From the first I was both attracted and repelled by different Stevens poems, sometimes by different parts of a single poem. I was attracted first by the music, by the intense familiarity yet strangeness of lines like
She sang beyond the genius of the sea
and
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang . . .
Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.1
The metrics and diction were familiar, that “high” tone at the intersection of Victorian and modern poetic English. But “The Idea of Order at Key West” offered me something absolutely new: a conception of a woman maker, singing and striding beside the ocean, creating her own music, separate from yet bestowing its order upon the meaningless plunges of water and the wind. This image entered me, in the 1950s, an era of feminist retrenchment and poetic diminishment, as an image of my tongue-tied desire that a woman’s life, a poet’s work, should amount to more than the measured quantities I saw around me.
Now grapes are plush upon the vines.
A soldier walks before my door.
The hives are heavy with the combs.
Before, before, before my door.
And seraphs cluster on the domes,
And saints are brilliant in fresh cloaks.
Before, before, before my door.
The shadows lessen on the walls.
The bareness of the house returns.
An acid sunlight fills the halls.
Before, before. Blood smears the oaks.
A soldier stalks before my door.2
If I first loved that poem for its sound, I later loved it for its soundings—its prescience, its concentrated fusion of fulfillment and disaster, autumn and war and death, the stripping down from combs full of honey to acid light, the figure of the soldier, unaccounted for, from the first couplet, so that right away you feel him there, only walking at first, but stalking by the end past the blood-smeared oaks. There are many poems of Stevens that have lasted for me in this way.
And there were others that, from the first, I found—and still find—irritating and alienating in tone, mere virtuosity carrying on at great length, like “The Comedian As the Letter C,” which begins:
Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil,
The sovereign ghost. As such, the Socrates
Of snails, musician of pears, principium
And lex. Sed quaeritur: is this same wig
Of things, this noncompated pedagogue,
Preceptor to the sea?3
I can allow that Stevens—disappointed husband of a beautiful woman, successful insurance lawyer, fugitive in the imagination—was shoring up around him a self-protective, intellectual wit, that his desperation must have needed the excess of virtuosity displayed in many of his poems. But it’s a voice of elegance straining against bleakness, renunciation, and truncation much of the time, ending suddenly and bitterly: So may the relation of each man be clipped.
Still, as a young woman, impatiently skimming the poem, I found passages that corresponded to my own moments of self-consciousness, of self-questioning: What was I really doing as a poet?
The book of moonlight is not written yet
Nor half begun, but, when it is, leave room
For Crispin, fagot in the lunar fire,
Who, in the hubbub of his pilgrimage
Through sweating changes, never could forget
That wakefulness or meditating sleep,
In which the sulky strophes willingly
Bore up, in time, the somnolent, deep songs . . .
How many poems he denied himself
In his observant progress, lesser things
Than the relentless contact he desired . . .4
Of the modern poets I read in my twenties, Stevens was the liberator. Yes: Stevens, whom I found so vexing and perplexing, so given sometimes to cake-decoration, affectations in French, yet also capable of shedding any predictable music to write poems like “Dry Loaf” or “The Dwarf,” which force you to hear music of their own, or The skreak and skritter of evening gone. It was Stevens who told me, in “Of Modern Poetry”:
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.5
I took this quite literally. It was he who said to me, Ourselves in poetry must take their place, who told me that poetry must change, our ideas of order, of the romantic, of language itself must change:
Throw away the lights, the definitions
And say of what you see in the dark
That it is this or it is that,
But do not use the rotted names.6
The last line in the Collected Poems is A new knowledge of reality.
I felt these were messages left along the trail for me. I was going on pure desire; I had no means of fathoming how life and work as a woman poet would force me to rethink ideas of order surrounding me and within me, ideas about scope and destiny, about the place of poetry in a life still so unrealized, so vaguely aware, so conventional. I was to carry Stevens with me into places neither of us could have foreknown, places as dense, implacable, and intricate as the desert at Joshua Tree.
•
In the last days I spent at Twentynine Palms, I thought I was coming down with ’flu. I ached, felt chilled at night; the desert wind seemed to blow across my bed. Mornings, I’d stand a long time in the hot shower, then make my instant coffee and sit on at the kitchenette table staring at the pines across the parking lot, hearing the United States flag whipping in the wind, an arrhythmic, riptide sound. Some days the desert was so dun, so coldly lit I could hardly bear it. My heart quailed and expanded under influences I couldn’t trace.
One evening I drove to an Italian restaurant on the strip to eat dinner, thinking to lift my spirits. I had lasagna, fries and salad, and a glass of ice-cold Chianti in a room otherwise occupied by a table of very young marines, teenagers, heads half-shaved (close over ears and necks, slightly longer on top). They had a bottle of wine, seemed out for a good time, but depressed, ill at ease with each other. I felt their physical strength—a terribly young, uninformed strength—were these kids descendants of European workers on the land, whose forefathers had been foot soldiers in war after war? Generations without education or control over the time and products of their labor?
