Stevens Textplication #26: The Emperor of Ice Cream

In memory of Katherine Hollands

If there is any one poem Stevens is known for, especially among the general public, it is “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” with its strange gay-90’s imagery, unusual word choices and its glad, fearsome and inexplicable last line “there is no emperor but the emperor of ice cream.” The poem represents Stevens in any poetry anthology you’d care to mention, an unlikely number one hit for the unlikely rock star, an ordinary surety bond lawyer from Hartford, Connecticut.

The Wallace Stevens industry in American academia, having decided (for reasons that have nothing to do with Wallace Stevens) that he was a post-Nietzsche “death of God” atheist, confronts in Emperor a poem so thoroughly at odds with that stereotype it must double down on its error by reading the poem as a “live now for tomorrow we die” Hallmark card sentiment. Normally there’s no harm in such things, good poems after all support wildly divergent interpretations. In this case, though, there’s a far more important point that may be missed. In a humble attempt to set the record straight, here is the poem, from 1922:

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let the wenches dawdle in such dress

As they are used to wear, and let the boys

Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.

Let be be finale of seem.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

The “essential gaudiness” of the language (as Stevens himself put it) makes even the poem’s relatively straightforward narrative hard to identify. In simplest terms we’re talking about someone giving directions for a wake (in much the same way as William Carlos Williams does for a funeral in “Tract”). The strong cigar-roller can handle the manual labor required to press the curds out of the whey to make cheese (or cheese curds, a farm delicacy) to serve at the gathering. It might be of interest to note that the Connecticut River valley around Hartford has long been the main place in the U.S. to grow the tobacco leaf for the outer wrapping of cigars, so it would not be strange there to go out looking for a cigar-roller for this task. These curds are “concupiscent” (amorous, lustful), suggesting not only the pleasure derived in eating them, but how close that pleasure is to sexuality as well as death (a hint carried also in the “horny” feet of the second stanza). “Let the wenches dawdle in such dress as they are used to wear” is a particularly striking way of saying the young women have to get dressed up so they should be forced into idleness lest they soil their Sunday best. The boys must be put to work bringing the flowers for the viewing, wrapping them in appropriately obsolescent old newspaper. The party promises to be free-spirited and gay, with ice cream as the dominant element.

The second stanza makes clear that this party is actually funereal. The dresser “missing” three knobs, made of “deal” (fir or pine wood, especially when sawn into standardized planks) is actually a description of a one-handled coffin. The “sheet she embroidered fantails once” is used as the deceased's winding-sheet, or burial shroud, a poignant image of how symbols and mementos of one’s life are kept with the body after death. “If her horny feet protrude,” in other words if the nasty reality of the corpse’s appearance is revealed, it helps remind us that she is no longer with us. The lamp must be directed correctly for the presentation. The most important thing among the protocols is the ice cream.

Having set the scene, so to speak, we can delve deeper into the meaning, starting with the most obvious question: why is death presented as being so full of life? The inescapable answer to this question, of course, is that it is not about death at all but about the living. Death may be the pretense, but the interests of the people are completely on their own lives: what to eat, how to dress, what to do, how to act. There’s an eerie lack of any real relation to the dead body. No clearer indication of that exists than the fabled last line: “death has no dominion” because ice cream is king. Why would the poet then take the time to set this in a funeral — as opposed to ice cream — parlor? And why is ice cream, seemingly so unrelated to death, so important?

Let’s approach this question by thinking a little about what ice cream may suggest at a more metaphoric level. Much of the force of the poem – its impact on readers – is in the surprise appearance of the ice cream. Ice cream is so redolent of childhood magic, the pure unalloyed joys of life, the wide feeling, the ultimate pleasure, it is as much an experience as a word. And, as much as any word can be, it is a window into our own hearts, a momentary and transient glimpse into what is natural and real inside us. The joy it brings at an unconscious level, here associated with death (not normally a joyous subject) suggests that in the celebration of life after a death (which is what a wake is supposed to be about) there is a chink that allows us a glimpse into the endless. The stained glass when cracked lets in a small glimmer of light that is enough for us to wake up inside of the dream. One can sense the real, see its structure revealed, know the lord because one knows the actual. At some point, one must “let be be the finale of seem,” we have to eventually step into the real of conscious awareness of our own immortality, and overcome the illusion of appearance and separation, the left-behind corpse we are profoundly alienated from that bears so little relevance to our lives. We get a glimpse of that other country during the ceremony of death's passage, but it's how we take that into this life that's what's important, and in this life, ice cream is the word.

Ah, but it melts. Ice cream, like life, like all form, is impermanent. What is not impermanent is the emperor, the one who dispenses the ice cream. The emperor of ice cream never dies. That’s why he’s the emperor. And that emperor is inside us. That’s why he’s the only emperor over us. We must find the divine within ourselves, step away from the "cold and dumb" bodies of other people and their rules, ideas, accountabilities, because how can they help us when they’re laid out on a slab, how, in fact, did they ever give us what we thought they were giving us when they were alive? The speaker points out the usefulness of the disgusting feet of the corpse protruding, for it reminds everyone that she is dead, as if they needed such reminders, as if nothing really changed with her death. The people gathered and ordered to their tasks in the poem, with only a dim understanding of what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, will learn little to nothing from the awesome proximity to death other than it was a party. Direct the lamp beam of the outward light within instead. The only rules and the only enforcement, the only understanding and the only transcendence, come from there. 

The Sacrifice of Eurydice at Yankee Stadium

The word “yankee” has been variously (and mostly derogatorily) used to signify “New Englander,” “northerner” or “American,” but it was coined by the early Dutch settlers in the Hudson River Valley to describe the more recent, less sophisticated English settlers.  Literally translated as “young Johnny,” the word’s connotation would in modern terms be roughly equivalent to “stupid white men.”

