Sailing with Stevens

In the previous issue of this journal (vol. 44, no. 1, Spring 2020), we presented an ample batch of creative endeavors undertaken by participants in the second series of Bogliasco Seminars, which were organized by the Wallace Stevens Society at the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy, on June 18–19, 2019. The following pages add three further (and final) contributions, one of them tried out as a performance piece in Bogliasco, the other two (the poems) composed in the wake of, or in memory of, this idyllic, pre-pandemic gathering of Stevensians.

The Editors

Sailing with Stevens

Beginnings

In the late sixties Nick Piombino gave me the paperbackPoems by Wallace Stevens edited by Samuel French Morse.It had a dedication, perhaps from a girlfriend:“December 13, 1963—To Nicky ‘. . . the search / And the futureemerging out of us seem to be one.’ Forever, ****.”A quotation, perhaps not immediately identifiablewithout the Concordance. Really my first encounter,though I had come across Stevens in The Faber Bookof Modern Verse and other anthologies. That summer,in Rapallo, I took Nick and his then girlfriend for a sailon the Vagabonda II. A sultry afternoon. Nick,who was to become one of the “Language” set,wrote a poem about the event, aptly titled “Without Wind.”But I could have found the best account in “Sailing After Lunch,”included in Morse’s selection: “the gorgeous wheel,” “That slight transcendence.” Just a few years earlierwe had taken out on the Vagabonda a convalescing Ezra Pound,“a blown husk,” yet for all that enjoying the summer breezeand listening intently (I have a photo) to somethingmy father Bubi (his doctor) was explaining.

Fig. 1.

“Sailing with Ezra.” Ezra Pound and his physician Giuseppe Bacigalupo on the Vagabonda II, June 1964. Photograph by Massimo Bacigalupo.

Train

Here I am much later on a train to a Hemingwayconference in Venice. I am now reading Morse’sselection. I’m having some trouble parsing it, I’m used toPound’s excitement, Williams’s straightforwardness,Eliot’s foxtrot. All those pentameters put me to sleep.“Too penty,” EP had written in the margin ofThe Waste Land drafts. Little do I know that I will beworming through all those lines and putting theminto quasi-Italian. Morse’s anthology is still on my bookshelf,inscription and all. It is held together by anenvelope that reads “Ambasciata d’Italia, London.”Anna, a favorite late cousin, had a job there, and myname and address are on the envelope in her handwriting.

Warming Up

In New York, at Columbia, in 1973, I produceda color movie called Warming Up. I prefacedthe program notes with the line: “Life’s nonsensepierces us with strange relation.” The point was somethinglike: One looks at the world with wonder, is piercedby meaning, rhythms, coincidences. Warming Upwas, more or less, a 40-minute traveloguewith this subtext. Jonas Mekas, who featured itat the old Anthology Film Archives in Lafayette Street,on April 20, my birthday, had nothing to say about itin his Village Voice column. Yet the date signaledone strange relation. A Joycean gift.

The Old Home

Visiting with my mother in the early 1970s the housewhere she grew up in Elizabeth, Pa., I had with methat compact trove, The Mentor Book of MajorAmerican Poets. At bedtime I remember reading“Sunday Morning” to mother and my aunt Enice.So improbable, therefore appropriate. Showingoff. Had I known it, I should have read: “It is anillusion that we were ever alive, lived in thehouses of mothers.” Mother had been an Englishmajor at Pitt before becoming a pediatrician.Recently, writing about Wordsworth, I discoveredI was using her college edition, signed“Freda M. Natali, Elizabeth, Pa. 2/20/28.”(She later changed or corrected her nameto Frieda.) Unfortunately she did not live to seemy first volume of Stevens in print. One of myfavorites there is “Two Letters”: “As if we were allseated together again / And...