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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Idea of Wallace Stevens

(MUSIC PLAYING)

CURTIS FOX: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, March 7th, 2011. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, The Idea of Wallace Stevens. Mark Strand calls him the master. Back in the 1970s, Harold Bloom called him the best and most representative poet of our time. Yet, Wallace Stevens is not an easy nut to crack for many readers, including this one. His poetry often comes out of ideas, not out of everyday experience or from his biography. His poems are philosophically complex. He's witty, he's playful. And, as we'll hear in a minute, he makes a sound that is very distinctly his. Controlled, elegant, and somewhat aloof. I'm joined by Jennifer Michael Hecht, a poet and historian. We don't often get to say that in the same breath. Her non-poetry books include the bestseller, Doubt: A History and The Happiness Myth. And she's also a Stevens fan. And we're going to listen together to a Stevens poem that has always eluded me. It's called “The Idea of Order at Key West.” So, Jennifer, when did you first start reading Wallace Stevens and what did you like about him?

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: I think that Stevens was someone I liked right away, but I didn't really feel linked with right away. As a matter of fact, I heard someone saying that they didn't understand Stevens until they were older. And I remember being annoyed by that when I was young. But in fact, it came to be the case with me that decades on, I suddenly opened the book and understood everything, whereas before, I had thought it was beautiful gibberish, to some degree.

CURTIS FOX: What brought about the change, just experience?

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Yes, experience in real life, and experience in poetry and philosophy. Yeah.

CURTIS FOX: Now, a lot of contemporary poets hate it when I ask what their poems are about, but they usually cough up an answer anyway, some kind of answer. And I've read “The Idea of Order at Key West” several times now, probably five or six times. I still don't have a handle on quite what it's about intellectually, what he's trying to do in this poem. What do you think his answer—he's not here to speak for himself—but what do you think his answer would be, if I asked him, “What is this poem about?”

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Look, for me, the poem is so crystal clear that it's hard for me to even pretend I'm just giving an interpretation. So, I'll tell you what I believe Stevens was writing about.

CURTIS FOX: OK.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: This is a poem about skepticism about the universe in general. Stevens is writing from the emotional point of view of someone who does not believe in religion and was trying to understand the world when the world is so huge around him and his life is so short and small. And what he knows is that the universe is real, and the mind of art is real too.

CURTIS FOX: The mind of art.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: The mind of... the human mind that appreciates a million different things at once. That adds feeling to the mix, adds accident to the mix, adds mistake to the mix, adds choice to the mix, so that everything is vastly overdetermined. So, our experience is a wholly separate thing from the universe, to some degree. And between these two things, how does the little mollusk, skeletoned mollusk man walk down and know what's happening?

CURTIS FOX: OK, well, hang on a minute. Let's start with the poem. We're going to break this poem up, and I'm going to interrupt to ask you questions along the way. But if listeners want to hear it uninterrupted, they can download the Essential American Poets podcast featuring Stevens. It was released just a few weeks ago. Let's hear the beginning of “The Idea of Order at Key West.”

WALLACE STEVENS:

(READS EXCERPT)

She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

The water never formed to mind or voice,

Like a body wholly body, fluttering

Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion

Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,

That was not ours although we understood,

Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

CURTIS FOX: The situation here is somebody is looking at the sea.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Right.

CURTIS FOX: But who is she?

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: She really exists and she's singing. And the singing makes him feel no longer alone. And, also, that the moment has become beautiful and special and memorable because of the singing. And in that moment, he realizes, this is one of those times when I'm keenly aware of the universe being big and vast and outside of me. And yet only the human mind is creating this moment, recognizing it as this thing that I'm experiencing right now, and the thing I'm experiencing right now is big and beautiful. This feeling of this stranger singing a song. I'm hearing it. I'm on the... I see the beach, I see the sky, all of that. He's saying to himself, it's the mind that brings all this to reality.

WALLACE STEVENS: She sang beyond the genius of the sea.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: So the sea is genius. But she sang beyond it. And then he quickly says…

WALLACE STEVENS: The water never formed to mind or voice.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: The water isn't there because she invented it. The water formed its own self.

