The Wallace Stevens Journal Special Issue: Stevens in Late 20th-Century Culture A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 24 Number 2 Fall 2000 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 24 Number 2 Fall 2000 Special Issue: Stevens in Late 20th-Century Culture Edited by Angus Cleghorn Contents Charles Baxter, August Kleinzahler, Adrienne Rich: Contemporary Stevensians and the Problem of “Other Lives” —Stephen Burt 115 Mark Strand’s Inventions of Farewell —Christopher R. Miller 135 Wallace Stevens, Armand Schwerner, and “The The” —Norman Finkelstein 151 Wallace Stevens and A. R. Ammons as Men on the Dump —Gyorgyi Voros 161 Wallace Stevens’ “Second Selves”and the Nostalgia of Discursiveness —Willard Spiegelman 176 Wallace Stevens’ Influence on the Construction of Gay Masculinity by the Cuban Orígenes Group —Eric Keenaghan 187 The Theoretical Afterlife of Wallace Stevens —Anca Rosu 208 Poems 221 Reviews 225 News and Comments 228 Cover Art from “The Man on the Dump” Charcoal drawing by Alexis W. Serio The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POETRY EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR H. L. Hix Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS EDITORIAL BOARD Thomas O. Hodgson Milton J. Bates A. Walton Litz Maureen Kravec Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Hope Steele Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff TECHNICAL ASSISTANTS Alan Filreis Joan Richardson Richard Austin B. J. Leggett Melita Schaum Claudette J. VanEss George S. Lensing Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDENT ADVISORY BOARD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates Joseph Duemer Owen E. Brady Kathryn Jacobi Robert Buttel George S. Lensing David M. Craig A. Walton Litz The Wallace Stevens Journal is published biannually in the Spring and Fall by the Wal- lace Stevens Society, Inc. Administrative and editorial offices are located at Clarkson University, Box 5750, Potsdam, NY 13699. Phone: 315 268 3987; Fax: 315 268 7117; E-mail: [email protected]; Web site: www.wallacestevens.com. The subscription rate for individuals, both domestic and foreign, is $25 for one year or $45 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $32 per year domestic and $37 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor. Manu- scripts should be submitted in duplicate and in Works Cited format. Word-processed manuscripts will not be returned. Authors of accepted manuscripts should furnish a nonreturnable disk copy. The Wallace Stevens Journal is indexed or abstracted in Abstracts of English Studies, American Humanities Index, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, IBR (In- ternational Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Lit- erature), Literary Criticism Register, MHRA Annual Bibliography, MLA International Bibliography, and Year’s Work in English Studies. This journal is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. © 2000 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Charles Baxter, August Kleinzahler, Adrienne Rich: Contemporary Stevensians and the Problem of “Other Lives” STEPHEN BURT HE LAST FEW YEARS have seen books called The Death of Satan, The Nothing That Is, and Farewell to an Idea; none of the three con- Tcerns modern poetry. Andrew Delbanco’s, Robert Kaplan’s, and T. J. Clark’s titles testify to the breadth of Stevens’ presence in nineties high culture.1 Stevens’ achievement is now accepted by senior poets whose work could not have seemed more distant from his in their youth: Robert Creeley’s 1998 Life & Death, for example, includes a fantasia on lines from “Anecdote of the Jar” (5).2 Although Stevens’ influence seems broader than ever, it remains deep: few critics who praise Mark Strand or John Koethe neglect to mention their Stevensian roots. A. R. Ammons’ latest long poem, Glare, brings “Mr. Stevens” in, by name, over and over.3 John Ashbery’s debts to Stevens have already been well traced: his recent Wakefulness, from its title (drawn from “Long and Sluggish Lines”) forward, represents his saddest, most sustained engagement with the poetry of clarity and mortality in The Rock.4 A particular kind of Stevens poem has provided foundations and re- sources for some poets whose uses of Stevens are less well known; these uses, in turn, can shed new light on him. The kind of poem I mean is the poem of the empty landscape—the poem, usually, of a specifically Ameri- can deprivation and impoverishment. It is a kind of poem that seems more central to Stevens’ oeuvre the more we regard him (following Helen Vendler) as “a poet of human misery,” of “ ‘Desire without an object of desire’ ” (Words 10–11). In this kind of poem, Stevens sees a town center where “The men have no shadows / And the women have only one side” (CP 221), or unpromising fields, where “Frost is in the stubble” (CP 208), “The leaves are dry” (CP 293), and only a crow, bright with malice, returns his gaze: the poem is prompted by the absence of “the romantic” in such a scene, the absence both of fruitful symbols, and of a perceiver who might share Stevens’ wish to see them.5 This kind of poem exists in both rural and urban varieties. It begins with “The Public Square” in Harmonium and comes into its own in Ideas of Order and Parts of a World with “Sailing After Lunch,” “The American Sub- lime,” “Loneliness in Jersey City,” “The Common Life,” “No Possum, No THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 24.2 (FALL 2000): 115–134. © 2000 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. 