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Kimberly Quiogue Andrews on Wallace Stevens ("Man Carrying Thing")
2.1k Plays2 years ago
"The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully." So begins this episode's poem, "Man Carrying Thing," by the modernist American poet Wallace Stevens. I got to talk about it with the scholar and poet Kimberly Quiogue Andrews.
Kim is an assistant professor of English at the University of Ottawa and the author of The Academic Avant-Garde: Poetry and the American University (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023). She's also a poet who has published two collections: A Brief History of Fruit (University of Akron Press, 2020) and BETWEEN (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She's the winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry, the New Women's Voices Award, the Ralph Cohen Prize for Criticism, and a development grant from the American Council of Learned Societies. Her essays and scholarship have appeared in such publications as The Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporaries at Post45, Modernist Cultures, and New Literary History. Her creative work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Asian American Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, and Crab Orchard Review. Follow Kim on Twitter.
And please follow, rate, and review the podcast if you like what you hear. Share the episode with a friend! And subscribe to my Substack, where you'll get a newsletter to go with each episode.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Close Readings' Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it gives me great pleasure today to have Kimberly Keogue Andrews on the podcast.
Introduction to Wallace Stevens' 'Man Carrying Thing'
00:00:15
Speaker
Kim has selected a fantastic poem for us to think about today, a poem that I've sort of known and had somewhere knocking around in the back of my mind off and on for decades at this point.
00:00:31
Speaker
A poem that often occurs to me as a kind of reference point when thinking about other poems or when thinking about poetry more broadly. The poem for today is by Wallace Stevens and it's called Man Carrying Thing.
00:00:48
Speaker
In a moment, we'll hear Kim read a man-carrying thing for us.
Guest Introduction: Kim Andrews
00:00:53
Speaker
But before we get to Stevens, let me tell you a little bit more about our guest today, Kim Andrews. Kim is an assistant professor of English at the University of Ottawa.
00:01:04
Speaker
and she's the author of a book that's been creating some buzz in our circles, I think, safe to say, recently published, The Academic Avant Garde, Poetry in the American University, which is, it was published by Johns Hopkins University Press and is, given what I know of what's, of the work and the research and the writing that's gone into it, it's going to be an important book.
00:01:35
Speaker
in lots of ways for many readers, and I am very eager to dive into it more fully. But Kim is not just a scholar, she's also a poet. She's the author of two volumes of poetry, one called A Brief History of Fruit from the University of Akron Press, and that's just such a wonderful title, and a beautiful book, and a book called Between, which came out from Finishing Line Press,
00:02:04
Speaker
Kim is the winner of the Akron Prize for Poetry, New Women's Voices Award, the Ralph Cohen Prize for Criticism, and a development grant from the ACLS. And her essays and scholarship have appeared in such publications as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporaries at Post 45,
00:02:28
Speaker
modernist cultures, new literary history. In fact, her piece of modernist cultures, I think, is the one that is addressed, at least in some ways addressed specifically to the poem that's at issue today. So certainly I'll put
00:02:46
Speaker
links to Kim's writing and information in the show notes so that you can access it more easily.
Kim's Recent Work and Interests
00:02:52
Speaker
Of course, you'll also find in the show notes a link to the text of the poem for today, which is short and easy to hold, I think, even in the device in your hand.
00:03:09
Speaker
Kim's creative work has appeared recently in such places as the Florida Review, the Asian American Literary Review, Poetry Northwest, and Crab Orchard Review.
00:03:22
Speaker
And, you know, I, as I was thinking about what else to tell you about, um, about Kimberly Kyouge Andrews today, I, you know, one line of thought that has impressed me so much, um, or one aspect of Kim's work that has impressed me so much is, you know, she has this kind of research interest
00:03:47
Speaker
in the intersection of two modes of thought or ways of being with respect to poetry, the academic, the scholarly, the critical. So we could make distinctions between those three things themselves, but put those all on one side for a moment. And the creative, the poetic, the practicing poet side on the other,
00:04:14
Speaker
The period that Kim writes about, which is a period that I've written about too, and a topic that I care greatly about is how these two streams, these two ways of thinking about poetry come together, and in particular come together, let's say in the middle of the 20th century in the United States or in the second half of the 20th century in the United States, and how that fact, the fact of poets entering the university,
00:04:41
Speaker
as a kind of primary site of their professional identification. What that fact has done to literary history and to poetic history, to our culture more broadly, to the extent that poetry has a place in our culture, and it does. And what I admire in particular about Kim's writing
00:05:03
Speaker
is the way that she is able to balance those two modes or impulses in her own work.
Balancing Scholarship and Creativity
00:05:12
Speaker
So on the one hand, the project of knowing that one traditionally thinks of as belonging in the academy, the project of research and of scholarship,
00:05:28
Speaker
And as she pursues that line of thought without giving up a kind of careful and nuanced and creative attention to the way poems work, the way poems often resist our attempts to know them,
00:05:43
Speaker
and the aesthetic experience that poems can provide. I'm thinking of moments like I know I mentioned that Kim had a piece in the Los Angeles Review of Books that was on the poet John Ashbury on learning to read with John Ashbury.
00:06:03
Speaker
And there's a moment in that essay where she talks about Ashbury's gentleness and his bashfulness with respect to, well, a kind of project of discovery or of an attempt to know something.
Comparing Poetic Styles: Ashbury vs. Stevens
00:06:20
Speaker
And it's just such a lovely and dead right evocation for my money of what makes Ashbury
00:06:28
Speaker
both endearing and different in some ways from, I think at that moment in the essay, Kim is actually comparing Ashbury to the poet that we'll be talking about today, Wallace Stevens, who is clearly an important poet in Ashbury's kind of prehistory, but a very different poet in many ways from him too. Or I think about the essay that the article that Kim wrote in New Literary History on the poet, Jory Graham, and
00:06:58
Speaker
the teaching of creative writing. So that's an essay about how George Graham's career intersects with the kind of pedagogy of creative writing and the teaching practice of writing.
00:07:15
Speaker
that kind of historical observation that Kim makes gives her a direct line into some of what makes Jory Graham a poet I love and a poet that I want to read and a person whose thoughts I want to engage with. So this is just to say that in Kim, we have a perfect guest on today to talk about this poem, which I think sits at the heart of this kind of
00:07:42
Speaker
question, that is, of how poetry comes together with the study of poetry in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. So today we'll be talking about Wallace Stevens' man-carrying thing, and we have Kimberly Kiyoge Andrews on the podcast to do it. Kim, how are you doing today?
00:08:04
Speaker
I am doing really well. Thank you so much for that super generous introduction. Come on. It makes me sound way more comprehensive than I feel. But I'm glad that you found that in my work. Well, comprehensiveness.
