Charles Wyatt on "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Wallace Stevens"

I think I need to look at some history. In the past several years, I’ve been fascinated by Rembrandt drawings and this led me to many attempts to draw them again in poems. It didn’t take me long to realize that almost all of those images had narrative implications. So my question to myself became, “What comes next?”

Then I became interested in archaic words as points of departure for poems. A poem examining an antique word asks another question, “What went before?” It burrows into the word and tries to discover its possible cosmologies. Then I became interested in fairy tales (because I’m a fiction writer and I wanted to burrow into the notion of story). There’s a lot of counting in fairy tales which seems to have more to do with music than with narrative—perhaps it’s the hinge where the two parted—I still puzzling this out. Anyway, there are always fairy tale images floating around in my unconscious these days.

I tell my students that poems come out of poems and stories come out of stories. But there are lots of ways that can happen. We can take a story type as a cantus firmus and write a new melody over it. Using the musical analogy is comforting to me because I’ve made my living as a symphony musician for most of my life, and I like to think of music both as something that comes out of poems, and as something that builds them or allows them to happen.

I’ve always enjoyed reading Wallace Stevens. My grandmother gave me The Collected Poems when I graduated from college. I’ve read them in a kind of sleepy way, listening the way people listen to music while doing other things. So when I got the idea of doing a sequence of poems which use lines of Stevens as points of departure, I found myself doing something new. In A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking asks, “Why can’t we remember the future?” He’s led to that question by a mathematics that allows time to move in either direction. But there is something in music that is kin to this notion. Neurologists have discovered that musical memory lies in a different place in the brain and works in a different way. People who have totally lost short term memory still have musical memory. Oliver Sachs has written a lot about this issue.

When I play a Mozart flute concerto from memory, I am connected to everything which came before, but also to everything that is coming. There is a continuum which allows the musician to be connected to all of the music even though he or she is still having to plow through the present moment of life’s narrative (however long the present is).

So a line of Wallace Stevens has any number of histories, all its connections with the poem it’s in and all the other poems it lives with in that ratty old book my grandmother gave me. And if I let it fall on me like music, it connects with my own images which spring out of the future. I’m getting to burrow back and float forward at the same time.(I don’t know if it’s completely honest to say images spring out of the future, but I do know they weren’t there a moment ago. Where were they?)

Because I was thinking about “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” as a model, I wanted the poems to be short. I wanted to let go of them as soon as I could. Of course, they hung on as long as they wanted. Back to process. Like blowing bubbles? Some burst. Revision meant going on to another poem. First person didn’t work very well for me—I think Stevens uses it when he’s being most cerebral. This isn’t what I was after. I just wanted to let go and float away.

Kerry James Evans on "Leaning in from the Sea"

I tend to remember quite a bit of what I hear. When I began writing “Leaning in from the Sea,” I started with this idea of the “heard” thing: the emotion and the physicality of an experience strained by voice. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Macbeth speaks mostly in iambic pentameter before he meets the witches. After he meets the witches, who speak in trochaic tetrameter, his speech changes, and he begins speaking in trochees and often in spondees. He loses his mind. What he hears he then speaks. His actions are then confused by his speech. Often I see this in my work: this disjointed narrative caused by what my narrator has heard. I am a young poet so it comes as no surprise that my narrator—especially in this poem—is struggling to form an identity.

The section breaks offer a shift in tone and logic. This poem is about poverty and class and race and the speaker in this poem has a difficult time understanding the words he heard as a boy. His own syntax imitates what he has heard. However, the real struggle is for him to put these pieces together and come out of the narrative with a hold on his experience. He claims responsibility in some sense I suppose, but he also looks for a way out. He in fact is leaning in from what he has heard—a protective measure—but the underbelly is much darker. His actions are influenced by what he has heard.

For me, this poem came out of a need to understand the landscape that in many ways has shaped me. As a Southern poet I am also writing from a tradition that questions the blood, the decisions and the history of a scarred agrarian society.

I just returned from a visit to Mississippi, where my mother still lives. She has adopted two foster children who are behind in school. She lives in double-wide next to a cornfield next to pine thicket next to another field. There are deer nesting in the pine thicket right now. The fields won’t be plowed for a couple of months. About two miles over, a chemical plant hums day and night. It also glows something awful.

Obviously these are images relative to the trope of this poem. Right now, in “Leaning in from the Sea,” I have yet to come to terms with this “home.” While there is beauty here, I am sure, there is no beauty in what I see, and there is nothing beautiful about this poem. Here there is an inherited blood that moves in my work. And there is a gun. There is mange on the land and there is poverty and racism and ignorance. This is where the poem comes from. As I reread this poem, I am often struck by how flat and void of music it is. I’d like to find that music in future poems. Which is to say that maybe we can broaden the discussion on this forum beyond this particular poem.

When is music necessary? Is lyricism all there is to poetry? In this poem, the narrative strangles the lyricism. These are my thoughts lately. When I wrote this poem, it was catharsis and a search for responsibility, the notion that I could end the narrative with silence. Silence must live in poetry as it must live in the poet. Often a poem wants to escape from what is heard, and in the lyric, we often find beauty and space. Here there is yelling and there is violence. I don’t know that the political can ever be comprehended in a poem, but sometimes what matters must be screamed there.