Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index
Mahendra Singh’s Website
ARTIST INDEX
Derik Badman | The Plain Sense of Things |
Noah Berlatsky | This Solitude of Cataracts |
Lilli Carré | Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock |
Warren Craghead | The Rabbit As King of the Ghosts |
Franklin Einspruch | Of Mere Being | Edie Fake | Floral Decorations for Bananas |
Anja Flower | Earthy Anecdote |
Anke Feuchtenberger | Depression Before Spring |
Shaenon Garrity | The Emperor of Ice Cream |
Blaise Larmee | Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird |
Vom Marlowe | Hibiscus on the Sleeping Shores |
L. Nichols | Frogs Eat Butterflies…. |
Paul Nudd | Mud Master |
Jason Overby | Nomad Exquisite |
Sean Michael Robinson | Sunday Morning (I) |
James Romberger | Madame La Fleurie |
Mahendra Singh | The Cuban Doctor |
Shannon Smith | The Sense of the Sleight of Hand Man |
Edra Soto | Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour |
Bert Stabler | Flyer’s Fall |
Marguerite Van Cook | A High-Toned Old Christian Woman |
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the Illustrated Wallace Stevens roundtable. For this project, 21 artists have created illustrations and/or artwork based on a range of Wallace Stevens poems. (Update: The roundtable is now complete; all 21 artists with links to their work are listed above.)
Note that comments are closed on individual posts. This is therefore the place where you can comment on the roundtable as a whole or on individual work. We’d love to hear your thoughts!
This roundtable was inspired by this post, which was itself inspired by a discussion of the intersection of visual art and post-structuralism. This roundtable may or may not advance that conversation…but whether or no, it’s certainly been a joy to curate and participate in. I’d like to thank Derik Badman for technical assistance and all the artists for their contributions.
All artwork is copyright by the individual artists. The Wallace Stevens’ poems that are not in the public domain are owned by his heirs.
Here follows “(Pages of Illustrations.)“
A little while ago I reprinted some drawings from a 2002 zine I made in which I illustrated Wallace Stevens’ 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. A bunch of people (okay, two people) expressed interest in seeing the whole thing…so here it is. (Click pages below to move through the zine.)
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
—Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,
So what’s being compared here?
At first the answer seems fairly obvious; three minds are being compared to three blackbirds. When you think about it a little more, though, things get blurry. For one thing, the simile doesn’t quite map; the three minds are actually being compared to the tree, not to the blackbirds. So is there one overmind in which the three minds sit? Or is the tree the mind in which the blackbirds sit — or a number of minds, in which different explanations of the simile quietly caw? The poem doubles — or triples — back on itself; it seems to be describing or explaining its own processes. And if it’s talking about itself, the simile is there merely to multiply. The mind, the blackbird, and the poem are shadows that slide one into the other, each and each and each.
Or, to put it another way, the connection between the blackbird and the mind is arbitrary. That’s how metaphors work; they connect unlike things. Language is all metaphor; a string of arbitrary links, slipping signs that magically pull meaning out of non-meaning, like an infinite string of blackbirds rushing out of that tree, or mind, or poem. Wallace Stevens poems are built out of metaphors and think about metaphors, which is what I meant here when I said:
Wallace Stevens is very much about words. It’s words as imagery, but the point of most of his poems is the evanescence of those images; they’re arbitrary. They appear in language and disappear into language.
As a result, it’s not really possible — or at least very difficult — to create an illustration that works like a Wallace Stevens poem.
Though, of course, there isn’t anything to stop you from illustrating a Wallace Stevens poem. Nothing simpler. Here’s my own illustration of the above poem, taken from a zine I made way back in 2002.
This drawing neatly reverses the poem its illustrating. In Stevens, the mind comes first, and then the image of the blackbird follows. But in the illustration, the blackbirds are as solid as, and essentially precede, the split consciousness. Instead of three minds generating three blackbirds, the blackbirds generate three minds, represented by the chain of question marks. The poem spins an epistemological conundrum (what do I think?) into an ontological one (where are the blackbirds?) The illustration, on the other hand, takes an ontological question (what is the status of these multiple, poorly drawn critters?) and spins it into an epistemological one.
Here’s another example:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Here, the illustration’s concreteness doesn’t so much mirror the poem as parody it. The poem treats the blackbird’s insubstantiality as sublime; the word is beautiful because it shimmers and passes; the singing depends on the silence and the silence on the singing. The illustration, by nailing down the ephermerality, reimagines it as (or teases out the implication of) violence. Language’s play is freedom — what separates us from the blackbird is that we can contemplate the blackbird. But that (loooooooooooooong separation) from the animal is also our knowledge of sin, which is the knowledge of death. The poem is about the joy of the world slipping into words. The illustration is, maybe, a reminder that, from the perspective of the blackbird, human mastery of the world may have a downside.
