[Grand Rapids, Minn.]

June 10 

1922

Dear Nightengale, Dear Roger:

Frances, the last, got born today. The nurses were the most womanly, the blades of their shins fit to cut, the calves shining like easter hams in casings when the sun came in. How did I know she was last, I could understand you asking. Let’s hold those discussions until we see each other alone. You and I know best that in some quiets you can have it both ways.

For breakfast this morning I had two slices of toast, two pats of butter, one sausage, which I split, and a cup of the thinnest coffee I’ve ever swallowed. Do you judge? Out the window of the shop I saw a lot of people not having babies. Men and women, girls and boys: none of them regally shitting anything from their wombs. Can you imagine?

Then by lunch we had Frances. So please understand I don’t mean to stay away. Will you fix it so my absence signifies something brighter? Soon enough the other babies will tend to the baby. Ethel will calm and curve her spine again. Everything, I mean to say, will calm down. Our changelings yet grow into something that looks like us. Stay true as you can.

Until As Soon,

Frank

The Rats & People Motion Picture Orchestra
Revue Songs Release Show
with brotherfather and TBA
8PM Saturday, June 29th
Off Broadway
3509 Lemp Avenue
Saint Louis, Missouri 63118

Tickets available for purchase online: LINK

Melopoeian Overlap

"Melopoeia - Poundian term to describe the kind of poem which induces 'emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of the speech.'  [Pound] stated that the maximum amount of melopoeia is to be found in poems that are written to be sung, chanted or read aloud." - from Glossary of Poetic Terms


"On April 29, 1971, a speaker rose at the University of Connecticut to deliver the eighth annual Wallace Stevens Memorial Lecture.  That speaker was not Helen Vendler or Joseph Riddel, both authors of what were even then canonical books on Stevens.  It was not a Stevensian poet like Richard Wilbur or John Hollander.  It was Louis Zukofsky - the same Zukofsky who is rarely discussed in the same room, let alone the same sentence, as Stevens.

[...]

George Butterick writes that Zukofsky 'welcomed the opportunity to speak on Stevens, that he took the talk very seriously, that when it was pointed out that most of the poets in previous years who had given the 'lecture' actually only read their own poems, or with maybe a few of Stevens' thrown in, that that was quite acceptable - he still preferred to work up a lecture, spent some time the spring of 1971 making notes, etc.'  Zukofsky's seriousness casts in a different light what might appear at first to be rather contrived biographical and literary connections between himself and Stevens.  When he and Stevens both lived in New York, Zukofsky says, they 'may have walked ... and walked the same streets, past each other unknown.'  In 1927 he almost met Stevens when he was interviewed for a job with Stevens' firm, the Hartford Indemnity Accident Company: 'Before leaving I asked the receptionist if Mr. Stevens was in and he went back to ask and Mr. Stevens was away.'  Elsewhere in the lecture Zukofsky seems to make sly jokes in which he questions the very idea of influence - his deadpan comment, for example, on his and Stevens' 'use of horses and donkeys throughout our poems.'

[...]

[Zukofsky's] Stevens lecture is packed with such contingencies.  Once we understand their appeal to Zukofsky, they begin to seem less contrived and become simply an accurate way of describing his relationship to Stevens - a 'partial coincidence or community of elements between two figures,' but a community that is no less real for being partial.  This community of elements, I suggest, extends to areas more significant than the mutual use of horse and donkey imagery.  It suggests some surprising general affinities between two American poetic traditions that we usually separate - the 'Imagist-Objectivist' and 'Symbolist' traditions.

[...]

One of Zukofsky's most ardent admirers, Robert Creeley, once praised Stevens for 'always going by the ear.'  And that is how Zukofsky's poetry 'goes.'  Like Whitman with Monongahela, like Stevens with Pascagoula, so Zukofsky with words like 'clavicembalo': he is interested in the sound of the word.  More than any other twentieth-century poet, Zukofsky aspired to return poetry to the condition of music; and music has no 'meaning.'  Hence 'A'-7:

Bum pump a-dumb, the pump is neither bum
Nor dumb, dumb pump uh! hum, bum pump o! shucks!
(Whose clavicembalo? bum? bum? te-hum ...
Not in the say but in the sound's - hey-hey -
The way to-day, Die, die, die, die, tap, slow,
Die, wake up, up! up! O Saviour, to-day!
Choose Jews' shoes or whose: anyway Choose! Go!

Beside this we might put Stevens' 'Tum-ti-tum, / Ti-tum-tum-tum!' or 'tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk.'  Such openness to linguistic play once led Robert Duncan to place Zukofsky and Stevens side by side as models for 'the addition of the un / plannd for interruption' in poetry.

