“Let be be finale of seem”:

Wallace Stevens on sovereignty, cigars & iced confections.

This séance fiction is a relatively short discussion with the shade of the American poet Wallace Stevens. It is based exclusively on his 1922 poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream”. The decision to keep it relatively short was obvious for such an encounter, as it had a reputation on its publication (and still does} as one of the most difficult and enigmatic poems in the entire canon of English poetry, literary modernism and postmodernism. And I must say that I was a little timid in wanting to invoke and take on his shade. Stephens wasn’t a poet per se. He worked full-time for an insurance company in Hartford Connecticut, which sounds quite banal in relation to the complex nature of his writing. This short snippet from his “Bantams in Pine-Woods” (1922) is indicative of this:

Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Of tan wth henna hackles, halt!

Damned universal cock, as if the sun

Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.

Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.

Your world is you. I am my world.

You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!

Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,

Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,

And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.

You get the picture. Stevens was influenced by modernist writers such as T.S.Eliot, Ezra Pound and more distantly Walt Whitman and the Romantic poet John Keats. An eclectic heritage such as this was sure to craft his style in very different, demanding and potentially unfathomable directions. He was without doubt a modernist who didn’t even know he was unwittingly creating post-modernism. “The Emperor of Ice Cream” is undeniably evidence of this.

Stevens’ writing is semantically dense and complex. It is riddled with inaccessible motifs, alarming conceits and startling metaphors. Having said that, while it is daring and compelling, I am no novice or shrinking violet when it comes to negotiating obscurantism. As a teenager I grew up with Ezra Pound’s audacious and at times incoherent Cantos (1922-), the notorious minimalism of e. e. cummings’ poetry, as well as the dog-eared and copious annotations on the pages of my copies of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939). I have written about the Wake many times and have always been stunned when re-visiting it. Each encounter would always reveal surprising inflections, alarming conceits and beguiling blocked door ways. Suffice to say it was this challenging prospect that diffused my initial trepidation and instead agitated a strong itch to jump into this most obscure and elusive text and just see what happens. Let the frozen confection begin.

*

[This conversation takes place in a simulacrum of Stevens’ office at the New York Law School. His “presence” is manifest not as an ice cream, as may gauchely be presumed, but rather a large cigar perched on an elegant bronze ash tray on a table piled with books. He communicates and responds to questions in the form of whorls of cigar smoke that take shape as sentences. The conversation, while very interesting, is quite short as the shade of Stevens has unexpectedly been summoned to an urgent meeting with the late Dean of the Law School. I’m not sure if this bodes well or not]

DT: May I address you as Wallace in this brief discussion? And I say brief because I am aware that you have an imminent appointment to meet with the spectres of Mary Shelley and Ezra Pound and I don’t want to detain your departure.

Stevens: Please do and I appreciate your courtesy.

DT: My pleasure. First I must say how your poetry caught my attention at a very young age. In fact I was overwhelmed by it.

Stevens: That’s very kind of you to say.

DT: “The Emperor of Ice Cream” has always remained for me an avatar, the incarnation of the essence of what poetry, at its very essence, should be.

Stevens: And what would that be, if I may ask.

DT: Quite simply it is a misprision, as the critic Harold Bloom describes it. That is a poem that either intentionally or unwittingly responds to a lesser poem, or poetry itself and from it creates something that it is overwhelming, startling, unsurpassable. A kind of remix. In sixteen bare lines it creates an enigma. I can’t say what it means, even if it doesn’t have a meaning, but only remain beguiled by its suggestibility, complete and infinite.

Stevens: Well now I’m… quite overwhelmed. For me it is simply what it is, words arranged in an order that is other than what it is.

DT: Well for someone who desires the unfathomable in poetry, that which is about to reveal its mysteries, then implodes into its own enigma, you have insured that its secrets are never to be revealed, yet tantalised.

Stevens: You can be assured of that.

DT: I’m delighted to hear it.

*

As the discussion is clearly winding down rather prematurely, I decided to ask a question that I knew would more than likely be a little abrasive with the upright and serious Stevens. I reminded him about the story of one of his friends, a famous and high-powered scholar whose name eludes me who had recently died. At one point the woman in question coughed politely into her handkerchief and asked, demurely, “Wallace, I’m a little confused having read your new poem ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’”. Stevens, with a polite nod, gestured for his companion to continue with her concern. “Well, having read it many times, do you like ice cream or not”. Suffice to say there was, for the first and only time in this encounter, an uncomfortable, even stern silence. I wasn’t surprised to hear this as another shade in this series, whose identity I shan’t reveal, cautioned me that Stevens could at times be impatient, even a little tetchy, especially when the conversation was not to his taste, or going his way. I now know what she meant.

[As I commence to take my leave I sense a very familiar odour of pistachio ice cream. I knew he would want the last laugh. And so he did]

*

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,

Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet

On which she embroidered fantails once

And spread it so as to cover her face.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

To show how cold she is, and dumb.

Let the lamp affix its beam.

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.