E2K: a journal for the new literary paradigm

Features: Rhyme and Reason

The Wallace Stevens Factor

by Sabina Becker, Poetry Editor

I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

--Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," VIII

If I had to pinpoint the exact moment when my fortunes as a poetry editor changed--that is, when the quality of the work I accepted suddenly took a quantum leap--I would say it came when I found myself accepting two poems, from different authors, in different forms and with different themes, but with a single thing in common: They both referenced Wallace Stevens.

Now this, in itself, is an odd coincidence; I've never been a particular fan of Stevens, although like anyone with at least a basic grasp of twentieth-century poetry, I recognize and appreciate his influence on the art. But frankly, I'm puzzled as to why this happened. It's just too strange to go unnoted. It may be that a minor rash of Stevensites, through some Jungian synchronicity known only to them (and maybe not even to them), were inspired to write poems based on or influenced by Stevens's work, and then send it to me of all people--an editor who knows of Stevens, but cannot honestly say she knows very much. Perhaps some Muse, seeing an urgent need on my part for work that would establish the young E2K as a leading literary outlet in the digital world, took pity on me and lent a helping hand. Whatever the underlying reason was, I am grateful that this strange thing happened. It gave me a chance to forge a direct bridge between the literary flowering of the twentieth century to the coming bloom of the twenty-first.

Maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. Many poets are old hands with strange things. Strangeness is part of our stock in trade; we observe it, note it down, then rejigger it until, through some unknowable alchemy, it metamorphoses into verse. We not only accept the strange, we poets--we embrace it. The workings of our own minds are often opaque even to us; not until the work is done do we look at it and say, "My God, I think I've just made a poem! And a good poem, at that! Now, if I could only remember the formula . . ."

Formula, of course, is one of the many things that fell by the wayside--fortunately, I dare say--in the twentieth century, when Wallace Stevens was at work. Free verse came into its own, decades after Walt Whitman broke a lot of very stony ground. Radical political and artistic movements rose and fell like tidal waves, leaving random heaps of woeful and disoriented flotsam in their collective wake. People were both afflicted and blessed by the lack of absolutes and certitudes that had steered their forebears along safe but stultifying channels. God was still there, but religion, as people knew it, was growing irrelevant. Humankind was still there, too--but where was it going? And of course, poetry was still there, although to many, it suddenly looked too much like prose to be fully understood as poetry.

Stevens was not the first to write unrhymed, irregularly-metered lyric poetry. He stands half in the shadow of not only Whitman, but T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the more flamboyant, experimental modernists like Gertrude Stein. This is quite in keeping with the personality of Stevens the man; he worked throughout his poetic career as a lawyer and insurance agent, and never gave up his day job for full-time poesy. Oh, he did get acclaim. But, alas, it came later in his life than it did for, say, William Butler Yeats, who was already well-established in his own voice at 23, when he wrote "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Stevens did not reach his poetic prime until he was well over 40. And it was not until the last five years of his life that he became widely known, let alone appreciated at his full worth.

While it's not quite fair to say that Stevens went utterly unrecognized in his life (any more than it is fair to say that of Emily Dickinson, who was in fact published in several leading literary outlets during her lifetime), it certainly is fair to say that it was, and still is, easy to overlook him. He's solid. Steady. His language isn't wild; he doesn't reinvent the wheel that is English, although occasionally he breaks out into delightful word-play that startles anyone who has the wit to recognize it. Of course, recognizing it is the problem. it's often subtle, easily missed at first. Stevens doesn't hit you over the head; he sneaks up behind your back, taps you on the shoulder, then quickly scoots away. You blink, you miss him.

But even that elusive quality is carefully crafted. I once read that Stevens was observed by Brendan Gill's sister in the act of mentally composing a poem as he walked down a street in Hartford, Connecticut:

As she watched, he slowed down, came to a stop, rocked in place for a moment or two, took a step backward, hesitated, then strode confidently forward--left, right, left, right--on his way to work. It was obvious to her that Stevens had gone back over a phrase, dropped an unsatisfactory word, inserted a superior one, and proceeded to the next line of the poem he was making (qtd. in Keyes 145).

Such meticulous attention to detail, recounted at third hand, impressed me--and, as a poetry editor, I am professionally unimpressible. Or at least, I like to see myself that way. But this tidbit pierced my armor better than a bazooka blast. If Wallace Stevens did what I myself have often done--written mentally, while on his way from Point A to Point B physically--why then (I thought, reading the above passage), I really ought to pay better attention to whatever it was this man may have been mentally writing as he walked to and from his boring insurance office in Hartford!

You'd think I would have gone out and dug up Wallace Stevens, pronto, at my friendly neighborhood independent bookstore. Or my town library. Or, failing that, gone on the Internet to look up anything of Stevens's I might be able to find, maybe even buy a book of his collected works . . . naaah. Not only am I professionally slow to be impressed, but I'm also professionally lazy: I blinked. And missed Wallace Stevens. Of course!

But if I blinked and missed Wallace Stevens, he certainly did not seem inclined to blink and miss me. Surprise, surprise. We are, after all, talking here about the man who wrote "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Thirteen! How many of us find even one? Well, maybe your dense editor. But that's because a blackbird, maybe even the blackbird, flew up beside her one fine day as she was taking a break from this essay, going for a walk. The blackbird--the blackbird?--hovered there against the strong headwind, right by her side, saying "Check! Check! Check!"

Now that was bloody strange.

But remember, I'm also a poet, and strangeness is part of my stock in trade. I immediately saw the poetic synchronicity of walking, thinking of Wallace Stevens (who also walked), as a red-winged blackbird flew to my side, hovered there for a few seconds, then, seemingly satisfied that I'd paid attention, veered off to perch on the guy wire of a nearby hydro pole and start singing: "Purple leaf!"

With signs and portents like that, how could I not feel that Wallace Stevens had come, like a benevolent household god, to settle, if not on my shoulder, then very near it, and let me know he'd seen, and approved of, what I was hoping to do? Maybe he even provided encouragement in the voice of a scolding blackbird, telling me to check, check, check. I don't know. All I can say is that it seemed strange, downright Jungian even.

A synchronicity: a meaningful coincidence. Meaning, you see, did not wholly evaporate amid the artistic, philosophic and political upheavals of the twentieth century. Stevens preserved it in his fashion; in fact, he postulated that poetry was going to take the place of religion one day. How could it do that if it didn't somehow undertake to show the relationships of seemingly unrelated things, and give some shape to what appears to be chaos? Isn't that what religion does?

So this whole business rounds out to a satisfying shape indeed. If I hadn't had two or three Stevens-admirers alerting me to what was going on, then the blackbird clinched it. We are going places in this new century, with this new medium. And we've got excellent company along the way.

Works Cited

Keyes, Ralph. The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.

Sabina C. Becker is NetAuthor/E2K's poetry editor. She lives in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada. You can visit her personal website at http://www.sabinabecker.com.