Dem Ehwz are behind 1-1 in the eighth. I sense a scab beginning to open. Home run by Frodo, er, Flaherty! It’s quiet as a movie theater except for the deafening leer of self-satisfied smirks. The requisite fat one-batter lefty comes in thanks to Tony LaRussa to squander a half-hour I will never get back, and then Hieronomyous Bosch, er Rafael Soriano, a grotesque assault on nature itself, er, a live arm, comes in, flapper like a frying pan attached to an obese turtle with an alarm clock for a head and a smile like the WB cartoon chicken hawk. Cal talks about the etiquette of taking. The widow has taken out her hair net. Manny Machado, the hardest working insurance salesman in this godforsaken town down the river, hits a home run to take the lead! No rip in the fabric, no groan, not even chattering teeth, as the fans en masse act like the game, the opponent, is barely worth their interest, so if they lose they can say “What game? Did you catch the debate?” but if they win you will be barraged with an unbearable and maddening cavalcade of hyperbolic hysteria and jingoistic jargon like no immortal‘s ever seen – until you finally cry uncle and admit your existence was never a threat to anybody. The noble birds try to tighten the stringent strings in a stringendo death movement, but the Big Apple Store sells it is what it is at the end of the day, and the side falls harmlessly to the ground like so many golden shells. Gonzalez is still licking the corner like a coroner, though, still splitting the straws that break the camelhair through the eye of the needle. Derek Jeter, obviously high on HGH, lets a smile pass his face as he condescends to react to the umpire’s call. ARod the useless superstar, the Sad Black Man seeking Stupid White Man for bondage and humiliation, is smoked by a 20 mph change-up. The wind pulls robins in. Jones blows a Topps bubble while chasing down a fly. The home weather advantage of the corrupt Bronx wind witches the ball out of his range. Television replays show routine fly ball after routine fly ball carried to the stands from the aforementioned home weather advantage. Does Ek Khan the Mayan wind God deliver to the Bronx? Can we call in a favor? Huitres the catcher, whose name means “oyster” in French, “raw oysters topped with lemon juice, hot sauce and saltine crackers at Lexington Market” in Baltimorese, picks one from the oyster bar to shuck to left – broken bat single, a bat shard hits the pitcher in the ass; he grabs his nuts as a conference of the stupes consult like pediatricians, then an elderly gentleman runs his fingers down the smooth pinstripe material before deciding he must be relieved. This seems to unglue the Stupid White Men, the indignity of it all. Nothing the Stupid White Men do is ever entirely honest – nothing – it would be laughably absurd if it wasn’t so shockingly appalling – it’s all so rotten to the apple core. The new pitcher thinks of running a spike through his mother as he uncorks a deadly screwball. As usual the Stupid White Man 3rd baseman has to fight with a fan for a ball that is neither fair nor foul. The wicked wind formed from the hot air of Stupid White Men facing down the cold hard truth starts brewing in the cauldron, and the next SWM batter finds his ball taken into the stands to seal the game for extra innings. Fans are standing like smirking turkeys, like cackling overfed vultures. I never thought I’d miss the tomahawk chop. Game stops for litter on the field. It was so much better to ignore the Stupid White Men and be thought a madman than to pay attention to them and remove all doubt.  As the orange and black winds of redemptive wisdom come in I see the Orioles as reforming pilgrims finding themselves in New Amsterdam gazing at all the abominations of Mammon amidst the old faith, then being lured into a “baseball” game where the real plan is to dispossess us of our very souls. The Tigers meanwhile are getting rested and ready to feast as they play. The requisite ex-Mariner sub-mariner in October relieves Gonzo and his jaw-dropping assortment of sinkers to throw upside down flying saucer sliders. He stamps his feet like a chicken, pitches like a beige praying mantis on speed, skims the arc of a sparrow. Can’t turn a double play because of the aforementioned home weather advantage! Oh to have them at George Herman Ruth Memorial Stadium for Game 5! We suffer because we can’t get with the program of ruthless domination based on materialistic soul-taking. We’re too soft-hearted. Some hail mary’s, reverse jinxology, and obscure incantations from the Popul Vul. Someday there will be other games and they will matter too in their own way … hard to imagine now. The owl has landed. Game over because gruesomely humorless SWM manager mourning father takes out useless superstar in 9^th for a pinch hitter who ties and later wins the game – it must go in some kind of management annals of the dark arts, goat-eyed managerial sorcery of the foulest and most depraved kind. It’s Red Harvest for the Maltese Vulture. A Bobby Valentine’s Day Massacre in the House That Ruthless Built. The mighty Negro League technicolor pharaoh has struck out. And when it happened, nobody in the Italian restaurant much bothered to look up from their plate, no round of applause or even the momentary wiping off of wifely frowns. No burning up the town or tearing down the rafters in irresponsibly joyful jubilee here, just the smuggest of smirks for the briefest of seconds. No nod to the bird kings, fallen like Icarus and playing for free. Oh the milk! (Orson Welles as Colonel Kurtz). Sad Polo Grounds of Divorce! Ragtime jingles from black sox park as the winds blow in like a bastard and the ghosts of October stake the heart of John McGraw twirling his mustache in his grave, but the Babe lets the moon shine equally on johnnys and junebirds, filthy lucre watchchains and indentured irredentists, new York minute rice and oystercrab sandwiches, the Met and the Walters Art Gallery, Mannahatta for some mardi gras beads and Fort McHenry with a wind from the Keys, Miss Parker and friends at the Algonquin Club and friendless Mencken at the Peabody Beer Stube, oysters rockerfella and crab Rangoon, a slice of greasy pizza with mshugina on the side and gwumpkies and kielbasa at the greasy spoon, the lady in the harbor and the widow on her walk, the Blue Note and Hammerjacks, Bobby Van’s and Haussners, the gaping hole that even complete domination can’t fill and the empty cackle filled with crabs, natty bohs and copious bonghits of shame. All’s fair in pyramid schemes, virtual night baseball and dreams. The streets will be running cartoon-red tomorrow as the vultures feed lasciviously on the entrails of Prometheus – you’ll need a mask to stay safe from the reek. It’s October Jake, fahhgettabutit.  All the perfumes of Araby will not sweeten this little hand. Stupid White Men win again.

At the Edges of Sleepless Oblivion

Faces shriveled ornaments like onion skins pulled back
That is just the nature of the white and black
That’s how the cards get stacked

The heart breaks in waves
Washing hollow shores
Asking for some more
Heart aches
There’s no past anymore

As if the mind could lie to life a soul
Puppets claw for tragic starring roles
Hands out on the dole

The heart breaks in waves
Washing hollow shores
Asking for some more
Heart aches
There’s no past anymore

Day Two

The chemicals are all in the air
ready to re-combine,
bonds of love beyond mere steel
snap open harmlessly,

the shortened circuit to myself
has switched polarities,
electric's flipped magnetic
and my thoughts now stand exposed

as my own only. To think
I could be seen inside the coverings
of trees, my heart to become real
in another's head — bless me,

I know not what I do, clinging to
the role asked by my story,
which only has one purpose, now, to end.
A tale told by mistake, and that's OK

it didn't touch the flame I really am,
who waits with patient nursing of the torch,
for poetry to rise out of the prose,
uniqueness uncontained within the whole.

Another Day in Paradise

I dared to sleep tonight
Beside my lover
Letting callous be
The only protection,
The fragile sounds of sleep
The lone intimacy.


No softness in her eyes
When I melted down the moon and stars,
The hawk just fixed on what she could attack
In a lunging rush of air
Where the world itself stops breathing
And the moon turns silver wings that once were black.


A blue nightlight has taken over for
The distant, helpless moon.
There’s no room inside
Still I tremble as my words
Shiver through her
Without the least reply.


Once I navigated through the booby traps
To make it all the way to the top of the stairs
And I went through her door by the balustrade
And urgently flew to the side of her bed,
Waved off her fears and softly said
“I will sit here ‘til you are OK”


And I took my heart out of my chest
And I placed it in her lap.
The moon made both our faces blue
And she stroked the cat as if it was a thought.
I was left with that, so many years ago,
Alone with my love that grew


Always so much larger
Than any object,
And the people that I loved stood far below
Gazing up, not really seeing me
And I wondered then if I really had a heart at all,
That thing inside of me, too small.

Autumn Tried

Autumn tried to reach me
With its whirligig ghosts
And its translucent frosts
Waving a skeleton key
Autumn tried to teach me

But imperviously
I slipped from its noose
With a youthful excuse
To prove I could disagree
Autumn tried to reach me

Autumn tried to teach me
With its creaking of leaves
And its evenings for thieves
The rot inside all its debris
Autumn tried to reach me

But I skirted the fee
To go gathering pears
And dividing the shares
Like I was the sole trustee
Autumn tried to teach me

Autumn tried to reach me
With its webs and its winds
The veil pulled so thin
Its silent and listening pleas
Autumn tried to teach me

But I only could see
And I could not believe
What I did not perceive
What impermanence was and would be...

Autumn tried to reach me
Autumn tried to teach me

Yellow and Gray

It is because the marigolds scream "forever"
that we see crows rise when the needles fall
as something with a secret not for us.

Poem Not About the Wind

Wind shakes and makes what's still seem real
but it is just some breath trespassing, the rasping
a resistance to what otherness is: a nothing.

The note of hollow shells when filled with emptiness
expresses what cannot be said, what won't be let go
with the rest, that remnant that stays on the branch

resisting streams of consciousness born at the poles
of thought—the hot and cold, the north and south—
a dumb and numbing flow, that changes how the trees

perceive themselves, that makes them speak and spread their refugees
to distant, barren pilgrimage—what passes in this world for interaction—
perhaps the truth is so well-hid because it is so deeply held,

there is no need to speak of it, except as moving of debris,
to clear some silence held too long,
to stretch some limbs and know you are alive.

The Yellow Light at the Depot

I.
October's hideous beauty
black mirrors in the street
white glare of lights blinding
wrinkled eternities spinning from trees
rainbows after dark

II.
Hypnagogic terror trails
I'm in over my cigar
I saw the heart geometries
the spiral of words spilling upwards
the all-seeing "I" creating forms to observe
but you lone rangered the joint
dropped the faux-la-dex into Loch Raven
and we must watch the action unraveling
after God has left the classroom
and the students improvise

III.
The perfume of mist
as colors are freed from their posts
light pure not revealing
it smells like crickets
a roomful of dreamers think you their ghost
but your turnip yields no blood
they float off like cotton misshapen
and there's no loneliness here
in emptiest air
the transparent ones do provide
all the help you can need
while the living are figments
of overwrought mind

Video: Two Poems by Mahmoud Darwish

My post at 2012 Banned Books Read-Out Videos of people reading from banned or censored books as part of of the American Library Association's Banned Books Week (September 30-October 6).



