A tune beyond us, yet ourselves"
So I'm hanging out at work at the library, talking with a co-worker, Scott, getting to know him better by creeping on photos with him on Facebook. We're helping patrons and then back on Facebook and then back to patrons and so on. For whatever reason, Scott has a few buddies studying in the library that day, and they keep stopping by too. Looking at those friends and then looking at Facebook, I realized Scott and his friends all had one thing in common: beards. Granted, some beards were more like scraggly patches here and there, but some had legitimate, bushy, mountain man beards. From that realization, we moved to the workplace, and we discovered that all the men closing the library that night either had a beard or was able to grow a nice Santa Claus kind of beard. We had a long conversation about this bearded discovery, when we decide it's time to do something more productive. I flip open Wallace Stevens and I read, "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard," because obviously it had to happen that way. I started laughing and I say, "Hey Scott- Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about you." And he says, "Of course, I'm awesome." And then more co-workers show up and ask, "Is it all about Scott? Is it like him?" and to answer that question, another English ed major, Michelle, reads the poem out loud for everyone, and the reaction is almost unanimous: ????? and "I guess not." My first thought was, "This has nothing to do with bearded men," but then immediately, "But then again, it probably has everything to do with them and us." Scott re-reads it and I re-read it and I don't know his thoughts, but the last line stuck out (for me) "it can never be satisfied, the mind, never."
After several readings of the poem, I got that modernist sense again of just trying to find "what will suffice." He's sliding thing in and out of view to find a world in which he can sleep and find rest. But then I was reading a paper by Ph.D. Justin Quinn about Nature and Ideology in Wallace Stevens-http://colloquium.upol.cz/coll00/quinn.htm It has an interesting look at the idea of landscapes and how Stevens's poetry dealt with reality of the time (something we saw in the TVA anecdote of the jar and in other poems we've unpacked). In it, Quinn discusses landscapes and the difference between Stevens and naturalist poets of his time, especially Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers' poetry dreamed of returning to a time where nature bloomed free from humanity's sordid touch. He can't wait until humans are wiped off the earth. Stevens's poetry contrasts greatly with this view, as his poems "sings the praises of the major man." He seems to criticize the idea of nature without man, because in order to write poetry or see nature as it is, man has to be an agent in the landscape.
"a thing supposed
In a place supposed, a thing that he reached
In a place that he reached, by rejecting what he saw
And denying what he heard"
Quinn applies that to Jeffers, saying his truth is a rejection of what is perceived- a kind of denial of the things as they are. With this idea in mind, Quinn looks as a "Well Dressed Man with a Beard," as Stevens saying "If" I looked at the world like these other nature poets, "If" I tried to create a nature or world the way I want by hiding the nature of things, I might be able to hold onto that beautiful landscape "out of a petty phrase, out of a thing believed." But then the mind would never find satisfaction. Reality and imagination are entwined together, and the things cannot be tucked away or hidden. Or at least, that's how I'm reading things.
Things as they are may not be what we'd like to see- the things we've imagined; but poetic imagination can simultaneously expose the truth, that seems beyond our grasp and keep things real. So poems like "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard" are songs "beyond us, yet ourselves."
Maybe.
No comments:
Post a Comment