The young recruits I saw that evening were all apparently white. At the motel, a weekend earlier, an African-American officer and his family had been swimming in the pool, later carried drinks to the patio. Our hosts had seemed to welcome them, but they were soon gone. Almost everyone I had seen hiking or rock climbing in the National Monument appeared to be white except for a Mexican family at one campsite among the rocks. Beyond the strip lay a kind of desert barrio of vaguely marked dirt roads leading to earth-colored shacks.
More than ever in my life I had been taking in the multivarious shadings of human life in the American landscape. Feeling how long whiteness had kept me from seeing that variety—or, in some places, noticing its lack—because whiteness—as a mindset—is bent only on distinguishing discrete bands of color from itself. That is its obsession—to distinguish, discriminate, categorize, exclude on the basis of clearly defined color. What else is the function of being white? The iris of actual light, the colors seen in a desert shower or rainbow, or in the streets of a great metropolis, speak for continuum, spectrum, inclusion as laws of life.
I have come, through many turnings of life and through many willing and reluctant mentors, to understand that there is no study of race—only of racism. It’s a bitter, violent, nauseating study, the
study of racism. Race itself is a meaningless category. But people have defined themselves as white, over and against darkness, with disastrous results for human community.
And for poetry?
•
Why, I was asking myself, was that “master” of my youth, that liberatory spokesman for the imagination, that mentor who warned Do not use the rotted names, so attracted and compelled by old, racist configurations? How, given the sweep of his claims for the imagination, for poetry as that which gives sanction to life, his claims for modernity, could he accept the stunting of his own imagination by the repetitions of a mass imaginative failure, by nineteenth-century concepts of “civilized” and “savage,” by compulsive reiterations of the word “nigger”? Why does the image and rhyming sound of the offensive word “negress” dominate one poem (“The Virgin Carrying a Lantern”) and slide, for no apparent reason, into The Auroras of Autumn? What impelled him to address the haunting poem “Two at Norfolk” to “darkies” mowing grass in a cemetery? And why should an abstract “black man,” a “woollen massa” be summoned up as interlocutors in the two epigrams “Nudity in the Colonies” and “Nudity at the Capitol”? What are these “frozen metaphors,”7 as Aldon Nielsen calls them, doing in his work?
Reading Stevens in other years I had tried to write off that deliberately racial language as a painful but encapsulated lesion on the imagination, a momentary collapse of the poet’s intelligence. I treated those figures—not that far removed from Rastus and Aunt Jemima—as happenstance, accidental. There in the high desert I finally understood: This is a key to the whole. Don’t try to extirpate, censor, or defend it. Stevens’s reliance on one-dimensional and abstract images of African-Americans is a watermark in his poetry. To understand how he places himself in relation to these and other dark-skinned figments of his mind—often Latin American and Caribbean lay figures—is to understand more clearly the meanings of North and South in Stevens’s poetry, the riven self, the emotionally unhappy white man with a “fairly substantial income,”8 the fugitive in the imagination who is repeatedly turned back by a wall of mirrors, whose immense poetic gift is thus compelled to frustrate itself. It’s to grasp the deforming power of racism—or what Toni Morrison has named “Africanism”9—over the imagination—not only of this poet, but of the collective poetry of which he was a part, the poetry in which I, as a young woman, had been trying to take my place.
A POET’S EDUCATION
Diane Glancy: “The poet writes as [s]he is written by circumstance and environment.”1 And “I . . . feel I must make use of myself as a found object.”2 Glancy: a woman of the Plains, of Cherokee and poor white “Arkansas backhill culture.”3 Driving hundreds of miles to teach poetry in the public schools of Arkansas and Oklahoma, she keeps a kind of journal, a series of meditations on place, poetry, literacy, oral tradition, words, religion. She has written one of the new sourcebooks brought forth in this country today by poets for whose parents or grandparents literacy or English was not a given. It’s a lie that poetry is only read by or “speaks to” people in the universities or elite intellectual circles; in many such places, poetry barely speaks at all.
Poems are written and absorbed, silently and aloud, in prisons, prairie kitchens, urban basement workshops, branch libraries, battered women’s shelters, homeless shelters, offices, a public hospital for disabled people, an HIV support group. A poet can be born in a house with empty bookshelves. Sooner or later, s/he will need books. But books are not genes.
•
A poet’s education.
Before I was eighteen, I was arrested on suspicion of murder after refusing to explain a deep cut on my forearm. With shocking speed I found myself handcuffed to a chain gang . . . and bussed to a holding facility to await trial. There I met men, prisoners, who read aloud to each other the works of Neruda, Paz, Sabines, Nemerov, and Hemingway. Never had I felt such freedom as in that dormitory. . . . While I listened to the words of the poets, the alligators slumbered powerless in their lairs. Their language was the magic that could liberate me from myself. . . .
And when they closed the books, these Chicanos, and went into their own Chicano language, they made barrio life come alive for me in the fullness of its vitality. I began to learn my own language, the bilingual words and phrases explaining to me my own place in the universe. . . .
