Sound and Substance in Wallace Stevens

When was the last time you read Wallace Stevens’ “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words?” If the answer is “not recently,” or (worse!) “never”, get thee to a library or your preferred book retailer (or the one that will send you stuff in two days?) and fix it! Fix it fix it fix it! 

For me, sound is the deal-breaker in poetry, as it seems to have been for Stevens (“…above all else, poetry is words; and that words, above all else, are, in poetry, sounds”):

The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which is only within the power of the acutest poet to give them. (“The Noble Rider” 32)

“That unalterable vibration” is what we want, that physical connection with this thing that has emerged from another mind and, all of a sudden, we find coursing through our own minds, our own bodies. For Stevens, sound often occupies his poems as a presence, as a galvanizing influence in several of his most famous poems including “The Snow Man.”

In “The Snow Man,” the sound of the wind is the force that transforms the “one” from the beginning of the poem (who “must have a mind of winter”) into “the listener, who listens in the snow”: a perfect observer ennobled by his refusal to impose himself upon the landscape. His virtue is his ability to allow the sound to remain just sound and the poem rewards him for it: his identity shifts from being an anonymous “one,” one of those abstracted, euphemistic Stevens-speakers to an entity entirely characterized by his listening. And it’s in this state of heightened perception—a kind of divine perception, really—that he’s capable of recognizing himself as part of the landscape.

And that’s just the way sound behaves within the landscape of poem; the poem also has so much going for it in terms of its rhythmic play. That first line (“ONE must | HAVE a | MIND of | WINter”) scans to a perfect trochaic tetrameter, giving it this proverbial authority, that Stevens immediately subverts with dactyls and anapests throughout the rest of the poem. Ultimately, we wind up in a place of rhythmic balance (“NOTHing | that is | NOT there | and the | NOTHing | that IS”) that mirrors the the equilibrium the listener experiences with his surroundings.

I could babble about this poem forever (seriously, read it out loud—the way the rhetoric of Stevens’ argument aligns with the music of the poem is tremendous), but I’m thinking about sound in poetry this summer in a different way than I have before: in the fall, I’ll be teaching a workshop focused on Forms in poetry and as I prepare that syllabus—terrified, exhilarated—I’ve been reading a lot of primers on form and meter, like James Fenton’s An Introduction to English Poetry, Mary Oliver’s Rules for the Dance, along with several others that create lovely stacks all around my small apartment. In this post-graduation haze, when temperatures here in Arizona carry on their hellish flirtations with nearly 110 degrees and I burrow deeper indoors, I’m wading knee-deep in the stuff, essays on sound and rhythm in poetry, and loving every minute.

Because it’s a strange, primal kind of magic, the way sound and rhythm turns words into not-quite-music but not-quite-just-words anymore, one that I’m not sure I can quite wrap my brain around yet, let alone communicate succinctly to students in a classroom. It doesn’t seem something you just figure out. Today, I’m rereading Donald Hall’s essay “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: The Psychic Origins of Poetic Form” because it encapsulates the sense of satisfaction that exists in the way poetry sounds:

[The poem] exists as a sensual body. It is beautiful and pleasant, manifest content aside, like a worn stone that is good to touch…. This sensual body reaches us through our mouths, which are warm in the love of vowels held together, and in the muscles of our legs which as in dance tap the motion and pause of linear and syntactic structure. (145)

And this is what I want to tell my students in the coming semester: that sound isn’t about counting syllables, circling all of the vowels in a poem to suss out the assonance, or knowing how to count dactylic hexameter off the top of your head (though we’ll certainly figure out how to do some of these things)—it’s about seeking delight, of relishing in the pleasures of a carefully-built thing, which is what brought me to poetry: the how as much as the what, that endless quest to be gladdened by the physical substance of words.

For the love of vowels, go check out, this great episode of Poetry Off the Shelf, which takes a look at “The Idea of Order at Key West” and what the heck it’s about. Also, the new edition of Stevens Selected, edited by John N. Serio, is pretty beautiful, as is this review of it by James Longenbach.

*

Hall, Donald. “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: The Psychic Origins of of Poetic Forms.” Claims for Poetry. Ed. Donald Hall. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1982. 141-150. Print.

Stevens, Wallace. “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.” The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1951. Print. 3-36.

—. “The Snow Man.” Selected Poems. Ed. John N. Serio. New York: Knopf, 2011. Print. 7.

