{"title":"News and Comments","authors":"Bart Eeckhout, Glen MacLeod","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910933","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910933","url":null,"abstract":"News and Comments Bart Eeckhout and Glen MacLeod The eleventh John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Juliette Utard for her contribution entitled “Epistolary Stevens” (Spring 2021). The award was judged by a committee of three Editorial Board Members (Tony Sharpe, Rachel Malkin, and Patrick Redding). It was officially presented at the 2023 MLA Convention in San Francisco. Please join us in congratulating the author. ________ The centenary of Harmonium, commemorated in this special issue, is stimulating various public occasions in the course of 2023 as well. The President of the Wallace Stevens Society, Lisa Goldfarb, reports, for instance, that she will be organizing a three-part Roundtable at the 92nd Street Y in New York City in October and November of this year. 92NY is itself celebrating 150 years of service to cultural life in the city. ________ In its February 13, 2023, issue, The New Yorker published a poem by Mark Strand entitled “Wallace Stevens Comes Back to Read His Poems at the 92nd Street Y.” This poem was presented as having been bought by the magazine in 1994 and typeset for publication in early 1995 but somehow lost. The poem is supposed to have disappeared from the radar for more than a quarter century so that it failed to appear even in Strand’s Collected Poems. ________ The 2022 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, a $100,000 lifetime achievement award “for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry,” went to Marilyn Nelson. [End Page 267] ________ In May 2023, Helen Vendler, the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University and one of the most influential Stevens experts from the past half-century, was awarded a Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This is the Academy’s highest honor for excellence in the arts. We devoted a special issue of the Journal to Vendler’s achievements as a Stevens scholar and her long-term impact on the understanding of Stevens’s poetry in the fall of 2014. ________ Aaron Caycedo-Kimura and Frederick-Douglass Knowles II were the featured poets at the 2023 Rose Garden Reading, which returned to Elizabeth Park in Hartford, Connecticut, after last year’s move to a nearby church. Originally planned on June 17 with Cristina J. Baptista as a speaker instead of Mr. Caycedo-Kimura, the reading had to be postponed due to weather conditions and was rescheduled to September 9. The event was sponsored by the Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens with the cooperation of the Elizabeth Park Conservancy. Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is the author of two collections of poetry whose honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, and a nomination for the Pushcart Prize. Frederick-Douglass Knowles II, the author of BlackRoseCity, is a Professor of English at Three Rivers Community College in Norwich, Connecticut, and the inau","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"2016 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135504710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Harmonium in a Time of War: Stevens and Contemporary Ukrainian Poets","authors":"Kathryn Mudgett","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910918","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910918","url":null,"abstract":"Harmonium in a Time of War: Stevens and Contemporary Ukrainian Poets Kathryn Mudgett You do not know the things that are taught by him who falls. I do know. —Eugène Lemercier, letter of October 15, 1914 IntroductIon: RegardIng the PaIn of Others IS IT POSSIBLE to convey the experience of war to others through language? Those of us who have regarded war from a distance, from a safe country, or city, or home, are not privy to the experience of those in war zones, as are soldiers, military support staff, or civilians, to whom war comes expectedly through engagement with the enemy or unexpectedly through an incendiary device or unprovoked attack. To suggest we can imagine their pain or fear is to trivialize their lived experience. Yet war can affect our psyche as well, even if we remain observers from afar. Susan Sontag has called “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another country . . . a quintessential modern experience.” Our access to conflicts through digital, social, and broadcast media allows us real-time tracking of events in other hemispheres and time zones: “Wars are now also living room sights and sounds” (18). Our psychic proximity to war began with the early modern period itself, what Sontag calls the “era of shock . . . in 1914.” Language suddenly seemed incapable of conveying the horrors of the trenches: “The nightmare of suicidally lethal military engagement from which the warring countries were unable to extricate themselves . . . seemed to many to have exceeded the capacity of words to describe” (25). Philip Larkin, born four years after the end of World War I, memorialized the psychological break with our past relationship to war in “MCMXIV.” As British men wait “patiently” in “long uneven lines” to sign up for war service, “Grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark,” the speaker marks the end of their innocent world: “Never such innocence, / Never before or since, / As changed itself to past / Without a word” (Larkin 127). Contrast this with Thomas Hardy’s 1914 poem “Channel Firing,” where God speaks to the dead awakened by “great guns” off-shore: [End Page 210] “It’s gunnery practice out at sea / Just as before you went below; / The world is as it used to be” (285). Perhaps “as it used to be” in its belligerent tendencies, but with a diabolical lethality unknown before. Wallace Stevens felt an ineluctable break with the past even before the outbreak of what was then known as the Great War. He described the decades before the war as a time of “happy oblivion” for many, when “the sea was full of yachts and the yachts were full of millionaires.” This prosperous period “was like a stage-setting that since then has been taken down and trucked away” (CPP 788). When the theater had been “changed / To something else,” Stevens had to “learn the speech of the place,” to “construct a new stage” from which to address his “invisible audience” (CPP 218–19). This task remains so for poets: to find words that will suff","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135505305","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Poetic Models of History and Time in Harmonium","authors":"Abdul-Karim