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Foreshadowing, Literal and Figurative

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Sometimes you can do some wonderful things with wordplay, even when said wordplay is deadly serious.

Take the word foreshadow. It is a literary term, yes, but watch what happens when an accomplished poet (in this case, Matt Rasmussen) plays with the word “shadow” lying inside the confines of the word “foreshadow.”

Interesting things, that’s what. The type things that get a reader / writer saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Of course, the answer is always the same: “Because someone else did first!”

But it’s good to know that there are plenty of other words waiting to be played with in interesting ways. Flip open that dusty dictionary in your study and take it from there.

 

Elegy in X Parts (My foreshadow stretches)
Matt Rasmussen

X.

My foreshadow stretches
out in front of me.

We stand on the soles
of each other’s feet.

I am a field
and there’s a man

standing in the middle
of me saying,

God is the sky pinning
me to my body.

I am a man
and there is a field

under me saying,
A dead man makes

love to the earth
by just lying there.

“The Mechanics of Mystery”

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I’ve read Dara Wier’s sonnet “Scorch Marks” many times, and my favorite line is its description of my favorite birds (and frequenters of many of my own poems), crows. Wier writes, “The crows look at us in their crooked / Ways. They converse and inverse and walk like the mechanics / Of mystery they are.”

And, happily enough, the crows are not the only mechanics of mystery in this poem. But they are one of many references to the color black, starting with the title, followed by a black swan and then the pupils of eyes and then that universal symbol of crushing depression, the black dog.

As is often the case, the secret lies in the pronouns. The narrator uses the first-person plural “we” and is addressing a second-person singular “you.” Only who is this “you” and where might that “you” be now?

As for the last line, it’s a wonderful finish for any work of literature that might use an unreliable narrator: “Who are we to believe what we say?” Many readers are convinced that any first-person point of view, be it the singular “I” or the plural “we,” is as suspect as John Wilkes Booth. We all, in other words, view the world through our own glasses darkly, and no two glasses are alike.

Don yours, why don’t you? See what you make of the poem. It’s a great example of the reader-writer compact. The writer leaves enough ambiguity for the reader to bring in all her baggage and get comfortable for a few days’ visit.

“What’s that I smell cooking?” the reader asks.

“You tell me,” the writer answers.

 

Scorch Marks
Dara Wier

Whenever we find wide black swaths burned across our paths
We think of you. Our friend the black swan turns to look
At us frequently when we pass by its pond. We see your back
Far away deep inside the pupils of those we love. We stare
And we stare where we are. That is what we do. It make us
Look as if we’ve misplaced our minds or perhaps replaced
Ideas of mind with some new stronger fog. I feel you
Fading and find you falling for that feeling, you staring farther
Into one of the farthest vanishing points in the universe.
We find this alarming. We are losing track of something.
Our friend the black dog watches us carefully as we walk by
The door she guards. The crows look at us in their crooked
Ways. They converse and inverse and walk like the mechanics
Of mystery they are. Who are we to believe what we say?

Love Poetry in an Unusual Place: the Bible

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sol

One of the great revelations (if you’ll pardon the word) of my youth was learning that you could read the Bible two ways — one if by religion and two if by literature. Another epiphany (if you’ll pardon a second word, oh good judge) was that the Bible wasn’t always a stodgy read. Who put me on to this? My 87-year-old great aunt.

Yep. As if she were discussing the weather, my devout Aunt Mae once got on the topic of the Good Book, which is really a whole lot of good smaller books. I was showing off by telling her how much I enjoyed reading the King James Version of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. What led me there? Of all things, the less-than-holy book, The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway. Papa had stolen his title from Ecclesiastes one day when he was chasing after wind and rivers returning to the sea. Me, I just wanted to read the source of his catchy title.

Anyway, back to Aunt Mae. She nodded and kindly allowed me my cynical dose-of-reality Old Testament favorite, but then she looked toward the ceiling and waxed poetic on the merits of the Song of Solomon, the book directly following Ecclesiastes‘ hard act to follow. What’s more, when I looked later, I discovered that the Song of Solomon is even shorter than its predecessor. To a teenager, that spells “readable”!