00:08:18
Speaker
will come or probably should only come over the years. And one wouldn't want to be prematurely comprehensive. But yes, it all feels like it's coming together so beautifully in your work. And I want to congratulate you on the publication of the book. Thank you so much.
00:08:39
Speaker
This feels like a supremely Stephenian moment, and I don't know if it's gonna be audible on my microphone, but rolling past my house right now, and maybe it's deciding to park right outside of my house, is an ice cream truck.
Exploring Stevens' Unique Blend of Poetry
00:08:53
Speaker
Amazing.
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah, so Stephen's right. Yeah. Well, I know the guy who drives it. He's kind of Emperor like, yeah. So for those of you who don't know, Stephen's, well, Stephen's is such a fascinating poet because on the one, I mean, for so many reasons, but one of them is that on the one hand, he, you know, if you read certain poems by Stevens, he seems so austere and sort of intellectual and abstract.
00:09:17
Speaker
And then there are other Stevens poems that you read, you know, that get at what, well, it's what he said in a letter famously about the Emperor of Ice Cream poem that what he liked about it was that it gets at the essential godliness of poetry. Yes. And there is such a crazy thing for Stevens to say, I think, in the in the Stevens that we typically know.
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, so there is this kind of earthy, and these are Stevensian terms I realize as I'm using them, but there's this sort of earthy side to him that is like a sensual poet and all of that. Okay, but I'm getting ahead of things.
00:09:53
Speaker
Kim, I'm wondering if you and I, this conversation came together sort of serendipitously and all at once, and I put the question to you as I put it to so many of my guests, or almost all of them. There have been a couple of cases where I've really strong-armed people into talking about a poem that I want to talk about, but the idea of the podcast really is to invite a guest and to invite the guest to choose their own poem.
00:10:19
Speaker
And you got to this choice pretty darn quickly, I think. And I wonder, since it occurs to me, at least in the first place, that I take it that Stevens has a place in your book.
00:10:37
Speaker
but that really the book is focused on a somewhat later period in US poetry. So how did you get here? Like why this poem?
00:10:51
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, this poem, it occurred to me, and I guess I'll just be honest with listeners here in the way that I was honest with you, is that a lot of the poets that I deal with in my book anyway, write these really unwieldy sort of long poems, some of the reverend prose. And so when we're thinking about a podcast like this, I was like, Oh, man, like, what is what is something that I can talk about that
00:11:14
Speaker
fits in a, you know, you can read it quick, like read it comparatively quickly, and you can kind of talk about it like a whole. And man carrying thing occurred to me not only because it happens to be referenced in the book, but also because I think despite the fact that my scholarly work takes place almost entirely kind of in the second part of the 20th century and into the 21st, that
00:11:40
Speaker
there is something about Stevens that feels really foundational to my conception of what it is like to do intellectual work in poetry.
Philosophical Ideas in Stevens' Poems
00:11:51
Speaker
And so man carrying thing, you know, unlike some, you know, this sort of tendency in Stevens to do this kind of philosophizing happens at length, obviously, in his longer poems or his, you know, notes on a Supreme Fiction.
00:12:06
Speaker
The man carrying thing I think is like, you know, it's what, seven couplets. He gets a lot of that same work done. And it's also such an interesting poem in the way that it encapsulates, again, in a really short space, a lot of the sort of thematic stuff that he, thematic, but also the imagistic, insofar as the poem has images, which I guess we'll talk about later. Yeah, yeah. We'll want to talk about that. It's an interesting question.
00:12:33
Speaker
Yeah, that he he brings up over and over and over again. And so I'm not a Stevens scholar. I'm not even I'm not even a modernist. And so my range of reference regarding Stevens, I think might be I fear that it might be a little narrow. But Stevens, you know, nevertheless, I continue to be an ardent Stevens supporter, maybe to my own detriment, I don't know.
00:12:56
Speaker
Maybe there's also an opportunity here or a responsibility we have to lay some further cards on the table, namely that you and I share an educational path, at least to some extent. That is, we got our PhDs from the same university, Yale University, which
00:13:19
Speaker
though we didn't overlap there. It's sort of hard to be a poetry person at Yale and not to have Stevens matter quite a lot to you and maybe in an outsized way to people
00:13:33
Speaker
I mean, I guess the only reason I bring it up, Kim, is because I know you have this interest in, you know, institutions of higher education and the ways in which they've shaped poetry in the second half of the 20th century. And Yale and maybe Harvard to some extent seem like places where Stevens has a kind of outsized influence, whereas in other places, famously, Stevens is less significant. He is less significant. Well, and the funny thing about, you know, obviously he
00:14:03
Speaker
lived in Hartford, but was in New Haven a lot. I mean, he's just such a Connecticut poet. It's interesting that you say that though, because I think that was one of those things and I kind of I felt like I was perhaps a particularly like oblivious graduate student, but it only did occur to me later that it would have been really difficult to spend
00:14:22
Speaker
six or seven years in New Haven and not wind up thinking about Stevens. I just didn't think I was doing it at the time. I thought it was a choice that made sense thematically as opposed to just me being in New Haven for years. Sure. Yeah. Nobody wants to think that they've...
00:14:40
Speaker
that their choices have been made for them. And I'm being glib here. I don't mean to suggest that yours were. I know plenty of people who've lived in New Haven and who don't care about Stevens. But nevertheless, I think it's hard to be in the English department that we were in.
00:15:00
Speaker
That's right. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, maybe we can think about that some more as we go on, but we probably shouldn't get much further without giving our audience a chance to listen to the
Publication Context for 'Man Carrying Thing'
00:15:11
Speaker
poem. So it's quite a short poem. As we've said before, I want to alert people to that again so that you don't miss it as Kim is about to read it. And remember also, of course, that you can look on to the text of the poem and the link that I provide.
00:15:29
Speaker
Kim, would you read Man Carrying Thing for us? Absolutely. Man Carrying Thing. The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. Illustration. A prune figure in winter evening resists identity. The thing he carries resists the most necessities sense.
00:15:55
Speaker
accept them then as secondary parts not quite perceived of the obvious whole uncertain particles of the certain solid the primary free from doubt things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow out of a storm we must endure all night out of a storm of secondary things a horror of thoughts that suddenly are real
00:16:22
Speaker
We must endure our thoughts all night until the bright obvious stands motionless and cold. Kim, thanks so much. So that's man-carrying thing.
00:16:42
Speaker
As you, I think, mentioned earlier on, and for people maybe who aren't looking at it, the poem is in couplets. Maybe that's something that we'll want to talk about at some point, think about why. I mean, they're not rhyming couplets, though
00:16:57
Speaker
maybe they do things like rhyme at times. So okay, we can come back to that. I guess also maybe just useful for people who really know nothing at all about Stevens. Worth it to say we've been talking about him as a 20th century poet, and it's true that he wrote his poetry.