WALLACE STEVENS: And yet, its mimic motion made constant cry, caused constantly a cry that was not ours although we understood.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: He feels like it is, in a way, kind of following her singing. It's constantly going (VOCALIZES SOUND OF WAVES). And, also, the cry of it sort of existentially. There it is, this huge, big thing. And he's saying, that was not ours. That part isn't human. We didn't make it.

WALLACE STEVENS: Although we understood. Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Yeah, we get it. We can listen to it. But we didn't make the sea. He is giving us a very straightforward philosophical proposition. We're bringing it into meaning. He's saying, I'm not pretending we imagined the whole thing.

CURTIS FOX: And then in this next stanza, he makes distinctions between what the sea is and what the sea, basically what the sea is not.

WALLACE STEVENS:

(READS EXCERPT)

The sea was not a mask. No more was she.

The song and water were not medleyed sound

Even if what she sang was what she heard,

Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

It may be that in all her phrases stirred

The grinding water and the gasping wind;

But it was she and not the sea we heard.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: This part is saying neither the woman singing or the sea are fake. They're both real. He's also saying they weren't really singing together.

WALLACE STEVENS: The song and water were not medleyed sound. Even if what she sang was what she heard. Since what she sang was uttered word by word.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: So he's saying, look, these aren't two separately recorded things played in an empty room together. She is being influenced by the sea because she is singing it word by word in real time, listening to the sea.

WALLACE STEVENS: It may be that in all her phrases stirred the grinding water and the gasping wind.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: It may be true that the reason she was singing the way she's singing is ‘cause she can hear the (VOCALIZES SOUND OF WAVES) of the ocean and the wind. But he says...

WALLACE STEVENS: But it was she and not the sea we heard.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: The ocean didn't make her, and she didn't make the ocean. And we're hearing the art. That's the primary thing we're hearing.

CURTIS FOX: Now, why is he spending so much time making this distinction? This is not a distinction that I find myself arguing with.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Which distinction?

CURTIS FOX: That they're both real. That the sea is real and that she is real.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Oh. Yeah, I make that distinction all the time. I mean...

CURTIS FOX: Really?

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Yeah. You know, I'm like Kilgore Trout. I have a lot of trouble staying stuck in time. If I'm waiting for a bus, suddenly I start to remember the last time I was waiting for a bus and how I already got home from that time. Yeah, it's very tricky. I think that he has this problem, too. He’s, you know, it's... What is the world?

CURTIS FOX: Right.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: What is real, if I can get so many different perspectives by thinking about it so many different ways? And so, yeah, no, he's really interested. Look, in a few minutes, she's going to be gone. And then in a few years, both people are going to be dead. And then in a few centuries, these poems might be not found. So, did it happen at all? It's a real question. And it's really there when you're at the beach, especially. And also, the sun is eventually going to expand and suck the earth into it, and then the whole universe is going to contract. So, is any of it here? And if it's here—Back to Bishop Berkeley, who's the one who expressed the notion that maybe we're thinking of this whole universe…

CURTIS FOX: Idealism.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: ..and it's not real at all. And very few people really ever agreed with that. But many, many philosophical minds, including my own, wonder all the time whether or not the world is anything like the way we perceive it. So choosy are we being in what we notice.

WALLACE STEVENS:

(READS EXCERPT)

For she was the maker of the song she sang.

The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea

Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew

It was the spirit that we sought and knew

That we should ask this often as she sang.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: He's saying that for him, the whole place just almost had no meaning until the singing. So, she says she was the maker of the songs that she sang, even if she's influenced by the water.

WALLACE STEVENS: The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Ever-hooded is a wonderful line. Hooded means mysterious, but also means the hood that the waves create. Tragic-gestured sea, because it kills people all the time, this sea. It's a big monster, and it drowns boats. So tragic-gestured sea. It's also constantly lapping at the shore, and it never gets anywhere. You know, there's tragedy to the gesture of it.

WALLACE STEVENS: It was merely a place by which she walked to sing.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: He's coming down on the side of art and humanity and spirit feeling meaning as being little more important than the universe.

WALLACE STEVENS: Whose spirit is this? we said because we knew it was the spirit that we sought and knew that we should ask this often as she sang.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: And that little last “as she sang” is saying, look, once she's gone again, we may be once again impressed and oppressed by the hugeness of the vast dead universe. But while she sings, all we're asking is, who is this spirit? Who is she? What is doing this? What is me? What is art? What is feeling?