The very night of our discussion, I dove into my KJV again. Whoa! This book was kind of sexy. Well, for the Bible, I mean. The young lovers of the little book that could were in worship mode, I discovered, but mostly about the wonders of love between (pardon us, Percy Sledge) a man and a woman. Metaphors and similes grow like kudzu in Solomon’s catchy tune, too.

For example, let’s cast a poetic eye on 5: 10-16, wherein she speaks of him:

 

My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.

His head is as the most fine gold, his locks are bushy, and black as a raven.

His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.

His cheeks are as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.

His hands are as gold rings set with the beryl: his belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires.

His legs are as pillars of marble, set upon sockets of fine gold: his countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars.

His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely. This is my beloved, and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.

Followed by 7: 1-9, wherein he returns the favor:

How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince’s daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.

Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.

Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.

Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bathrabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.

Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple; the king is held in the galleries.

How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!

This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.

I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples;

And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.

 

Granted, the figurative language trades in objects and allusions most Biblical–ones sounding a bit foreign to modern ears–but there’s no questioning the ardor heating up these pages. The lyrical poetry is a paean to youth, love, the beauty of God’s human creations. In short, the book serves as early inspiration for a favorite font of poetry (even in months outside of February), love.

My discussion was many decades ago in a city far, far away, but I’ll never forget Aunt Mae’s eyes, how they sparkled clear and young again as she glanced up and momentarily lost herself in praise of this book. Who was she recalling, I wonder? Surely a love from her deep and storied past. Surely a tale I would never hear but could infer, anyway. A story that repeats through the annals of time with an infinite cast of entering and exiting players….

Teaching Poetry Through Think-Alouds

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Think-alouds are a great tool to help students unpeel the meaning of a poem. The first step in the process is for teachers to model by reading and unpacking a poem aloud.

The second step? Have students emulate the process – only not alone.

Instead, have students think aloud in groups. We think of group work as a classroom staple, but it also can be done through technology, where groups can be formed online using features on the many Learning Management System platforms (LMSs) available to educators.

Be sure the first poems students do on their own are easier so they can enjoy early success. Then gradually work your way up to more difficult fare. Done in groups, these think-alouds are an enjoyable process for students. Just don’t tell them they’re analyzing poetry and having fun.

But first, your model think-aloud. Before reading a poem (twice) and then “thinking out loud,” ask students to notice your thinking process so you can write some of their observations down on the board or on large easel paper. This will be reinforced after you read both poem and do your think-aloud, when you’ll take the opportunity to remind everyone by saying, “What did you notice me doing? How did it help you to better understand the poem?”

As a model for your demonstration, I’ve selected an Emily Dickinson poem and a script for you to read. If you wish to customize the think-aloud to stress skills you’ve focused on in your class, that’s fine!

 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers

Emily Dickinson

 

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

 

 

TEACHER READ-ALOUD SCRIPT

Note: Remember, every good think-aloud starts with the facts — what you observe. Inferences ride caboose on the train of observation, I like to say. Show them by observing, then questioning, then moving toward inferences.

 

Teacher: “I notice that the author places the word ‘Hope’ in quotation marks. Then she says it has feathers, like a bird, making a metaphor right away. How is hope like a metaphor? Next she uses two action verbs — ‘perches’ and ‘sings’ to extend the metaphor. So, hope perches in the soul, an abstract part of all of us, and sings without ever stopping. Emily Dickinson separates a lot of her words with dashes. I wonder why? When I read it, I paused at the dashes. Could it be a way of emphasizing? In past readings, what other methods have we noticed writers use to emphasize words?

“The second stanza gives us the third and fourth lines in a row starting with the word ‘And.’ This keeps the poem moving quickly. I notice ‘Gale’ is capitalized. I’m not 100% sure what ‘Gale’ means, but it’s followed with ‘the storm’ so the context connects the two as similar in meeting. After looking the word up online, I saw that Merriam-Webster’s dictionary site defines it as “a strong current of air; a wind from 32 to 63 miles per hour (about 51 to 102 kilometers per hour),” so my inference seems about right.

“It’s interesting, then, how Dickinson places the bird’s sweetest song in the context of the worst part of a storm. I wouldn’t expect that contrast. Perhaps she is making a statement about the nature of ‘hope’? I notice she capitalizes ‘Bird’ in the second stanza just as she capitalized ‘Hope’ in the first. Those are the two things being compared in the extended metaphor.

