nuns, and the manifold capabilities of perception, the poetry of wallace stevens
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
In essence, Poetry is a condensed mode of perception. Though its role as a condensation of anything should not be taken to imply a resulting increase in simplicity; namely, there is somewhat of a reversal regarding the laws of language inherent to poetic construction—the complexity of poetical meaning, implication, and imagery is most often inversely proportional to its simplicity in syntax and form. That is: With poetry, saying something simply is not necessarily the same thing as saying something straightforwardly.
Consider Wallace Stevens, and the gap between the two widens all the more. If we are to trust self promotion, “Artists,” Ezra Pound says, “are the antennae of the race,” endowed with a heightened sense of perception, graced with the ability to see and consequently speak concisely what they observe. Hopefully this well of intellectual greatness is used to inform and guide the populace. However, where Pound would implement a stark separation between the artist and the everyman, Stevens, viewing this role of the poet as an artistic impertinence, is keen to dwell on the democratic multiplicity found in the act of perception itself—he seeks the poet within the everyman, and the poetry within the corporeal, not just the spiritual and the far removed. In Stevens’ work, a deconstruction of poetry is at hand. Therein, layers of philosophical rumination are removed, and the object—the idea, the image, the poem—is revealed in its essence: condensed, transformed, and undoubtedly complex.
Stevens is a compiler of cognizance. His poetry often never speaks with a single voice, but rather with the voices of many. For this reason, a blackbird can be seen in thirteen diverse ways. However, are we to take all thirteen “ways” of seeing this blackbird as individualized instances of unique perception, or rather as the collective product of a single persona, attempting to view something mundane in new, different ways? Perhaps the answer is less important than the question itself; granted, we can accept that this is Stevens at work, the capable wordsmith, testing his abilities to express a singular image in multiple styles, moods, and constructions. But, the poem’s authorship could be feasibly contributed to a consortium of individuals as well, all of them composing unique submissions for our consideration with the only prompt being a blackbird which ostensibly “whirled in the autumn winds.”
The importance of the poem is in its potential for expansion; if Stevens’ sense of humor had gone unrestricted, the poem very well could have been called, “Seven Hundred and Forty Eight Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” And this was precisely his point—perception, being an individual construct of the human imagination, is endless, limitless, and boundlessly eccentric.
Thereby, there exists an infinite number of ways of looking at a blackbird. And the thirteen that come to us through Stevens—each constructing the same bird in distinct, and specific ways—could ultimately be the products of a poetically inspired flock of dichromatic nuns, issuing from a stone church, and frantically pencilling their ideas and thoughts regarding blackbirds within the margins of their prayer books—glory be to God, and all his creatures here on Earth…The specifics of the poem’s inspired origin are inconsequential.
In short, Stevens refused to become a despot of perception. Through his poetry, Stevens did not seek to present something as he perceived it, but rather sought to explore the various ways in which things are, and can be perceived. This is the primary element of Stevens’ complexity. The mercurial aspect of his poetry—the flippancy, the inconclusiveness—though repelling the less than vigilant reader, works to distance Stevens from the poetical “high-horse” upon which Pound (“The Antenna” of his race) would have gladly ridden.
Because Stevens does not present a concrete method of understanding in his poems, there is an implied expectation of contribution. In this regard, Wallace Stevens’ poetry can be seen as a kinetic machine requiring input and even insight of its readers in order to function. The act of perception is rife with movement and association. The production of poetry—and, in connection, the reading of it—thus becomes a kinetic conversation of the mind in relation with the objective, physical world. This is most basically exhibited in Stevens’ inclination to question, and to conclude images and thoughts mid-stride before an answer is reached. This aspect of Stevens could be extended and contrasted with the complacently thoughtful stasis of Frost and the Romantics.
Stevens, instead of presenting the reader with a fully fledged poetical edifice of American ingenuity and art, is content in asking the reader to despair in his own ignorance. Though in doing so, Stevens simultaneously assures the confused peruser that he is not alone in his desperation. Numerous examples can be found within the enigmatic spiritualism of “Sunday Morning.” “Shall our blood fail?” he asks, “And shall the earth/ Seem all of paradise that we shall know?” These are profound and troubling questions, lacking an explicative antecedent or conclusion. Should not the poet answer these perplexing uncertainties? Given the common model, it would seem so. But engendering this hasty conclusion would be to disregard the implied multiplicity of perceptions—the questions are open and therefore exposed. Here, the open question as a linguistic device is an instigator of depth—with each reading, and thereby with each new reader, an additional answer is contributed, an ancillary route of perception is laid bare.
Perhaps the most powerful effect of a unique perception is its ability to transform an object or idea into something conforming to the perceiver’s immediate mode of thought. It is safe to assume that Stevens was aware of this, and thus attempted to expose the dark side of poetry implicit in this characteristic of perception. Capable of providing insight and awareness, poetry is also capable of clouding those same ideals—the goals and aspirations of its own production—in vague verbiage, only masking something it seeks, in vain, to expose. Poetic perception, being a construct of the mind, and thereby a product of the imagination, can never express a thing as it truly is. Rather, perception can only attempt to express in its own language things that are without language. By perceiving something, we subconsciously enact a cycle with the ultimate aim of reconciling things of a corporeal nature—things of the earth—with things and processes of the mind. It is within this cycle, within this attempt at defining singular perceptions, that poetry takes its root.
This concept of the relation between mental perception and the physical, almost organic process of visual reception became Stevens’ primary theme. The definition and understanding of the physical object in the poem thus becomes, to a certain extent, nonessential. Instead, the importance of the same object lies in its infinite potential for the production of a series of unique perceptions. The subject of the poem—whether it be a scene, a persona, or an event—does not exist in isolation; there is no individual approach to dismantling or perceiving it. It is in this way that Stevens’ work can be seen as a summation of every poet’s role within himself and as a working component of a cognizant society.
Poetry relies on perception, and thereby can never be an honest and simple representation of reality; what was described and perceived by one poet is discounted entirely by another. Stevens understood this and thus presented his subjects as they were: mercurial, open-ended, and unresolved. In this regard, Wallace Stevens, battling some of his “naive” contemporaries, was unwilling to break his subjects down into their visual essences. Each image—each subject—as Stevens’ poetry manipulates it, is a silo of potential perceptional approaches. Inevitably, these approaches become more important than the subject—the image—itself. At root, the physical existence of the subject cannot be contained, nor can it become a “mask” for the object’s true identity. For this reason, “Water never formed to mind or voice”. Water, as an element—as an image—forms not to the mind but to itself and from a series of perceptions spread across time.
And what of Wallace Stevens? Is he to fall away, lost in the complexities of his own making? What did Wallace Stevens perceive? If the thirteen ways are, in fact, individual representations of a blackbird, which impression belonged to Stevens? It is easy to assume VIII. With its nobility and calm acceptance of what is, it is perhaps the closest we can come to pinning Stevens down:
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
The speaker is older, educated, and wise. The segment could easily be taken as the poet’s admittance of his own insufficiencies and a recognition of the shortcomings in his art. It is the poet, elated by his ability to interpret and to “know noble accents,” to compose “lucid, inescapable rhythms,” realizing for the first time that, as an element of the world which he—the poet—must see, the blackbird demands recognition—it is the divine within the mundane, though it is seen as such only through a unique and individual form of perception.