115 Sop, No Taters,” and “The Dwarf,” among others. All these poems might be described by phrases in Stevens’ posthumously published “From Pieces of Paper”: they are poems of “American Poverty” or of “A Spirit Without A City In A City Without A soul” (Lensing 181, 167). Their category feeds into the later, major lyrics of loneliness, metaphysical deprivation, and final reduction, such as “The Plain Sense of Things”; of the long poems, it impinges most on “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” The Stevens of these poems informs the three later poets I discuss here: Charles Baxter, August Kleinzahler, and (at greater length) Adrienne Rich. Randall Jarrell famously disliked The Auroras of Autumn for its “lack of immediate contact with lives” (Age 130); it is this lack that these later poets wish to remedy. Each revises Stevens’ poems of American deprivation by infusing them with historical particulars and by trying to bring in the per- spectives of precisely the other people Stevens fails to reach. Charles Baxter uses Stevens’ symbols to describe other people’s lonely lives. August Kleinzahler imagines himself at once amid Stevensian tropes and among other lives. And Adrienne Rich connects Stevens’ remoteness from indi- viduals to the remoteness from “society” that he also found and described in himself. The mature Stevens, as his poems describe him, was not natu- rally or happily social; as the penultimate section of “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” has it, It needed the heavy nights of drenching weather To make him return to people, to find among them Whatever it was that he found in their absence, A pleasure, an indulgence, an infatuation. (CP 158) Some of Stevens’ other poems of American deprivation anticipate the ways in which later poets reacted to that “absence,” to the removal from “people” Stevens’ critics have also described. In their admiring quarrels with Stevens’ poetry of American deprivation, Baxter, Kleinzahler, and especially Rich can help us interpret and appreciate Stevens’ late quarrels with himself. The poems in Baxter’s Imaginary Paintings sometimes conceive of entire life stories in terms of the needs and absences Stevens describes. We have only to reread “The Dwarf” to recognize the source of Baxter’s couplets in “Sorrow”: There might be sun but, yes, it’s gone, and the dew is freezing so that grasses scrape their blades together, a sclerotic sound. A sparrow pecks at birdbath ice, then calls: a frozen melody iced in frozen air. Sister word of “weary,” sorrow separates the lovers’ flesh with snow. (IP 11) 116 THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL As Stevens would, Baxter specifies the month, then cannot imagine progress from this chilly season to later renewal: “no one has a clue why it’s November / all this year.” Baxter’s more complex reworkings of Stevens add narrative time to scenes Stevens leaves static. The unpromising flatness of the public squares and rectilinear factories in “The Common Life” seem to Baxter to charac- terize his own Michigan landscape: yet Baxter’s “Midwestern Poetics” takes off from that flatness and imagines, there, a generic biography. In Baxter’s Midwest The unpromising meets the unexotic, and we are home again, alone, with this image of the possible: these hills that anyone can climb, the lowlands, reeds perched with red-wing blackbirds, leading painlessly to cemeteries and small towns where voices are subdued and have no region. (IP 20) Baxter’s sentences meander within the bounds of familiar diction (“un- promising” is the longest word in the stanza) as if to mime the Midwest’s lack of resources, what Baxter would later dub (in a discussion of novelist and photographer Wright Morris) “a specific kind of American emptiness, an emptiness filled with things and pragmatism and people” (Burning 237). After another stanza of nonevents, It’s not that something has to happen. A man writes a letter to himself and excludes the absolute: he is four seasons, paths in third-growth woods, nature that is endlessly familiar. (IP 20) The absence of the absolute, the lack of wildness in nature, looks like and stands for the absence of the erotic: if, as Stevens’ “Arrival at the Waldorf” has it, “the wild poem is a substitute / For the woman one loves or ought to love” (CP 241), then Baxter’s Midwest excludes a wilder poetry just as it seems to exclude erotic love.