In March of 2000 Israeli Minister of Education Yossi Sarid announced the inclusion of two poems by “Palestinian national poet” Mahmoud Darwish, perhaps the most acclaimed Arab-language poet of the 20th century, into the Israeli high school curriculum. This erupted a political firestorm that resulted in Darwish’s poetry being officially banned from Israeli schools, a ban that is still in effect, with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak remarking that his country “wasn’t ready.” Darwish replied “"It is difficult to believe that the most militarily powerful country in the Middle East is threatened by a poem. The first step of real peace is to know the other side, its culture and creativity." Here are two Darwish poems translated into English by Lamdi Hasan:


Rita and the Rifle

Between Rita and my eyes there is a rifle
And whoever knows Rita kneels and prays
To the divinity in those honey-colored eyes
And I kissed Rita
When she was young
And I remember how she approached
And how my arm covered the loveliest of braids
And I remember Rita
The way a sparrow remembers its stream

Ah, Rita

Between us there are a million sparrows and images
And many a rendezvous
Fired at by a rifle
Rita's name was a feast in my mouth
Rita's body was a wedding in my blood
And I was lost in Rita for two years
And for two years she slept on my arm
And we made promises
Over the most beautiful of cups
And we burned in the wine of our lips
And we were born again

Ah, Rita!

What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours
Except a nap or two or honey-colored clouds?
Once upon a time
Oh, the silence of dusk
In the morning my moon migrated to a far place
Towards those honey-colored eyes
And the city swept away all the singers
And Rita
Between Rita and my eyes — A rifle


Think of Others

As you fix your breakfast, think of others. Don’t forget to feed the pigeons.

As you fight your wars, think of others. Don’t forget those who want peace.

As you pay your water bill, think of others, who drink the clouds’ rain.

As you return home, your own home, think of others. Don’t forget those who live in tents.

As you sleep and count the stars, think of others. There are people who have no place to sleep.

As you liberate yourself with metaphors, think of others, who lost their rights to speak.

And as you think of distant others, think of yourself and say “I wish I was a candle in the darkness.”

Stevens Textplication Special Birthday Edition: Pecksniffiana

The first published collection of Wallace Stevens’ poems (other than the occasional handful of poems printed then as now in journals and magazines) was a 14-poem portfolio called “Pecksniffiana” that appeared in the October 1919 issue of Poetry magazine. What makes this doubly significant is that it marked the month of his 40th birthday in the magazine that first and most prominently published him.

In honor of Stevens’ 133rd birthday today, I’ve decided to do something a little different and reproduce the entire batch of poems as they appeared 93 years ago. Six of the 14 would be “eligible” for textplication anyway (Fabliau of Florida, Ploughing on Sunday, Banal Sojourn, Anecdote of a Jar, The Place of the Solitaries and The Paltry Nude Starts on a Spring Voyage), having appeared in The Palm at the End of the Mind (my reference point for this series). Some of the others have never been re-published.

Pecksniff is a term coined by Charles Dickens (from Martin Chuzzlewit), referring to an arrogant and hypocritical bully. The poems may not show direct reflections of this word, but taken together they display a variety of comic, self-mocking personas that reveal Stevens in a more human, less serious light, more playful and idiosyncratic on the whole than philosophical and incantatory. As such I will forego detailed explications to let the works speak for themselves, with a brief note at the end for every poem. Happy birthday, Wallace Stevens, wherever you are!


FABLIAU OF FLORIDA¹
Barque of phosphor
On the palmy beach,

Move outward into heaven,
Into the alabasters
And night blues.

Foam and cloud are one.
Sultry moon-monsters
Are dissolving.

Fill your black hull
With white moonlight.

There will never be an end
To this droning of the surf.


HOMUNCULUS ET LA BELLE ETOILE²
In the sea, Biscayne, there prinks
The young emerald, evening star—
Good light for drunkards, poets, widows,
And ladies soon to be married.

By this light the salty fishes
Arch in the sea like tree-branches,
Going in many directions
Up and down.

This light conducts
The thoughts of drunkards, the feelings
Of widows and trembling ladies,
The movements of fishes.

How pleasant an existence it is
That this emerald charms philosophers,
Until they become thoughtlessly willing
To bathe their hearts in later moonlight,

Knowing that they can bring back thought
In the night that is still to be silent,
Reflecting this thing and that,
Before they sleep.

It is better that, as scholars,
They should think hard in the dark cuffs
Of voluminous cloaks,
And shave their heads and bodies.

It might well be that their mistress
Is no gaunt fugitive phantom.
She might, after all, be a wanton,
Abundantly beautiful, eager.

Fecund,
From whose being by starlight, on sea-coast,
The innermost good of their seeking
Might come in the simplest of speech.

It is a good light, then, for those
That know the ultimate Plato,
Tranquillizing with this jewel
The torments of confusion.


THE WEEPING BURGHER³
It is with a strange malice
That I distort the world.

Ah! that ill humors
Should mask as white girls.
And ah! that Scaramouche
Should have a black barouche.

The sorry verities!
Yet in excess, continual,
There is cure of sorrow.

Permit that if as ghost I come
Among the people burning in me still,
I come as belle design
Of foppish line.

And I, then, tortured for old speech—
A white of wildly woven rings;
I, weeping in a calcined heart—
My hands such sharp, imagined things.


PETER PARASOL⁴
Aux taureaux Dieu cornes donne
Et sabots durs aux chevaux….

Why are not women fair,
All, as Andromache—
Having, each one, most praisable
Ears, eyes, soul, skin, hair?

Good God! That all beasts should have
The tusks of the elephant,
Or be beautiful
As large, ferocious tigers are.

It is not so with women.
I wish they were all fair,
And walked in fine clothes,
With parasols, in the afternoon air.


EXPOSITION OF THE CONTENTS OF A CAB⁵
Victoria Clementina, negress,
Took seven white dogs
To ride in a cab.

Bells of the dog chinked.
Harness of the horses shuffled
Like brazen shells.

Oh-hé-hé! Fragrant puppets
By the green lake-pallors,
She too is flesh,

And a breech-cloth might wear,
Netted of topaz and ruby
And savage blooms;

Thridding the squawkiest jungle
In a golden sedan,
White dogs at bay.

What breech-cloth might you wear—
Except linen, embroidered
By elderly women?


PLOUGHING ON SUNDAY⁶
The white cock’s tail
Tosses in the wind.
The turkey-cock’s tail
Glitters in the sun.

Water in the fields.
The wind pours down.
The feathers flare
And bluster in the wind.

Remus, blow your horn!
I’m ploughing on Sunday,
Ploughing North America.
Blow your horn!

Tum-ti-tum,
Ti-tum-tum-tum!
The turkey-cock’s tail
Spreads to the sun.

The white cock’s tail
Streams to the moon.
Water in the fields.
The wind pours down.


BANAL SOJOURN⁷
Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.
The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,
Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries,
“That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of seasons,
When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness.
And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land.
For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?
And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox?
One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady.


THE INDIGO GLASS IN THE GRASS⁸
Which is real—
This bottle of indigo glass in the grass,
Or the bench with the pot of geraniums, the stained
Mattress and the washed overalls drying in the sun?
Which of these truly contains the world?
Neither one, nor the two together.


ANECDOTE OF THE JAR⁹
I placed a jar in Tennessee, 
And round it was, upon a hill. 
It made the slovenly wilderness 
Surround that hill. 

The wilderness rose up to it, 
And sprawled around, no longer wild. 
The jar was round upon the ground 
And tall and of a port in air. 

It took dominion every where. 
The jar was gray and bare. 
It did not give of bird or bush, 
Like nothing else in Tennessee.


OF THE SURFACE OF THINGS¹⁰
I
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four hills and a cloud.

II
From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
“The spring is like a belle undressing.”

III
The gold tree is blue.
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.


THE CURTAINS IN THE HOUSE OF THE METAPHYSICIAN¹¹
It comes about that the drifting of these curtains
Is full of long motions; as the ponderous
Deflations of distance or as clouds
Inseparable from their afternoons;
Or the changing of light, the dropping
Of the silence, wide sleep and solitude
Of night, in which all motion
Is beyond us, as the firmament,
Up-rising and down-falling, bares
The last largeness, bold to see.


THE PLACE OF THE SOLITAIRES¹²
Let the place of the solitaires
Be a place of perpetual undulation.

Whether it be in mid-sea
On the dark, green water-wheel,
Or on the beaches,
There must be no cessation
Of motion, or of the noise of motion,
The renewal of noise
And manifold continuation;

And, most, of the motion of thought
And its restless iteration,

In the place of the solitaires,
Which is to be a place of perpetual undulation.


THE PALTRY NUDE STARTS ON A SPRING VOYAGE¹³
But not on a shell, she starts,
Archaic, for the sea.
But on the first-found weed
She scuds the glitters,
Noiselessly, like one more wave.

