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January 8, 2006

Wallace Stevens and me: Penelope poems

In the spring of my senior year in high school, I received in the mail, wrapped in plain brown paper, a paperback book, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

The postmark was illegible, its sender a mystery. A young man, certainly, perhaps Alan, whom I'd met at a debate tournament In Washington.

A strike had canceled my flight home, so I took the bus to New York City with him, and he took me to the Night Owl, a folk club in the Village. (My frantic parents wondered where their 16-year-old daughter was, not expecting an authorized late-night detour.) Sitting at a round table under a naked light bulb in the back room, in awe of these older hipsters, I think I talked with Richie Havens. Dylan's girlfriend Yvette borrowed my hairbrush.

Would the motherless genius who lived with his debate coach have sent me Stevens? Maybe not..

But if couldn't know who, could I sniff out why? I tried to find a clue inside the book, and it opened to this poem:

THE WORLD AS MEDITATION

Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east,
The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended.
That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

On the horizon and lifting himself up above it.
A form of fire approaches the cretonnes of Penelope,
Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells.

She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him,
Companion to his self for her, which she imagined,
Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend.

The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise
In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own.
No winds like dogs watched over her at night.

She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone.
She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace
And her belt, the final fortune of their desire.

But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun
On her pillow? The thought of it kept beating in her like her heart.
The two kept beating together. It was only day.

It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met,
Friend and dear friend and a planet's encouragement.
The barbarous strength within her would never fail.

She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair,
Repeating his name with its patient syllables,
Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

It had a light around it, and I returned to it over the years. It informed me.

In the early '80s, I carried a notebook everywhere, writing what overflowed into it. Late at night, poems.began pouring out of my pen fully formed, so quickly I soon had to type them to keep up with the dictation. One night I spread all sheets of paper out on the living room rug and walked around them, reading, looking for a pattern.

Viewed that way, I saw they were Penelope's story, my response to the same impulse that had seized Stevens, 25 years a-borning. One of them is here. (Like Stevens, who died the year he won the Pulitzer Prize for this collection, and like Penelope, whose story stretches over decades, I feel I may be old before I finish this work.)

This was all triggered this morning when I stumbled out of bed to the computer, and found Robert Pinsky's Poet's Choice column in today's Washington Post. It begins,

When I come across a poem or movie that makes Mother Nature out to be merely sweet and benign in some sentimental humanized way, I think of Wallace Stevens's poem "Madame La Fleurie."

And then he publishes the poem for readers of the Sunday paper.

A line jumped out at me:

He looked in a glass of the earth and thought he lived in it.

The 70-year-old Stevens had a brief encounter with the Penelope archetype. The poem passed it on, intact, to a girl who could -- and would -- live in it.

Related: A fascinating chronology of Stevens' life in its cultural context.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:03 AM | Permalink