What compelled Zukofsky, then, were specific features of Stevens' early style, not his thematic concerns or sensibility (both of which could be said, by contrast, to have influenced James Merrill or the 1984 Stevens Memorial Lecturer, John Ashbery).  That style changed, of course; but each stage in Stevens' stylistic evolution nevertheless has its own manner, its own limited, definable set of recurring tropes.  Because of this Stevens' styles are easily imitated, and they have been assumed not only by Zukofsky but by other poets in the Objectivist line with whom Stevens would seem to share little: Rakosi, Creeley, Charles Tomlinson, Clayton Eshleman.  Stevens has served these poets as a kind of stylistic antiself, giving them access to a manner that their tradition finally leads them to reject.  Generally, Objectivist poets have loved Stevens and left him.  But the fact that one can demonstrate Stevens' importance to poets like Zukofsky and these others should lead us to rethink the relationship between the two traditions that we have learned to call, rather too patly, the Symbolist and the Objectivist.  Where the two traditions overlap, as we have seen, is in the area of melopoeia - the area where, as Stevens and Zukofsky often do, the poet can empty the meaning, leaving the song."

- from "Wallace Stevens and Louis Zukofsky" by Alan Golding in Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism

1955

Wallace Stevens, Noted Poet, Dead

"'Hence, unpleasant as it is to record such a conclusion, the very remarkable work of Wallace Stevens cannot endure,' wrote Percy Hutchison, the late poetry editor of The New York Times.

Mr. Hutchison had just reviewed the new edition of the poet's Harmonium. That was in 1931, eight years after the volume first appeared. The poetry editor described the poems as closest to pure poetry. He explained that such works depended for their effectiveness on the rhythms and tonal values of words used with only the remotest link to ideational content.
 
He remarked that the poems were 'stunts' in which rhythms, vowels and consonants were substituted for musical notes. But this achievement is not poetry, Mr. Hutchison said before adding: 'From one end of the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion.'

[...]

In recent years [Stevens] felt a sense of imminent tragedy in the world, and to this situation a poet addresses himself, he said. "What he gets is not necessarily a solution but some defense against it," Mr. Stevens remarked.

In The Necessary Angel, a book of his essays published in 1951, the poet said: 'My final point, then, is that imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.'"

1930? - 1955

"The poet seems to confer his identity on the reader.  It is easiest to recognize this when listening to music---I mean this sort of thing: the transference."

"Which is correct: whether, if I respect my ancestors I am bound to respect myself or if I respect myself I am bound to respect my ancestors?"

"The reading of a poem should be an experience.  Its writing must be all the more so."

"A poem need not have a meaning and like most things in nature often does not have."

Stevens' "1922 Dial Group": To Urgency from "Horrid Cocoons"

"[Stevens] could not have written the group of poems that appeared in The Dial in 1922 as early as 1915 or 1916.  In them he is simply too exuberantly confident in his abilities, supremely sure, as he tells the woman in "A High-Toned Old Christian Woman," that "poetry is the supreme fiction"; the speaker in "Bantams in Pine-Woods" bristles in defiance, and the wit, the words, and sounds bristle, too, in a way not evident in the earlier poems.  The other poems in the group---"The Ordinary Women," "Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs," "O Florida, Venereal Soil," and "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"---have, taken altogether, an extravagance of conception and an energy of language and tone that approach the violences of imagination that Stevens sought but had not found in the earlier poems.

As the 1922 Dial group indicates, he became less rococo, less exquisite and coy, and more baroque and boisterous.  Though the changes in his style are of degree, the general tendency is away from Keats, Tennyson, the Pre-Raphaelites, Parnassians, and Decadents, away from Verlaine, away from the more attenuated qualities of the Symbolists and the ironic disillusionment of Laforgue, and toward Whitman and the gusto of the Elizabethans, toward the hugely fantastic situations and points of view, and the essential gaudiness of word and metaphor with which Stevens probed to the limits of the imagination's power.  Also, his early Imagist techniques were absorbed into his other qualities.  And he moved from Fragonard and Watteau to the Fauves and beyond, from orientalism to a more intensive use of Impressionistic technique.

[...]

Such glorious excesses marked the end of the first phase of Stevens' poetic career.  And although he would say with extreme self-effacement, at the time when Harmonium was about to be published, that his earliest Harmonium poems seemed "like horrid cocoons from which later abortive insides have sprung," he must at the same time have realized that the best of the poems in Harmonium are major twentieth-century poems.  They are major poems not simply because they brilliantly combine a variety of elements into an incomparable style but also because the style grew out of the urgency of the poet's search for meaningful relationships between imagination and reality, art and banality, order and violence, life and death."

[from The Making of Harmonium by Robert Buttel, Princeton University Press, 1967]