She too is discontent
And would have purple stuff upon her arms,
Tired of the salty harbors,
Eager for the brine and bellowing
Of the high interiors of the sea.

The wind speeds her,
Blowing upon her hands
And watery back.
She touches the clouds, where she goes,
In the circle of her traverse of the sea.

Yet this is meagre play
In the scurry and water-shine,
As her heels foam—
Not as when the goldener nude
Of a later day
Will go, like the centre of sea-green pomp,
In an intenser calm,
Scullion of fate,
Across the spick torrent, ceaselessly,
Upon her irretrievable way.


COLLOQUY WITH A POLISH AUNT¹⁴
Elle savait toutes les légendes du Paradis et tous les contes de la Pologne. Revue des Deux Mondes

She

How is it that my saints from Voragine,
In their embroidered slippers, touch your spleen?

He

Old pantaloons, duenna of the spring!

She

Imagination is the will of things…
Thus, on the basis of the common drudge,
You dream of women, swathed in indigo,
Holding their books toward the nearer stars,
To read, in secret, burning secrecies…



1. A Fabliau is a rhymed comic narrative of 100-300 lines from 12th to 14th century Europe, remnants of which appear in classic literary works like The Canterbury Tales and Gargantua and Pantagruel. They almost always have explicitly sexual and scatological themes involving characters like cuckolded husbands, greedy clergymen and stupid peasants. Since none of these elements appear in “Fabliau of Florida,” one can only assume Stevens is referring to the Fabliau’s characteristic use of verbal tropes like double entendres and puns to achieve their effect. In this case, the initial word “barque” sounds like the bark of a palm tree in Florida, but it also signifies barque as the boat in ancient Egypt that transported the dead to the afterlife, most notably the pharaoh himself through the Milky Way to his throne in the sky. Thus, the poem can be read on two levels, as the literal disappearing of palm trees in the moonlight and as a metaphorical voyage away from the earth in a “black hull” to the milky-white heavens.

2. The title would be roughly translated as "The miniature human model and the beautiful star." The narrator speculates here how the rich and sensuous Florida milieu, “Good light for drunkards, poets, widows, ladies about to be married” would appear for Platonic and religious philosophers, who ascetically seek to strip away the veneer of the senses to get to essential forms. His conclusion is that such extreme sensuousness would profoundly torment and confuse them, even as they would be mesmerized into animal contentment. Instead of being turned from a life of sin into a life of piety, they would be turned from a life of piety to a life of sin, because of all the life their pose of abstraction denies.

3. An uncharacteristically personal poem, as exemplified by the “weeping” “I” of the burgher, a complacent middle-class man that Stevens also most assuredly was. Just as the mind turns the normal frustrations of everyday life into pleasurable fantasies, so too the poetry that comes out of such diversion disguises the sickness of the heart that impelled its creation, leaving behind only the immaculate work of hands, the poem, to be enjoyed but not understood.

4. The French epigram translates as “God gives the bulls horns and the horses hooves.” This appears to be a cryptic send-up of the type of over-sensitized sentimentality that French poets specialize in. Peter Parasol was the name Stevens used when he first sent poems to Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine in 1914, but whether this slight poem refers to Miss Monroe’s physical appearance is supposition at best.

5. This poem is so politically incorrect it might actually have become cool. The scene is of an over-the-top Cinderella-like carriage with an African-American woman in it wearing an embroidered loincloth (breechcloth). One can only guess that Stevens is making fun of the pretensions of respectable woman here.

6. Stevens called this poem a “fanfaronade,” meaning boasting or flaunting behavior. The flaunting boast of the narrator that he is ploughing fields on the Lord’s day, especially with the bravura he expresses, seems to invite a kind of comeuppance. Stevens elsewhere suggests it was inspired by listening to Dvorak’s Symphony Number 9 (“The New World Symphony”), which gives one another good glimpse in: at the American doing his own free-form version of a jaunty European dance, whereby Remus the co-founder of Rome is morphed into a kindly ex-slave, and all of North America is brought into the field, like an expansive Walt Whitman tribute to America.

7. See my explication of September 14, 2012.

8. A cute little riposte to the so-called debate between Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Neither the imaginary and poetic “indigo bottle of glass” that represents Stevens nor the realistic bench and geraniums etc. like something out of a Williams poem serves to capture reality at all, even if these two poetic visions are combined. Stevens however reserves his version as a title.

9. See my explication of June 15, 2012.

10. One of the more interesting of Stevens’ lighter poems, where the absurd descriptions of natural phenomena convincingly appear as accurate surface descriptions.

11. A poem ponderous and funny at the same time, the vague ruffling of curtains effortlessly becomes a symbol and indicator of all forces in the universe, and in fact becomes the universe showing itself, but that provides no help in deciphering the meaning behind it (“the largeness”).

12. A beautiful sounding poem full of o's and s's and "ions", it seems to revolve around the idea that other people provide the essential stuff and dynamism of life, the thing we react to and act upon. Or as Stevens once said in another context, "life is a matter of people and not things." For one to be solitary (ironically plural here), the natural world must have some constantly shifting, unpredictably exciting movement, which of course it does. Or as Stevens said in another context, "one who is alone is never really lonely."

13. This strange and enchanting image of some Botticelli Venus jettisoning her half-shell to glide upon the water like some goddess on water skies is made stranger by the adjectives used to describe her and what she does: "paltry" and "meagre." The "later, goldener nude" surpasses her, even though she does the exact same thing. A wry comment on progress (and the ambition underlying it) is undoubtedly what is intended here.

14. The French epigram translates as "she knew all the legends of paradise and the stories of Poland." This she, presumably the Polish aunt, and presumably some kind of "duenna" or chaperone assigned to protect some young lady's virtue, is taken aback that her seemingly innocent slippers embroidered with pictures of the saints would provoke a response of spleen (anger, melancholy and ennui) from the male character. This is obviously not about slippers. The male responds that the pantaloons are too old, cover too much, and crimp his style, to which the female replies that he has made too much of the woman in question, not too little, using imagination to make her less common and more desirous. This colloquy, or conversation especially with religious connotations, ends with an ellipse, preventing us from seeing any more than the distinct perspectives of the two.

October Postcard

The immortal scarecrow
bones akimbo
stares at the indistinct brown
of ripened corn.

How hard it must be
to let the whole thing go
having become nothing more
than what he has seen.

Video: Redemption Train

For Jesse

Rainy Day Memory

We watched a darkness he had never seen
turn into rattlesnake day, and the turquoise
sky settle in above the Jesus trees.

I suppose I should have told him then
that the scorpion, to survive, doesn't
give away its lunch to those less fortunate;

or I should have told him not to touch
the feather blue pocked cholla skin, for some things
should be thought about but not experienced;

and maybe I should have been more matter-of-fact
about that makeshift cowboy grave and said
that's what happens, son, to fools who can't obey;

and maybe I should have complained about
the hard ground that we'd slept on, or the cold air
instead of smiling at the silence of the sleeping.

Maybe I should have told him anything
—how to tie his shoes, how to comb his hair,
a technique for cleaning behind the ears—

all the things I want to shout out now
down that sad and rain-drenched street to him,
but we just sat there on that hip-bone rock

and in silence watched the sun in layers rise,
as I sit here now with him in my heart
and nothing I can say.

Three Short Essays about Television

I. After Three Downs, Pun the Ball!

The Hail Mary tate of grace at the tate finals revealed a tate of confusion about the tate of the nation. Tate’s attorney pled tate’s rights as a tate wrestling champ with the right tate of mind but the nation tate wanted to tate the obvious and throw the tate flag and have the tate bar examined, they wanted the head of tate in the tate pen as the law clearly tates. In the turning of tate’s evidence they saw a police tate, a welfare tate, a tate of disrepair, and wanted an official tatement with a tate seal of a tate crime so we could steer the ship of tate away from lawless rocks and an unfair, ineluctable tate. The golden tate warrior was now flagged golden tate bare for jumping to conclusions off the golden tate bridge after a ball shaped like a tater.


