>> From the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. 

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>> We're thrilled to honor one of America's great voices on what would have been his 135th birthday. You can read more about Stevens and about our two featured readers Jennifer Michael Hecht and Peter Streckfus in our program. And we're thrilled to have them both here. A word about the program. Our two featured readers will read their favorite Stevens selections and connect them to their own work. Following their readings, Mark Manivong of our Rare Books and Special Collections Division will say a few words about the tabletop display of Stevens' materials in our collection and about the invaluable work his division does to ensure that future generations can connect to the exemplars of our culture. To learn more about the Library's Rare Book and Special Collections Division, you can visit its website at ww.loc.gov/rr/rarebook. And now please join me in welcoming Jennifer Michael Hecht and Peter Streckfus.

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>> Hi. Thanks for coming. I think everyone has philosophical problems when they're young. You know we see when they drive us around, we see all those houses and the idea that in each house is someone who thinks they're important. And we are important. And how could it all make sense? Time we experience slowly and then fast, and we understand that there's something really odd about that, the way a day goes by slowly and a year goes by fast. And I think while Stevens is someone who kept his philosophical questions. He educated them. I guess that's how I see a lot of philosophers. That they start out with their own philosophical questions. Things that don't make sense about being a human being. You know like the way our narratives in our heads have endings that have something to do with the beginnings, but when we die it's just like for no reason, in the middle of the story. There's no end to the play, right. It doesn't matter when you walk out. There's no finale. I think that Stevens is excited about his questions his whole life, and he puts his guts into the poems. But his primary concern is usually these philosophical questions. I think in particular whether the world can be described as real. Because we die so fast. If you think about the lifetime of the galaxies. And then when we're gone, what is it to say it ever happened? And that notion that, you know, in this podium there's more space than atoms we know, right, the physicists tell us. And yet it's here. But it's also not here. And he's just totally aware of that. And it kind of drives him a little crazy. I think I want to start with a three part, it's one of the longer poems I'll read. It's not terribly long, but it's called The Rock. It's from his last book that isn't just a selected collections. And so I guess he writes it, starts writing it in 1950. And it's, yeah, he's going to use the rock, I know you know some Stevens, but I read it two or three times in order to understand it. So I'm giving you crib notes before I start. He's using the rock as a kind of reality about himself and about life. And it's a rock because it's kind of nothing. It's kind of not changing. It kind of needs excuses, and it needs a story. And it needs to get covered up, and it needs all these things. The Rock, seventy years later. It's an illusion that we were ever alive. Lived in the houses of our mothers, arranged ourselves by our own motions in a freedom of air. Regard the freedom of seventy years ago. It is no longer air. Houses still stand, though they are rigid in rigid emptiness. Even our shadows, their shadows, no longer remain. The lives these lived in the mind are at an end. They never were. The sound of the guitar were not and not absurd. The words spoken were not and are not. It is not to be believed. The meeting at noon at the edge of the field seems like an invention, an embrace between one desperate clod and another in a fantastic consciousness. In a queer assertion of humanity. A thermo proposed between the two, two figures in the nature of the sun in the sun's design of its own happiness. As if nothingness contained a métier, a vital assumption, an impermanence in its permanent cold. An illusion so desired that the green leaves came and covered the high rock. That the lilacs came and bloomed like a blindness cleaned. Exclaiming bright sight, as it was satisfied. In a birth of sight. The blooming and the musk were being alive, an incessant being alive. A particular of being that gross universe. Two. The poem as icon. It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves. We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground. Or the cure of ourselves that is equal to a cure of the ground. A cure beyond forgetfulness. And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud. If they broke into bloom. If they bore fruit. And if we ate the insipient colorings of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground. The fiction of the leaves is the icon of the poem. The figuration of blessedness. And the icon is man. The pearled chaplet of spring. The magnum wreath of summer, time's autumn snood. Its copy of the sun, these cover the rock. These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man. These are a cure of the ground and of ourselves. In the predicate that there is nothing else. They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change. They are more than leaves that cover the barren rock. They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout. New senses in the engendering of sense. The desire to be at the end of distances. The body quickened and the mind in root. They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love. They bear their fruit so that the year is known. As if its understanding was brown skin. The honey in its pulp, the final found, the plenty of the year and of the world. In this plenty, the poem makes meaning of the rock. Of such mixed motion and such imagery. That its barrenness becomes a thousand things. And so exists no more. This is the cure of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves. His words are both the icon and the man. So you know, he doesn't worry too much about being understood, but he's working out something that is a consistent problem. I thought, now I have to remember what I had in mind. Yeah, okay. Here's a poem of mine that is also about thinking. And I do have to say that Stevens stands out among poets as being willing to talk about his philosophical problems straight out. There's a kind of cult of talking about the big ideas in life through the domestic and the small, the leaf and the drop. But sometimes it's fun to just say what the hell is going on here. And Stevens is willing to do that time and again. And I think everybody who does it now is on some level being influenced by his willingness to write, to versify his philosophy. This is Zoo Review. He worries so much about whether the world is real, given all the issues of skepticism. I think I worry a lot in a similar way about how we get from one idea to another. About how we innovate. About how the new thing comes. And I picked some poems that look like that. So this is a villanelle patterned poem. Zoo Review. It's from my latest book. To begin is to let things out of control. 

