[Andrew Szilvasy]

Stevens loves the sun and the moon. I think it stems from his dual love of Romanticism and what he knew of classic Chinese poetry.

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

He is not here, the old sun,
As absent as if we were asleep.

The field is frozen. The leaves are dry.
Bad is final in this light.

In this bleak air the broken stalks
Have arms without hands. They have trunks

Without legs or, for that, without heads.
They have heads in which a captive cry

Is merely the moving of a tongue.
Snow sparkles like eyesight falling to earth,

Like seeing fallen brightly away.
The leaves hop, scraping on the ground.

It is deep January. The sky is hard.
The stalks are firmly rooted in ice.

It is in this solitude, a syllable,
Out of these gawky flitterings,

Intones its single emptiness,
The savagest hollow of winter-sound.

It is here, in this bad, that we reach
The last purity of the knowledge of good.

The crow looks rusty as he rises up.
Bright is the malice in his eye...

One joins him there for company,
But at a distance, in another tree.

[Michael F]

Allen, that is a very perceptive review with which I largely agree. I particularly like the invocation of the Dionysian; it’s straight out of Nietzsche, and very much Stevens, IMO. The review makes me want to spend more time with the late Stevens, if it is indeed true that he finally knew to eschew “his philosopher’s bow-tie”. I shall have to get on that... I enjoyed that, thank you.


Andrew, another lovely poem of images. It reminds me of the blackbird poem, of course, but it also makes me think of this by Dickinson:

THE SKY is low, the clouds are mean,
A travelling flake of snow
Across a barn or through a rut
Debates if it will go.

A narrow wind complains all day
How some one treated him;
Nature, like us, is sometimes caught
Without her diadem.


Being Wallace Stevens, it seems he can’t help but relate the scene back to poetry and writing, and he seems to see it as an aesthete’s mystical “dark night”. Remarkable. Thank you for posting it.

[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.

[Michael F]

Walter, that's a juicy comment, and a great additional perspective. There's almost something Whitworthian about the first poem you posted -- though I'm not sure John would say he's influenced by Stevens!

Aaron, thanks. I'm learning from this, too -- as I had hoped.

Carry on...

[Aaron Novick]

I just had recalled to my mind that I've actually written a short piece about No Possum, No Sop, No Taters, here.

I promise to contribute with more original and responsive thoughts when I can make time.

[Orwn Acra]

To elucidate my previous comments: One notable aspect of Carroll’s writing is its play with the so-called arbitrary division between word and object, sign and the signified. Jabberwocky is the most well-known example of this, but we see it, too, in the following dialogue between Alice and the White Knight:

"The name of the song is called Haddocks' Eyes."

"Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested.

"No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is The Aged Aged Man."

"Then I ought to have said 'That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself.

"No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called Ways and Means: but that's only what it's called, you know!"

"Well, what is the song, then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered.

"I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is A-sitting On a Gate: and the tune's my own invention."

There are many more examples throughout his stories and poems. I said “so-called arbitrary division” because Carroll’s neologisms in Jabberwocky somehow convey their meaning through sound, whereas most words (like table) are arbitrary sonic demarcations of a specific concept. Carroll is able to do this partly because his nonce words are portmanteaux, so in galumphing we get a taste of gallop and triumph and that influences our conception of the word’s meaning; his ingenuity shows more in words like vorpal, which does not have the same blend of connotations, yet still produces a specific image in our mind. This breaking-down of the supposed arbitrariness between word and what the word signifies anticipates De Saussure (and later Wittgenstein) and refutes him.

Stevens uses nonsense sounds in a similar way. [Insert here an inventory of them; there are many but I am away from my books]. These sounds constitute a deconstruction of language into its most primitive and basic forms: baby babble, onomatopoeia, animal sounds. Many of Stevens’ poems deal with an enlightened solipsism (“I was the world in which I walked”), as if one’s inner world cannot be described with regular words (since their sounds convey one meaning) and can only be approximated through sounds that have no meaning, in which the connection between the word and the concept behind the word has not yet formed. “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” said the Austrian homosexual who chose to remain silent while Stevens chose to speak nonsense – both resist saying something rather than court a specific meaning that falls short of what must be expressed but, ultimately, cannot be.

[William A. Baurle]

Michael F,

You'll hate me, but I absolutely love The Comedian as the Letter C. I've mentioned on the Sphere several times that I think Stevens' handling of blank verse in that poem is so masterful that I can forgive whatever failings it has. He could write a thousand lines about breakfast cereal and I'd read it.

Oh well, that's my two cents about Stevens.

Just a snippet I really can't get enough of. And remember, I like this not for what it's about, but for how it sounds:

The spring came there in clinking pannicles
Of half-dissolving frost, the summer came,
If ever, whisked and wet, not ripening,
Before the winter's vacancy returned.
The myrtle, if the myrtle ever bloomed,
Was like a glacial pink upon the air.
The green palmettoes in crepuscular ice
Clipped frigidly blue-black meridians,
Morose chiaroscuro, gauntly drawn.

This is even better, more Shakesperian:

He came. The poetic hero without palms
Or jugglery, without regalia.
And as he came he saw that it was spring,
A time abhorrent to the nihilist
Or searcher for the fecund minimum.
The moonlight fiction disappeared. The spring,
Although contending featly in its veils,
Irised in dew and early fragrancies,
Was gemmy marionette to him that sought
A sinewy nakedness. A river bore
The vessel inward. Tilting up his nose,
He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells
Of dampened lumber, emanations blown
From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes,
Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks
That helped him round his rude aesthetic out.

[Aaron Novick]

Originally Posted by Andrew Szilvasy

No Possum, No Sop, No Taters

I was planning to post this one here, once I could set aside time to really get into this thread.

Thanks for making this, Michael. Maybe this will finally get me to really delve into Stevens. I love the glimpses I've gotten.

[Andrew Szilvasy]

Bill Murray reading "A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts"