Three Experiences with Stevens

WALLACE STEVENS has been a crucial poet for me since around 1980, when I took an idiosyncratic seminar in his poetry at Princeton with a professor, Clarence Brown, whose field was Russian poetry, Mandelstam in particular, but who loved Stevens. Full disclosure: it was in this seminar that I first encountered Glen MacLeod, who, unlike me, went on to become a scholar of Stevens’s work.

Perhaps like Clarence Brown, I adore Stevens’s work without feeling myself to be at all expert in it. Over the years, I’ve spoken about Stevens on a panel or two, most recently at the 2006 MLA, where the topic was sound effects in Stevens’s work. In 2010 or 2011, I wrote a little piece for the magazine then known as Shambhala Sun (now Lion’s Roar) on Stevens’s poem “Prologues to What Is Possible.” But I’m no Stevens scholar. Over the course of my career at Rutgers, I’ve certainly taught some Stevens poems to both undergraduate and graduate classes, but not because Stevens is any specialty of mine. His work is hard to talk about, and (but? therefore?) I love it. Students coming to this poetry for the first time, or for the twentieth time for that matter, may be baffled or enchanted or both at once. I know all three feelings.

Three Stevens poems stick in my memory as classroom experiences. The first classroom wasn’t at Rutgers; it was in the basement of a building in Chelsea that was the headquarters of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis. This would have been around 1989. Using Kenneth Koch’s remarkable anthology Sleeping on the Wing as a guide, I asked the people in the poetry workshop I was running to imitate “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Charles Barber wrote about his Hickman catheter; James Turcotte about his young son. Both their poems were published posthumously in Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop, a book I put together in 1991. Stevens would never have written these two poems, never have engaged with such material; but his crystalline blackbird variations generated two vivid and thoughtful lyric poems which navigate emotionally fraught territory by approaching their respective topics from various angles, and do so with clarity and grace and without a touch of sentimentality.

“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” is of course a much-anthologized poem. So are (for example) “The Snow Man” and “Anecdote of the Jar” and “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” Rather than recall my efforts to explain those three poems, all of which look simple and are anything but, I remember with pleasure teaching “Of Modern Poetry” to more than one class—probably, indeed, to five or ten classes over the years. Undergraduates and graduate students alike grasp that this poem, while beautiful in itself, is also a meditation on aesthetics. It offers an enticing glimpse into the changes wrought, early in the twentieth century, by modernism, or by the death of God, or by whatever one chooses to call certain salient shifts in the way poetry was written or any art was made, or indeed in the way people thought. That poetry can do some of the work of criticism or of cultural history, while never ceasing to be elegant and artful in itself, was a revelation to me when I first encountered Stevens’s work. And I believe this revelation continues to engage students, whether they are puzzling over modernist poetry or are themselves budding poets, or both. Of course, one always has the option, too, of forgetting about the wider cultural scene and simply (or not so simply) reading “Of Modern Poetry” as a meditation inside the poet’s mind about the poet’s mind.

Finally, “A Postcard from the Volcano,” a poem which is both gorgeous and foreboding, speaks to students who feel belated. If “Of Modern Poetry” observes that the mind “has not always had / To find” (CPP 218), that the poet’s task used to be easier because an agreed-on scene or scenario was available, “A Postcard from the Volcano” takes place in a...