00:17:18
Speaker
published his poetry in the 20th century, but Stevens was born in the 19th century, born in 1879, lived to 1955, lived mostly in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was famously not only a poet, but an executive at an insurance company at the Hartford accident and indemnity company, as I think it was then called. This
00:17:45
Speaker
Poem, Man Carrying Thing, was first published in book form in Transport to Summer.
00:17:52
Speaker
which came out towards the end of Stevens's life in 1947. So maybe that places our listeners a little more precisely in Stevens's life. But when I said before, you know, while I was introducing you that this is a poem that has knocked around in my head for all these years and that it's a poem that I think about as a kind of point of reference and thinking about poetry more broadly,
00:18:23
Speaker
really what I had in mind was its first sentence, which is, I mean, it's so aphoristic that Stevens reappropriated it as an aphorism. Actually, I'm not sure if that's the right order, if it was first in the poem and then in his Adagio, which is this sort of collection of one-liners, basically.
00:18:48
Speaker
But that line, the poem must resist the intelligence. And for people who aren't looking, there's a line break comes at that word. The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. So, you know, I don't think we have necessarily when we read poems to begin with the first line, but in this case, I think one really ought to.
00:19:11
Speaker
What is it that, like, help us understand some of the complexities that are at work, Kim, in the first line and a half?
Interpreting 'Resist the Intelligence'
00:19:21
Speaker
It's almost the first couplet, but interestingly not quite the entire first couplet of the poem. It's the first sentence of the poem. It's the first sentence of a poem that actually only contains
00:19:33
Speaker
like four sentences, right? There's a couple of short sentences in the middle of the poem is like a big long sentence, and then there's short sentences at the end again, or a short sentence at the end again. But the funny thing about the first stanza of this poem is that it contains a line break right after the intelligence that seems
00:19:57
Speaker
like a gimmick, you know, the must resist the intelligence. And then there's like the gotcha line break gotcha almost successfully. And so that turn, there's a kind of double turn we're doing in the line break, and then we're doing it with the thought. And one of the things that's interesting to me about those, that first sentence is the way that it can be read in two separate ways, depending on how you take intelligence, which is to say that I've always read it,
00:20:27
Speaker
in terms of the poem must resist the intelligence of the poet almost successfully. So in order to write poetry, you must resist your own intelligence almost successfully. But the more classic reading of the poem is the poem must resist the intelligence of the reader almost successfully. That's the more I think standard reading. I have this weird heterodox reading of the first
00:20:51
Speaker
Okay, well, I'm happy to play like boring straight man. Regular reading. Yeah, right. So let's maybe start with the more boring reading and work our way up to your more interesting one. But just so for people who aren't quite
00:21:11
Speaker
apprehending what you called the double turn of the line break and the thing that's happening with the syntax of the sentence. Maybe with that first reading in mind, walk us through it a bit, Kim. So what should we take from it if that's the reading we're following?
00:21:29
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And it's not the more boring reading. I think it just is the one that seems more obvious to people and clearly did not seem more obvious to me. And I don't know whether that's because I'm a poet or what. Yeah, it's so interesting. The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. In that reading, thinks of the poem as an object that is meeting the reader
00:21:57
Speaker
right, in some kind of imaginary sense, in some sort of imaginary space rather. And the poem is performing a kind of work on the reader, but the reader is also trying to do something to the poem. So when you come as a reader to the text, what is it that we do to text? Now, obviously, we're, you know, two professors talking to another, so we have a really specific sense of what we do when we come to texts.
00:22:23
Speaker
Um, and one of the interesting things about this being a later poem of Stevens is that this would have been, I think either during or after the period when he was really thinking about, you know, creating the poetry chair at Harvard or whatever. He was, he had a lot of discourse with like academic readers as it were. And so I think there is this sense that poems meet these readers and they have to kind of fight with them.
00:22:51
Speaker
a little bit because there's this sense in which the reader is going to try to pull something out of the poem that's going to try to encapsulate or try to say what the poem means, like I'm making air quotes with my hands. We heard it, I think. We heard those air quotes, right? We heard the air quotes. The poem has to resist that, but not quite. It has to let something in. It has to give something up.
00:23:19
Speaker
to the reader that isn't merely impressionistic. Yeah. So let's wait. Yeah, that's great. And let's stay with this for a minute longer, at least, because a couple
Temporal Aspects of Stevens' Poetry
00:23:33
Speaker
of things. One thing that I just would want to observe, and I don't know when he wrote the poem, I have to say, but if it was published in 47, so let's say it couldn't have been written too long before that, since by that point in his career, he was publishing fairly regularly.
00:23:50
Speaker
you know, it's more or less contemporary with a kind of change in the way poetry was being talked about in universities. And what I have in mind here is the development of the new criticism, you know, in the late, you know, well, it depends on how you date the kind of prehistory of the new criticism, but let's say sort of firmly in place in American universities in a way that Stevens would have noticed
00:24:15
Speaker
by the late 30s, you know, by the mid to late 30s. And the new criticism for people who aren't familiar with the term and, you know, this would be a whole other podcast to really, you know, series of conversations to get into the various things that term might be taken to indicate.
00:24:34
Speaker
I think an accurate enough thumbnail version of it is that the new criticism informs indeed the kind of project that this podcast is still doing, which is to say the practice of close reading
00:24:49
Speaker
whereby you take a poem and perhaps if you're doing new criticism in the most orthodox sense, which isn't what the podcast does because this podcast swerves left and right in all kinds of ways, but you'd really only be paying attention to the poem, to the definitions of the words in the poem. You'd be moving line by line through it.
00:25:14
Speaker
and you'd be trying to through some kind of display of your own ingenuity or wit or intelligence to extract from it some kind of meaning or more often the case some kind of ambiguity or multiple sets of meanings or something. And yet also a kind of unity, right? Like that was the big thing about the American New Critics in particular was thinking about thematic unity and like the poem is like a whole new thing.
00:25:44
Speaker
That's right. That's right. Which is why, you know, for the new critics, the kind of preferred kind of verbal artifact, and that's a term they would have used to take on with that method is like the short lyric poem, the kind of poem you had to choose for this podcast for some of the same reasons, because like the scene of the new criticism was just as often the classroom as it was
00:26:10
Speaker
the essay or the article or what have you or the book. That was developed as a pedagogical method. It was developed precisely in order to do things with poems and classrooms.