II. The Most Intelligent Movie Critic in the World

Every Saturday night he’ll wax poetic about a dying Dirk Bogarde, say, melting in Venice while Mahler plays sunset music to pagan and quite insane Alices, or talk about the tracking shot from the horses at St Marks Square like he was born for it, in that unctuous Alec Baldwin way, say it’s Summertime not Summer and Smoke or The Long Hot Summer, the final answer. Or he'll say things like he first learned that life was doomed, shame-ridden and messy from Written on the Wind, but thankfully he unlearned all of that in Imitation of Life. Or he'll defy us to name a movie that's made today as realistic and profoundly moving as Sunrise, with its “Melies mise-en-scene like a silent movie music video”, or he'll visibly wince at “the disappointment he still feels in the pit of his stomach over Antonioni’s American work.” Or in wistful tribute to Irving Thalberg intone “no movie is an island, but they are best as peninsular insularities,” or, charming us with the sheer force of his Baldwinality, suggest “what is the point of movies, really, after 2001: A Space Odyssey?’

Recently he’s been replaced by Drew Barrymore, who's the opposite, completely starry-eyed and hopelessly cynical at the same time, and always looking sideways nervously on the off-chance Lionel might appear with a truncheon.


III. The Most Intelligent Movie Critic in the World at the Corporate Karaoke Function

Following faux-Gaga and faux-Jay Z he tried “coffee is for closers” to mollify the hedge fund traders who screamed for “I Wanna Be Sedated” but really wanted all the shame and humiliation they feel every moment of every day visited like a Sicilian’s revenge on any turkey in a suit damn fool enough to take the singing stand before they pony up enough charity money to feed a mid-sized third world country. It only got a dull squint of momentary attention before they asked him to croon “Singing in the Rain.” Holding an Amstel Light he reflected back with the air of complete calm every arrow of insanity in the room, and with a voice that implied “the problem with pearls is that they tend to attract swine” said with puckered lips “I couldn’t help but be impressed at your sign out front: ‘leave your brass balls at the door.’” But it was clear by then they wouldn’t let him slum as a 30 rock-ribbed republican, because they’d memorized the phone call and demanded a eye contempt citation and a million dollars as limousine liberal admission. But all that was a ruse. Deep down they knew you have to be real to be funny and people stopped being real in 1997, and when the going gets funny the funny turn into Alec Baldwin.

Video: Far from Stars

Barbed Wire on an Empty Building

The face I can’t perceive
I wish to see it smiling;
The oneness I’m ensconced in
Must be shared.

I want my soul to travel
To the darkest forest edge
To light what can’t be seen
Beyond my eyes.

Video: Fisherman Song

Equinox on Prudence Drive

The dogwood in fall
red leaves and berries

Curled in waving
transcendent swirl

Of how immeasurable death is,
how fertile its black soil.

The red and yellow flowers
stand like angels in the shag

Of withering greens,
shown bones of trees.

Each house allows its ghosts
a creaking jaunt about the place.

The smell of gold pine needles
and the sawdust of first harvest.

The blue mailbox
becomes the center of the world.

Song: Karma

Song: Fisherman's Song

When I come I'll whistle to Bartholemew

Our Current Problem 101

Recently my wife asked me for a brief explanation for our current economic troubles that could be understood by normal people. The essay below is what I came up with. I’m posting it here because for all I know there may be some normal people reading my blog.

The root of all our current problems is the Federal Reserve, a monopoly of private banks controlled by five banking companies: JP MorganChase, Citibank, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. This cartel creates our money (with little to no real government oversight) and lends it back to us at interest rates it sets. That’s its job, and we are not allowed to know very many details about how and why it does it. In 2008, the time of the financial crisis, these five companies collectively owed over $800 trillion dollars when their super-complex and grossly illegal pyramid scheme of making trillions of dollars on home mortgages for poor, uneducated people crashed. That amount was more than 300% of the entire value of the world’s economy! Such an amount could never be paid back. What should have happened is the same thing that happens when a house that is valued at $300,000 falls to $100,000, it goes underwater, and either the mortgage-holder or bank eventually eats the loss.  In this case, the creditors should have eaten their losses (taken a haircut), the banks should have gone into government receivership, the government should have prosecuted them for fraud to recover for taxpayers some amount that was stolen, and the monumental amounts owed should have been forgiven (for the creditors who took on these risks knew what they were getting into).

But that’s not what happened.  Instead, the banks demanded to be made whole for their losses and received the following:

•           0% interest-rate loans so they can make even more money loaning it out at higher rates (thus screwing non-cartel investors and savers)
•           The collateral they held (which gives them the right to print money) was allowed to be valued not at the dismal market price but at the original price (and US taxpayers backed this bogus price)
•           The banks’ “toxic sludge,” the worst of the worthless debt the banks held, was bought up at face value by the U.S. taxpayers (a debt that is not counted in the deficit projections)

The problem with all of this is that none of these actions can really change anything. The amount of debt is so huge it just sucks up all the life of the overall economy to keep these banks on life support (so they can pay their executives huge bonuses). One can rightly ask how the President, Congress and the American people agreed to all of this, but the fact is that none of this was done by the U.S. Congress. It was all done by the banks themselves, acting as the Federal Reserve. They did not even have to report that they borrowed over $29 trillion dollars from the US taxpayers, because most of the Fed’s actions are secret by law. To give one an idea of how much money we are talking about here, one blip on the radar screen was the Fed agreeing in 2009 to have the US taxpayers take over toxic debt from WAMU so JP Morgan could buy it. The cost of this was not even 1% of the total giving to banks that year, but it was more than all the Medicare and Social Security checks sent out for the entire year combined.

How did the Federal Reserve get to be so powerful? Simple, it has been using its right to print US money since 1913 to make a lot of money, and has used a tiny amount of that money to buy off politicians, media, foundations, universities, you name it. How does it make money? By creating money out of thin air to lend it back to us the American taxpayers at interest.  Its goal has been to create a debt-based economy so these banks can profit from our debt (with periodic planned crashes so they can buy up property at fire sale prices). That’s why we have wars, welfare, Medicare, oil subsidies, food stamps, farm subsidies, corporate welfare, etc. (BIG GOVERNMENT). It’s all part of a plan to enslave Americans in debt, and it’s worked so well most Americans don’t even know that individually they owe more than $100,000 a person in this system. Bear in mind, by way of contrast, that the U.S. didn’t even have income tax at all before the Federal Reserve came into being. If we didn’t need it then, we don’t need it now.

Without the Federal Reserve (which is about as Federal as Federal Express), the government could print its own money, and do so to PAY OFF debt instead of create it. If the money the Fed created for its member banks had instead been distributed to American business and people, there would be no talk of unemployment or economic stagnation or China, because the economy would be humming, and people would have LOTS of cash in their pocket. Instead it has gone into the black hole created by the greed of a few banks (the Federal Reserve), from which only the most infinitesimal percentage of the population profits. It’s socialism to protect the monstrously rich from their own mistakes, and we will be paying the price for centuries to come if we don’t wake up.

Some Deleted Scenes from the Oxford Dictionary

“I’m guessing that, say, Shakespeare, in the heat of composition, discovered something that affects us deeply (his words, the way he says something) and might make us feel what he never did. What he wrote somehow just showed up, came from his labors of trying to write a play. He just found himself writing “discandy” or “spanieled.” I’d go so far to say that when Shakespeare wrote his great soliloquies, he had no idea, nothing specific, of what he was going to say. He’d write, compose, work hard, and figure that in the struggle to put words on the paper the beautiful words, those beautiful juxtapositions, he’d just find them. I am almost prepared to say that anything Shakespeare felt deeply and tried to express would not measure up to what he wrote when he was merely working. Of course Shakespeare uses form, but creates from that which has already been created.” – Bruce Floyd

I imagine the Earl slumming in East London public theatres

Finding there some distance in its Shoreditch motley scapegrace

From the relentless logic of the court, its arts of fair skullduggery,

What he needed to perceive the truth of how he fell so far,

The way he’d been abandoned down the line to deadly lords

And careless ladies. At Fisher’s Folly in Portsoken Ward

Behind the Blue Boar Inn, he could reconstruct the scenes

For traveling entertainments, make a mecca for lewd friends,

The dissolute Lyly, Peele, Munday, Nashe, Kyd, Marlowe, Greene,

The lowest form of vermin, known as poets. A place for guilt

To fester, for his wife, his debts, his rage, the blood set on revenge

Against as his only satisfaction, what fuels the artist is

What’s never satisfied, for it’s always pure for others.

Or I see him as an outcast on the rocky Isle of Man

Older than the scofflaws and tax dodgers,

Holding court with shipwrecked sailors and would-be players,

Revising as his last Bermuda freight in “common shipwreck” sank,

Trying to buy some time once more for all

Those oceans of unending patience and practice

That it takes to channel the muses,

To create unconsciously, without that ruthless voice to mediate

All soundings from the deep.

