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  • Casting for Keener Sounds: How to Make Difficult Poetry Fun Again
  • Alex Streim and Zachary Tavlin

Unsnack your snood, madanna, for the stars Are shining on all brows of Neversink.

—Wallace Stevens, “Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain”

OUR EPIGRAPH, the opening of “Late Hymn from the Myrrh-Mountain,” in its Miltonic gravity (“Descend from Heaven, Urania”) and metrical poise (u / u / u / u / u /), has, we might say, “rather a classical sound” (CPP 120). We are justified in saying the lines feel “classical,” because we know Stevens elsewhere uses the word, and because we know the lines address a kind of muse in a kind of pentameter. The line is amenable, as is most of Stevens, to serious semantic parsing (see each “drab gloss” below), but here, as in most of Stevens, we momentarily feel disinclined to such a parsing. The lines feel classical, but—knowing Milton, knowing Stevens, knowing history repeats itself as farce—we know they aren’t (or aren’t simply). At first blush (we actually did), that is, the line feels (knowing what we know) like a delicious joke, a purple Skittle popped on the way to the Met.

There’s a pleasure in this merely parodying, but it’s a pleasure, we may find, not so easily conveyed to student readers. Why should they care, for instance, that Stevens is invoking a tradition of poetic apostrophe if that tradition has never mattered to them in the first place? What’s a farce before its tragedy?

But Stevens’s opening gambit is, even by lay accounts, outrageous. You read it out theatrically and your students smile. This is your buy-in. You try to play up that sense of parody you feel is there, but fear they might not. You read, as best you can, seriously—pompously, even—as would best befit an epic that is “pretentious” enough (the favored teenaged critique) to justify the ways of god to men. Maybe you try on your best worst English accent.

Twenty syllables later, you tell your students they look different. That their mammalian bodies seem to have registered an affect their sapiens brains know little about. That they are smiling. You ask, “What about [End Page 235] those twenty syllables made it happen?” The stakes couldn’t be lower. The “analysis” can begin.

Unsnack

Verb, from the root “to snack,” meaning to eat, say, a string cheese on your way to the bus after your last class. But here, “unsnack.” A seemingly impossible command, implying, perhaps, the extraction of said cheese from the stomach, after it has been so eagerly enjoyed. A ridiculous, frustrating injunction you’re inclined to resist, but, for some reason, want to say out loud again. Un-snack. It feels, after all, kind of cool to hear your mouth hissing and humming through that first mucky syllable-and-a-half “Unsn” before clacking everything open from the back of the throat: “ack.”

(Also, for the curious, the OED’s drab gloss of the root: “To snap up, seize upon, etc.”)

Your

Yes, your. He’s talking to you.

Snood

Noun, sounds like “snooze,” or what you did maybe several times to your alarm this morning before coming to class. Also—in the popular video game—a disembodied, brightly colored, circular face shot out of a cannon at the bottom of the computer screen toward the top, where it clings, hopefully, to a string of three or more like-colored faces, blasting them apart and giving you and your cannon a bit more breathing room (think Tetris) and a higher score. This a slightly happier moment than that thought of “unsnacking,” but nonetheless you’re reminded viscerally if not consciously of making yourself hungry again as you pronounce that same hissing, humming “sn” from before. Here, though, you end in a thud.

(Also, for the curious, the OED’s drab gloss: “A fillet, band, or ribbon, for confining the hair; latterly, in Scotland [and the north of England], the distinctive hair-band worn by young unmarried women.”) [End Page 236]

Madanna

Noun, misspelled. Name of the erstwhile Queen of Pop. Pronunciation unclear, but you want to say “Mad Anna,” as if with an...

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