[Orwn Acra]

Stevens is immensely silly. Seemingly by accident (in that so far as I know, there is no indication he ever read Carroll) he builds upon the tradition of Carrollian nonsense to make it right for the new century. This is not so much of a stretch – other grand modernists like Eliot and Joyce acknowledged their debt to Carroll – but whereas the twentieth century’s purveyors of nonsense simple wrote more nonsense without changing the mien of the thing, Stevens brought fresh face. The article Allen links to is great (“He sounds like a man imitating a whole orchestra, not despising the triangle.”) but Stevens is not Lear, a poet whose ragtag whimsy lacks all the logical structures of Carroll and Stevens (when you read Stevens, you start to believe him, no matter how outrageous his presupposition). I await the poet to build on Stevens and provide us with a twenty-first-century strata of nonsense, which I imagine will contain a structured discombobulation of our fractured world.

Two poems I love:

The Search For Sound Free From Motion

All afternoon the gramophone
Parl-parled the West-Indian weather.
The zebra leaves, the sea
And it all spoke together.

The many-stanzaed sea, the leaves
And it spoke all together.
But you, you used the word,
Your self its honor.

All afternoon the gramaphoon,
All afternoon the gramaphoon,
The world as word,
Parl-parled the West-Indian hurricane.

The world lives as you live,
Speaks as you speak, a creature that
Repeats its vital words, yet balances
The syllable of a syllable.

To the Roaring Wind

What syllable are you seeking,
Vocalissimus,
In the distances of sleep?
Speak it.