Write This Way

A while back, I received an email soliciting a poem for a webzine I'd never heard of, but new journals sprout up all the time, some of them even good, and I almost always contribute when asked by an editor. After a week, however, she wrote that she could not print my piece because, well, she had an aversion to certain words. I told her, "Don't worry about it," but I was frankly annoyed since she obviously had never read my poetry. If she had, she would immediately see that I embrace every word in the English language, as many as my untrepanned skull can hold, that I freely mix high and low in the same reasonably-fragrant-yet-still-funky tub, that I believe there is the right place and time for every utterance. So here's a friendly suggestion for editors: Don't solicit poems from people you haven't read. Is that too unreasonable? Also: Don't dictate how a solicited piece is to be written. Poets aren't advertising writers! I bring this up because a curator recently asked me, for chump change, $200, to write a 200-to-250-word essay, press release to "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," a group show opening on January 23 in Chelsea, Manhattan. "It would function as another art work in the exhibition, creating a loose narrative or atmosphere for the physical objects," he explained. After I sent my piece, however, he responded, "I fear it may run antithetical to the exhibition, which explores interior and meditative states. It's true that the world is falling apart and far from calm, but does it not make the desires expressed in Stevens' poem even more urgent and necessary?" I told him to forget about it. To waste less time, I should learn how to say no more often. My short take on the Stevens:

Was is the operative word here, since this Stevens poem, published in 1947, has already become a period piece. Thanks to the increasing intrusion, to the point of madness, of the television then, even more insidiously, the computer, our houses are rarely quiet, calm or even a refuge anymore, with the virtual outside constantly disrupting our visual, sonic and psychological equilibriums. Reading itself has become less contemplative and more anxious, our eyes and mind flitting compulsively from one webpage to the next. We can barely get through a poem of any length before jumping to, say, a stock market quote, pornography or the latest, up to the minute sport scores. Since the house was quiet, Stevens extrapolated, ironically, that the world had to be calm, yet this observation was relatively valid, since a major war had just ended. Order had been restored and prosperity awaited, conditions that are the exact opposite to the great unraveling we’re experiencing now, a fact that is becoming more and more undeniable in spite of all the white noise. As our collective house implodes, many of us are being kicked out of our provisional homes. Obama, Obama, we're braying, but there is no quiet, and there will be no calm.
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The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm
Wallace Stevens
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoke as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.