Susan Howe Renders Wallace Stevens Luminous at The Nation

At The Nation, Susan Howe on the essence of Wallace Stevens. "The poetry of Wallace Stevens makes me happy. This is the simple truth," she writes. "I owe him an incalculable debt, for ways in which, through word frequencies and zero zones, his writing locates, rescues, and delivers what is various and vagrant in the near at hand." This becomes a beautiful piece, told in fragments. An excerpt:

Poetry is an incessant amorous search under the sign of love for a remembered time at the pitch-dark fringes of evening when we gathered together to bless and believe. In “Somnambulisma,” Stevens’s vulgar rolling ocean follows Walt Whitman’s solitary sea-bird in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” “Soothe! soothe! soothe! / Close on its wave soothes the wave behind, / And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close, / But my love soothes not me, not me.”
     “Sound is sight sung inwardly. I am folding tangled threads of royal purple for a robe wrapped tightly round to keep the breath of the night wind warm. The way women in Irish paintings wrap themselves in woolen blankets, or the way in To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay covers the boar skull on the nursery wall with her green shawl so her children will sleep. As we grow old we return to our parents. Their absent submission to the harsh 
reality of Death renders the tangle luminous. A stellar pallor hangs on strips of silver bubbling before the sun. The spell is broken. There they are—embarking with other happy couples for Cythera.
     “Up from waves scudding over

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Sarah Pierpont Edwards’s mother, Mary Hooker, was a granddaughter of Thomas Hooker. In 1636, at the height of the 
antinomian crisis, he led his congregation along Indian trails to the bend of the river where Hartford is now.
In my unspeakable fish net spectra version she’s still roaming

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Stevens wrote the magnificent ninth poem in the Rock series several months before Santayana’s death at the Convent of the Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary, in September 1952, (where he was being cared for by Irish nuns) and three years before his own death at Saint Francis Hospital, Hartford (established in 1897 by the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Chambéry). Reading and rereading this poem of parallel worlds—the city Rome, and the Rome of pastoral—composed by a poet-philosopher in homage of a philosopher-poet, I experience the wonder and mystery of art—its mortal deception its hawk-eyed majesty.

Read it all at The Nation.