00:26:23
Speaker
So now I want to think, sort of keeping still on the track of this more kind of commonplace, I won't call it boring, but way of reading that first line and a half, which is to say the poem is resisting the intelligence of a reader, let's say, almost successfully. If I heard you write Kim, your way of interpreting the word almost, which is the first word of the second line of the poem,
00:26:54
Speaker
And Stevens is the kind of poet who for whatever it's worth is still like, he likes to capitalize his lines. He does. And he comes at a moment where poets don't have to do that anymore, but he does. Yes. It's a kind of, is this one of the reasons why people associate Ashbury with Stevens? Cause Ashbury also like insistently did that despite the fact that nobody else seemed to be doing it. I think probably lots of reasons, but okay, we'll come back to that. Okay. Anyway, anyway, sorry. You, if I was hearing you right, Kim, you were taking the word almost to mean,
00:27:24
Speaker
Well, the reader wants something from the poem. The poem, almost like a koi mistress or whatever, is like holding the reader off at arm's length, resisting his advances. Sorry, I say his because I offered the koi mistress scenario, but resisting the reader's advances.
00:27:53
Speaker
But it's almost successful in your way of reading it because something of the poem can't hold itself off, that the reader will apprehend some part of the poem.
00:28:08
Speaker
And it occurs to me that there might be other ways of taking the almost too, like it might be, in other words, that the resistance works for a while until it doesn't work at all anymore. That is the almost might not be, I don't know if it's quite spatial in the first sense, but something like that. Whereas in second sense, it's temporal, right? It's like, I can hold you off and hold you off and hold you off. And then finally, you overwhelm my defenses.
00:28:33
Speaker
Right. Yeah. So, so was I here? Is that, you know, I guess, what do you think of that? No, I think that that's, I mean, that's probably the better reading, actually. I think those things can coexist in that, like, you know, even well, or maybe not coexist, but, but
00:28:50
Speaker
that there is a point before everything collapses where you have this kind of like back and forth where the poem is still resisting, but the reader sort of sense of it is sort of starting to become clear. There's that kind of like back and forth moment in that kind of temporal progression that you're talking about that makes a lot of sense to me. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah. So you got a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, and then... And then... Yeah. And I mean, I think
00:29:16
Speaker
The only thing I'd say about the sort of the full end of the temporal reading is that I don't think you ever get well. It's hard to say I don't I don't know whether or not you get to a point where like the poem just sort of opens itself up completely to the intelligence. And that's I think maybe part of where my reading comes in, which is where you have this, you know, this kind of very melancholy back and forth between what
00:29:46
Speaker
what we can think and what we can know. Oh, yeah. And what we say or write. Yeah. And how what we think and what we can know makes itself known only ever incompletely in language. Okay. So this does bring us to your way of reading those first two lines. So now let's talk about, yeah, yeah, no, I want to hear you think about that. I mean, I guess some of what invites
00:30:14
Speaker
your first way of reading, since I suppose you're willing to entertain the possibility that it could go either way, some of what invites that possibility is Stevens' kind of abstract way of speaking at the beginning of this poem anyway. The poem must resist the intelligence. I mean, he's not
00:30:38
Speaker
Because that language feels so abstract, it sort of makes it available, I think, for taking it from one end of the telescope or the other. But so what would it mean for the poem to resist the intelligence of the poet almost successfully? Yeah, this to me, I don't know, maybe listeners will find this to be like a completely implausible reading of these lines. But for me, the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. There's a kind of mythos of
00:31:07
Speaker
poetic composition that I think obviously very much persists today, which is a kind of muse style scene of composition. And the muse style means literally something else is just speaking through you, right? So you're not a composer so much as you are just kind of a mouthpiece. And so the poem as a kind of type of inspiration
00:31:33
Speaker
doesn't really require thinking, it requires expressing in a way. And maybe we can talk about this later, because I think one of the things that's so interesting about Stevens is how inexpressive he is, actually. And in that reading of what writing poetry entails, there's almost no intelligence involved at all. It's this inspirational act
00:32:01
Speaker
And there's part of Stevens that I think is quite enamored of that idea, that kind of muse-like idea. But he wrestled- The poet who's inspired by a muse isn't an intelligent poet, right? That poet is just sort of a medium. And it's not necessarily, I don't want that to be pejorative, right? It's just, we're talking about two different faculties here. Sure.
00:32:25
Speaker
And so, you know, I mean, you can make it perjorative, I think, you know, in my less generous moments, I do. But I think in this case, it's like, no, if you have this sort of the muse model is no, you are not a, quote, intelligent being you are yet you are an inspired one. And in fact, your intelligence might get in the way. Indeed, which is exactly where you find the beginning of this poem. The poem must resist the intelligence in order to allow the sort of kind of pure expression to sort of do its thing. And then you have the infamous line break.
00:32:54
Speaker
almost successfully. And I think one of the things that makes me, you know, partial to that, this reading of the first part of this poem is because you see this everywhere in Stevens, his sort of old school romantic desire towards a kind of expressive quality in poetry and what we wind up with, which is maybe some of the most obviously abstractly philosophical poetry
00:33:21
Speaker
of the 20th century, where he just can't stop himself from thinking. He's just constantly thinking. And this isn't ours poetica in a lot of ways, right? I mean, this this poem falls into the genre of like poetry about poetry. And so he's already kind of doomed from the start, even by starting with this aphorism, he's already screwed himself, like he already has the intelligence that his his poetry is, you know, that he is, I think, disingenuously trying to trying to resist.
00:33:50
Speaker
I see.
Inspiration vs. Intellectual Control in Stevens
00:33:52
Speaker
So even taking your way of reading, which I don't, I mean, I'm totally persuaded by it. And you've changed for me the way I will read and think about this poem, because I think you've put your finger on something that's so right. It must have been a preoccupation of his.
00:34:16
Speaker
and must, you know, not to zoom too far out of the frame, but just for a moment, must be a preoccupation more broadly of poets in our time who might often feel like they know too much or like knowledge or intelligence might get in the way of their, I mean, I mean that in particular as poets have, you know, are all in universities now are almost all.
00:34:39
Speaker
But to come back to the poem, if we didn't have the almost successfully, but if it were just, the poem must resist the intelligence, then you would have to take it as a failure to live up to its own standards because
00:35:04
Speaker
you know, there. Yeah, right. But to say that, so to say that it must resist the intelligence almost successfully, if we take it as like, that's the poet who must resist the intelligence that almost successfully, then I then the sense I'm getting from you is that, you know, Stevens there might be telling himself something like, well, you have to try and you will fail.
00:35:29
Speaker
But it will be important to try nonetheless, because that will change something, you know, that will enable or unlock some aspect of what, you know, passes for inspiration by the muse in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that that's right. I think it's it's a it's a remnant, maybe remnants the wrong words. I think it was quite a strong line of desire and Stevens throughout his entire
00:35:56
Speaker
sort of poetic life is that it is a romantic desire, I think, like capital R, romantic, this, you know, even if you take, even if you remember to read the last part of Wordsworth's sentence about, you know, spontaneous overflow of feelings that have been recollected in, you know, that have... In tranquility. In tranquility, right? Recollected in tranquility. So like, you have to actually, you have to think about them.