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The parks caged condor stumbles to the fore. The mind cannot be told what it does not know. Let us begin by calling a massive bird a soul, each wing wide as the height of a man or more. To begin is to help things out of control. With a clasp, a fence in beak and a forceful fold of what was given, then out the rifted door. The mind must graze what it cannot hold. If the population of the park took up a goal of leaving, it wouldn't stop to wonder where to go. To begin is to chase thoughts out of control. Likewise, as love and birth have come to show, much cannot be seen before we are ashore where minds find what at sea they did not know. The bird adjusts its shoulder feathers like a stole, a bristling cape, a heft of flight. A height left low. To begin is to let things out of control. The mind cannot be told what it does not know. So you can see again, wearing my questions right out there. Okay, here's a tiny poem by Stevens. Disillusionment of Ten O'clock. It's one of his famous ones. The houses are haunted by white nightgowns. None are green or purple with green rings or green with yellow rings, or yellow with blue rings. None of them are strange with socks of lace and beaded censures. People are not going to dream of baboons and periwinkles. Only here and there an old soldier, drunk and asleep in his boots, catches tigers in red weather. I think this poem is famous mostly because of its catches tigers in red weather. It's a movement of surrealism that we don't see in other American poets at this time. And that it allows that kind of thing. In a way it's just following on Keats' mixing of adjectives. So he says one thing, and he says the opposite both to describe something. But yeah, I think also that the poem is underestimated, that is that people think it's just a critique of the bushwa life. These people are just in white nightgowns. But of course they're not. The nightgowns are all different colors. And they will dream of baboons. I mean they will have crazy dreams. So the fact that he finds the tigers and the red weather and a drunken sailor is still liberating, right. Because sometimes we're all drunken sailors. But we're also, and he's alos, an utterly normal human being in a green nightgown dreaming about baboons, right. And so he's catching the absurd for us so that we aren't stranded in life. Because the absurd is running most of the show. Let's see. This would be faster if I'd had stickies. Oh yeah, here's a little one, again from my new book, on reading the letters of the dead. Why were the dead so timid while they lived? In mind they step in groans, toes on point to test the sand. Despite traversing seas and rushing gold, they still seemed cautious to a madness. Why did they not act more like us, I kid? Still, why were the dead so timid while they lived? 

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I knew this would happen. Time would go by. There's just so much deliciousness here in my Stevens. Man on the Dump. Do I have time for the Man on the Dump? 

