1.
My wife called me over to proofread one of her papers for modern poetry class. “Oh, Wallace Stevens, I like Wallace Stevens,” I said brightly. “I don’t need to hear it, just find the typos,” she said. “What’s this in the 13th line: spended? That’s not right.” But it was.
Now, I had read this poem before. In fact, I’d read the Complete Works early on in college. I was in the philosophy professor’s office standing in front of a tall stodge-full bookcase. Seeking a royal shortcut or something, some clue, I asked what the best book out of all of these was. I probably would’ve gotten around to it in time anyway, but the upshot was I read my checked-out library copy cover to cover like a novel.
Anyone will tell you that’s not how you do Stevens. Like hell would I remember ever reading this ridiculous leprechauny little word. This word which is not in the English language. I grew intrigued. (Once I fasten on a question I don’t let up.) I looked in concordances of Shakespeare, Milton, and Chaucer: no dice. Frustrated, I dug deep into the OED. And so I gradually concluded I could almost guess what he was up to, in this particular line.
I ended up writing a paper for an important academic journal, even though my wife warned me that a single word in a poem was “a trifle slender” for a topic. See, if he wasn’t quoting some other old writer (though I couldn’t rule that out; I found nothing in any other Stevens criticism that even noticed it) and archaïcizing, since no one had used that spelling for 400 years, then the obvious thing was that he had a joke in there, and it happened to be the joke of a form which looked like a verb but wasn’t. What if it was the noun “spend” (meaning, here, ‘debt’) with the rare (but still preserved in certain phrases, e.g. in the song “America the Beautiful”: “Above the fruitèd plain”—having an abundance of fruit) nonverbal -ed ending, and he meant that the ghosts’ hearts were not just exhausted but way beyond that, full of a voracious emptiness, full of debts?
They rejected my essay. I did, however, start receiving fund appeals by email.
The Large Red Man, as far as I know, is still Reading.
2.
I love to quote Hugh Kenner: “…nobody has yet imagined a plausible Wallace Stevens.” I used to think I had.
We were in a dusty old New Orleans bookstore (this was pre-Katrina, needless to say), and what did I find? A vintage copy of Harmonium. Good price (it was full of pencil’d annotations: “willow= symbol of sorrow, desolation or [illegible]”). And so, home with it we sped. I won’t tell you what other goodies I found there (who else would rejoice at finding not one but four Van Vechten novels?) but it quickly became part of my most cherished shelf, my truebrary.
He was H. R. Pufnstuf, that’s who he was. Just turn on any blacklight.
The way my mind works, I line up: H. R. Haldeman of Watergate notoriety, the local orange-dwarf star HR 8832, H. R. Giger (don’t say “Geiger”!), the royal monogram HRH, oh, maybe Old Norse words that start with Hr- like hráfn ‘raven’…you get the idea. This is an explanation.
What boggles people’s minds is they think a poet has to live hand to mouth like a Murger hero and spit blood from his eyes like a horntoad. If he wears a suit to work every day it has to be a stunt. Sure he went to Florida every year just so he could sit out on a verandah and nurse watery juleps.
“Forms, flames, and the flakes of flames.”
Anyone can write about snow in Connecticut. It takes real genius to have a “mind of snow” in Key West.
3.
I spent five years on the ninth floor of a glass office tower and rode the bus to work. I learned to loop a tie just right, and keep nettlesome thoughts to myself. These were the “mecha” years—lodged willy-nilly inside a Giant Robot. There were things required of me. Imagination lay elsewhere and otherwise.
“And a large dwarf picked and picked up nothing.” –Laura Riding
Hundreds of foreclosures crossed my desk every day. And this was just one of many desks in the mortgage department. These were truly the cryptic record of dreams being ruthlessly destroyed, lives shattered, entire families thrown into the streets. Would it matter if I withheld my rubber stamp’s approval? Would the flicker of the fluorescents skip one hemidemisemiquaver?
I saw Stevens in his fuzzy gray suit, eyes hooded, mind furiously at work upon some blank verse paragraph that wouldn’t come out right. There was a truce between Giant Robots.
It was only humans they exterminated.
4.
Sometimes Facebook is like lifting great rocks and finding the grisly early larval form of yourself. I found out through a mutual electronic connection that (let’s call him:) Yorick had died, just recently in fact. I was aghast: his jetblack mane and beard had turned ghost white. (He was still trying to legalize pot...) Well, it’s been quite a few turns around the sun I admit, and humans today are just fixing to reach the asteroid formerly known as Planet Pluto with an unmanned probe, but once upon a time I made him concede he was now “the second-best chess player in the Yippies.”
I for one find nothing as scathingly hopeful as a new recrudescence among youngfolk of the idealistic though totally unfounded belief that they can change the world. I would be out there with a sleeping bag on the red-eyed barricades. I still want to bring down Babylon. “Horrors and falsities and wrongs...” Whatever.
We were building a man-high papiermâché head of the current incumbent, a peanut farmer who’d done none of us any real harm. We were going to mount it in a parade down Fifth Avenue. Gradually the eagerness of the volunteers tapered off, till it was only me and Yorick’s willowy lover left still at work. You have to be another Aspergian to appreciate the category of “someone I could imagine might have been my girlfriend” and to be truthful, we only talked a few times. (I expect for part of that night I was describing the desired consistency of the paste.) What appealed to me was that she was fierce, and in fact it was proverbial that the female Yippies were bolder and far more uncompromising than the males. She was also pregnant.
It set me to musing, it did, this unborn child of two arch-anarchist braves. Would it ever see a world where America’d quit the idle habit of dropping bombs on strangers by the kiloton, would there ever be a flower in the Giant Robot’s hand?
“Be the voice of night and Florida in my ear.”
One line can be a complete poem (--Ben Jonson?); one word can be worth explicating. In my case it was on Facebook when I read, under her personal profile, the word “grandma”.
5.
What’s inside a Giant Robot? Maybe only leprechauns. The re-invention of vampires led to that of werewolves, witches, now it’s zombies’ turn to shuffle onstage and into the cultural spotlight. I say the leprechaun’s day is at hand. You heard it here first.
To my co-worker at lunch I was expatiating on the subject of cars. “There ought to be a race track that wasn’t used for races, just for people who had a car they wanted to drive fast in, without being bothered by other cars or the heat. I want an evil old Ferrari from the Sixties. I figure I’d start out, oh, a hundred laps at 50, 60, I’d work my way up to 180 but I’d get there.” He pointed out that such a car was probably the costliest thing on four wheels this planet could offer. “Yeah, and you’d still crash that motherfucker.”
Well hey, that’s the next best thing to a Viking Funeral.
CODA
Taylor and the girl are riding a horse along the shore. From off-camera the horns of a colossal crown slowly appear. The girl doesn’t know why he’s stopped cold, cursing, fallen on his knees in the gelid surf, gripped with an unbearable realization as he stares into the man-high wrecked Giant Robot face of that iconic statue he thought he would never see again.
“As he sat there reading, the giant blue tabulae.”
Come, hungry ghosts.
