PeopleHerd

Earthy Anecdote

Every time the bucks went clattering
Over Oklahoma
A firecat bristled in the way.

Wherever they went,
They went clattering,
Until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the right,
Because of the firecat.

Or until they swerved
In a swift, circular line
To the left,
Because of the firecat.

The bucks clattered.
The firecat went leaping,
To the right, to the left,
And
Bristled in the way.

Later, the firecat closed his bright eyes
And slept.

*

Signs of the frontier—sonorous, repetitious, dreamed. We often recognize the presence of the unknown by what Wallace Stevens here names “clatter”: an ambient chaos, the solid thrum of footfalls upon footfalls. The cycle of pursuit, evasion, and repose upon the edges of the mind. To introduce us to Harmonium, Stevens’ seminal 1923 collection of mostly lyrical inventions, he fades into a haze of dust in the banal panhandle of Oklahoma. But what has been stirred up?

Welcome (perhaps in familiar greeting, to the cowboys and cowgirls among us) to the natural energy of migration upon the earth’s open landscapes. It might be a symbol for the stampede of the imagination, or myriad other energies. These sorts of movements are always at work in life as we know it. In fact, they comprise it. But with motion, as far as I’ve ever experienced, comes the refrain of order. Repetition reminds us of the shape of chaos. The bristle of the superego herds the tumultuous advance of the id into pastures of comprehension. Likewise in Stevens’ exploration—because of his attention to this matter as a feeling, breathing consciousness—the clouds of dust are consumed by the voice of the poet, whose wash of aggression and resistance, scuttle of words and solid bristle of form, will guide page by page into promises of passage.

A kaleidoscope upon the plains or page, the dance of vectors over the sheer plane of consciousness: Stevens reinvents the lyric in its panoramic or aerial form, where there is no “I” to proffer explanation. Instead of personal perspective, there is only distanced, disembodied pattern—a crop circle in the imagination. If the topography of Stevens’ anecdotes correspond at any point to those of Wordsworth’s lyrical wanderings, it is likely only in the familiarity with which both poets return to their particular places: “after many wanderings, many years / Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, / And this green pastoral landscape, were to me / More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!”

In its earthiness, “Earthy Anecdote” repeats the eclogues of Virgil and his successors, but this time in mythic American space, vast and unpopulated. It chronicles not agrarian labor but the work of linguistic cultivation. There is no hand yet at work in such a scene.

But shape can also menace: form, whether of language or landscape or predatory firecats, constrains the creativity of the mind, but also its intelligence. As the first gatekeeper explains in one of Kafka’s infinitely constrained parables, “I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him.”

In composition, there is a time of cowering that can supersede the sensation of inspiration. This might be what makes the Romantic vision of spiritual space so fleeting, or misleading even. Time passes. Bob Dylan sings a chorus that rhymes with “rangin.” We know now that the bulk of pre-industrial droves will be bolted onto the riveted floor of machinists and managers. Buffalo have long been on the cusp of extinction. Their silhouettes and shag return in analog legends and nerve endings. What kinesis there is circles in the interior spaces, if anywhere, vaulting out at times into the empty space of the firecat’s smoldering eyes.

Read more from our friend Ryan at: http://looseleafcollection.blogspot.com