How to Live, What to Do by Richardson Joan;

Author:Richardson, Joan; [Richardson, Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781609385507
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

9

ORDINARY EVENING

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

This is the eighth of Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” It focuses on one of the basics of his “rude aesthetic,” something else he learned from Emerson, as noted earlier, that was reinforced by what he learned from “the old Chinese . . . by their mountain pools”: that the extraordinary is to be found in the ordinary, and that an essential part of the poet’s work is shaping and turning words so that they bring to light the miraculous in the everyday—like turning a piece of labradorite to find its transparent brilliance, as Emerson described. In the introduction to The Necessary Angel Stevens quoted himself from a recent lecture and continued, “[Poetry] is an illumination of a surface, the movement of a self in the rock. A force capable of bringing about fluctuations in reality in words free from mysticism is a force independent of one’s desire to elevate it. It needs no elevation. It has only to be presented, as best one is able to present it” (CPP 639–40). Stevens knew from experience how vital this exercise is. In the absence of a belief in God or gods, being able to participate in what the Beatles would later call the “magical mystery tour”—attending in detail to the immense strangeness of existing on a planet spinning on its axis at 1,040 miles per hour (at the equator) while simultaneously revolving at 67,000 miles per hour around an aging low-mass star on whose energy all life on earth depends—provides a secular sense of the sacred. In opening “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” Stevens used an ordinary memory to begin to explore the idea of writing “poetry to find the good which, in the Platonic sense, is synonymous with God”:

A day or two before Thanksgiving we had a light fall of snow in Hartford. It melted a little by day and then froze again at night, forming a thin, bright crust over the grass. At the same time, the moon was almost full. I awoke once several hours before daylight and as I lay in bed I heard the steps of a cat running over the snow under my window almost inaudibly. The faintness and strangeness of the sound made on me one of those impressions which one so often seizes as pretexts for poetry. (CPP 781–82)

Stevens’s use of “pretexts” here alerts us to his attending to that archaic, prelinguistic, animal register of being discussed in chapter 6. “The faintness and strangeness of the sound” situated him in pure sensation—the level of embodied cognition even deeper, more primal than that of emotions, which are instinctual reactions experienced and reexperienced over eons to become humans’ second nature, as it were. Learning to attune ourselves to the level of sensibility we share with all animate creatures exponentially expands our sense of earthly commonality. At the same time

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