I’m in the middle of meandering, moving from place to place, preparing to move to Providence, so it’s fitting that my reading would reflect this kind of movement: my reading has been full of interruptions and digressions, even more than usual. My browsing of great libraries, like the one belonging to my friends in Far Rockaway, has circumvented any kind of schedule or plan. So, I took a detour from John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (vide John Domini’s and Amber Sparks’s excellent discussion of same), a hilarious, digressive, irreverent, but still lovingly rendered take on the Künstlerroman, to read yet another collection of Wallace Stevens’s poetry, this one selected by John Burnside. Its annoying amount of typos notwithstanding (for some reason, someone missed how a “Z” replaces “ffl” any time it appears so that “shuffling” becomes “shuZing”; “muffling” becomes “muZing”; “afflicted” becomes “aZicted”; and “affluence” becomes “aZuence”; and worse, considering Stevens’s obsession with the word, “Things” inexplicably appears, once, as “hings”), and its rather redundant inclusions, it’s a fine selection. Reading it, I felt like the character in “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm,” a poem worth quoting in extenso:
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.
Poem after poem, Stevens explores the nature of being and reality, themes encapsulated in a letter to Henry Church (to whom he also dedicated “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”) where Stevens wrote: “Poetry means not the language of poetry but the thing itself, wherever it may be found.” It’s an ironic statement considering the rich sonorities and word play in the poems, the musicality and jeweled diction of Stevens’s poetics. Stevens’s use of language, while not entirely a means to an end, might still be thought of as his primary tool toward realizing reality, creating a “supreme fiction,” as it were: something that through its resonance captures something actual and real.
Here’s my word-hoard from this selection of Wallace Stevens’s poetry:
Citherns, peristyle, muzzy, concupiscent, fantails, ceintures, peignoir, pizzicati, viol, mickey, funicular, turgid, amorist, jocular, semblables, fulgurations, selvages, grassman, majolica, phosphored, haggardie, ensolacings, exhumo, versicolorings, scrivened, esplanade, panniers, raggeder, infuriations, roseate, myosotis, blazoned, caparison, juvenal, blague, halyards, catafalques, copulars, coronal, catalepsy, curveted, jubilas, fundament, pauvred, spredden, collops, clou, perquisites, paradisal, commodious, tournamonde, ouncings, hidalgo, finikin, and chaplet.