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Wallace Stevens Journal
Journal Prestige (SJR): 0.1  Number of Followers: 0  Subscription journalISSN (Print) 0148-7132 - ISSN (Online) 2160-0570 Published by Project MUSE  [305 journals]
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- Chinese Whispers: Toward a Transpacific Poetics by Yunte Huang (review)
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Abstract: True to the goals of the “Thinking Literature” series in which the book is published, Chinese Whispers renders the difficult phrase “transpacific poetics” into a mode of reasoning in and about the world. Yunte Huang deftly moves between poetry, cybernetics, the insurance industry, linguistics, translation, calligraphy, computer science, nationalist cultural projects, and geopolitics, revealing how all these things have to do with the “transpacific” and even with “poetics.”The power of the book is its defamiliarizing effect. In Chapters One and Five, for example, Huang highlights the “transpacific” in contemporary definitions of “information.” In Chapter Four, in the course of relaying his tribulations in ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Poem as Icon: A Study in Aesthetic Cognition by Margaret H. Freeman
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Abstract: Borrowing her title from Wallace Stevens’s “The Rock,” Margaret H. Freeman gives us a fascinating exploration of how poetry “enables us to cognitively access and experience the ‘being’ of reality, all that is and is not, both seen and unseen” (1). Freeman develops the case that the poem as icon is an activity or function more than it is an object or artifact. Poetic iconicity is what a poem does as it maps ways to free ourselves from abstractions and concepts structuring our usual rationality. Freeman contends the iconic poem is an affective response to reality by the poet and then to the same reality by the reader. Through it, both have immediate experience of the self’s existence in a primordial, preconscious ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- An Old Piano Tuner in Vienna, and: Wallace Stevens on His Way to Work
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Abstract: I saw a report the other day that only thirty pianos had been sold in Austria last ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Harmonium through the Years
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Abstract: A FEW MONTHS AGO, around the time when the Wallace Stevens Society decided to organize an American Literature Association panel on the centenary of Stevens’s 1923 publication of Harmonium, I had a dream about the poet. I do not often remember my dreams, but this one remains vivid in my memory. I had recently been reading (and teaching) Susan Howe’s beautiful poem “118 Westerly Terrace,” so perhaps it is not surprising that in my dream I found myself in Stevens’s Hartford home, climbing the stairs to the second floor. The stairs were carpeted, so that my footsteps were hushed, and I tread carefully as I turned the corner into a hallway. I walked tentatively, thinking that if I was quiet enough, I might feel the ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- News and Comments
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Abstract: The eleventh John N. Serio Award for the Best Article Published in The Wallace Stevens Journal was awarded to Juliette Utard for her contribution entitled “Epistolary Stevens” (Spring 2021). The award was judged by a committee of three Editorial Board Members (Tony Sharpe, Rachel Malkin, and Patrick Redding). It was officially presented at the 2023 MLA Convention in San Francisco. Please join us in congratulating the author.The centenary of Harmonium, commemorated in this special issue, is stimulating various public occasions in the course of 2023 as well. The President of the Wallace Stevens Society, Lisa Goldfarb, reports, for instance, that she will be organizing a three-part Roundtable at the 92nd Street Y in ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- In Memoriam Robert Buttel (1923–2023)
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Abstract: Editorial note: Our Editorial Board Member Robert Buttel passed away on April 20, 2023, at the age of ninety-nine, at his home in Providence, Rhode Island. Bob had been the longest-serving Board Member of this journal: he started out in 1984, thus serving for nearly four decades. Below we would like to honor him with four personal testimonies by Wallace Stevens’s grandson, Peter Hanchak, our Honorary Editor John Serio, fellow Board Member Milton Bates, and former Book Review Editor and Board Member George Lensing. In the world of Stevens criticism, Bob’s name is remembered especially for two major books that have continued to be used by subsequent generations: his monograph Wallace Stevens: The Making of Harmonium ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Still Whipping Hullabaloos among Spheres
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Abstract: WALLACE STEVENS’S first book of poems, Harmonium, was published by Alfred A. Knopf on September 7, 1923, less than a month shy of the poet’s forty-fourth birthday. It didn’t exactly make a splash. Though Mark Van Doren in The Nation predicted that someday a monograph would be written about it (and other contemporary volumes), and that Stevens’s work would be more “durable” than much of what “passed for poetry in his day,” he still called Harmonium “tentative, perverse, and superfine,” and wondered out loud, “What public will care for a poet who strains every nerve every moment to be unlike anyone else who ever wrote[']” (40). Van Doren’s skepsis about the book’s ability to find an audience seemed to be borne out at ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Regards to Mrs. Church, and: Remember Me to Mrs. Church
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Abstract: The things at flower shows that interest me most are precisely the things that one never sees in gardens.It may be that the contemplation of cacti, while a weird occupation, is not completely satisfying . . ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Thought and Poetry: Essays on Romanticism, Subjectivity, and Truth by John
Koethe (review)-