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Yeah I guess so. The Man on the Dump. I think of this in terms of Yeats' Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart. A kind of looking around for what's there. The Man on the Dump. Day creeps down. The moon is creeping up. The sun is a corbeil of flowers, the moon blanch. Places there, a bouquet. Ho-ho...The dump is full of images. Days pass like papers from a press. The bouquets come here in the papers. So the sun, and so the moon, both come, and the janitor's poems of every day, the wrapper on the cans of pears. The cat in the paper-bag, the corset, the box from Esthonia. The tiger chest, for tea. The freshness of night has been fresh a long time. The freshness of morning, the blowing of day, one says that it puffs as Cornelius Nepos reads, it puffs more than, less than or it puffs like this or that. The green smacks in the eye, the dew in the green smacks like fresh water in a can, like the sea on a coconut. Excuse me, so he's just so in love with water. And the sparkling of it. And he realizes that people in society are always trying to get that kind of sparkle on them. But its purest form is this very simple thing. Smacks like fresh water in a can. Like the sea of a coconut. How many men have copied dew for buttons? How many women have covered themselves with dew? Dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew. One grows to hate these things except on a dump. Now in the time of spring, azaleas, trilliums, myrtle, viburnums, daffodils, blue phlox, between that disgust and this, between the things that are on the dump, azaleas and so on, and those that will be, azaleas and so on, one feels the purifying change. One rejects the trash. That's the moment when the moon creeps up to the bubbling of bassoons. That's the time one looks at the elephant-colorings of tires. Everything is shed, and the moon comes up as the moon, all its images are in the dump. And you see as a man, not like an image of a man. You see the moon rise in the empty sky. One sits and beats an old tin can, lard pail. One beats and beats for that which one believes. That's what one wants to get near. Could it after all be merely oneself, as superior as the ear to a crow's voice? Did the nightingale torture the ear? Pack the heart and scratch the mind? And does the ear solace itself in peevish birds? Joking with Keats there. Is it peace? Is it a philosopher's honeymoon one finds on the dump? Is it to sit among mattresses of the dead? Bottles, pots, shoes, and grass and murmur aptest eve. Is it to hear the blatter of grackles and say invisible priest? Is it to eject, to pull the day to pieces and cry stanza my stone? Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the. And the bravery is just amazing. The bravery of just actually saying what's on his mind. I'm going to finish with two poems, one sort of medium, not long. And the other one very short. Oh my God, the tension. Which one. I want to read Gender Bender. Alright, this one is a bit of a poem if I may. But I just want to say it's still in the tradition of what he does. But I don't know how to, Gender Bender. Evolution settles for a while on various stable balances. One is that some of the girls like cute boys, and some like ugly, older men. And sometimes women. The difference between them is the ones who like older men were felt up by their fathers or uncles or older brothers. Or if he didn't touch you, still you lived in his cauldron of curses and urges which could be just as worse. They grow old already, angry and wise. They get rich, get mean, get theirs. The untouched, uncursed others are happy, never needing to much and never do much more than good. They envy their mean, rich, talented drunk sisters. Good girls drink milk and make milk and know they've missed out and know they're better off. They might dance and design but won't rip out lungs for a flag. Bad ones write books and slash red paint on canvas. They got rage to vent. They fault lines and will rip toga off of Caesar and stab a goat for the ether. It's as simple as that. Either deep in the dark of your history, someone showed you that you could be used as a cash machine, as a popcorn popper, as a rocket launch, as a coin slot, jackpot spunker. Or they didn't, and you grew up unused and clueless. 

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Either you got a clue and spiked lunch, or got zilch but no punch. And you never knew. It's not anyone's fault. If it happened and you don't like older men, that's just because you like them so much you won't let yourself have one. If you did, everyone would see. Then they would know what happened a long time ago with you and with that original him whose eyes you've been avoiding for decades long forgotten. That's why you date men smaller than you or not at all. Or maybe you've turned into a man. It isn't anyone's fault. It's just human. And it is what happens or doesn't happen. That's that. Any questions? If you see a girl dressed to say no one tells me what to do. You know someone once told her what to do. And the last one, again, he just mentioned Eve so I will. Even Eve, the only soul in all of time to never have to wait for love, must have leaned some sleepless nights alone against the garden wall and wailed cold, stupefied and wild and wished to trade in all of Eden to have but been a child. In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace that she might have a story of herself to tell in some other place. Thanks.

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>> Mark's allowed me to use one of the volumes to read a poem I decided to add while I was on the train here. This is from Ideas of Order. Mozart, 1935. Poet, be seated at the piano. Play the present. It's hoo-hoo-hoo. It's shoo-shoo-shoo. Its ric-a-nic. Its envious cachinnation. If they throw stones upon the roof while you practice arpeggios, it is because they carry down the stairs a body in rags. Be seated at the piano. That lucid souvenir of the past, the divertimento. That airy dream of the future, the unclouded concerto. The snow is falling. Strike the piercing chord. Be thou the voice, not you. Be thou, be thou. The voice of angry fear. The voice of this besieging pain. Be thou that wintry sound as of the great wind howling. By which sorrow is released, dismissed, absolved, in starry placating. We may return to Mozart. He was young, and we, we are old. The snow is falling and the streets are full of cries. Be seated thou. 

