A familiarly young Wallace Stevens.

I was recently pointed digitally towards an article written by James Longenbach for The Nation—-a publication which appears both as an internet persona and in print—-pertaining to Wallace Stevens, a modernist poet whose work appeared between the years of 1927 and 1972.  Early on, the piece touches upon the seemingly strange duality of Stevens’ pursuits:  The first as the Vice President of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he performed Surety Law; The second, the voice of reserved understanding we encounter in his poetry, a tone which we might recognize in The Snow Man:

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Reading work such as this, it would seem that he should be a man of two minds, the one locked up in the language of the law, one in which the world is sure, and the other somewhere just outside the world, gazing in—-a man at once within his house, looking out, and of the passersby, glancing about as they wander on their way.  In fact, he might say he is of more, as in the second section of his Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird:

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

The Snow Man seems to suggest a complete immersion into ones’ surroundings, so that there is no distinction between the “listener” and the environment in which s/he exists.  The second excerpt again uses a natural scene to describe a state of mind, so that the mind and its surroundings are one.  Having badinaged that “money is a kind of poetry,” it seems he approached whatever befell him in his life with this same playfully poetic imagination, submersing himself in and questioning/observing the goings on of his time on earth.  Stevens, then—-the man, the body—-is the tree, rooted in the world, whose many minds appear to take flight, flit about, observing life at a distance, only to land variously again to reflect within the body.  Perhaps we may even call him single-minded, his mind a house with myriad colored rooms.

About one of his disappearances from the literary world for a decade or more, Longenbach quotes a letter in which Stevens writes to W.C. Williams:

My job is not now with poets from Paris.  It is to keep the fire-place burning and the music-box churning and the wheels of the baby’s chariot turning.

There seems to be a fetishization in recent years of the “Professional Writer,” who sits at his computer, punching at the lettered charges of his mined imagination.   And yet, I wonder about the staying power of such work.  The greatest writing seems to me to speak of the greatest experience, the widest range of sensual and imaginative exploration.  The old adage of writers is, of course, to “write what you know,” yet if our lives are only writing, than of what life can we truly write?  It seems to me it is often lives lived most within them that echo out the longest time.

Go out into the world, you spectacled and inquisitive minds.  Kiss the earth.  Love.  Provide a perch where all your wandering thoughts might alight.  Carry with you your pen and your pad, and do write, but do so while walking; it is a strange and astonishing planet, this.  Ask of it, then take down what it says.  Be whimsical.  Find your happiness, perhaps, through the writing, and not simply in the writing alone.

I will leave you with a poem of Stevens’ about poetry, about the poet/writer’s role here.

Of Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.