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Abstract: John Koethe is rare among philosophers. He is an accomplished poet who has also produced excellent work on issues to do with skepticism, metaphysics, and the nature of the mind and self. In other words, he has had two careers, an academic one as an analytic philosopher working on the problems that define philosophy in the Anglophone academy, and a largely extra-academic one as a poet of practice and not profession. This, he tells us, has been a healthy arrangement, since it has allowed his poetry to issue “from an impulse internal to the poetic act” rather than “from pressures external to it” (65). After reading this superb book, one is inclined to say that the same is true of his academic career, since as a ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Stevens’s Soil: Intelligence, Conceptual Affordances, and the Genius
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Abstract: HEARKENING BACK to Harmonium at a hundred, one comes to “The Comedian” at the numeral C. Although the long poem’s transatlantic odyssey has now circled the sun a century, its bounds remain two notes-to-self: “man is the intelligence of his soil” and “his soil is man’s intelligence” (CPP 22, 29). The latter, Crispin confides, is “better,” “worth crossing seas to find” (CPP 29). But how so' And why soil'From the opening lines of the first and fourth of six cantos—that is, from the poem’s very beginning and its midpoint—the two claims demand to be contrasted and often are. Few of the many scholars who have offered readings of Harmonium’s longest poem over the century since its first publication fail to juxtapose them. ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- “A Sort of Buoy”: Stevens, Plato, and Benjamin Jowett
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Abstract: ON JULY 4, 1900, shortly after moving to New York City to begin his short-lived career as a journalist, the twenty-year-old Wallace Stevens wrote in his journal, “I am going to get a set of [Jowett’s] Plato as soon as I can afford it and use that as a sort of buoy” (L 42). In what is perhaps a telling error, however, the name Jowett was mis-transcribed both in the Letters of Wallace Stevens and Souvenirs and Prophecies as “Lowell’s Plato,” a mistake Milton Bates notes in his Wallace Stevens: A Mythology of Self (44). If the name Jowett was already arcane enough by the 1960s and 1970s to be mis-transcribed, today Benjamin Jowett is likely even less familiar, except, perhaps, insofar as his English translations of ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Harmonium in a Time of War: Stevens and Contemporary Ukrainian Poets
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Abstract: You do not know the things that are taught by him who falls. I do know.IS IT POSSIBLE to convey the experience of war to others through language' Those of us who have regarded war from a distance, from a safe country, or city, or home, are not privy to the experience of those in war zones, as are soldiers, military support staff, or civilians, to whom war comes expectedly through engagement with the enemy or unexpectedly through an incendiary device or unprovoked attack. To suggest we can imagine their pain or fear is to trivialize their lived experience. Yet war can affect our psyche as well, even if we remain observers from afar. Susan Sontag has called “Being a spectator of calamities taking place in another ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- A Graduate Seminar Roundtable: Introduction
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Abstract: IN FALL 2022, I taught a graduate seminar at Johns Hopkins called “1922 and Its Neighbors.” The course aimed to situate the most famous works of English-language modernism’s annus mirabilis—Ulysses, The Waste Land, Jacob’s Room—among other texts published between 1920 and 1924 (some canonical, some scarcely read today). In keeping with its title, the seminar also featured theoretical and historical writing on the question of the neighbor.One of the students in the course was Nora Pehrson, who had just accepted an appointment as new managing editor of this journal. Nora happened to mention to Bart Eeckhout—whose extraordinary helming of The Wallace Stevens Journal we also celebrate, and thank our stars for ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- The Place of the Neighbor in Harmonium
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Abstract: IN A 1906 JOURNAL entry, the twenty-six-year-old Wallace Stevens expressed a sentiment that would go on to become something of a commonplace in his reception both as a poet and as a literary personality: “I detest ‘company’” (L 89). But if the young Stevens’s asociality here sounds absolute, the scare quotes also indicate a possible interest in alternative notions of what company could be. Must it be human' Some fifty years later, Stevens would attest to his enduring ambivalence about his fellow humans in a letter to Robert Pack in which he reported having long considered making humanness the fourth essential feature of modern poetry: “For a long time, I have thought of adding other sections to the NOTES [i.e. ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Poetic Models of History and Time in Harmonium
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Abstract: IN HARMONIUM, Wallace Stevens builds poetic models of history and time, juxtaposing quotidian and historical chronologies to capture the interrelations between ephemeral moments and grand narratives. Stevens thinks historically while remaining critical of history, searching across time for poetic subjects while steadfastly refusing to “play the flat historic scale” with them (CPP 11). As has been widely noted, the supposed objectivity of the historical method became the target of criticism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings, for example, the rumination of historical consciousness endangers the mere act of living (“Uses” 62), while in Hayden White’s formulation ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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- Stevens as Modernist: The Intensities of Harmonium
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Abstract: FOR THIS CELEBRATION of Harmonium’s centenary, my central concern is to provide an account of how I see crucial aspects of the book as establishing the most intelligent and possibly the most intensely moving of the founding poetic texts in American modernism. I mean by “modernist” an imaginative resistance to Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic intellectual practices achieved primarily by stylistic means. Modernist strategies seek to release potential affective and contemplative investments blocked by these orientations of consciousness. My guide here is Wallace Stevens’s interest in Friedrich Nietzsche. But for now I will be content with mentioning B. J. Leggett’s superb commentary on Stevens’s interest in ... Read More
PubDate: 2023-11-12T00:00:00-05:00
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