00:36:25
Speaker
So even the romantics, I think, you know, knew better, but there is definitely a sense, and you get this from Stevens' letters too about, you know, when he was at university, like he was like, ah, I hate the classroom, I really like sitting around the woods. And so there is this deeply, I think, even if it's sort of like slightly falsely, romantic sensibility about Stevens, but he's constantly getting, he's constantly kind of like out
00:36:52
Speaker
outthinking himself or overthinking himself. You're right. It's totally a romantic mode. I mean, I was thinking of the line that Keats writes in a letter where he says that he's been thinking that if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all. But then he immediately follows that statement by saying, and you can see from what I'm doing right now, how far I am from the center of that remark. Right.
00:37:21
Speaker
that's an ideal which one fails to meet. And that failure is the sort of predicament out of which the poem that one has written has come. It's the generative predicament, right? It is absolutely the generative predicament. It's the generative predicament of like basically Stevens' whole of would be my argument.
00:37:40
Speaker
Oh, that's great. Okay. And in this case, we move right from that kind of famous first sentence, that line and a half. And then as I was saying before, before we get to the second couplet, so with the last word of the first couplet is the word illustration.
00:37:58
Speaker
colon and then line break and stanza break. So then what follows, I suppose, is an illustration. Well, I don't know. Illustration in what sense, Kim, right? So illustration might mean
00:38:12
Speaker
like an illustration in a children's book, it might mean a philosophical kind of example. Yeah, e-g. Yeah, right. So how do you take that word and how do you take what follows the colon? Since at some point we're going to have to move on beyond those two lines of the poem. Yeah, no, it's true. Illustration, I take relatively simply to be the kind of illustration you would find in a philosophical text. It's definitely an example given.
00:38:40
Speaker
Um, the thing that's interesting about this poem is that then you have a couple of break, right? So illustration, colon, and then you have a bunch of white space. So you're like, okay, what's going to happen next? And what you get is just a reiteration of the title kind of you get a guy and you get a thing. And so it's not illustrating much of anything other than the
00:39:12
Speaker
other than the inability of the poet to get back to that sort of romantic sense of, you know, maybe like describing nature or being very close to nature and language or being able to describe the external world accurately in language. And so you have this moment where it's like illustration, a broom figure in winter evening. So you get you actually figure in winter evening. So that's fine that you get you have this like moment of
00:39:41
Speaker
you can picture that kind of but then the rest of the line it says it resists so you have to resist again line break identity resist identity so it's like okay we can we could see the figure but you he doesn't resolve in anything and then the thing he carries resists again you have a line break so both lines of the second couplet end in the word resist resists next the most necessitous sense which is a much kind of um
00:40:08
Speaker
more debulous thing that maybe we can talk about because I've never really known what to do with the sort of most necessitous sense other than the kind of, again, romantic concept of necessity, capital N necessity. It's almost an impossible phrase to say to the most necessitous sense. It's like a real tongue twister of all those S's and T's and all those sounds that are produced there. But
00:40:37
Speaker
Right. So you said that illustration here must be a kind of example in a kind of philosophical argument.
Imagery in 'Man Carrying Thing'
00:40:47
Speaker
And yet it is also kind of an image, as you suggested, right? So a broom figure in winter evening resists identity. Am I hearing you right that at least the one kind of sense or maybe a primary sense in which to take that resisting of identity is to mean rather
00:41:08
Speaker
that this man remains anonymous. Like you said, he doesn't resolve into a kind of clearer image or something. Like we can't pin down his identity. Is that right? Something like that? Yeah. And so that the image winds up being a kind of stand-in almost. It's not, you know,
00:41:32
Speaker
When I tell, okay, so I'm going to digress here into a sort of pedagogical story because obviously I spend a lot of time teaching students how to write poems. And one of the things that I'm constantly telling them is that you have to use like, quote unquote, real images. Right.
00:41:46
Speaker
And there was like, what do you mean by real images? And I'm like, well, it has to be sort of specific to something that you've, it doesn't have to be, but like, you know, a lot of poetry is based on specific images that are sort of particular to your own observation, right? So if it is a cup of tea, like we need to see sort of your cup of tea. And here, you have the poet saying, okay, a broom figure in winter evening,
00:42:15
Speaker
is sort of refusing to become real in that specific sense, right? And in that, like, it's just, it's just a figure. And so it is, yeah, and so it doesn't mean that we have to name the guy Bob or whatever, but simply that you have, yeah, Bob, Bob the Baroon figure, that you have the poet sort of moving towards
00:42:44
Speaker
specificity of imagery and then stopping themselves, right? Resist identity, the thing he carries. Again, you never know what the thing is. It could be anything. The thing he carries resists the most necessities sense, right? And so like that kind of refuses to sort of do what it's supposed to do, which is cohere into an image that can then, I guess if we go back to the front of the poem, I know you didn't want to do this, but that refuses to cohere into something that can meet the reader
00:43:15
Speaker
and be like, you know, here's something specific that then you can interpret in all of its sort of imagistic fullness. Uh-huh. I see, right. So the reader here is like the figure in a movie, like a spy movie or something who sees a photograph of something and wants to keep like enhancing the photograph. Right, it just refuses to. Yeah, you're just not going to get a high-res enough
00:43:42
Speaker
image to be able to perform that act of identification. I guess the thing that I wonder is, as we talked about at great length, so we don't need to necessarily rehearse that here, in the first line and a half, that kind of resistance was almost successful. Whereas the resistances that are named in the third and fourth lines of the poem, either their total or the almost successful nature of them is left implied.
00:44:11
Speaker
or something. Yeah, right. And that's a good point, right? It's like either they're almost successful, or they're completely successful. And it doesn't, it doesn't, it's not clear.
00:44:20
Speaker
Yes. So and then, sorry, just because it has always stuck out like a sore thumb to me and maybe does to our readers too, maybe feels like a characteristically Stephenian kind of moment. When he calls the figure a Broun figure, Broun, B-R-U-N-E, which, you know, Stevens was a poet who thought about French
00:44:47
Speaker
poetry in the French language now and then or often enough. So that would be like a French adjectival form of brown, maybe the brown figure, but then why use the French word and why is the figure brown to begin with? And I know, and maybe this is a place just to sort of flag also for our listeners that
00:45:11
Speaker
You know, Stevens is a poet who in some ways seems very kind of central to the story of American poetry or of English language poetry, in particular in the 20th century. And increasingly over the years, Stevens has been a poet
00:45:29
Speaker
whose legacy has rankled for, I think, good reason, readers who have objected to the racism that we find in certain poems by Stevens and in certain letters and prose statements of his. And of course, when you detect racism in its explicit forms in one place, you suspect that it is a more pervasive kind of
00:45:59
Speaker
ideology that undergirds things in which it isn't announcing itself. So is this figure brown in some kind of racialized way, or how should we understand the brownness of the figure in the third line? Kim, do you have a way of thinking about that?