One last one…and here, I think, the illustration and the poem really do come close to meaning the same thing.
In “Thirteen Ways,” the blackbird stands in for both sign and signified. It’s the mark that points and the thing pointed to; the trace of a reality that can be indicated but not reached. The poem above can be read, perhaps, as an acknowledgement that words are not a self-contained system; the world is in there too, even if we can’t really tell exactly where. If words coat our images, then maybe images infest our words. We speak blackbirds — or at least something that looks a little bit like them.
In Caro’s recent post she argues that Asterios Polyp fails to deliver a kind of literary complexity.
The result is the reiteration – on the level of performance if not assertion – of a hierarchical division between “the literary” and the “graphical”: a dichotomy that is aggressive and dismissive in precisely the same way as Asterios’ treatment of Hana. It is completely uninformed about how literary fiction works. It creates a destructive incoherence at the center of the book.
I’ve probably bashed Asterios Polyp enough for one lifetime at this point. But I thought it might be interesting to look at a couple of examples of works that I think demonstrate the kind of literariness Caro is looking for.
I’ve been rereading Wallace Stevens recently, and I’m quite taken with this poem, the first in his first collection:
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.
As with a lot of Stevens’ poetry, nobody seems all that certain what the fuck this means. I’ve seen various efforts to parse it as some sort of allegory (the firecat means “change” was one particularly painful example.) But none of them are very convincing. Even the relation of title to poem seems maddeningly obscure. How is this earthy? Is there some sort of bizarre sexual double entendre known only to Stevens? That seems fairly unlikely — and yet, no other explanation presents itself.
The confusion here is, I think, on one hand simply a result of looking too deeply, or of coming at the poem from the wrong perspective. A lot of Stevens’ writing seems to me to be inspired not by abstruse epistemological theories or Romanticism, but by children’s poetry. “Earthy Anecdote” makes most sense if read not as allegory or complicated symbol, but as nonsense verse. Dr. Seuss’ battling tweetle beetles aren’t symbols of the futility of martial endeavor. They’re just goofy fun for kids. Similarly, the clattering bucks and the firecat are entertaining images. It’s fun to say “bucks went clattering over Oklahoma.” (Go ahead, try it. I’ll wait.)
At the same time…Stevens was also, and undoubtedly, inspired by abstruse epistemology and Romanticism. And he was writing verse for adults, not kids. Starting his first volume of poetry off with a bit of extravagant silliness is a fairly dramatic line in the sand — even if the line is curved. It’s a certain kind of statement; an elliptical declaration of love for the earthy, clattering bucks rushing about in glorious, purposeless panic — metaphors in frantic search for a meaning. In that vein, perhaps you can see the firecat as Stevens himself, leaping here and there to goad his images (and perhaps his readers) into a lather, before closing his bright eyes in self-satisfied pleasure. Or, alternately, Stevens might be the bucks, thrashing this way and that in an effort to avoid a meaning which is always leaping to thwart them — and which, in lazy triumph, curls around the poem at the end despite every horse’s best efforts.
None of these explanations are “right”, I don’t think. Rather, the point of the poem is the pleasurable possibilities of the point of the poem. That’s how the modernist puzzle works; the poem is playing with its own interpretation. Form and content (buck and firecat?) aren’t separated, or even separable; the content of the poem is its own metaphors. The reader doesn’t so much understand the poem, as shuttle about inside it. It’s a joke where the punchline is that the form of the joke is the punchline.
There are not a ton of comics that play these kinds of shell games with meaning, form, and content. But one example that does spring to mind for me is Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel. In my review on Comixology I wrote:
Yokoyama had wrong-footed me. I was looking for realism, and so I found the epistemological uncertainty frustrating. But the book isn’t realism — or not exactly. It’s pomo; Yokoyama’s tongue is in his cheek the entire time. Take the scene of ducks flying over the plane as hunters shoot at them. The footnote points out that the hunters all miss, and indeed, you can see the ducks traveling in a perfect V, not even disturbed by the shells exploding in pristine, regimented bursts all around them. The demands of narrative (somebody shoots, somebody hits) are sacrificed, with a wink, to the exigencies of layout. It’s as if the hunters and the ducks are not adversaries at all, but part of some single great mechanism, controlled by one guiding hand. As, of course, they are.
In Travel, as in Stevens, the sleight-of-hand manipulation of the tropes of the medium, the formal elements of the work, are themselves the content. As a result, modernist works like this are like two facing mirrors; absolutely flat surfaces leading into infinite depths.
I’m not saying that this is the only kind of worthwhile art by any means. I don’t want all art to be playful modernist puzzles anymore than I want all art to be slasher films or shojo. Still, Stevens and Yokoyama are great, and I wouldn’t at all mind seeing more comics that followed in their hoofprints.