Mustapha, Jonah Shallit, Jungmin Yoo","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910921","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910921","url":null,"abstract":"Poetic Models of History and Time in Harmonium Abdul-Karim Mustapha, Jonah Shallit, and Jungmin Yoo IN HARMONIUM, Wallace Stevens builds poetic models of history and time, juxtaposing quotidian and historical chronologies to capture the interrelations between ephemeral moments and grand narratives. Stevens thinks historically while remaining critical of history, searching across time for poetic subjects while steadfastly refusing to “play the flat historic scale” with them (CPP 11). As has been widely noted, the supposed objectivity of the historical method became the target of criticism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, for example, the rumination of historical consciousness endangers the mere act of living (“Uses” 62), while in Hayden White’s formulation, historical telling reshapes disparate events into narratives of a completed diachronic process, necessarily sorting the stuff of life into cause and effect, significant and insignificant (6). From such a perspective, history unfolds as an encyclopedic repository of moments abstracted from mundane experiences and organized by temporal linearity. But might there be a different way to envision history? How might one give expression to everyday moments and experiences left out by grand narratives? And to what extent can poetry offer an alternative to the standard ways of interpreting history and time? Rereading Harmonium as Stevens’s attempt to wrestle with such questions, this essay explores the ways in which his poems break down the grand narrative of history and its steady, onward-moving temporality into recurring moments of ephemerality lived and felt at the level of the everyday. Stevens’s poetic imagination reconceptualizes history as an outburst of fluttering moments interwoven through an idiosyncratic temporality, and this conception of history resonates with the Nietzschean notion of eternal recurrence as well as a Paterian aesthetics that consecrates the sensuous moment. In Harmonium, Stevens presents poetry as an alternative historical method in its own right. The type of temporality that Stevens is interested in shifts attention away from linear progression and toward small moments of ephemerality, rupture, and recurrence. He terms this modality “perpetual undulation” in “The Place of the Solitaires” (CPP 47), a poem that envisions the titular site as a place saturated with a constant renewal of motions and noises following one after another. Here, renewal happens primarily as the recurrence of the same in the undulating forms of “restless iteration” (CPP 48). [End Page 236] Similar imagery reappears throughout Harmonium, as in “The Comedian as the Letter C,” where the heroic Crispin’s grand colonial ambitions slip away in the “motionless march” of chirping crickets and other mundane and pastoral rhythms (CPP 34). Stevens’s attention to these undulations of rhythmic repetition, like the “endless tread” of Rosenbloom’s mourners in “Cortèg","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135504985","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stevens as Modernist: The Intensities of Harmonium","authors":"Charles Altieri","doi":"10.1353/wsj.2023.a910915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wsj.2023.a910915","url":null,"abstract":"Stevens as Modernist: The Intensities of Harmonium Charles Altieri FOR THIS CELEBRATION of Harmonium’s centenary, my central concern is to provide an account of how I see crucial aspects of the book as establishing the most intelligent and possibly the most intensely moving of the founding poetic texts in American modernism. I mean by “modernist” an imaginative resistance to Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic intellectual practices achieved primarily by stylistic means. Modernist strategies seek to release potential affective and contemplative investments blocked by these orientations of consciousness. My guide here is Wallace Stevens’s interest in Friedrich Nietzsche. But for now I will be content with mentioning B. J. Leggett’s superb commentary on Stevens’s interest in that philosopher.1 I have to devote my time instead to arguing that Stevens’s 1923 volume is considerably more experimental in its pursuit of imaginative processes for mapping new ways of thinking, feeling, and writing than is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In my view, Eliot’s poem is the best Victorian poem ever written, with essentially the same laments as Matthew Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gypsy,” but modernized in two important ways. Rather than envisioning the poem as an expressive act by a speaker, Eliot treats the poem as virtually an expressive act performed by a culture in need of a cure for its anomie. In order to have what seems almost the entire white Euro-American culture represent itself, Eliot has to deploy a full modernist array of stylistic innovations—from the force of acute juxtapositions to devices that produce a continually incomplete presentation, where what is not said often seems more telling than the actual words spoken. The second mode of modernization is thematic and structural. The poem does not merely lament the death of god but foregrounds by means of the suffering the poem exhibits a need for something like a global religious conversion made appealing most strikingly by Eliot’s invocation of Sanskrit wisdom. But in this poem the wisdom cannot be acted upon because the three kernels of wisdom must be interpreted in conceptual terms, and interpretation inevitably reinstitutes the modes of self-interest and self-concealment that were major features of the cultural problems producing a waste land in the first place. [End Page 156] What does Stevens do differently that more fully adapts modernist stylistic innovations to what are plausible cultural needs? Let me enumerate the ways by commenting on five particular poems, with the final poem enabling me to offer some comments about the volume as a whole. My opening discussion will be of an intimately connected pair of poems stressing Stevens’s sense of the intellectual crisis he thought poetry had to address. The first dramatic gesture captures the difficulties involved in escaping Romantic ideals grounded in the powers of subjective expression. “Nuances of a Theme by Williams” dramatizes William Carlos W","PeriodicalId":40622,"journal":{"name":"WALLACE STEVENS JOURNAL","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135506987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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