00:46:19
Speaker
I think that it is absolutely important that folks are reckoning with Stevens' long history of explicit racism. And the fact that the brownness in this poem gets attached to a human being is definitely one of those things that seems to announce itself as something that could be read in that way, particularly because the broom figurine we're treating resists identity.
00:46:49
Speaker
the brown figure refuses to coalesce into a person. Right. But isn't that that kind of stock figure? It is a stock figure, right? Like, you know, and I don't, my, I guess, hesitation there is that I don't, I haven't figured out a way in which that helps us read the poem in any way that makes any sense. I think for
00:47:15
Speaker
me, that sort of that Bruin figure. And this is where I am consonant with. So Timothy Donnelly at the Poetry Foundation did a long reading of this poem. And he notes that Bruin is obviously French for brown, but also La Bruin, like as a noun, I think it's like, like the dusk, maybe. It's like kind of like a twilight
00:47:42
Speaker
sort of thing. And so again, that that time of day where you kind of can't see anything very well, where your vision kind of goes. And again, it announces itself as a winter evening poem. And so I think that
00:47:56
Speaker
That just makes more sense, I think, than a kind of racialized reading of this line. Well, I wonder if we necessarily have to choose between those two possibilities. But there might be a sense in which the one thing is kind of giving Stevens license to do the other or something. But yeah, that idea of, well, I guess it brings us back to the resisting of the intelligence almost successfully of the sense of things kind of becoming indistinct or unnameable.
00:48:28
Speaker
In any case, as Stevens moves on here in the poem, we get this very long sentence,
00:48:37
Speaker
You know, sort of after he said that the broom figure resists identity and the thing he carries resists the most necessitous sense. I'm not sure I know really what to say about what the most necessitous sense is. I mean, maybe we can come back to that if we have something that occurs to us.
00:48:59
Speaker
And then he says, accept them then as secondary. And then there's this long parenthetical, which sort of spans, you know, six lines or something. The sentence itself is really tiny. Like most of it is in parentheses, which is, yeah. Right. So if we were to ignore the parentheses, that sentence would read, accept them then as secondary, a horror of thoughts that suddenly are real.
Thoughts and Reality in Stevens' Work
00:49:24
Speaker
which is fascinating, actually. But we can't, of course, in the end, ignore the parenthetical. And here it seems to me, Kim, like something, you know, like the title of the poem is almost like a, I wonder what you would say if a student turned in a poem with this title where you might, you know, at first, I mean, unless you, I mean, so let's say Stevens had never used the title, right? And you were seeing it for the first time.
00:49:52
Speaker
you might think either they're doing something clever or this is just a terrible title, like this is the title, you know, they may as well, you know, it's like when a student turns in their paper to me and it's called the title of the paper is like first paper, you know, it just seems right. Do something here like it's so it's almost like Mad Libs, like it wants you to fill in the more, you know, the more particular versions of those things within those parentheses. This is what I was trying to say.
00:50:23
Speaker
I'm getting the sense that there is like a really kind of...
00:50:27
Speaker
countervailing spirit in this poem, countervailing to the spirit of the title, in other words, and maybe of those first few lines, where suddenly the scene is quite vivid and moving and, I mean, moving in two senses, like there's motion, but also it has a kind of emotional heft to it. It sort of moves me. So it's been a while since we've heard the
00:50:55
Speaker
lines read aloud and for people who aren't looking, Kim, I'm just going to read that sentence as a whole and then ask you to say whatever you'd like to observe about it or whatever you're hearing in that sentence in the parentheses or whatever else. So here's the sentence, except them then a secondary, parts not quite perceived of the obvious whole,
00:51:20
Speaker
uncertain particles of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt, things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow, out of a storm we must endure all night, out of a storm of secondary things, a horror of thoughts that suddenly are real." So, Kim, what do you notice in that sentence? I don't know, start anywhere.
00:51:52
Speaker
I think your introduction was perfect in that contained in this parenthetical is the sort of most book a the most specifically evocative piece of imagery and be the place where Stevens kind of lets the emotional hammer of the poem drop, right? You have
00:52:14
Speaker
And both of those things come towards the end of the parenthetical. Things floating, and then you have this simile, right? So it's a simile, fine. But on the other half of the simile, like, and then you get this very specific image, the first hundred flakes of snow. That's so weirdly particular. It's so weird.
00:52:33
Speaker
So you imagine like exactly 100 flakes of snow sort of like floating around in the air. And this is of course what I, yeah, what I, what I tell my students to do is like, give me a hundred flakes of snow. Like I want not 99, not 101, but like a hundred flakes of snow. Except nobody in the real world measures snow in that way. Of course not. It is the strangest moment of, and so in a way. It's like an artifact. It's like almost like a snow globe or something, you know? Totally. Absolutely a snow globe.
00:53:01
Speaker
and absolutely is a product of the imagination, like, quote unquote, merely of the imagination. This is the major tension in the poem is that 100 flakes of snow is an impossible image and it's kind of the only image you get. And so then you get the, then the sort of pathos comes in. Out of a storm, we must endure all night. And so you get this sense of like this kind of temporal lengthening of the poem.
00:53:31
Speaker
Um, the hundred flakes of snow presage, like way more flakes of snow. And then you get the second part of the metaphor, which is, well, what are the flakes of snow was like, well, the flakes of snow, because it came out of my imagination because nobody counts to a hundred when they're looking at flakes of snow. The flakes of snow are in fact the secondary things. And the secondary things are poetic images, just full stop, like anything that you can try and pin down in language.
00:54:00
Speaker
what you're trying to pin down a language is like the totality of the sort of external world, you are constantly surrounded by a blizzard of images of the lizard of potential images. And you're kind of as a poet sort of sitting in there trying sitting there trying to endure this, and never really being able to pin them down. The broom figure resists identity, the thing he carries resists sensibility, like you can't you can't do it. The only thing you can do is imagine counting counting 100 flakes of snow.
00:54:31
Speaker
And that sort of, you know, the horror of thoughts. I like the way that you read that, because instead of it being like a horror of thoughts, like, as in, like, I have a horror of thoughts, you were like a horror of thoughts, like a herd of cows. Yeah, I couldn't stop hearing it that way in my own head. And so it's funny to me that you picked up on that. But yeah, I was thinking of it as like a murder of crows or something like that. Yeah. You know, and so like a group of thoughts is called a horror, which when you are a deeply
00:54:59
Speaker
philosophical poet means that you're kind of running scared all the time. And I think, again, that's the generative force in Stevens. But we should say what that phrase more plausibly means. No, we shouldn't.