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I called this Talk on Influence. One, when I was a young man of 22, my father gave me a sea adventure novel for young adults. He had written it 40 years previously between 1954 and 57. The final three of his 17 years as a Catholic monk. Knowing I identified myself a writer, he suggested I finish it for him. Two, our understanding of influence has shifted over time. It begins with the fourth century root of the term, an astrological phenomenon, an influx. An inflowing of ethereal fluid from the lights of the night sky that affect the actions and destinies of persons on earth. This astrological meaning passed eventually into our contemporary sense of influence and into our contemporary sense of literature. Three, literary tradition is a relational process. The poet opens himself to the influx of voices, the tide of voices behind him and before him. An aggregate consciousness present in new form, in every poem, on every page, he reads. Here is Wallace Stevens' The Reader from his second collection Ideas of Order, published in 1936. The Reader. All night I sat reading a book. Sat reading as if in a book of somber pages. It was autumn, and falling stars covered the shriveling forms crouched in the moonlight. No lamp was burning as I read. A voice was mumbling. Everything falls back to coldness, even the musky muscadines. The melons, the vermilion pears, of the leafless garden. The somber pages bore no print, except the trace of burning stars in the frosty heaven. Four, stepping into this aggregate consciousness, becoming its channel, he changes it and finds himself more truly himself and more strange. Here again Stevens. This time from his first collection Harmonium, published in 1932. Tea at the Palaz of Hoon. Not less because in purple I descended the western day through what you called the loneliest air. Not less was I myself. What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there? Out of my mind the golden ointment rained. And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea. I was the world in which I walked. And what I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself. And there I found myself more truly and more strange. Five, when I was a young boy I saw my father revising his manuscript in the summers when he was not teaching. I took paper and pen to the playhouse behind our actual house. I wrote the following sentences. Today I'm in my office. My office is where I write. I am a writer. To what degree does the author of the child sentences above represent me? And to what degree do they represent my father? Six, over time I have become increasingly interested in the various authors represented in my own work. And more broadly, interested in the many sentences in which my work unique to me, is not my own. W. S. Merwin, Jorie Graham, Eric Pankey here today, Louise Gluck, John Ashbury, themselves channeling Wallace Stevens wash through, speak through poems I call mine. This is not a mark of the poem's success at all. Rather, it is a mark of poetry in any sense. Seven, Stevens' most beautiful poems represent a consciousness among other consciousness's. Being one with others, they are often colored by an abstract sense of the world. 

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An effort to pull from the world the cover by which the single individual views it. The poem is a struggle with the inaccessibility of the abstract, Stevens says. A struggle with, in other words, the inaccessibility of the supreme fiction. What the world may be beyond our experience of it. An attempt on the part of the poet to touch that fiction with others. In his poem Idea, the Idea of Order at Key West, we are all Ramon Fernandez. Here I'll read that poem. She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice. Like a body, wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves. And yet its mimic motion made constant cry, caused constantly a cry. That was not ours, although we understood. Inhuman, of the veritable ocean. The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound. Even if what she sang was what she heard. Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred the grinding water and the gasping wind. But it was not she and not the sea we heard. For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea was merely a place by which she walked to sing. Whose spirit is this, we said. Because we knew it was the spirit that we sought and knew that we should ask this often as she sang. If it was only the dark voice of the sea that rose, or even colored by many waves. If it was only the outer voice of sky and cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled. However clear, it would have been deep air. The heaving speech of air, a summer sound repeated in a summer without end and sound alone. But it was more than that. More even than her voice, and ours, among the meaningless plungings of water and the wind. Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped on high horizons, mountainous atmospheres of sky and sea. It was her voice that made the sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world in which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, whatever self it had, became the self that was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, as we beheld her striding there alone, knew that there never was a world for her except the one she sang and, singing, made. Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, why, when the singing ended and we turned toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, the lights in the fishing boats at anchor there. As the night descended, tilting in the air, mastered the night and portioned out the sea. Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, arranging, deepening, enchanting night. Oh, blessed rage for order, pale Ramon. The maker's rage to order words of the sea. Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, and of ourselves and of our origins in ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds. Eight, the poem occurs in the mind written by poetry itself. For countless poets, writing today, the ghostly demarcations, the veritable ocean, not ours of Stevens, sounds in our work. Nine, here's my own poem, The Reader, written unawares after Stevens. The Reader. Experience among the waves allows one to limit the field. Each year he grew another soul. Oblong. Slightly pointed at the end. Like an ore. Its surface turned to the light. Blacken now and lift your news into the air. 