There is nothing that he wants to leave behind him

But the art—all else has burned in its fire:

His forests, his falcons, his theatres,

The Scottish wars, Aegean coast,

His erudition, his reputation and his family,

All vaporized to words that betrayed all

But some invisible seeker of the true.

He was a man so hopelessly out of place,

A noble from the longest, most prestigious line in England

Stuck in this tortured artist’s body

In a most unpromising time and ridiculous place.

Even his title was a joke: 17th Earl of Oxenford,

Lorde Greate Chamberleyne of Englande,

Viscount Bulbecke, and Lorde of Badlesmere and Scales.

He was trained from birth to execute betrayals,

Make despicable deals as haughtily as he would

Tear a pomegranate open, practice misdirection on a scale

Unimaginable to normal men, lightly wave his fingers

In the air as if some matter has been settled

When the horror had just begun.

Yet it was so easy for a prince to write like a fool,

For a failure at every art of war to voice the orders of generals,

For an unrepentant courtier to sweat the obsequies mere mortals

Must swear to survive. For the man who could have been king

To throw play thrones away in shame of love, for he knew

What he had given up, in fealty to no crown.

His every figure was perfectly drawn from life,

It was as easy as taking dictation,

But he was ill-equipped

To fathom they’d recoil like that,

At his hypnosis to be stopped

Or pushed back into the pewter kegs

Of his grand but shameful theatres,

Where the truth came line by line.

He had lost with every word

The thing that made him human among humans,

Compassion was all that was left inside,

The smallest and most bitter dreg.

Online Biography of Edward de Vere

Finem Estatis

Shockingly cold, the old tiger patch
while days are still golden, with birdsong and green,
the aquamarine hydrangeas in bloom,
the squirrels not rushing to deadlines,

but the leaf-tops are red, the humus-
rich scent of what's dead fills the air,
calls cinnamon and soup from dark ateliers.
Altair and Vega still preside in the skies,

dividing the milk in the river,
and the harp strings of Lyra grow softer until
we feel the change, as her swan song transforms
our freedom into the beautiful.

What heaven this is, this ripeness now rotting,
the grandeur of late afternoons stilled with light,
the thinning sky, where voices are rising
to speak distant truths from the other side.

They'll wait 'til the carnival closes up shop,
collects all the insects in jars for the road,
breaks down the jungle to load into trap doors,
and tells the young bucks to cool their roar,

but the merry-go-round is still open for business
and the kids clamor on for a last special ride,
for the knowledge that it will be gone come tomorrow
is most of our knowledge of life.

Still-Life with Newspaper Clippings

Rubber chicken QEIII
Her Majesty's secret sauce
as Kentucky burns fried golden like the dickens
flying carpet bombing carpet kissers dipping
pouring oil upon the grease fire
by a mudsling to the mudslimes
a holy roller dervish derby
the chickens you say
with Yemen slices and salt crystals for the tongue
(peace be upon the Seal of the Prophets)
black pepper, blood ketchup, gold mustard
and straws to break the camels' backs
and finger-licking cotton-picking hot-mess-diggety
lickety-split persnickity package-sniffing dark star dog
rotisserie fricassed
old tymey religion chicken
with USS Coleslaw and mashed Al Queda with crazy on the side
a green dome sno-cone
no coke pepsi.
It's a Sahara mirage like the gold in old Fort Knox,
or the frankincense from Arabia Felix
for the mystery schools of Grease.
They hate us for our chickens
our Kentucky funky chicken gold sun ra
Memphis fried on the Chickasaw bluff,
home of the white King who died on his throne,
land where the black King dropped down to his tomb,
near Timbuktu, the home of the blues.
Ai-gy-ptos spins like a gyroscope
at the business end of a pyramid scheme.
Ambassadors of Soul negotiate with Pharaohs now
at the nuclear Necropolis,
say "Nyet" to NotYetaYahoo
and "wait" to Abominable Dinner Jacket
that needs to be I-roned out
and "are you Sirius?" to Dr. Syria
with a wife from Goldman Sachs.
They're re-writing the Marine Hymn
for plausible deniability
that they landed on the shores of Tripoli
to take out the Colonel who tortured chickens
because he'd eaten too much LSD.
It's a trans-cultural jubilee,
the grease for GDP,
shish kebabs of flesh for trade or sale,
kosher and halal, with double zeros in the eyes
for as long as it takes and as far as the eyes can see,
the mirage seen from the city on shit's creek.
No coke pepsi.

Stevens Textplication #24: Banal Sojourn

The second most common question poets receive (after “how can I get published?”) is “what does your poem mean?” Stevens, like any self-respecting artist, answered such queries with a lawyerly velvet of misdirection and obscurity, but there was one notable exception, a correspondent named Hi Simons. Simons, a medical book publisher in Chicago, started writing Stevens in 1938 to get answers on his cryptic poems, and Stevens surprisingly complied, offering patient and literal explanations over a period of years for many of his poems. Some examples include: “I shall explain The Snow Man as an example of the necessity of identifying oneself with reality in order to understand it and enjoy it,” and [on “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle”] “The trouble with the idea of heaven is that it is merely an idea of the earth.”* Most professional Stevens critics today ignore these serious and lucid explanations, because they view Hi Simons as a rank amateur who had no business asking Stevens such questions, so therefore Stevens must have been mocking him by responding as he did. However, the genuine amateur quality (amateur means "lover" in Latin) that critics so despise about Simons is probably what attracted Stevens, since, after all, only lovers can know the joy and sadness that is at the root of great art.

“Banal Sojourn” from 1919 was one of many poems Stevens provided Simons insights into (bearing in mind something else Stevens wrote Simons: “I made up my mind not to explain things, because most people have so little appreciation of poetry that once a poem has been explained it has been destroyed”). “Banal Sojourn,” Stevens wrote, “is a poem of exhaustion in August. The mildew of any late season, of any experience that has grown monotonous as, for instance, the experience of life.” It is hard to imagine a more concise or complete explanation for the poem:

Two wooden tubs of blue hydrangeas stand at the foot of the stone steps.
The sky is a blue gum streaked with rose. The trees are black.
The grackles crack their throats of bone in the smooth air.
Moisture and heat have swollen the garden into a slum of bloom.
Pardie! Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,
Our old bane, green and bloated, serene, who cries,
“That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” reminding of seasons,
When radiance came running down, slim through the bareness.
And so it is one damns that green shade at the bottom of the land.
For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?
And who does not seek the sky unfuzzed, soaring to the princox?
One has a malady, here, a malady. One feels a malady.

Picking up with Stevens' explanation, the first four lines offer on the one hand almost overwhelmingly lush and beautiful poetic images (sky as blue gum, grackles cracking throats of bone, a swollen slum of bloom), but the literal sense is severe and anti-romantic: the hydrangeas are defined by the wooden tubs they are held in, the trees are the color of darkness, the sound the birds make is a painful and perhaps violent action, an overgrown garden is equated with a slum. The overbearing richness of late Summer is thus beautifully expressed, as one looks beyond the intensity of life for the mechanisms (the “moisture and heat”) running the dense machine.

The middle four lines (after the interjection “Pardie,” roughly equivalent to “Mercy”) personify summer as a “fat beast,” overcome by mildew (“our old bane [enemy]”), corrupted into decadence like Sydney Greenstreet by the heat, having no energy itself but crying out for others “That bliss of stars, that princox of evening heaven!” Princox is another rare word Stevens uses in odd but appropriate ways, the literal meaning being an arrogant, strong-willed but effeminate young man (think of Tybalt in Romeo and Juliet). The contrast between the sapped old beast of summer and the eternally young play of the stars across the sky is to my mind an accurate account of the time right before autumn arrives, when it looks like this endless regeneration of life will go on forever. It reminds the narrator of life's beginning as winter turned to spring and then summer, “slim through the bareness” the light green shoots were as they reached to a suddenly golden sun.

The last four lines move the speaker from observation and memory to a personal reaction, an emotion triggered by the scene. “One damns that green shade at the bottom of the land” one wants “the sky unfuzzed” (by ragweed, dandelions, humidity, etc.), one has (three times) “a malady.” Almost effortlessly, the reader finds herself wanting a certain sickness unto death from all this heaviness, so that birth can come, a true princox of innocence. It’s a subtle contrast to elegiac poems of autumn and winter, where death is seen as a loss and an end. Here, death is welcomed as a new opportunity to escape the boredom and oppression of the fullest ripening of life.