00:55:15
Speaker
It would mean like being like that one has a horror of sorry, I'm just repeating the phrase now, but sorry, we're taking the of in two different senses, right? Right. Yeah. Like a fear of thoughts like that is a kind of a stance of recoiling with respect to the presence of thoughts. Well, and the rest of the line is important, right? That's suddenly are real. Yeah. And
00:55:44
Speaker
You know, I think of that Ashbury line that you and I have discussed, I think, in a different context, which is the snow that came when we wanted it to snow. Yeah. Yeah, it's as though you're like, OK, sorry. The poetic image has somehow, through some act of magic, conjured a reality that one then lives in.
00:56:09
Speaker
Right. Yeah. And that that you're I don't know, maybe maybe I'm going off the rails here, but like the idea that thoughts could supplant that. Right. The thoughts that suddenly are real. So like that's where you live now. Like that's, you know. Like a careful what you wish for kind of policy. Indeed. Indeed. Or the sort of recognition that the act of poetry is always rendering the external world through the mind.
00:56:37
Speaker
into language. And so the reality of poetry is the reality of language, which sounds, of course, like a deeply obvious thing to say. But when you have Stevens is kind of romantic sensibilities, like that is a kind of horror. It's like, oh, man, I'm just like constantly putting something between myself and anything that I want to describe. And we're all putting stuff between ourselves and things that we want to describe, because we have to be able to describe those things in language.
00:57:02
Speaker
you know, it's sorry, it makes me think of something that's only sort of tangentially related, but the fact and who knows if it, I mean, I don't know, I shouldn't say who knows, I should just say, I don't know if it's true, but I take it that it is that when here's reported from psychologists, which is that the way memory works is like, you're not retrieving a memory from some data bank in which you've stored it, you're like, redescribing each time. And so each time you're getting in, each time you remember a kind of beloved memory,
00:57:33
Speaker
you're in fact encountering, you're recreating it and it's in one way of thinking, getting further and further from the thing itself, which is a really more, I mean, so it makes you want to not remember the thing, you know, because- To try and keep it truthful in some way. Right. And you know, and so for Stevens, you know, who's always thinking about the relationship between the imagination and reality,
00:58:01
Speaker
Um, you know, he, he has that line somewhere where he says, you know, he's talks about the, the, the quote unquote, the necessary angel. And he talks about the angel of reality and the angel of imagination. And he says most I'm paraphrasing badly here, but I think I'm getting the gist of it right. He says that like,
00:58:18
Speaker
People think that the necessary angel is the angel of the imagination, and 9 out of 10 days they're right, but it's the 10th day that counts or something. You know, Stevens wants to come back to the real. But here it's as though the thoughts have become suddenly real, and that is itself a horrifying development.
00:58:45
Speaker
that we have to endure. So that gets us to the last couplet of the poem. I was about to say that then you immediately get to the last couplet, because, you know, I mean, one of the things that's so interesting to me about this poem is the way that it, you know, we probably won't have time to discuss the sort of like the couplet form, but there's so much repetition. We have a little bit of time. Yeah, feel free to, you know, share some thoughts on that. Yeah, there's so much repetition in this poem that ultimately doesn't have any images in it. And so you have this like, the must endure all night, we must endure our thoughts all night.
00:59:15
Speaker
Um, you know, the obvious hold, the bright obvious, there's just, there's so much like weird recursivity. And so you get out of the parenthetical horror of thoughts that suddenly are real. And then you get to the last couplet in which he basically just, it almost verbatim repeats the thing that he just said, which is we must endure our thoughts all night.
00:59:36
Speaker
Um, it's the thing I tell students not to do in their, in their writing is to just don't just repeat. Yeah. Don't tell me something new at the end, but you're right. And, and it's so interesting because in both of those cases, he's, he's repeating things from, it's like he's extracting them from the parentheses and now they're in the.
00:59:53
Speaker
you know, I'm imagining like a kind of sentence being diagrammed here. They're up at the highest point, you know, at the main kind of trunk of the sentence. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And now they're suddenly in the sort of the maiden body of the poem. But of course, he's not, you know, somebody writing a five paragraph essay. And so he does the inconclusion move, we must endure our thoughts all night until and then you get this confounding last line.
01:00:21
Speaker
until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold, which along with the first line of the poem is I think one of his more well-known lines. And it's a really difficult line to know what to do with, as I sort of mentioned to you before we started this podcast.
01:00:44
Speaker
the most obvious reference here is to a poem that is in harmonium, in fact, an early poem in
Winter and Death in Stevens' Poetry
01:00:51
Speaker
harmonium. So one of the first poems that appears in Stevens' Oeuvre, The Snowman, and the last line of that. Which isn't like Frosty the Snowman. It's like a man made of snow somehow. Literally like just a guy made of snow, and just so that I don't misquote it,
01:01:11
Speaker
You know, the last stanza of that poem is for the listener who listens in the snow and nothing himself beholds nothing that is not there and then nothing that is. I can't think of these, these poems as separate, right? Main carrying thing always reminds me of the snowman. I think that
01:01:34
Speaker
This is something that I've wanted to talk about this whole time, so I'm glad I can bring it up now. I think that Stevens is one of our great poets of winter. He's just constantly... Now, obviously, we have academic discourse at Havana and the idea of order at Key West, and so sometimes he's obviously in the tropics as well, but I think where Stevens is at, his move's to Venzi, and it's always freezing out. And... And often, that sort of...
01:02:04
Speaker
that climate of his sort of pairs with the kind of the impulse towards abstraction. Absolutely. Right. And it's one of the reasons why I think like Stevens is a really people love to hate Stevens. I think for partially for this reason, he is a cold poet or like he seems like I think there are lots of ways in which you can read him as not being this way. I certainly do myself. But, you know, you read poems like The Snowman, you read poems like this and it's just it feels like a, you know,
01:02:34
Speaker
if you're not paying a lot of attention to that kind of the beauty and the deep conflictedness of those sort of that first hundred flakes of snow and the sort of we must endure the storm and then the we right we must endure the storm all night um if you kind of look at the sort of the the sort of general sense of something like man carrying thing it does seem like a like he's a little bit like a brain in a jar
01:02:59
Speaker
And so there is this kind of cold sensibility to him, the kind of cold calculating sense of what poetry is, what poetry should be. I am a poet of sort of propositions, et cetera, doubling down on the kind of enlightenment subjectivity thing, which is, as we all know, a kind of white man's subjectivity, the neutral body. And yeah, so I think that's one of the reasons why
01:03:27
Speaker
people don't like Stevens, but I personally, winter is my favorite season. So I, all this sort of like thinking about what the cold can do and what that kind of like. Now you're in Canada, forget Connecticut. Yeah. This is like the sort of joke line in the end of my bios, right? I'm an American living in Canada, but I'm actually enjoying the really cold winters. Is that there is, you know, I'm literally, I'm looking outside my window right now.