“In the last stanza, she talks about where she has heard this bird of hope, ‘in the chillest land –/and on the strangest Sea.’ Again, two opposites: land and sea. Hope is always placed in the context of extremes here. I know the most important part of a poem often comes near or at the end. Here Dickinson uses capitalization again when she says that ‘never — in Extremity’ does the bird ask for a ‘crumb — of Me.’ Capital letters highlight the thought of extremes in life and of her, the poet, though the voice of this first-person speaker, who does not have to feed this particular bird, it seems, even though it sings for her in the most extreme of situations.

“What did you notice me doing here? How did it help you to better understand the poem?”

(Pause for classroom discussion and write down some observations for them to emulate when they tackle their own poem as a group. Once everyone has had their say, continue…)

“Now, could you generate a few questions of your own about Dickinson’s poem? What questions remain? What’s still a little confusing in your mind? What answers do you still need before you are confident in stating the author’s purpose in a thesis statement?”

(Done alone or in groups, this will take time. It can also be given as homework before you reconvene the class the next day for a seminar-like exchange on their questions and answers. Below are some tips on the question phase of the lesson.)

Next day (or, if you continue on the same day), set a timer (I use www.online-stopwatch.com) and ask students to write down as many questions about Dickinson’s poem as they can think of (alone or collaboratively). The timer always adds some urgency to your request! You want them to generate as many questions as possible about the poem and about possible connections between hope and adversity. Be sure they understand (via review or teaching) the difference between open-ended questions and closed ones. Assure them that all questions are good ones and not to worry about the quality of their material in the questioning phase. If they don’t come up with these, add the following: “Why did Emily Dickinson write this poem?” “What was her purpose?”

Once they have all of these questions, students are ready to discuss possible answers on a higher plane — in a seminar-like discussion designed to help them reach conclusions on their own.

No matter what discussion format you choose — small groups as stated here, pairs, fish bowl, Socratic Seminars, online discussion threads, etc. — have students use words like “Could you clarify what you mean by…,” “Could you elaborate on…,” “I’d like to add to that point…,” “I understand that thinking, but I’d still challenge the idea that… because…,” “So what I hear you saying is…,” “Where in the poem does it say that?” and, toward the end of discussion, “Let’s sum up here. Can we all agree that…?”

Once this lesson is complete and groups have each collaborated on thesis statements on a possible literary analysis (have them write on the board and then judge which is the best and why), provide students with a list of poems you have prepared in advance. The purpose? Students in groups (or alone, if you feel they are ready) shall use your model and create a think-aloud for their own poems. As previously stated, this can be written out like the Teacher Script above, then read aloud in front of the class. Having a script gives students confidence, especially if it is a collaborative effort and a volunteer from the group does the reading, saying “We thought…,” etc.

I find that ending this method with thesis statements, then judging them, helps sharpen their skills as a preparation for an eventual paper analyzing poems. Moving from groups to solo work will be like removing the training wheels. In a poetry unit, I’ve sometimes done this practice method five or more times before moving to deeper instruction on essay writing as a whole. Initial literary analysis papers are on the short side. Again, small steps build confidence!

What poems do you assign? Any list you create will probably include poems in your curriculum already, but you can add to this list by searching your favorite poets online or allowing some degree of student choice, especially if you want each group or student to have their own poem.

Some of my favorite poets to use with students include Billy Collins, Naomi Shihab Nye, Robert Frost, Dorianne Laux, Joyce Sutphen, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, Ted Kooser, Jane Kenyon, Donald Hall, Gary Snyder, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, Jane Hirshfield, Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos Williams. The website poets.org has a section called “Poems for Teens” divided by theme, so you can find these and other poets there.

A Garden of Earthworm Delights

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Now is the winter of our discontent, said the Bard, in some play’s-the-thing or other. Here in Maine, it’s zero degrees Fahrenheit outside and, before sunrise, might hit the magical Negative Number One. Time to think of summery things, to engage in a Southern Hemisphere frame of mind. What better way than a Danusha Laméris poem? One with imagery from a garden of earthly delights, or maybe a garden of earthworm delights. Check it out:

 

Feeding the Worms

by Danusha Laméris

 

Ever since I found out that earth worms have taste buds

all over the delicate pink string of their bodies,

I pause dropping apple peels into the compost bin, imagine

the dark, writhing ecstasy, the sweetness of apples

permeating their pores. I offer beets and parsley,

avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.

 

I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,

almost vulgar–though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure

so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,

forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.

 

This little gem starts with trivia–a fact I never knew. Wasting no time, Laméris tells us that earthworms are wrapped in taste buds, which explains why they like to get down and dirty early and often. This brings the speaker to the compost pile, rife with worms. She feeds it (and thus them) a litany of specific foods that delight the January eye: apple peels, beets, parsley, avocado, melons, the feathery tops of carrots. Imagery like this is enough to attract even carnivores!

In stanza two, Laméris shares thoughts that might be similar to our own: “I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden / almost vulgar,” but then goes in an unexpected direction, and there’s nothing poetry likes better than unexpected directions!  “…though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure / so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can.”

Ironically, contribute the speaker (as well as all the poem’s readers) will, which leads us to the lovely last line: “forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.”

Ah, a sweet memento mori poem! That’s Latin for “remember that you must die,” which is English for “so enjoy great poetry like this while you’re still alive!” (Oh. And pass the apple slices with peanut butter, thank you.)

The Angry Young Man

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In the recent long ago known as 1976, Billy Joel wrote a song called “The Angry Young Man.”  Basically, it described a dude who was forever angry at the world, forever fire, forever brimstone. Oh. And forever a bore to be around.

Tony Hoagland’s poem “You’re the Top” reminded me, in its way, of the Joel song. The poem’s speaker describes his grandmother, a debutante in 1938, who sees the world of privilege as an ideal one. The speaker sees it differently: “My liberal adolescent rage / was like a righteous fist back then / that wouldn’t let me rest.”

But there’s a slight turn toward the end of this poem. This angry young man matures to his own realizations — both about himself and about his grandmother. When you get there, note the power not only of the last line but the last word.

 

You’re the Top
Tony Hoagland

Of all the people that I’ve ever known
I think my grandmother Bernice
would be best qualified to be beside me now

driving north of Boston in a rented car
while Cole Porter warbles on the radio;
Only she would be trivial and un-

politically correct enough to totally enjoy
the rhyming of Mahatma Ghandi
with Napoleon brandy;

and she would understand, from 1948,
the miracle that once was cellophane,
which Porter rhymes with night in Spain.

She loved that image of the high gay life
where people dressed by servants
turned every night into the Ritz:

dancing through a shower of just
uncorked champagne
into the shelter of a dry martini.

When she was 70 and I was young
I hated how a life of privilege
had kept her ignorance intact

about the world beneath her pretty feet,
how she believed that people with good manners
naturally had yachts, knew how to waltz

and dribbled French into their sentences
like salad dressing. My liberal adolescent rage
was like a righteous fist back then

that wouldn’t let me rest,
but I’ve come far enough from who I was
to see her as she saw herself:

a tipsy debutante in 1938,
kicking off a party with her shoes;
launching the lipstick-red high heel
from her elegant big toe

into the orbit of a chandelier
suspended in a lyric by Cole Porter,
bright and beautiful and useless

First-Person Point of Dock

kencraftpoetry Lost Sherpa of Happiness marketing poetry poetry poetry books

Here in Maine, in the very heart of winter, there are times when you need to close your eyes and conjure the smooth, sun-struck slats of a dock jutting over a lake.

Even much-maligned heat waves don’t seem so bad from the vantage point of winter. After all, on a lake in the month of July, the escape is just inches away in the form of deep and cool water.

The dock days of summer inspired a poem once. I dug it out for a reread yesterday. It’s one of those poems written last for a manuscript (which would become Lost Sherpa of Happiness). One that never had a chance to play the markets and look for a home in some poetry journal.

I often like these orphans best. Never accepted anywhere, but never rejected, either. They just “are,” which is the perfect metaphor for whiling away hours on a dock, like you did when you were a kid and time held nothing against you.

Rereading poems from different seasons sometimes brings you back, and they’re much less complicated than a time machine, where hitting the wrong button could land you in the Battle of Hastings or something. If you’re cold, why not join me for a sec? And if you’re in the Southern hemisphere, perhaps you can relate:

 

From a Dock on a Maine Lake
Ken Craft

Lying here, side of my head resting
on the crook of right arm and gazing
from the grotto of my right eye,
I hear the water and see the creased
dam of my left elbow, the occasional bird
flying through its wild blond grasslands.

