Well, now that MacJournal has its bug/beef with blogger all ironed-out, an entry:
I just listened to a PoemTalk podcast from last year, “it’s like a new reality, man,” on Stevens’s late poem "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” (the text of the poem is at the podcast link). As Al Filreis notes in the podcast, this poem continues Stevens’s long argument with William Carlos Williams over poetics, whether it’s better to try to capture the thing itself (a red wheelbarrow) or to revel in the imagination (concupiscent curds). It’s, of course, more complicated than that, and we can see the complication emerge (again as the podcast discusses) in the opening of Stevens’s poem:
At the earliest ending of winter,There: like. And later, at the conclusion, again:In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
Surrounded by its choral rings,The podcast’s participants labor over that word, one (Bernstein or Joseph) suggesting we hear it there at the end as a hipster or Valley Girl (remember those?): “it’s, like, a new reality, man.” Poor Stevens.Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
Well, he can take care of himself.
I wanted to add my two bits to say that the “battered panache” we see in “The sun was rising at six,
/ No longer a battered panache above snow...” may be one of the many Cs (the letter) we see Stevens playing with in this poem, and elsewhere in this poetry.
Who goes on and on about his panache, particularly in a lacrimose final scene? Cyrano. Cyrano the big-nosed peacock who delights in verse, in imagination, in flourish and heroism. Stevens chose this poem for the last poem in his collected works, the capstone of his career, a cenotaph. The seeming ambivalence in this poem over whether or not the imagination (Stevens) or the real (Williams) triumphs seems to me to resolve somewhat with the final speech of Cyrano. So here’s Cyrano at his death: " ... yet there is something still that will always be mine, and when I go to God's presence, there I'll doff it and sweep the heavenly pavement with a gesture — something I'll take unstained out of this world ... my panache.”