More Moore, in Singapore

Not so long ago, for poetry month, I chose one of Marianne Moore’s poems when asked to come up with my five all-time poetry-reading highs (see “A Grave”). Since then, I’ve spent considerably more time with her Collected, as well as made my way across the Pacific— all the way from Phoenix to Singapore, actually, where I’m teaching a course this summer. During that strange expanse of flight time, I experienced a long while with only clouds and ocean beneath me—an expanse of time which, when I let myself actually think about the atmosphere around me, caused me to make an even deeper connection to that poem of Moore’s. Because, at the root, “A Grave” is about the anxiety of perception, of “taking a view,” of wanting to find one’s personal grounding in a space where that seems to be an impossible task.

[http://www.panoramio.com/photo/11727971]

From time to time on that plane I felt an internal scramble, not unlike Moore’s speaker, to understand my existence in relation to the expanse below me—more than that, really: I wanted to shape that relationship. I wanted to make, in a way, my own subjectivity the center of the expanse; I had, I think, a natural desire for control. Perhaps you’ve experienced a similar (hopefully passing) sensation on a long-haul flight—at once exhilarated and overwhelmed by the bigness around you, the urge is to be able to containthe idea of it, make sense of it in your own terms and keep it tidy in your brain, so that this incredible situation you find yourself in is simply routine; it can have a place in your human world. Is this why I write poetry? To be in control—to ease fears that I’m not? I’m sure it’s a part of it, but I certainly hope (and, deeper down, am sure) that it’s not the only reason.

 What I love about Moore’s poem, as I briefly mentioned to y’all before, is that her speaker realizes how egocentric that drive for control is. She is putting before us how ridiculous this impulse of ours is—as humans who want to perceive of the world in purely human terms (so as to not, for example, have a panic attack on a fourteen-hour flight), but also as writers, who take that shape-making impulse to the nth degree, building their own little worlds. Moore begins with a statement that might indeed easily make a reader feel admonished: “Man looking into the sea,/ taking the view from those who have as much right to it as/ you have to it yourself…” (1-2). If I feel any alignment with that universal “man,” I’m put immediately on-guard as I enter the poem, as if I’d taken something I didn’t have the right to. In this way, poetic tradition—the taking of a subject for a poem, or of an individual view/analysis of said poem—is called into question.

But (but!) after putting us in our place, so to speak, Moore nevertheless goes on to write a poem about looking at the sea, has her speaker take a view: “The firs stand in a procession, each with an emerald turkey-/foot at the top” (7-8). In describing the sea here in terms of the earth, the she uses a metaphor that unmistakably admits her individualized perspective—a particular action of seeing that the speaker has just supposedly admonished. That action is, she immediately admits, what makes us human: “it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing,/ but you cannot stand in the middle of this;/ the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.” In this sly way, Moore’s speaker pokes fun at herself; she also gets at a deeper truth: our impulse to perceive and to contain those perceptions—long enough to, say, compare and contrast them with another perceptual experience— might be, to the core, a wholly impossible task—but that doesn’t mean it’s not a task worth trying. It’s a careful distinction: If we are to follow by example, it’s not that one shouldn’t “take,” but that one “cannot,” after all, have.

And I think that by choosing an earthly analogue in that first description of the sea, Moore both acknowledges and tempers her egoist tendency to filter her experience of the world through a human lens. The description is wholly of the natural world: the waves are like trees in a procession, the tops of those metaphorical trees as a turkey’s feet. I’m launched into the poem, then, wary of the process the mind undergoes to make a connection with the world—and also, because these acts are inescapably related, wary of the communal act of writing and reading. The speaker, too, is wary of this—having showcased her own impulse to take what everyone else has “as much right to”—hence the careful language of distinction and insinuation. It’s as if she’s trying to level the playing field rather than play a trick. The opening of the poem isn’t Moore’s way of saying you’ll never know what I was really thinking, but rather her way of admitting that’s something I’ll never be able to give you, though it’s worth proceeding anyway.

James Dickey has said something similar of Moore, that:

What seems to me to be the most valuable point …is that such receptivity as hers . . . is not Ms. Moore’s exclusive property. Every poem of hers lifts us toward our own discovery-prone lives. It does not state, in effect, that I am more intelligent than you, more creative because I found this item and used it and you didn’t. It seems to say, rather, I found this, and what did you find? Or, a better, what can you find?

To me, this is encouraging as a writer: I’m to keep taking my point of view, drawing those connections, but am also to constantly challenge the control-loving ego. My poems will probably fail precisely where I ignore that ever-pestilent subjectivity of mine, forget that the act of writing is, in a sense, taking from those who have as much right to it as I do.

**I’m indebted, a bit, to a fellow teacher and writer here with me at NUS, who spoke yesterday to the idea of control and writing. Sarah, if you’re reading this, please feel free to critize where I ran with our conversation. Also, folks: more on poetry in Singapore to come soon, I promise, la.