Come Together

or, Strength in Numbers

Over the last few months, I’ve taken a half-dozen approaches, some more direct, some more oblique, to Wallace Stevens’ sixteen-line poem The Emperor of Ice Cream:

• Reading Paul Mariani’s biography of Stevens, The Whole Harmonium

• Reading Harmonium, the Stevens collection that includes the poem

• Reading Helen Vendler’s Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out Of Desire, which includes a close reading of the poem

• Watching the Wallace Stevens episode on PBS’s Poetry in America

  

Watching Dana Gioia on Stevens on YouTube

• Meeting with four other poetry lovers to talk about the poem

Both the PBS show and the Gioia video are worth your time whether you are enamored of Stevens or puzzled by Stevens, but by far the richest encounter for me? The group conversation. We set aside 90 minutes to talk about two poems, and knew that The Emperor of Ice-Cream would require (and merit) more time than the Billy Collins poem on our agenda, so we started with Stevens.

And we were so right! The final accounting: The Emperor of Ice-Cream, 75 minutes of conversation, Billy Collins’s The Blues, 15 minutes. None of us purport to be an expert on Stevens, but, trust me, the light we were able to shed on the poem by asking questions of it, by sharing images and turns of phrase that attracted us, and by bringing in a little of the background knowledge we each had, had the desired result: somehow most of us could say we now loved a poem that 90 minutes earlier was inscrutable.

...In kitchen cups concupiscent curds ...Let be be finale of seem ...Take from the dresser of deal ...If her horny feet protrude ...Let the lamp affix its beam ...The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream

I'll not defeat the purpose of learning together by explaining just what we made out of those lines. Instead, I'll invite you to convene your own group of poetry lovers and set aside the time to explore together The Emperor of Ice-Cream. You'll thank me. Here's some suggestions should you be fortunate enough to organize a group:

1. Give yourself enough time (at least 90 minutes) and no more than two poems

2. Circulate copies of the poems to the group in advance of the meeting

3. Read the whole poem through to start, and have someone else read it aloud one more time towards the end of the meeting

4. Acknowledge from the start that there are no wrong answers when it comes to poetry; all insights are valid

5. Solicit ideas and feedback from everyone constantly, so that as far as possible, everyone has equal air time

6. Encourage face-to-face meetings, but allow someone to Zoom in if they can’t make it in person yet wouldn’t want to miss the conversation

I’m a middle school teacher and find that even my 12-14 year old students can learn better when they explore a text on their own. What works well with kids works dazzlingly with adults. Plus you can make new friends who just somehow assumed that nobody but themselves would want to convene over poetry.

Post-Script:

In a recent post, I noted that I was reading Ada Calhoun’s book Also a Poet, which starts out with its focus on Frank O’Hara, but becomes very much an exploration of Calhoun’s relationship with her father, the art critic and poet Peter Schjeldahl. Late in the book, Schjeldahl is battling cancer. He chooses this time to share with his daughter a favorite and appropriate poem, W.H. Auden’s In Memory of W.B. Yeats. Calhoun in her book has a few things to say about how unfair it is that, for example, she needs to pay $285.37 for the right to quote the first six lines of Auden’s poem when the entire poem is available for free on the Internet. Calhoun invites her readers to seek it out there and read it in full; I did. Here it is, read by Auden himself: