by Nils Peterson
Reading into and about Wallace Stevens this morning I find this quotation, “The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings…loving them and feeling them, makes us search for the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration….” I’m an endless rewriter and surely this is part of the reason for that, getting the sound exactly right even if it means a shift in meaning, but I thought as I read those words of my first pure experience of the delight in sound divorced from meaning. I should add as an adult because I loved word-sounds as a child “Hey diddle diddle,” “with a knick-knack paddy whack,” Rumplestiltskin.
At this time I was sitting at my desk working as Assistant Director of Admissions at Upsala College in East Orange, New Jersey [auto-correct wanted to make it Upscale College which it wasn’t though it was a good school] reading a lot of Faulkner in my spare time, thinking of myself essentially a fiction person though I had written some traditional poems and had bouts of strange love with one poem and another. A phrase out of nowhere flew in one ear and almost out the other before I managed to catch it, “crew went the curlew as it flew in a curlicue.” I can’t explain the delight it gave me. I loved the sound of it, the shape of it, the feel of it though clearly it was meaningless. But meaning was irrelevant. I don’t know if I wrote it down, but memory found some way of retaining it. I would take it out now and then and feel it, almost like pebble one finds at a beach and carries in a pocket for awhile for comfort.
Almost sixty years later, I found a place to put it. I was poet laureate of Santa Clara County in California. There were half a dozen other laureates around and we were going to do a reading together. I suggested that it would be fun to all write something of the same kind and suggested a piece of exactly 100 words. It could be prose or lined, whatever shape or form, but it had to be exactly 100 words including the title. The ocean of words and word combination possibilities is so large that some kind of shape-giving limitation is a gift not a handicap. By making things harder, it makes things easier. Here’s what I wrote:
A Small Bang
Syllables pour into a hundred word universe shocked as the first hydrogen atoms. Each has a music. They circle, join, suddenly – word sounds – “Crew went the curlew as it flew in a curlicue.” They rhyme. “Ache did” pairs with “naked.” They gather into galaxies, “He did not know who he was until she taught him desire, then he did not know who he was,” until here at the end of the Dictionary of the Milky Way, we dangle from a participle, aware of dark matter, what has not as yet been seen, so not as yet said.
[I wonder now if it should end “what has not as yet been said, so not as yet seen.” Just a morning wonderment.]
The more I read this, the prouder I am of it and glad that my old bit of sound joy at last had a home. How my koan about desire got in there I’m not sure, but I’m proud of it too though my pride derives from sense as well as sound.
I’ll add as a little footnote here, in my collection All the Marvelous Stuff there is a gathering called The Book of Scheherazade. “A Small Bang’ is the opening poem. The gathering consists of ten hundred-word pieces and one more word, the word I think of as the most important in the language, in any language. You’ll have to go there to find out what it is. You’ll remember that Scheherazade saved her life by telling stories for a thousand and one nights.
P.S.
I want to end this by giving you the full Stevens quotation that began this piece. “The deepening need for words to express our thoughts and feelings which, we are sure, are all the truth that we shall ever experience, having no illusions, makes us listen to words when we hear them, loving them and feeling them, makes us search for the sound of them, for a finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration, which it is only within the power of acutest poet to give them….” from “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words.
The middle of the second sentence offers much to think about.
P.P.S Two more hundred-word pieces from Scheherazade.
Introversion
How immense the space inside. Sometimes gazing up into the night sky’s viscidity we think how small we are, yet we take it all in, inside ourselves, and there’s room, room for sun, moon, galaxies, the ocean of nebulae, and if the red shift carries us on and on, there’s room for that too, – room for our immense selves, the idea of God, the moving slide show of our lives. No matter how greedy our eyes, they are not bigger than our stomachs. We hold it all. No indigestion, though sometimes a dose of language helps get it down.
Time, “twixt sleep and wake”
Body comfortable in its cocoon of quilt. Spirit, free to travel, lands on a clearing between wood’s-edge and woodpile. Early morning. Air crisp, clean. Snow, blue with night, red-orange with morning. A fox on his way home trots by leaving a trail of footsteps one could follow if one were interested in history. I leave no footsteps, but the fox looks my way, nods, and sets off about his business. Why am I here? I wonder, then see in a cairn a Buddha, serene as surrounding stone, present to snow, woods, fox, me.
P.P.P.S. OK, the one word more, the greatest word is – and. It’s why Scheherazade survived. I’ll say the same for me and for any of you who are out there reading this. N