{"id":61090,"date":"2013-10-01T01:01:53","date_gmt":"2013-10-01T01:01:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=61090"},"modified":"2013-10-01T16:13:53","modified_gmt":"2013-10-01T16:13:53","slug":"90th-anniversary-of-wallace-stevenss-harmonium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/90th-anniversary-of-wallace-stevenss-harmonium\/","title":{"rendered":"90th Anniversary of Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

“At college I knew “Harmonium” almost by heart.” – Elizabeth Bishop<\/p>\n

Alfred A. Knopf published Wallace Stevens’s first book of poems, Harmonium<\/em>, on September 7, 1923. William H. Gass, \u00a0Micheline Aharonian Marcom, Amber Sparks, and Curtis White share their thoughts 90 years after the fact…<\/p>\n

William H. Gass<\/strong><\/a>:
\n20 men crossing a bridge into a village means 20 murderers sneaking across 1 bridge out of a clump of trees unless 1 man with the most fatal arms is all that’s necessary to carry the gun while crossing the bridge out of a fist of weeds. This is an old song they aren’t singing while crossing a silence into a clump of reeds where they will waylay their prey. Please keep your boots dry and your powder too. \u00a0The dancing we shall do. \u00a0 Oh. \u00a0Shoot. \u00a0It’s only a movie. Not merely a poem. Simply a metaphor.<\/p>\n

Happy birthday to Harmonium<\/em>, Magnifico.<\/p>\n

Bill Gass<\/p>\n

Micheline Aharonian Marcom<\/strong><\/a>:
\nOn Wallace Stevens<\/em>
\nI can’t recall when I found Stevens’ work, an old used paperback I picked up somewhere over a decade ago and began to read from The Palm at the End of the Mind<\/em>. \u00a0 And for years I have kept this book on my desk and in my to-ing and fro-ing and sitting at my desk and not knowing, I often open up the collection and read a poem and am, not consoled, and yet consoled by the possibilities and beauty and strangeness of his work, and of what English is capable of (I forget and reremember again and again), and he reminds me. His work \u00a0 is always contending with what it is we are doing here, or how we are, or simply, usually, with what Is<\/em>. And he says to me again and again in his work: the poet, the writer, is the metaphysician of our age. And Wallace Stevens, well, his work helps me to live my life.<\/p>\n

Amber Sparks<\/strong><\/a>:
\n“The Emperor of Ice Cream” was the first adult poem I remember reading, and it made me a perpetual and willing prisoner of poetry. One late summer day I was digging in my father’s old books, bored by then with ripping heads off in Mortal Kombat<\/em>, and I came across an old Norton poetry textbook. I flipped through – the poems looked old, stodgy, boring, pious – and then I came across the words “ice cream” and fell in love, very quickly, with what I’d later learn Stevens called “the essential gaudiness of poetry.” I didn’t understand<\/em> the poem, but I felt some sort of love, some new expanded palate for words–concupiscent curds!–some flash of pre-insight just the same. Harmonium<\/em> is probably the text I’ve come back to most in my life, after Hamlet<\/em>, and it’s full of the brilliant gaudiness of poetry, of the way things are and the way they ought to be. I’d like to raise a mental glass to it now, and to many more years of it bringing people to poetry.<\/p>\n

Curtis White<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cDear fat Stevens, thawing out so beautifully at forty.”
\n\u2014W. C. Williams<\/p>\n

When I first read Stevens as a very young man, most of what I found was his exuberant, intoxicating, liberating music, the perfect antidote for a suburban youth whose reading experience didn’t go much beyond the San Francisco Chronicle’<\/em>s \u201cSporting Green.” But what I find now, forty-plus years later, is an undecided poet, a young poet at forty, in earnest dialogue with possibility.<\/p>\n

The reigning critical truism about Stevens in the sixties was that he was the last great Romantic poet, and there is plenty in Harmonium<\/em> to support that idea. The most famous of the poems here is \u201cThe Comedian as the Letter C,” a long Kunstler roman<\/em> in the tradition of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (especially the Wanderjahre<\/em>), Byron’s Childe Harold<\/em>, and perhaps Wordsworth’s \u201cThe Excursion.” It is also a superlative application of Romantic Irony to the Romantic itself.<\/p>\n

And of course there are nature images\u2014perhaps I should say that there is language evocative of the idea of nature\u2014everywhere: Firecats, frogs, swans, lilacs, pine trees, wind, winter, and always the sea. For Stevens, the things of nature come on sine waves, oscillations created by the ironies of perception and language. (There is something of the quantum physicist in him.) It’s not just a matter of the sea, something to look over but not into as Shelley does in \u201cDejection”: \u201cthe waves are dancing fast and bright.” That’s how waves ought to behave. But for Stevens it is the more complicated matter of \u201cthe makers rage to order words of the sea.”<\/p>\n

As a Romantic, Stevens is a \u201cphilosopher’s man,” as much at home with Schelling as he is with Wordsworth.<\/p>\n

Stevens is also in earnest dialogue with the poetry of the moment, especially what his friends William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound were calling Imagism. They rejected the poetry of the Romantic tradition in the name of a sort of haiku dream in which the world could reveal itself in an \u201cinstant of time.” But wouldn’t this quatrain from \u201cHomunculus et la Belle Etoile” pass as an Imagist poem?<\/p>\n

By this light the salty fishes
\nArch in the sea like tree-branches,
\nGoing in many directions
\nUp and down.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, for Stevens the point is that the poem doesn’t <\/em>stop with the image or the instant but goes on profligately to \u201cthe thoughts of drunkards, the feelings\/ of widows and trembling ladies.” A later poem, \u201cThe Red Fern,” seems to mischievously echo Williams’s \u201cThe Red Wheelbarrow,” but you sure wouldn’t say that Stevens thinks that much \u201cdepends” upon this fern. The fern only appears at all as its \u201cdouble” in clouds. For Stevens the fern itself is inevitably \u201cdifficult.”<\/p>\n

Williams may have faulted Stevens’s opulence for failing to find itself in the American grain, but Stevens had his own America and it was in venereal Florida and in a tropical and very fecund world further south where Fernando and \u201cpale Ramon” repose on \u201cpalmy beaches.”<\/p>\n

I still love the great, round voluptuousness and the playful Bach-like intricacy of the poems in Harmonium<\/em>. But as an older man, it is the few late poems of The Rock<\/em> and \u201cOf Mere Being” that speak most directly to me now. There are no emperors of ice cream to be found there. No snowmen. Nothing strutting about in gauds. In poems like \u201cThe Plain Sense of Things” Stevens achieves a meditative purity, a philosophical dignity, worthy of Keats who is, in the end, his only peer.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Wallace Stevens’s “The Rabbit as King of the Ghosts”<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

“At college I knew Harmonium<\/em> almost by heart.” – Elizabeth Bishop<\/p>\n

Alfred A. Knopf published Wallace Stevens’<\/b> first book of poems, Harmonium<\/em>, on September 7, 1923. William H. Gass<\/strong>, Micheline Aharonian Marcom<\/strong>, Amber Sparks<\/strong>, and Curtis White<\/strong> share their thoughts 90 years after the fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[552,553,554,555,549,551],"class_list":["post-61090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction","tag-amber-sparks","tag-curtis-white","tag-harmonium","tag-micheline-aharonian-marcom","tag-wallace-stevens","tag-william-h-gass"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=61090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61090\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=61090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=61090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=61090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}