Dancing in the Kitchen with Stevens

I HAVE TAUGHT Wallace Stevens over a number of years. With one exception, none of the classes in which I taught Stevens’s work were exclusively for poets, although all included promising or beginning writers of poetry. Many of these students—especially when they encountered Stevens’s work in classes that were listed as more academic introductions to modern poetry—expressed occasional discomfort, not knowing how to talk about or “understand” the poems, in particular the earlier anecdote-like poems from Stevens’s first two volumes.

Recently, however, I have found more enthusiasm, even if no less anxiety about how to write more academic essays, about the poems; indeed, perhaps I should have titled this short essay “Anecdote of Reading Stevens with Poets.” Reading poems like “Earthy Anecdote” or “Life Is Motion,” I used to face puzzlement or silence, sometimes followed by attempts to theorize the poems, often in a Nietzschean vein or in a symbolic register (with bucks and firecats decoded as reality and imagination, for example) or in historical terms (with attempts to consider Stevens’s imagination of Oklahoma, which became a state only twelve years before “Life Is Motion” was written, in terms of the Indian Removal Act and the 1838–39 Trail of Tears).¹ None of these approaches were unreasonable or unprecedented, but neither did such critical frameworks leave students with much to emulate or much to say about lines like “‘Ohoyaho, / Ohoo’ . . .” (CPP 65).

However, somewhat to my surprise, I find student-poets are now inclined to focus more on the sonic and rhythmic qualities of the poems: the first response to “Earthy Anecdote” has recently become about the pleasures of mouthing the plosives in “Oklahoma,” “bucks,” “clattering,” and “firecat,” about the materiality of the voiced poem (CPP 3).² Also to my surprise, a poem that I have in the past avoided teaching (because it is so often used in high-school classes and comes with, as it were, a pre-packaged response), namely “The Emperor of Ice-Cream,” is now something my students revisit in ways that do not involve discussions of life and death or imagination and reality. There are still those who point to what they see as the more abstract language of the couplets that conclude each stanza (and especially the repeated refrain), and who then turn, or talk about the way they think readers must turn, to the more intellectual pleasure of puzzling out what the couplets mean and away from the more embodied pleasure found in the repetitions, assonance, alliteration, rhythm, and rhyme that all but occlude any sense even of a represented scene, so that lines like “In kitchen cups concupiscent curds” exist less to denote the making of dessert than as the occasion of the ephemeral sweetness of saying the words (CPP 50). Issues of representation arise as well: I have students who draw on critics or poets ranging from Roy Harvey Pearce to Helen Vendler to C. S. Giscombe to worry about the depiction of Cuban cigar factory workers, presumably witnessed in Ybor City, Tampa, Florida, during Stevens’s visit there. However, the younger poets’ focus is mostly on the poem’s sound and diction, on something like what Stevens would call the poem’s “essential gaudiness” (L 263).

Moreover, it’s not simply the somatic pleasures of patterned sound that are featured in such discussions, but also the exuberance of the imperatives—and, especially, the use of “Let” as a marker of performativity in lines 4, 7, and 15—which momentarily aligns the poem’s act of speech with the original “Let there be light” (especially in line 15: “Let the lamp affix its beam”), yet which first and foremost maintains the kinetic force of the poem’s repetitions (of the imperative verbs, of the etymology linking “imperative” and “emperor,” of the internal and end rhymes of “be,” “be,” “finale,” “seem,” “only,” and “cream”) so that the apparent abstraction of the stanzas’ concluding couplets is absorbed by the patterned sound (CPP 50). In one sense, then, the poem does not elicit intellectual pleasures by means of or set against somatic or...