The Wallace Stevens Journal “The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds” The Wallace The Wallace Stevens Journal Vol. 33 No. 1 Spring 2009 Vol. Special Issue Wallace Stevens and “The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds” A Publication of The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Volume 33 Number 1 Spring 2009 The Wallace Stevens Journal Volume 33 Number 1 Spring 2009 Special Issue Wallace Stevens and “The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds” Edited by Natalie Gerber Contents Introduction —Natalie Gerber 3 Sound at an Impasse —Alan Filreis 15 Sound and Sensuous Awakening in Harmonium —Beverly Maeder 24 The Sound of the Queen’s Seemings in “Description Without Place” —Alison Rieke 44 The “Final Finding of the Ear”: Wallace Stevens’ Modernist Soundscapes —Peter Middleton 61 Weather, Sound Technology, and Space in Wallace Stevens —Sam Halliday 83 Wallace Stevens and the Spoken Word —Tyler Hoffman 97 Musical Transformations: Wallace Stevens and Paul Valéry —Lisa Goldfarb 111 Poems 129 Reviews 133 Current Bibliography 139 Cover Karhryn Jacobi The Tink-tonk of the Rain from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” XIV The Wallace Stevens Journal EDITOR John N. Serio POETRY EDITOR ART EDITOR BOOK REVIEW EDITOR Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing EDITORI A L ASSIST A NTS EDITORI A L BO A RD William H. Duryea Milton J. Bates George S. Lensing Maureen Kravec Jacqueline V. Brogan James Longenbach Hope Steele Robert Buttel Glen MacLeod Eleanor Cook Marjorie Perloff TECHNIC A L ASSIST A NT Bart Eeckhout Joan Richardson Jeff Rhoades Alan Filreis Melita Schaum B. J. Leggett Lisa M. Steinman The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. PRESIDENT ADVISORY BO A RD John N. Serio Milton J. Bates Owen E. Brady Robert Buttel David M. Craig Joseph Duemer Kathryn Jacobi George S. Lensing Glen MacLeod The Wallace Stevens Journal is published in Spring and Fall by the Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Editorial offices are located at Clarkson University, 8 Clarkson Avenue, Potsdam, NY 13699. P 315.268.3987; F 315.268.3983; E [email protected]; W wallacestevens.com. The subscription rate for individuals, both domestic and foreign, is $30 for one year or $50 for two years and includes membership in the Wallace Stevens Society. Rates for institutions are $40 per year domestic and $50 per year foreign. Back issues are available. Also available are volumes 1–25 on a text-searchable, PC/Mac compatible CD. Manuscripts, subscriptions, and advertising should be addressed to the editor. Manu- scripts should be in Works Cited format and may be submitted as attached document files. Authors of accepted manuscripts should furnish photocopies of all secondary quotations. The Wallace Stevens Journal is indexed or abstracted in Abstracts of English Studies, Hu- manities International Complete, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Current Contents, IBR (International Bibliography of Book Reviews), IBZ (International Bibliography of Periodical Literature), MHRA Annual Bibliography, MLA International Bibliography, ProQuest, Scopus (Elsevier), and Year’s Work in English Studies. This journal is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. © 2009 The Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. ISSN 0148-7132 Introduction NATALIE GERBER The less legible meanings of sounds, the little reds Not often realized, the lighter words In the heavy drum of speech, the inner men Behind the outer shields, the sheets of music In the strokes of thunder, dead candles at the window When day comes, fire-foams in the motions of the sea, Flickings from finikin to fine finikin And the general fidget from busts of Constantine To photographs of the late president, Mr. Blank, These are the edgings and inching of final form, The swarming activities of the formulae Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at. —Wallace Stevens I N 1991, JACQUELINE V. BROGAN edited the special Wallace Stevens Journal issue Structures of Sound in Stevens, which first collected at- Itention to the use of sound in Wallace Stevens’ verse. The author of the thoughtful study Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language (1986), Bro- gan had gathered fine essays that took an admirable range of approaches. Historically and theoretically grounded studies drawing on subjects as diverse as classical verse, foreign etymologies, theories of repetition, and prosodic history were included without neglecting the important testi- mony of Stevens’ influence upon contemporary poets—both their practice and their lifelong reading of Stevens. The mere appearance of the issue was cause for rejoicing to scholars of Stevens and of poetics sensitive to the materiality of language and its centrality in Stevens’ poetry. Brogan’s careful editorial efforts had accomplished even more than might be apparent. For this journal issue signally diverged from a deep- ly entrenched tradition of Stevens criticism that had veered away from THE WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL 33.1 (SPRING 2009): 3–14. 