink it in
The Bruins won

A Century of Forgotten Theories

A news item about U.S. government “payments” (credits) to banks and other financial institutions since the “credit crisis” of 2008 being sufficient to pay off over 90% of the mortgages in the U.S. prompted me to reflect on the Social Credit theories of C. H. Douglas, which were a key element in the creation and distribution of poetic High Modernism, and seen as the solution to all the dualistic isms of the 20th century by Pound, Eliot, Williams, Read, Chesterton, Beloc, Huxley and a host of other literary figures.

Bankers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world
More private and invisible than even poets
Who own the poems that flash in from the sun
As bankers own the funds dreamed from their pens
Created to be shared Credere* in either case
For laurels to the poet, interest to the bank.
We pay, with mortal minds, to see a vision through a vapor screen:
Endure ellipses, too-far distances,
words that never say quite what they mean
and are far too mean in not quite saying it
As we must pay, with our mere wages, for all the markups of production:
The extractions from the earth, safe passage over Styx,
the overhead of whips and chains, pornography of profits,
the interest entered daily like the tunnel into town.
But if we suspend our disbelief, these poets give us stories:
Of how to lose the sacred things, for the rarest kind of vision
the thing that still is pure, that still is useless
As bankers will give us, if we pretend they own all life, the things we ask:
Faster food, higher cheekbones, less ennui at work,
more choices among shoes and muses with lutes.
So exponentials of debt—and poems—must be produced
To keep this system stable
With no possible re-payment or of meaning in clear sight.
But no one seems to care about the bankers and the poets
As we walk down life with eyes and voices blazing
For diversions always rain straight down from God,
Butterflies, lions and delivery dogs
always seem to land with the most impeccable taste.

* Credit comes from Latin “to believe”