01:03:57
Speaker
And what I can see is like a 12 foot snowbank. Oh man. That is what I'm looking at is this huge white wall, but it's reflecting the sunlight, right? It's reflecting the sunlight into my room. It is making everything brighter. Um, and the way that a kind of that cold, you know, has like a kind of crystalline quality, um, is something that is very clearly near and dear to Steven's heart. And so you have this sort of bright, obvious standing motionless,
01:04:27
Speaker
in cold is I think rather than I think the classic, you know, reading of something like the snowman is this sort of like deep, you know, sort of cold rationale, like a man made of snow, like without an emotions or whatever. But the bright obvious standing motionless and cold I think for Stevens is an image of great beauty. Even if also terrifying.
01:04:49
Speaker
Well, something that's obvious etymologically, right? Doesn't it mean it's like stands in the way, right? It's sort of like, it also, I mean, it's interesting to me to hear you and moving, Kim, to hear you describe the beauty for you of winter. And I guess I admit that beauty must lie in the eye of the beholder because I don't see that beauty as a- I'm in the minority, I don't know.
01:05:17
Speaker
But, you know, and and it's interesting to hear you talk about Stevens as a, you know, the Stevens at his most divensian as being a winter poet. And I think that's right. But, you know, and then I'm immediately thinking of like summer Stevens, too. And what it brings me to is this other thought I've had off and on about poetry, which is that more than like winter poets and summer poets or spring poets and fall poets, sometimes I think there are like solstice poets and equinoxial poets.
01:05:44
Speaker
That is, there are poets of extreme states, and there are poets that are more interested in transitional states. And I think for me, Stevens is a real solstice poet. Absolutely. He likes that. And maybe the poet we just talked about on the last episode, James Schuyler, is a real equinox kind of poet, a poet of
01:06:05
Speaker
of smooth and subtle transition from one state to another because he's not an equinox poet, right? Skylar is a poet of the kind of like transitional season. Yeah, no, Skylar of equinox, right? Of the movement from, say, summer into fall. Oh, I see, right, right.
01:06:25
Speaker
or winter into spring, those kinds of middle state seasons, as I think of them, as opposed to like the big primary color seasons, which are the thing in all of its cold or all of its light.
01:06:39
Speaker
I also wonder if, and maybe this isn't to dispute your bringing the snowman into things because I think what I'm about to say might apply as well to that poem as to this, but I wonder if in the bright obvious standing motionless in the cold,
01:06:57
Speaker
I shouldn't leave out that word motionless because it helps me here. You never want to leave out evidence that helps you, listeners, is that there's some sort of reference being made here to death to a kind of
01:07:14
Speaker
And the word that ends the penultimate line in the poem is the word until, right? Which seems to me like, in some way grammatically like the word almost, right? It's like, there's a state of, the current state of affairs either temporally or otherwise is going to persist
01:07:43
Speaker
Until it doesn't. Until it doesn't, or it's going to almost do the thing that it does, but not quite. And in this case, you know, well, you know, there's one thing that will put an end to the horror of thoughts. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, this is, and we can bring this episode full circle by talking about the corpse and the shroud and the emperor of ice cream.
01:08:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's right. That's the end of imagery. Let B be finale of Seem. Right. And the finale of Seem, the B there is just death. Yeah. I think that's a brilliant reading of the last of the poem. And it makes total sense until the bright obvious, which is that B being finale of Seem is, in fact, not a lot of people. That's another one of those lines that's really easy to read incorrectly, which is the sort of like, you know,
01:08:42
Speaker
only in reality will be sort of satisfied. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. It's like once we're dead, once we language stops, we're dead. And I think that's absolutely here. The bright obvious, which is that, you know, you go back to that line, the, the storm of secondary things, right? We are, that's, that's the thing that's real. The thoughts that suddenly are real. And that the storm stops when it's motionless.
01:09:10
Speaker
Yeah, so listeners, you know, it's funny to me the way we've kind of ranged all over the place, but have also found ourselves in talking about the end of this poem, talking about these two early great poems of Stevens, which I think of as paired in their own way, but as a kind of
01:09:30
Speaker
northern Stevens and southern Stevens or something, the snowman and the emperor of ice cream. The emperor of ice cream, for those who don't know it, is a poem that seems to, I mean, it confuses a lot of readers right off the bat, but it's helpful to think of it as like the description of a funeral or something like, or instructions for a funeral. And I'll provide links to all of these poems with the newsletter that goes out with the episode.
01:09:59
Speaker
This has been a really wonderful conversation to have had with you, Ken, and I'm so glad we managed to make this happen. Can I ask you maybe to read the poem one more time so we can hear it one last time before all is said and done?
Concluding Reading of 'Man Carrying Thing'
01:10:18
Speaker
Yes, of course.
01:10:20
Speaker
This is something that I do kind of quasi for a living, so I'm more than happy to read again. Not quasi. Well, yeah, I mean, this is the problem with having like one, like I said, you know, like one foot in the analytical world and one foot in the sort of poetry writing world is I guess like half my job is reading poems out loud to an audience. The other half is reading about poems.
01:10:39
Speaker
Oh, but I can't let that go because that brings us to this other fascinating thing that we were talking about at the very beginning, which was like, we mean two things by read. Yes. Right? And you do both of them, right? Yes. You read your poems, but you also do readings of poems. Yep. Yeah, just constantly reading. And one of the things that I love so much about Stevens is that despite himself, he too is constantly, constantly reading.
01:11:07
Speaker
So here's man-carrying thing, one more time. Man-carrying thing. The poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. Illustration. A broom figure in winter evening resists identity. The thing he carries resists the most necessitous sense. Accept them, then, a secondary. Parts not quite perceived of the obvious whole. Uncertain particles of the certain solid.
01:11:37
Speaker
The primary free from doubt. Things floating like the first hundred flakes of snow. Out of a storm, we must endure all night. Out of a storm of secondary things. A horror of thoughts that suddenly are real. We must endure our thoughts all night until the bright obvious stands motionless in cold.
01:12:05
Speaker
Well, Kim, thank you so much for the conversation. Thank you for reading the poem again. Thank you. My pleasure. And thank you, dear listeners, for making it this far. We will have more conversations, exciting ones coming for you soon. Bye now.