3 © 2009 THE WALLACE STEVENS SOCIETY, INC. sound for all the professionally and socially fraught reasons that Alan Fil- reis lists in his essay in this 2009 volume: “(1) fear of mannerist reputa- tion; (2) guilt by association with the non-innovative; (3) Hi Simons; (4) Stevens’ dull-seeming poetry readings; (5) a lagging interest among crit- ics in sound technology; (6) a certain deafness in the project of disclosing Stevens’s politics” (15). Beyond all these customary causes for resistance lie even more serious obstacles. As the venerable Helen Vendler had com- mented in her acclaimed study of Stevens’ longer poems, On Extended Wings (1969), “[S]ince criticism has yet to find a way of making notes on cadence, rhythms, and sounds both reliable and readable, I resort to only occasional remarks on these subjects” (9–10). Marjorie Perloff quoted Vendler’s com- ment in her 1982 essay “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” as emblematic of the persistent yet puzzling situation that, “in marked contrast” to criticism on Ezra Pound, rarely do the best in Stevens studies deal with his “prosodic innovations” (497). These two instances alone could have occasioned the rousing call by Eleanor Cook in her introduction to the 1991 issue to attend to the “technical,” which includes the central role of sound, in Stevens: “It seems especially important at this moment of our critical lives to under- stand that word ‘technical’ in its fullest sense, to be as fully responsible to its demands as any good artist is. Otherwise we lose the life of forms, and thereby something of ourselves” (124). Today, Brogan’s 1991 volume remains invaluable for pointing to impor- tant sound patterns and phenomena in Stevens—those that once appeared in criticism erratically, but now are central topics when we talk about sound in Stevens. These include his use of natural and animal sounds, his irruptive delight in the sound(s) of words themselves, his use of nonsense words and syllables, and his fascination with non-referential aspects of words (e.g., their etymologies and their derivations from foreign cognates with distinctive phonological structures). They also include the distinctive sounds of the poems themselves, characterized as they are by Stevens’ in- sistent repetition and variation of lexical materials. The sounds of the early poems are characterized by his explosive play with phonological pattern- ings such as phonemes and syllables, while the late poems are character- ized more by the repetition, anaphora, and modulation of words, phrases, and propositions that mimic or simulate the content of a mind sorting itself out, or a will testing out different stances toward reality. In retrospect, we might see the 1991 special issue as also being in the vanguard of a renewed interest in sound in Stevens. The well had not, per se, run dry in the 1980s, but general prosodic and sonic issues had fallen prey to charges of mere aestheticism and to assumptions that for- malism was somehow immune to (or outside of) the concerns with social and political history that dominated the era; and thus efforts in the area of sound were limited, or at least perceived as such. Given the currency of the academic marketplace, even lauded studies of sound in poetry— such as Marie Borroff’s and Eleanor Cook’s extraordinary work on sound 4 THE wallace STEVENS JOURNAL symbolism and wordplay in Stevens—were unlikely or unable to spur a sustained critical trend. For whatever reason, the period since then has proven more receptive to attention to prosodic and sonic innovations in verse. The Structures of Sound in Stevens was followed over the next five to ten years by Alison Rieke’s The Senses of Nonsense (1992), Anca Rosu’s The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens (1995), and Beverly Maeder’s Wallace Stevens’ Experimen- tal Language: The Lion in the Lute (1999). John N. Serio and B. J. Leggett’s anthology, Teaching Wallace Stevens (1994), put prosodic and lexical issues above the fold with much of its second section dedicated to sonic aspects of Stevensian language, including George Lensing’s superb essay, “Ste- vens’s Prosody,” which helped to attune readers’ ears to Stevens’ consid- erable rhythmic, intonational, and metrical effects and their relationship to his diction. Since 2001, there have been more than a dozen essays just in The Wallace Stevens Journal explicitly addressing various musical, lin- guistic, and prosodic aspects of sound in Stevens. (By contrast, The Wallace Stevens Journal from 1981 to 2001 lacks an equal number of essays on these topics if one excludes the 1991 special issue.) The return to sound in Stevens criticism has happily corresponded with a return to sound in broader critical efforts as well. In 2006, MLA’s then- President Marjorie Perloff’s determination to sustain a meditation on the theme “The Sound of Poetry, The Poetry of Sound” renewed scholarly attention to the technical and its significance. Acknowledging that poetry often is discussed in terms of content and not its materiality, she writes, “Yet poetry—which today is largely synonymous with lyric poetry—has always been designed not to deliver messages but to embody what are often conflicting meanings by formal and material means.