Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens: “Ideas of Remoteness”

Survey Review of a Year’s Essays on Stevens
“Ideas of Remoteness”

Dean Rader’s essay on Stevens’s various hauntings of contemporary American poetry features some new remarks by the poet Terrance Hayes, which will furnish me with the main theme of this survey of recent Stevens criticism: “I don’t believe he thought black folk could write poems, comprehend poems, care for poems. But that’s not what both scares and influences me most about Stevens. It’s the remoteness his brand of imagination engenders. He champions the kind of imagination that makes all else secondary.” Throughout this review, I want to consider such an idea of “remoteness.” The unfavorable perception of Stevens as a “remote” poet is not new, nor are the efforts of Stevensians to dispel or disprove it, to collapse the distance it implies. A reputation for remoteness is self-fulfilling, likely to ensure that a poet remains distant from readers. In this sense, collapsing remoteness, surely, has to be one of the primary tasks of contemporary literary criticism. It is such a task that Helen Vendler seems to be motivated by in the opening pages of Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire, when she writes of her attempt “to present the Stevens I know to the public eye, which still too often finds Stevens remote and distant from the common life” (3). Presumably, Vendler is referring to the usual—whether misconceived or not—complaints that Stevens presents a poetics of privilege, that he isolates himself in a showily obscure and rarefied vocabulary, that his poetic extemporizations are willfully, inaccessibly cerebral and abstract.

But to be remote is, nevertheless, to be in relation. Remoteness is, as it were, a mode of intentionality and, if we look to the poems themselves, we often find attempts to measure the distance from something, a measuring that always implies an activity of reconciliation. In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens asks, “Not to be part of the sun? To stand // Remote and call it merciful?” (CPP 138); here, in a way that clearly resonates with Hayes’s ambivalence, the intentionality of Stevens’s remoteness is more concerned with an aesthetic remoteness from things or “things as they are” than it is with a social or political remoteness from people, or from a “common life.” My aim is to show how this past year’s essays tackle this problem by demonstrating how remoteness and its various spatializations are an immanent concern of the poems themselves, and how remoteness might thereby be critically recuperated.

I want to set Brian Brodhead Glaser’s essay “Wallace Stevens and Racial Melancholy” in the context of Hayes’s comments on the implied interlinkage between Stevens’s private prejudices and his supposedly remote “brand of imagination.” Hayes is one of what Lisa Steinman calls Stevens’s “unanticipated readers” in her contribution to the critical anthology Poetry and Poetics after Wallace Stevens, published this year by Bloomsbury and reviewed in this journal’s Spring 2017 issue. Theorizing the legacy and influence of Stevens on African American poets, Steinman writes that “Stevens’ poems . . . self-consciously look forward to ‘unanticipated’ readers” (225). Glaser’s argument instead offers something like the exact temporal opposite of this idea, suggesting that Stevens’s poems (or at least “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery”) self-consciously look back, and look back to a loss they are incapable of fully comprehending and representing. Glaser’s argument has two central points. First, he borrows Anne Anlin Cheng’s notion of racial melancholy to contend that Stevens’s “coldness” was a means of affecting and reflexively incorporating “his inability to mourn a figure, the Africanist victim of violence, who was always already lost to him” (388). Melancholy names the affective process of situating the intentionality of an experience of remoteness. Eschewing a redemptive account (and, to be clear, he does not pull any punches), Glaser suggests that the poem is haunted by a pervasive and oblique awareness, rather than an absolute ignorance, of its own remoteness, the kind that Hayes would decades later ambivalently ascribe to Stevens...