WALLACE STEVENS:

(READS EXCERPT)

If it was only the dark voice of the sea

That rose, or even colored by many waves;

If it was only the outer voice of sky

And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,

However clear, it would have been deep air,

The heaving speech of air, a summer sound

Repeated in a summer without end

And sound alone.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: If it was only the sounds that we hear in the universe, it would have been a sort of nothing. He describes nothing as air.

WALLACE STEVENS: It would have been deep air.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: However clear it was, it really would have just been something that could have been replaced by the wind of any summer, any beach, any moment.

WALLACE STEVENS:

(READS EXCERPT)

But it was more than that,

More even than her voice, and ours, among

The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,

Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped

On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres

Of sky and sea.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Yeah, it was more than that. And that moment while she was singing, it was every fantasy any human being had ever dreamed, any feeling of majesty. It was drama. It was theater. It was plunging. It was high horizons and mountainous atmospheres. It was big.

WALLACE STEVENS:

(READS EXCERPT)

It was her voice that made

The sky acutest at its vanishing.

She measured to the hour its solitude.

She was the single artificer of the world

In which she sang.

CURTIS FOX: That's an odd thing to say. The single artificer of the world in which she sang, as if nobody else is present.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Right. All the other stuff that he's experiencing, because he's sort of not noticing himself while he's writing the poem. But while he's writing the poem, he doesn't sort of notice himself. He sees just there's the universe and there's the woman singing. And between those two, only one of them is making something. It was her voice that made that sky acutest. Everything that could interpret this scene as something other than water, H2O, sand, everything that made this something else. Down to the hour. Down to the second. Down to every sand. She's the one who gave it shape and measure and meaning. She was the single artificer of the world. She was, in a sense, a god of this moment. She created it because the real moment he's experiencing is all feeling.

WALLACE STEVENS:

(READS EXCERPT)

And when she sang, the sea,

Whatever self it had, became the self

That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,

As we beheld her striding there alone,

Knew that there never was a world for her

Except the one she sang and, singing, made.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: He’s already dismissed the idea that she's making the sea. And we're talking about philosophy on such a level that that needs to be clarified. He's saying her mind doesn't create the sea, and yet he's convincing himself that the singing that she's doing is the entirety of why he's experiencing the sea the way he is right now. She's making the sea on such a level that he's careful to have already dismissed that she's actually making the water. The water exists without her. But his experience of the sea is so much because of her singing it.

CURTIS FOX: And then the poem throws... (CHUCKLES) It's very strange. Throws a name in there. There's somebody right beside him.

WALLACE STEVENS:

(READS EXCERPT)

Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,

Why, when the singing ended and we turned

Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,

The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,

As the night descended, tilting in the air,

Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,

Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,

Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: He, and with all of us, metaphorically, turned towards the town. That is, he's going back to the life of people where you don't always think about meaning in this complicated way. And he's saying, guy who's going to stand in for every man, he really wants to say, hey, Joe Smith. But for some reason, he wanted it to be a Spanish name.

CURTIS FOX: Right.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: And here's the question he asks the world. When you look out at the ocean, it's empty, it's blank, it's nothing, it’s black. It's nothing unless there are these lights on it, which grid out for a human's space, even in just the most basic sense of our ability to see the grid out the ocean. But they also give it human meaning. What the human brings both arranges night, but also deepens it. It deepens our ability to know the depth of how far out the ocean goes. And it also deepens the meaning of it. And it enchants it because art and feeling enchants an otherwise dead world. And he’s asking why. Why did that happen? Why do I need the night mastered in this way? Why do I always have to get categories for everything and explanations for everything? Why can't I be like the universe and be utter chaos? Or why can't the universe be like me and have its own real order? It's very frustrating and confusing, Ramon!

CURTIS FOX: (CHUCKLES) Poor Ramon. And then the poem winds up in a final stanza, the shortest stanza of the whole poem.

WALLACE STEVENS:

(READS EXCERPT)

Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,

The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,

And of ourselves and of our origins,

In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: The negative capability in that, the complication of putting these oxymorons together. Blessed means it is wonderfully good.