The left eye, though. It peers over
the tanned levee, sees the high gold-shot
lake—so high it threatens
to flood and marl the east shore
where clear sky, punctured by treeline,
seeps anemic blue to airy bone.

Shifting to my back I get the sky’s
gas-flame blue scribed by pine and maple
treetops, the firmament a forgotten
language from first-person point of boy.

And my God, the wind! Needles and leaves
nodding like anxious ponies,
wagging like old ladies’ heads
at green gossip. Trees exhaling a ropey
poem of clouds. White thoughts, broken
words, startled birds put to flight. They flock,
elongate, twist and split open like smoky time
seeking its own shore to roost.

When Reputations Are Wrong

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olds

Sometimes poets get a reputation and carry it around like Jacob Marley’s chains. Consider Sharon Olds and sex. The two are closely aligned in poetry readers’ minds, but Olds is more than that. She can write about family–both her kids and her parents–in moving ways. Ways that could pass muster with the Hallmark Channel, even.

Consider “Late Poem to My Father.” It is an exercise in empathy wherein Olds uses her imagination to visit her own father’s childhood and what he might have experienced under his father. The incentive? Olds’ father apparently was an alcoholic, and like most alcoholic fathers, no joy to be around if you were his son or daughter.

“Why?” Olds must have asked. “How?” And, as is so often the case with poets, these questions drove her muse.

Olds’ poem, then, is similar to an adopted child’s search for her birth parent. The chariot is driven by the winged horses Why and How. The poem seeks answers. It wants to understand, to connect, in the worst way. Let’s take a look-see:

 

Late Poem to My Father
by Sharon Olds

Suddenly I thought of you
as a child in that house, the unlit rooms
and the hot fireplace with the man in front of it,
silent. You moved through the heavy air
in your physical beauty, a boy of seven,
helpless, smart, there were things the man
did near you, and he was your father,
the mold by which you were made. Down in the
cellar, the barrels of sweet apples,
picked at their peak from the tree, rotted and
rotted, and past the cellar door
the creek ran and ran, and something was
not given to you, or something was
taken from you that you were born with, so that
even at 30 and 40 you set the
oily medicine to your lips
every night, the poison to help you
drop down unconscious. I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me. When I love you now,
I like to think I am giving my love
directly to that boy in the fiery room,
as if it could reach him in time.

 

Here time dials all the way back to Dad at age seven, when he was “helpless, smart.” Then comes the purposely vague “there were things the man / did near you, and he was your father.”

So much for hard and fast rules. Writers are instructed to forswear words like “things” and yet, sometimes, they are just the ticket. Sometimes letting the reader imagine different concrete interpretations enhances the effect.

Olds continues with her reverie: “…something was / not given to you, or something was / taken from you that you were born with.” Either might explain a path toward alcohol–one cleared with the machete of misery rooted in childhood.

The poetic part of the poem hits its stride toward the end:

I always thought the
point was what you did to us
as a grown man, but then I remembered that
child being formed in front of the fire, the
tiny bones inside his soul
twisted in greenstick fractures, the small
tendons that hold the heart in place
snapped. And what they did to you
you did not do to me.

Not many are willing to look at an adult and see a child “formed in front of the fire,” or see “the tiny bones inside his soul / twisted in greenstick fractures, the small / tendons that hold the hear in place / snapped.”

With images rendered like that, despite his very evident flaws, the father is redeemed by a forgiving daughter who wishes she were there to help him as a child when he was most vulnerable. And now, she finds it noble that, unlike so many others, her father, addicted as he might be, refuses to carry the curse forward: “And what they did to you / you did not do to me.”

Sharon Olds’ poems with sexual themes are often frank and provocative–hardly subtle. But the story, as with most reputations, is more complicated than that. Reading a collection of her works shows that she can be sensitive and forgiving, too. She is not, in other words, a one-trick pony.