As is usual with Stevens, reality and imagination lurk in the shadows. The palpable loss of innocence forces one to view what would have been seen in romantic, fantastical terms (the garden, the sky, the stars) under the harsh glare of reality, and this is seen as a kind of death.

Before we close, I’d like to discuss the puzzling (to many commentators) line: “For who can care at the wigs despoiling the Satan ear?” Eleanor Cook (in A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens) reads this (I think correctly) as a reference to earwigs, as big a bane as mildew to a gardener. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, “The earwig, a small centipede, is thought to be a disguise for the devil in Irish folklore.” Taking this a step further, this line could be making a reference to Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Satan, as the season turns into Autumn, comes into paradise at night to whisper in Eve’s ear as she sleeps:

Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve; [ 800 ]
Assaying by his Devilish art to reach
The Organs of her Fancie, and with them forge
Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams,
Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint
Th' animal spirits that from pure blood arise [ 805 ]
Like gentle breaths from Rivers pure, thence raise
At least distemperd, discontented thoughts,
Vaine hopes, vaine aimes, inordinate desires
Blown up with high conceits ingendring pride.

This act, quickly discovered by Gabriel, sows the seeds for man’s expulsion from Eden. This fits right in with the theme of lost innocence, “the mildew…of any experience that has grown monotonous.”

* All letter references from L504, Collected Letters of Wallace Stevens

Taking the News Personally

As the crowds in Cairo chant “we’re all Osama now”
My lumbago throbs like Sirius at a false flag itching immanent,
A wagging of the angriest hound in the firmament,
As soldiers of the IDF bus to the Wailing Wall
To make peace with their holy pineapple before…

As my country stares sleep-swollen at the sermons
Of Baroness Burnett, Vanna Fortuna and Quim Carcrashion
Or that Michigan Romulan Romany the terrorvangelist Mormon
Whose mad shame glistening eyes transport them like Persephone
From the underworld of a chimney-purple President waving the bloody
Gorgon’s head, paralyzing like the idol of every tribe, to some meadow
Free from dew, as the harps and wind machines go through Yanni’s
Magnanimously voluminous hair.

Running my eyes across the entrail teletype, the luminous flicks
Unspooled from their safety canisters at this moment of the world,
I grieve for my countrypeople, for things are always so much worse than
They appear to be: the Boys Town abductees have influential positions
(If they’re raped when young enough the voices in their heads can run
their lives)
And the cells of virus programs have been mobilized for swift distraction
(In case the mind-controlling drugs and food have side reactions),
The money made in secret shipped offshore (dead sent offline).
The secret’s hid in plane site, the jail gates left wide open,
It’s clear they only care about destroying love, destroying life,
And we give in worship body, mind and soul for the privilege
Of them eating us like Chronos for our own good. And we’re happiest
To serve like this; it’s those on the outside who are lonely
With the coldness of the truth their only friend
And an opening in the rabbit-hole that only hints how deep it goes
Revealing we know nothing at all levels. But the writing on the wall
Proclaims the truth in incomprehensible diction
Which the guests at the table of the beast whitewash
As if Cleanliness was next to Godliness not Death.

Ah, but how could this matter to me? Love is at the end of every thought;
What need could it have to defend itself? There’s no enlightenment
Without Lucifer. The hero’s journey must go through delusion,
For at-one-ment is too easy, without the play of dark self-doubt
We would leap through all our lessons, be untouched by what's not right.
We’re created in full consciousness, and we’re learning all the time,
Reaching for the light in all that moves. Infinite blackness on all sides
Would scarcely be enough to keep us eyeless, without yearning, without
hope.

Yet I cannot accept that all is God, I want you to hear the screaming
From the project towers and bazaars under the bridge,
To feel the brainwaves masquerade as radio transmissions.
I want you to see the grid for rats, with electromagnetic channels,
Surveillance and a noose around the cheese.
When she clutches on her cellphone for dear sweet life
I’d have you believe it has kidnapped her daughter
And she’s waiting on some invisible lord for the ransom word.

The thing is, you see, every fact telegraphed in advance
Comes with a fat disclaimer, that the sender is never satisfied or complete.
In my case, I’m a prophet who remembers how my mouth was washed
with soap
For telling truth; the advocate told at three years old
I did not know what the hell I was talking about;
The visionary shamed for believing in God
By the people I most wanted to please.
I see only terrors in your stoic faces,
Feel keenly the fear that comes off of your brows,
Afraid I’ll be sliced to order again
By the merest raise of an eyebrow,
The slightest unanticipated question.

We calculate the debts we owe to fathers, sons and holy ghosts,
But what of that orphan left with nothing?

When every word is a lie
Maybe silence is the truth.

The bitter man who took away your dreams
How you would thank him now, if only you could.

Resisting Forgiveness

Every day is judgment day
where God is judged.
A suspect in absentia.
How wide we are
we must conjure bars.
Shaped into cells
dreaming of freedom,
we can't conceive how right we are
when we are wrong.

Mid-Year Review

And just like a busboy annoyed at no burn
the CEO walked off the combat carpet
and all we were left was a curt, quick-drawn note:
"our vision is undiminished, thanks to You,
in mutual pursuit of unlimited excellence.
There's nothing to see here, go on with your lives."

And nothing changed in our sun-drenched day,
the levers were so far away, but the father
whose wrath we concocted like a mythical beast in our hearts
was dispensed. The spears were unused,
the chits for late-night candle burning unredeemable.
He'll "pursue other opportunities, effective immediately."

And the tirades where laptops were sacrificed as examples,
the Friday late firings for fun—all done
and gone like a mighty storm passed long ago.
To think of his coffins and parachutes of gold
or the golf swing he mastered while we were here working
is to waste time in bitterness, when there's more to be done,

what existed before him, and continues forever,
the thought and reaction that rolls down the line
as psyches are struck by the mirror-shard grinding
of victims and victors, survivors and saints.
It's not for their hideous waste that these behemoths thrive
but our crossing of boundaries and sharing of space.

And each passing smile and personal affront is a gift
the Corporation is there to serve.

Only In Dreams

Only in dreams is there consciousness
—No footnotes of mind: "we're aware"—
No care how the maze we created got there,
How bewildering the symbols are to us.

There we're the soul that we bow to and bless,
No parsing of breathing and heaven,
No mourning a world that can never awaken
Or look out for its own precious interests.

All answers lead back to the labyrinth,
The walls that divide from the unity.
Past the feeling of some deeper memory
No distinction will stay to imprint.

We wake to the maze, in its haze we're caught
Lost in the fractured confusion
Soon seeking the safety of our own sun
Whose sphere turns as slowly as our thoughts.

Summer Late and Loud

Before it's gone
birds shriek,
crickets scream,
grasses shiver,
the leaves wave farewell.

I am not making this human,
I am failing, in fact, to reach out of my skin,
to see how near to us they are,
to use my mind for any purpose but illusion.

I split like a knife the tremulous print,

on one side: the fear
that expression is stopped like the flesh with death

on the other: the last opportunity
to speak to a world that is love.

But the truth is
it's a harmonization

the one thing we humans can't grasp.

The King Who Played The Fool

Homage to the great lost Don Quixote film

Oh George, I wish I could be like you,
Keep the world at bay with veils and masks
To make movies that no one is allowed to see.

To let a beam of light in called the real.

The whole shooting match of The Tradition
You had it in your bones, no one knew it like you,
But you cast it like a magician’s cape aside
While they held on to what they did not understand
For dear life, as you concocted unimaginable futures
Like others use a mop, you had to be stopped,
For the world is much too fragile not
To be persuaded by your illusion,
Like a blueprint always turns somehow to stone.

What else was there for you,
Master of illusion, than the certainty of the real?
Real opinions, real conversations, real depictions,
No Fakespeare for you, it was more current than the news.
You had to choose from the bottom of a black slush pile
Through the hollowed out Hollywood hole – only that
Was worth the letting go, of endless improvised invention,
How the perfect can be better, the unique more extreme,
The future turned to rancid butter fat, to melt in burned
Producer’s Roman vaults – with no sign of your rococo picaro.