CURTIS FOX: Yeah.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Rage means you're a little crazy for it. You're a little obsessed. You're a little out of your mind. It's wonderful that we're so crazy for order.

WALLACE STEVENS: The maker’s rage to order words of the sea.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: “The maker’s rage to order words of the sea.” So now he's the maker. The singing woman was the maker before, but now he's home. He's writing the poem, and he has a rage to order words, words of the sea this time, not the song, but the words he's writing.

WALLACE STEVENS: Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred. And of ourselves and of our origins. In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Here, he brings “and ourselves and of our origins”. Right in the last couplet. He's saying ourselves and our origins is both part of the natural world and part of the feeling world. And he's saying the rage to order ourselves and our origins with ghostlier demarcations, than such things as either the lights in the ocean, on the boats, or her song. We don't have even anything to demarcate ourselves and our origins. But still, the people we knew, the years we assign things to, there's all these ways in which we demarcate ourselves and our origins just the way the lights on the boat are demarcating the expanse of ocean and the way her song demarcated the vast universe for the experience of the time of the song. And he says, also, “keener sounds”. We're going to need something awfully specific, awfully strange, to do that kind of demarcation work for ourselves and our origins. But we have such things. The words.

CURTIS FOX: And we have to do it.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: And we have to do it. Can't stop doing it. We're constantly being thrown up against it.

CURTIS FOX: Yeah.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: It's a beautiful poem.

CURTIS FOX: It's curious that you began by saying it's clear as day to you, because it's still... It's still not... I enjoyed your explanation tremendously, but it's still not as clear as day to me. Maybe because I don't obsess over the same problem that Stevens was obsessing over.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: I think that it's a complicated poem. I was wondering what people said about it recently. And I looked up on the Internet and I saw that the one thing everybody says about it is that it's a complicated poem. So then I went to my big book of Stevens’s letters. I went and I just looked up in the index, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” and the first thing I saw was there was a letter he responds to. He says... He mentions Berkeley. And so I said, oh, yeah, he is talking about what it sounds exactly to me he's talking about. He mentions Bishop Berkeley, and he says no to Bishop Berkeley, that that's what this poem’s saying.

CURTIS FOX: And Bishop Berkeley believed, and he proposed, that the world is simply the imaginations of people, and there's no way you could prove otherwise.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: No way you could prove that it isn't all in the mind of one person.

CURTIS FOX: Yeah.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Yeah. And Samuel Johnson famously kicked a rock and said, thus, I do refute it.

CURTIS FOX: Yeah.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: And of course, Berkeley could say back, well, the rock’s in your imagination, and your foot's in your imagination, and the pain’s in your imagination. But we all instinctively agree with Johnson because we kick a rock and we say, you know what? I know that when I'm dreaming, I don't know that I'm dreaming. But when I wake up, I sure as hell do. And I know that I'm not dreaming right now. And so, Berkeley, I like your idea, but your idea entails that I invented Shakespeare, if I invented all of this, and I don't think I could. So, there are ways of kicking a rock.

CURTIS FOX: Well, Stevens is not kicking the rock in this poem, he’s picking the rock up and carefully observing it and wondering if it exists. (LAUGHS)

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Well, he's picking up the rock and he's saying, the rock is moving me, and it's moving me because of other people. Other people's feelings about this rock have given meaning to this rock.

CURTIS FOX: And that, for Stevens, a non-religious person, probably an atheist, that was probably one of the deepest sources of meaning he could have given the world.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.

CURTIS FOX: For somebody who's a non-believer, there's not many other places to go, but...

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Right. But why would you want anything else? I mean, in a way, belief is a strange, limp shadow version of this bigger question of, what can we make of the real?

CURTIS FOX: And what's our place in it and what we... And how important are we? Jennifer Michael Hecht, thanks very much.

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Thanks. It was a blast.

CURTIS FOX: You can hear and read much more from Wallace Stevens on our website, poetryfoundation.org, where you can also read some poems by Jennifer Michael Hecht. Her books of poems include Funny and The Next Ancient World. Do you have something more recent than that?

JENNIFER MICHAEL HECHT: Now, I've got a manuscript I'm cooking up right now.

CURTIS FOX: OK. Let us know what you think of this program. Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. From Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.