A House Going Quiet

Wallace Stevens and Reading a Restless Mind

13 Ways of Looking at Color, by Jerilyn McLean. And a Slice of View from my Current Writing Outpost

I keep finding the same Wallace Stevens poem on top of different piles of papers and books in the rooms of the house we’ve been renovating for a couple years. No matter where the piles are stacked, it’s there: The House was Quiet and the World was Calm. Like a card trick. Cut the deck; there it is.

Our new house is on a quiet, in-between road. It’s a fixer upper in my old neighborhood in East Watertown, where I had my first classroom and taught for a decade at the turn of the century. These days, I run into old Watertown High students, teens in their 40s now. They work in their families’ Armenian grocery stores, or they’re cops, or they’ve had big lives in Hollywood or New York and have come back home to settle. 

I’m hoping to settle, too, into this strange and good old house with nooks and stairs that lead nowhere. In the couple years since we moved in, I keep migrating my writing and working spot from one room or desk to another. From my latest outpost, I can see giant conifers out the window and our nice Lebanese neighbor down below collecting grape leaves from vines coiled around a chain link fence and low hanging cable wires. I see the tiny, stunningly angry lady next door—an old art and music critic who writes now about getting the most from three day visits to various small cities, etc. She’s in her slippers, moving our survey markers.

Restlessness is a bitch. Healing from Covid, I watch from the couch as my college kids add to their piles of new apartment stuff from T.J. Maxx and yard sales—cutlery, colanders, incense, pillows. I make them lists they don’t need and didn’t ask for, and the steroids I’m taking make it all seem sadder, I think, than it probably is. It takes me a few days to realize how much I fear the coming emptiness of the fixer upper. And that I miss our old house and my garden. It’s strange that you don’t take your garden with you when you move. It feels a little like leaving your dog behind for the new owners to take care of.

***

It’s a predicament to be bugged or bogged down or sad but not know the source– usually a thought– that brought it on. You notice you’re moping around, awash in sadness or worry or irritation, but you can’t pinpoint the particulars yet. Maybe you try to shake it off, go and pet the dog, get coffee, talk to people about current events. If you’re lucky, you catch it early, tracing your thinking back and back until you find the thing—a-ha! of course!— that set off your mood. Or maybe you don’t even notice you’re down in it, and so you stay down, lost for quite some time. 

Sometimes sad or restless starts with a trickster thought, usually some dopey comparison like: I should be vacationing like they’re vacationing. Or Why am I home when other people go out and learn to surf? But sometimes the beginning of a mystery mood is not a trickster thought. Sometimes it’s a thought that got banished or ignored, and deserves attention: Oliver is dead. Or Why did I talk to my kid that way?

I think it takes a lot of practice to be good readers and careful caretakers of our thoughts. They can be hard things to catch before they settle into your body and register as fact. This is easier said than done. And while specifying and sourcing vague woes won’t disappear them, doing so makes the consequent moods less daunting and mysterious. Now you know where to find them, on your own terms. None of this comes naturally to the restless among us.

*

It was a good thing I had the house to myself tonight, and it was good the windows were shut. Because I cried in a loud, medieval way, with wailing and such, that would have been alarming to passersby or family members. It didn’t alarm me, though. For one thing, I knew at least some were steroid tears. And two: I knew where my grief came from, pretty precisely, after mulling it for some time while being sick and forced to be still. I was too tired to fidget or futz around, or fight it.

After a couple minutes of the crying, I blew my nose and cuddled the dogs.  Then I sat down and read the poem that’s been so gently in my face these past few months. The House was Quiet and the World was Calm. It was just what I needed. I read it again. I thought about my students, and about times we read it and other Wallace Stevens poems together, and we felt mystified, stumped, annoyed, gratified, satisfied, delighted, neutral, etc. Then I went upstairs to read my book. I read late into the night. 

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm by 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 spoken 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.

Note to teachers, students, anyone: 

Stevens once said “Personally, I like a word to sound wrong.”

Students and I can always find a way to take it from there…(“much most”??) Like John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) put it: “You should never, ever be understood completely. That's like the kiss of death, isn't it? It's a full stop. I don't ever think you should put full stops on thoughts. They change.”

Wallace Stevens and Johnny Rotten. Together at last. 

Sometimes when I’m reading any poem by Wallace Stevens and I try to “teach it,” I  feel small and silly. But I feel enlarged and alive when I read him with students. We read a lot of him– the long poems and the short. Of course we–me, students– marvel at the language, or are made restless by it, or wonder why this choice and not that. Or we think there must be something we’re not getting and wonder about that. I don’t mean to be breezy about it. I just don’t know how much teaching of his poems was any different from or better than reading them and working with them and asking questions together. Enjoying them. I’d say most students like being a little mystified together once in a while.

We spend a lot of time with “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and we read and come back around to “The Snowman” over the course of a school year. Kids do projects/poems/paintings/dances:  (“13 Ways of Looking at Envy,” “13 Ways of Looking at My Mother’s Suitors”...) and emulations. 

We notice how villanelle-like this poem is and what that dirge-y quality does to lull us, lullaby us, soothe and calm and rock us, or rattle us. Every few years over my 20 year span teaching, I’d go to Porter Square books or Wordsworth and buy a book of essays on Wallace Stevens. Always interesting, but again, I’m not sure my “teaching of Stevens” improved.

Still, some starting approaches/questions (aside from Stevens’s “I like a word to sound wrong” quote above): Look at the lines vs. the sentences. Where do they dovetail, clash, complement, antagonize, and how? Look at what his couplets do, separately and together/in context; and how coupleting and line-making don’t always mirror sentence-making. Look at how his iambic pentameter couplets work on your rhythmic sense of the poem, to your reading, to your intuiting, to your understanding, to your undoing of your understanding, etc. What makes a good line; what’s the shape of the poem; where’s the repetition; which words are key (hint: all of ‘em, but which could you absolutely not spare?)...etc. 

And of course: Does this get at the one-ness of the reading experience? Of a house quiet at night? Of calm? What is it to become one with …?

“Stevens so often highlights the often-hidden process of translating into words that we become conscious of what and how words are.” - from A Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens by Eleanor Cook (2007)

That’s what I got. You?

Xo

• Wallace Stevens, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens and copyright renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens.  Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

• The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Alfred A. Knopf, 1954)

• House postcard purchased on Ebay.