The people took it all in, hoodwinked at a glance,
But they hadn't had a clue on how their lives
Depend upon it; they would get so confused, if you were any less
Dangerous, or less generous in your profligate perversion
To do everything against the senseless established sense.
You shamed the sadists with the most to hide
Behind their bars of power, took in with tragic pity
Such orphans of the storm, exchanging Rita Hayworth
For Marilyn Monroe, as if the Black Dahlia didn’t hang
Over the affair like the acrid orchid scent of human flesh.
In a country without clowns, yours was a pernicious
Elegance, a stunning gravitas. You shot the camera
Like a gun, played the dissonant angles straight,
Bled not like any gunsel on the Cinerama plate,
Brought shades of gray to light the thing we wouldn’t see,
Blackened it to show the void we try so hard to be.

You took responsibility for Senator Joe McCarthy
While they fricasseed your effigy in envy of your nerve,
Your verve, your fire, and slaughtered the golden boy cow
Who refused to die a tragic king for Mephistopheles so pretty
As long as blood is fed, a rotting corpse alive obese besides.
“We will sell no wine – before it’s time.” It’s time.

Lyrics: Alive Tonight

Then say we're two
unjustified
no longer unified
no more worlds
colliding
I can't look into your eyes
the species will survive tonight
if you're alive tonight
hear the flower softly cry
in pain too deep and wise
it disappears until the last time
before it's recognized

I come home
there's a lawyer
got an easy way with smiles
he's on your speed dial
it's perilous
to lie in bed with you tonight
the species will survive tonight
if we can't unite
pull the light you're right
you're always right

Our old friends arranged a ferry
when we both were getting married
we drank a glass of light
threw it away
into the fireplace
they wished us hell
but hid it well
then rang the bell
for kiss and tell
we felt the swell
before the sell
and then we fell
into the well

Song: Resurrection Zion

Solar system climate change
Heat shifts out of range
A thinning of magnetics
Increase in volcanics

Chorus:
Time for surfing
Surfing the Dao
Heaven is flirting
Surfing the Dao
Tears for the birthing
Surfing the Dao
Keys for the searching
Surfing the Dao

Babylon System getting weary, son
Earth firsters show some universal tolerance, mon
Lift yourselves from the rivers of Avon
You will weep when you remember Zion

Sirian pharaohs had dere dog days
Now they grieve for the parting of the rays
The sun is spinning to a resurrection zone
Exodus to make our home our home

Chorus

(Bridge):
See the weeds be trees of life
The streets as cities of light
Love and the word are aligned
We understand why we are kind


Violet Flame heal Jamaica’s poor
A column of light between the earth and stars
Wash all your pharaoh pity away
Ride the banks of the Milky Way

Chorus

See there are stars in our eyes
Star people let’s recognize
(repeat)

Song: Far From Stars

I'll pull you from the hellfire of time
fallen angel little daughter of mine
your present moment never ends
a brand-new world full of brand-new friends
until you think of who you are
and see how far you are from stars
that's when I tell you 'bout the law
that's when you fall into the flaw
where you earn while you burn
and you burn while you learn

How can I be right
when I divvy up your light for the night
chasing demons from the dreams in your bed
put ideas in your magical head
and when you finally pause to stop
after I've pushed it to the top
that's when my heart begins to turn
that's when I get my body to burn
so you'll learn while you burn
and you'll burn while you earn

Three Resting Poems

I. Hope Terrace
The monarch spreads and closes
like the cover of a book
as it ravishes the lilac
like a reader with its limbs
then it flies away like pages
on the other side of sight

II. Deepspring Wood
You cannot hear the water
jiggling on stones
above haze of cicadas
waving heaven's rattles
the bubbles through the hatch
break to ripple supernovas
but the leaves lay still as death
on the waters
and the only way you'd know
the stream was moving
was the way the trees and sky
bounce off against the surface
with a wobble

III. Eden Road
The people here have roots
as dug in as the stones
but the black sunflower
comes from far away
to claim its dibs
on their eternity

Stevens Textplication #23: Nomad Exquisite

I have a line from a poem "let's lucid dream the professional boat-naming class" that I love even though I'm fully aware nobody would have any idea what I'm talking about. It actually has to do with the well-documented fact that there are never any good names for boats (probably a vestige of the British tendency to name everything, pretentiously and badly). If only one could imagine a class where one learned how to properly and professionally name boats, the thinking went. Anyway, "Nomad Exquisite," in addition to being a great or terrible boat name depending on your perspective, is one of those poems that seems to many observers too private, too personal for elucidation (some say this about all of Stevens' poems). Stevens' relationship with Florida in these early poems was indeed shockingly personal, addressing it more often as an alluring and fickle lover than as one of these United States. He published quite a number of poems in this vein, full of exotic tropicality and poignant Northern longing. This one, as they all do, has its own special feel:

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth
The big-finned palm
And green vine angering for life,

As the immense dew of Florida
Brings forth hymn and hymn
From the beholder,
Beholding all these green sides
And gold sides of green sides,

And blessed mornings,
Meet for the eye of the young alligator,
And lightning colors
So, in me, comes flinging
Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.

First, a gentle reminder that this was written in 1919 not 2012. A quick count of the number of syllables in each of these lines shows how thoroughly Stevens was resisting the English meters still conventional in his time (9,2,4,8 9,5,5,7,6 5,11,5,6,7). So many odd syllables, so erratically arranged, yet the diction (and rhythm) is one of portentous solemnity, lush with phrases such as "immense dew," "brings forth," "beholding," "hymn and hymn" (as opposed to "hymn and whore"?), "blessed mornings," "meet for the eye." It's like Milton on a bender. Notice too the progression of vowel sounds, as the "ih" and "aye" sounds of I dance with the "ee" sounds until the final line, where the a's march in and take over. And what's with all these f's, the most confused sound in the English language?

All of these poetic tricks, I would argue, are for a purpose: to create an disarming and off-putting musicality (an appeal to the South* of emotion, love, sensitivity) in order to disguise its far more prosaic (Northern) content, for the substance of the poem is nothing more than a philosophical proposition that reads something like this:

As water creates vegetation,
As the effect of water creates poetic response in the witness
So out of me comes poetry

So simple, yes, but nothing seems this straightforward in the poem itself, does it? We've got the personification of Florida as "immense dew" for one thing, allegedly non-human green vines "angering for life" (what an unexpected blend of sound and sense here, the aggressive growth of tropical plants as passion for life that mimics in sound the spindly way it grows to the human observer), a bunch of "side" dishes (suggesting how the edges of vegetation in sunlight can be distinctly green or gold or an indistinct mix), the well-timed cameo appearance of a "young alligator" (signaling both birth and death in close proximity to the poet), and the sudden appearance of lightning like one of those famous Floridian storms, so intense that the poet apparently becomes the lightning ("forms, flames and flakes of flame" also sounds like lightning - if lightning could talk - in addition to being a good description of the poet's project in general).

All this poetic license with trademark Everglades imagery (and the Florida of Stevens' time was a lot like the Everglades through and through) expresses with Poe-like hysteria how crazy it feels to be in such a strange place, all the more crazy because one can so easily become a part of it.

This delicate relationship between appearance, metaphor and identity is at the center of this poem. We create our identities through metaphor, the lucid images of relationship we latch onto to imagine who we are in the so-much-larger world, and this metaphor is created out of appearance, what we see. Somewhere along the way, however, the metaphor and the real become confused, we get lost and the arboretum becomes a jungle so to speak, and with this shift, who we are becomes an open question. We act as nature, flinging our own "flakes of flames" (like so much glitter) and believing we are speaking as the lightning, directly inspired by the natural world. But we can only imagine ourselves so at one with nature because we are so totally removed from it. And that's always the Stevensian dilemma, how we can become so completely what we are not, to the point where we don't trust our minds, our senses or our spirit. There's no break in the appearance to clue us in that we are dreaming it, no telling us to stop as we assume all of God's creative powers. There's only a feeling that it isn't as it appears.

So we write poems, literally or figuratively, trying to at least document the subtle interpenetrations between self and world to find in them some evidence, in our own words, of who we are and why we are here.

Since this is the first of Stevens' Florida poems we will discuss I will announce that each of these explications will end with a link to Farewell to Florida, a poem from 1936 that was to be the last poem Stevens ever wrote about Florida. I'm doing this not just because I like to spoil any party I'm invited to, but because without that poem these ones would, for me, have no real meaning.

* It has been poignantly called to my attention that my habitual citing of Native Peoples mythology may appear to one not versed in it as the ravings of a madman. Therefore, let me clarify on this point that I am using the concepts of South and North here in the traditional American Indian usage of North as the cold, white, rational, boundary-making father mind that is in this cycle of being in control of the planet, and South as the hot, red, loving, open, all-accepting mother heart that is now in the process of taking over as a new cycle begins.