“Autumn Glory and Candy Wrappers”

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New to me is Matthew Rohrer, a New York City poet who has a whiff of the old New York School, given his casual verse and non sequiturs (minus Lana Turner and the season of falling). I just finished his collection, Surrounded by Friends. Here is a review, as posted on GoodReads, everyone’s favorite Amazon-owned reading site to revile:

 

If you write poetry, you read poetry. What’s weird is how reading some poets’ work inspires you with ideas of your own, while reading others inspires…nothing. It doesn’t mean the poet is BAD if they do not inspire — in fact, they can be depressingly talented — but the inspirational ones are often writing approachable stuff like a particularly docile and friendly horse happy to come over to the fence and munch carrot or cube from your hand.

Yes, yes. It all looks so simple, kind of like imitating Hemingway in short story writing. Then, when you go there, you see that your work is very un-Hemingway, so maybe there’s some hidden complexity in the simplicity’s weeds. That happens with the poets that inspire, too, but hey, at least it gets words churning in the brain and marching on the paper (or screen).

As you might have guessed, Matthew Rohrer is one of these approachable guys. Short poems. A bit off-the-wall poems. A little this, a little that. Some non sequiturs thrown in. Unusual word pairings. Thoughts local and worldly. Lines three to six words short. By way of two examples, I give you these:

Where I Lived

I live up here,
you live down there,
he said, touching first
my forehead then
my sternum; come up
and see me sometime,
and flicked my nose
as he said this,
traveling up from where
I lived to where he lived.
He also said, every time
our family saddled up
to depart, see you in the
funny papers, which was
another place he mistakenly
believed I lived, when I lived,
as everyone knew, in an
enormous mitten with a beetle,
a mouse, a hedgehog, a hare,
a badger, and other increasingly
large creatures of the forest,
and waited there for a stranger’s
kiss to set me free. His own wife,
my grandmother, knitted it for me.

Autumn Glory

Looking at old pictures
I’m on fire
don’t show your dad
how it says Legalize it
on the other side of the hill
now we are older
it’s like that whole place
shifted out from under us
the self is the constant
past which time flies
until a cloud melts
through the wall
it is a translation
of an abstract painting
into a feeling
I don’t even have
I have a slight fever
while feeding the kids
and in a dream
they eat candy
on top of me
and when I wake up
autumn glory and candy wrappers

Wallace Stevens: When Weird Is Grounded in Normal

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wallace stevens

“The greatest poverty,” Wallace Stevens once wrote, “is not to live in a physical world.” This observation came decades before the SmartPhone, the Internet, and the iPad, meaning, if Stevens were to return today, he’d find the entire planet a “third-world nation”–impoverished, indeed!

Ironically, Stevens used the physical world for fantastic leaps by using metaphor to couple reality with the imagination. Delmore Schwartz called him “an aesthete in the best sense of the word.” Marianne Moore crowned him “America’s chief conjurer.”

Stevens finishes his poem “In the Carolinas,” for instance, with this surprising proclamation on the physical world: “The pine-tree sweetens my body / The white iris beautifies me.” The effect of such unnatural naturalness might explain his poetry.

Note, for instance, how far afield Stevens goes from the physical world while still hewing close to his own realities in another famous poem:

 

Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded centuries.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

 

Everything’s normal here, right? And not. We have familiar colors, white night-gowns, and lace socks. But we have reality skewed, too. The house is haunted, the old sailor is drunk, and people might just dream of such realities as “baboons and periwinkles” (what a pair!) if they’re not careful. Best of all, and most memorable, you can catch tigers in “red” weather. For readers, it’s all familiarly strange–a quintessential Stevens poem.

Only Wallace Stevens could look at the abject ordinariness of a blackbird from thirteen angles. In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” one of his most famous poems, readers might well surrender all hope of interpretation and take succor on his delicious turns of phrases alone: “twenty snowy mountains,” “of three minds,” “small part of a pantomime,” “A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one,” “the beauty of innuendoes,” “barbaric glass,” “thin men of Haddam,” “noble accents,” “the edge / Of one of many circles,” “bawds of euphony,” “the shadow of his equipage,” “The river is moving,” and “It was evening all afternoon.”

If you don’t understand the poem, you well know the feeling of it being evening all afternoon because you understand evenings and you understand afternoons. You just haven’t understood how one could be the other at the same time. Until now.

Unusual word pairings are Wallace Stevens’ reality, and his readers are at once at home and off balance because of it. That’s why the greatest riches are found while living in his unique physical world. Read him and leave poverty to the SmartPhone addicts.