Two years passed. I was twenty now, and behind bars again . . . One night on my third month in the county jail . . . [s]ome detectives had kneed an old drunk and handcuffed him to the booking bars. His shrill screams raked my nerves like hacksaw on bone, the desperate protest of his dignity against their inhumanity. . . . When they went to the bathroom to pee and the desk attendant walked to the file cabinet to pull the arrest record, I shot my arm through the bars, grabbed one of the attendant’s university textbooks, and tucked it in my overalls. It was the only way I had of protesting.
It was late when I returned to my cell. Under my blanket I switched on a pen flashlight and opened the thick book at random, scanning the pages. . . . Slowly I enunciated the words . . . p-o-n-d, ri-pple. It scared me that I had been reduced to this to find comfort. I always had thought reading a waste of time, that nothing could be gained by it. Only by action, by moving out into the world and confronting and challenging the obstacles, could one learn anything worth knowing.
Even as I tried to convince myself that I was merely curious, I became so absorbed in how the sounds created music in me, and happiness, I forgot where I was. . . . For a while, a deep sadness overcame me, as if I had chanced on a long-lost friend and mourned the years of separation. But soon the heartache of having missed so much of life, that had numbed me since I was a child, gave way, as if a grave illness had lifted itself from me and I was cured, innocently believing in the beauty of life again. I stumblingly repeated the author’s name as I fell asleep, saying it over and over in the dark: Words-worth,
Words-worth. . . .
Days later, with a stub pencil I whittled sharp with my teeth, I propped a Red Chief notebook on my knees and wrote my first words. From that moment, a hunger for poetry possessed me.4
Jimmy Santiago Baca writes of poetry as a birth into the self out of a disarticulated, violently unworded condition, the Chicano taught to despise his own speech, the male prisoner in a world . . . run by men’s rules and maintained by men’s anger and brutish will to survive,5 forced to bury his feminine heart save in the act of opening a letter or in writing poems. Every poem is an infant labored into birth and I am drenched with sweating effort. Tired from the pain and hurt of being a man, in the poem I transform myself into woman.6 Released from the anguish of speechlessness (There was nothing so humiliating as being unable to express myself, and my inarticulateness increased my sense of jeopardy, of being endangered),7 Baca transforms himself into a woman who has transcended the pain and hurt of being female, who has actually given birth to words, not to a living, crying, shitting child. But how balance the hard labor of bearing a poem against the early depletion of uneducated women bearing children year after year? Or against the effort for speech by a woman who culture has determined that women shall be silent?
En boca cerrada no entran moscas. “Flies don’ts enter a closed mouth” is a saying I kept hearing when I was a child. Ser habladora was to be a gossip and a liar, to talk too much. Muchachitas bien criadas, well-bred girls don’t answer back. Es una falta de respeto to talk back to one’s mother or father. . . . Hociona, repelona, chismosa, having a big mouth, questioning, carrying tales are all signs of being mal criada. In my culture they are all words that are derogatory if applied to women—I’ve never heard them applied to men.8
Gloria Anzaldúa, disentangling the heavy hanging strands fringing the cave of mestiza consciousness, finds speechlessness compounded by femaleness, and both by the fact of being alien, “queer,” not a woman in her culture’s eyes. Her sense of identity is more complicated than Baca’s because she’s forced to transform many layers of negativity surrounding femaleness itsel
f—images of Malintzin, the Indian woman as betrayer, of la chingada, the Indian woman as the fucked-one, of la Llorona, eternally mourning, long-suffering mother—and to confront the despot duality of simplistic masculine/feminine: I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within.9
A poet’s education.
In the 1960s, I read my first Chicano novel. It was City of Night by John Rechy, a gay Texan, son of a Scottish father and a Mexican mother. For days I walked around in stunned amazement that a Chicano could write and get published. When I read I Am Joaquín I was surprised to see a bilingual book by a Chicano in print. When I saw poetry written in Tex-Mex for the first time, a feeling of pure joy flashed through me. . . .
Even before I read books by Chicanos or Mexicans, it was the Mexican movies I saw at the drive-in—the Thursday night special of $1.00 a car—that gave me a sense of belonging. Vámonos a las vistas, my mother would call out and we’d all—grandmother, brothers, sister and cousins—squeeze into the car. We’d wolf down cheese and bologna white bread sandwiches while watching Pedro Infante in melodramatic tearjerkers like Nosotros los pobres, the first “real” Mexican movie (that was not an imitation of European movies). . . . I remember the singing type “westerns” of Jorge Negrete and Miguel Aceves Mejia. . . .
The whole time I was growing up, there was norteño music, sometimes called North Mexican border music, or Tex Mex music, or Chicano music, or cantina (bar) music. I grew up listening to conjuntos, three- or four-piece bands made up of folk musicians playing guitar, bajo sexto, drums and button accordion, which Chicanos had borrowed from the German immigrants who had come to Central Texas and Mexico to farm and build breweries. . . .
Essential Essays Page 29