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Ten, after my father passed away, some 20 years after he gave me the manuscript of the novel of Sea Adventure, I wrote a poem to him. A dialogue with the child protagonist of his novel. A dialogue composed almost completely of language taken directly from his novel. And the current of Stevens' influence struggling with the inaccessibility of the abstract. And I'll read a portion of that poem here. I'm cutting and pasting a bit for the spirit of keeping us on the clock. Now my dear, it's called Erring, E-R-R-I-N-G. Now my dear. A golden life. I will dictate your prayers. See what we mean to find this lost thing, to find loss. Also, submission to me. Also taking as in what pains it took me to dry your blue and lumpy skin, [foreign language]. As in, I was lost in the waves until one in the four sheets with the pole and hook salvaged me and wrapped me close inside his coat. About his neck a drinking cup. His warmth composed me so. There were complaints from the hull and cargo at the slapping blows of the monster. There was creaking, scraping, singing, groaning, clipping, and all decrescendoing into a splintering, ticking and mousey noise. Then there would follow the hurt sounds of whimpering, meowing and cheeping as the ship righted itself again. Mounted before me you pointed to the sea village as we came to the lee of the island. And the crimson light of human life made fast to the shore. A dow waited. Its lateen sheet rattled in the wind. 

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This is how we learn. Everything appears as light and images. Rainbow bodies and bodies of darkness and water. The lamp of the white and smooth channel. The far reaching water lamp. And the lamp of space. This solution and coming into being. Later they began to occupy themselves with reading, feeding the fowls and smothering the charcoal embers. A flying fish skidded staring wide eyed along the deck. I recognized it from the one you had been wearing. 

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Labyrinth filled with [inaudible], bays, inlets, forks and a twisting silver monsters the size of a donkey. They could not fly and used grass shrimp for bait. With torches they lighted brush piles, and they simply kept the fire going night and day on the hilltops where they lived. As all the others remained at the edge of the flock where the weak and the young were. Three individuals ran up the hill. They fell on our necks and cried. They were the maroons, shades and have given up hope of ever seeing the living again. 

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Where is my father? He is there close to the lips with the forefinger and thumb, which means to speak. 

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Slowly blown ahead of the wind, the pilot tied himself to the foremast. He wanted to search for the corpses of the drowned. By dawn, most of them would be floating face down with crabs hanging on and disputing their bodies. There was nothing, sea, not one saved himself. I held myself first born vulture from heaven. A few seconds later, I heard a voice in my ear. I felt my language torn from my mouth, writhing on the deck like an eel out of water. 

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You shall be my page. Your duty will be to stay always by my side and carry my musket and cutlass. Wreaths tied to a huge stone obtained by barter from the mountain people who sent their merchants. My son, carry it around in your work. We look down into the blue of the glacier, and we shuddered at the [inaudible]. And we started down the other side. Now we came steadily through the low cloud ceiling. Now then, you know the whole story. Proudly we sing this day, pour out mellow notes. Pull, pull compadre. So tear away from me. Lift my hearts to heights serene. Painfully, my head will never be the light remember its parents meant. Made and presented to me and presented to me in gratitude. You leaned forward and put the question with living breath right into my ear. And there I will keep it, like the wife of Lot, the historian. My position ever gazing astern. They rode their steeds out into the swells. But the horses refused to swim very far. So after shouting curses and threats, the armed men turned back. One of them dismounted and helped the viewer on to his horse. Then mounting in front of you they galloped toward the open book. The open shore. The open horse. Hush now, quiet, listen. Thank you.

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>> Good afternoon. My name is Mark Manivong, and I'm the curator for poetry collections here at the Rare Books and Special Collections Division here in the library. I'd like to thank our poets first of all once again for being here. And also the Poetry and Literature Center for organizing this event. The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds more than a million items spread across 90-some special collections. Over the past ten years we've been actively trying to strengthen our poetry holdings. And that's done mainly through concentrating on certain collections like our poets laureate collection where we collect their works comprehensively. Our small presses and fine presses artist's books, broadsides, modern first editions, and LBGT authors. Today for this display you'll see some materials that come from many of those collections, so I'd invite you to come up and take a look. The division is always open Monday through Friday. And we're happy to help you with any of your research needs. Okay.

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>> And lastly I just want to thank everyone for coming out. Happy Birthday to Wallace Stevens. And thank you to our participants for coming. And their books are outside for sale. So please grab one. I'm sure they wouldn't mind signing.

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>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.

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Title: "Literary Birthday Celebration: Wallace Stevens" 
Speaker(s): Jennifer Michael Hecht, Peter Streckfus 
Description: Poets Jennifer Michael Hecht and Peter Streckfus will celebrate the birthday of poet Wallace Stevens by reading selections from his work and discussing his influence on their own writing.