April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

An unhappy people in a happy world--
Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.
An unhappy people in an unhappy world--

Here are too many mirrors for misery.
A happy people in an unhappy world--
It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.
                   (from "The Auroras of Autumn", Wallace Stevens)

The bad...

Hypothesis of parasitic-push-outwards.

She sucks on his hypothesis.

Turns it in her mouth until there's a lozenge-shaped crevasse
that begins to slice sides off her tongue.

A hank of chopped silence gathers.

Verification slides his black eyes toward her
to check the effect against the ammonia.
                    (from MODESTY: LESSON NO. 2, Karen Houle)
_______________________________

Without meaning to be one Stevens's verse is philosophic; Houle's is, however, simply there, opened in front of her like the academic's connect-the-dots imitation of a favourite author. Stevens's "Auroras" is, beyond even the philosophic, a very mirroring Torah and the mystery between itself and the Master of the Universe never more reverentially problematized. Of course, it's never apparent to the readerly sense and yet the mysteries of an autumn season were never more happily read. The quickening cynicism of a people condemned to be unhappy in an unhappy land is a very jewel refracted (and never just vulgarly seen) in poetic light. By contrast, "hank of chopped silence" is a rather stupidly misappropriated sense of movement and rhythm altogether. Even in the age of différance, the stupidly misappropriated movement of a "hank of chopped silence"...

Reading Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird: I"

                     I

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

Some procedural principles of my own:


(a) a reading shouldn't exceed 500 words;
(b) I choose the following passage from Deleuze-Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus to serve as a general 'paratext' for my reading of Stevens's opening verse:

But to break the becoming-animal all that is needed is to extract a segment from it, to abstract one of its moments, to fail to take into account its internal speeds and slownesses, to arrest the circulation of affects. (p. 260 from Chapter 10. 1730: "Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible...");

(c) I choose to talk not about linguistic units but rather more interesting lines of flight or deterritorialization;
(d) I view the poem (and its first verse) as a map "with multiple entryways and exits"; and
(e) I regard the critic's language as always "acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying".
______________________


Twenty mountains and thirteen ways. Snowy habitat and a solitary blackbird distinguishable not by wing, tail but eye only. The poet's first verse is a bird's moving eye. The significant question is whether the poem's a "program" for transformative viewing or a lyricist's plain and simple address.


To me it's clear. We don't ever dare to take from the bird's true motion a single identifiable (read codifiable) moment and treat it as Stevens's true poem (haecceity): we continue the rêve, transported by the object's physicality and potential to move freely over the white plane of true flight. It's potential to mix flight and feeling at the same time is something which will be eventually regarded as its primary "becoming-animal" experience.


Snowy mountains don't form a backdrop for flying blackbirds as much as simple speeds do, & rates of descent and slow-moving flight formations across the sky. An interiorized type of flight, in particular, that can't be expressed initially as anything but a synecdoche. But more than that. Landscapes over which the eye of flight roams can't (like aerial photography) really be plotted as points, depressions or peaks for a bird's eye in flight is a total of "speeds and affects". Stevens's first way is then an assemblage and not a set of decipherable coordinates.

Furthermore, it's a question of eye for eye: the slowing, transformative power of bird-vision in place of an authoritative (which in the case of humans may even become voyeuristic) viewing that's always centered, always full of meanings. Eye does not co-opt eye. Slowing with the blackbird in mid-flight over snowy valleys is not a type of arrested activity, tracked on the viewer's sensory radar And since this type of bird flight's been interiorized, the only way to distinguish the moving eye from its environment is to the see the bird's body as a smooth planar surface over which the viewer and viewed pass as flights towards a new deterritorialized 'site' .

Stevens's bodiless eye is permissible only because of a truer body of which it is part. The moving eye can be said to belong to a much more general Body, organless, smooth and always tied to flows, a site for traces of flights rather than a knowledge grid. Lines in Stevens's opening verse are striations ("schizzes"). The flying eye is where one among many entryways into (and exits out of) the essentially heterogeneous Body of flight can be envisaged: with space always for one more ( n+1) Viewing the blackbird's flying eye is a becoming-animal, a radically liberatory sense of engaged reading.

What does "the eye of the blackbird" signify? Nothing that frees us this easily from the rooted strictures of 'text' need fear stoppage of bird flight (poem's primary flow) or the threat of lexical units  supplanting flights and entryways altogether. Or even twenty mountains and thirteen ways