Half Starts and Trail Offs

Dave Kiefaber on Wallace Stevens

Apr 29

MeredithUncategorized 3 Comments

Today’s guest blogger is Dave Kiefaber, who I think is especially fantastic because of his collection of punk flyers and his poetry podcast series.

Wallace Stevens was, to judge by appearance, the photographic negative of what people expect a poet to be; a lawyer and insurance executive who looked like Dwight Eisenhower, complete with matching politics (Stevens was a conservative Republican). Throw in several drunken altercations with the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Robert Frost, and Stevens comes off as a bit of a thickie, certainly not someone to whom whimsy came easily.

And that’s where you’d be dead-ass wrong. Stevens wrote some of the goofiest poetry ever. He wrote “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” which has become the mantra of UB’s writing/publishing program, but my personal favorite of his is “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” Let’s look at the first six lines of it, shall we? Right.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.

Note the jaw-breaking consonance he uses to slow the reader down, to build a rhythm. Free verse poetry withers and dies without rhythm, in my opinion, and Stevens was right up there with Walt Whitman in terms of anchoring his work on the page with sound.

“Emperor” examines contemporary mourning rituals and how mundane they are in the face of what they’re supposedly preparing the deceased for; note “last month’s newspapers” and the dresses “as they are used to wear.” Ritual has become routine, which is by nature unthinking and unemotional. In the face of the afterlife, it does all seem rather shallow  But there’s a giddiness to this poem that I can’t put my finger on, most likely because I’m not a poet, that keeps it from being a downer or a wooden morality play about how to properly grieve the dead. Maybe it’s the pace that’s eventually set by the diction employed here. Maybe it’s the imagery of ice cream, long celebrated as a confection and associated with youth and innocence and joy and thoughtless consumption. No great political or philosophical points were ever built on a hill of ice cream. It’s soft and sweet, far removed from the finality of death.

Whatever it is, it works for me. I like vivid, unorthodox imagery. I like playfulness and absurdity. I like poems that aren’t total self-gratifying inside jokes between the poet and maybe three other people he/she knows. Wallace Stevens satisfies these things in ways that, honestly, not very many other poets do. That and he punched Ernest Hemingway. In the face. Awesome.