The Thing Itself
Essay by Leonard J. Cirino


 "I learned very early knowing the difference between the name of something and knowing something."
Richard P. Feynman (Nobel Laureate in Physics)
        When I was twelve my mother was taking a graduate course in literature at UCLA. One night she came home and asked to read me a poem -- to see if I understood the work, as she was having a hard time with it. This was my introduction to Wallace Stevens. Of course I didn't understand a thing about the poem. What I did hear was a lovely music and sense of structure. The poem struck me as profound, actual, and unique. Immediately, I fell for poetry, and grew up hearing my mother recite the Romantics and the Modernists. Nowhere then, and nowhere since, have I found the qualities, meanings, and importance of a poet's voice so profoundly as in Stevens. In the early Seventies, when I was a beginning poet and incarcerated for several years, I went back to Stevens almost daily to escape my harsh surroundings. He may have saved me as a human, and given my poetics some of the qualities I admire so much in others. Not the academics -- especially not the academics who mimic the talky poets. In his vast capability to speak eloquently Stevens opened parts of me that no one except Shakespeare ever had-- and only in the dramas, not in the bard's poems. In the late Eighties I went back to Stevens once again. I read his Collected Poems, always finding something new and important in work I'd read dozens of times before. No other poet did this for me. Since then I've become relatively familiar with the early and mid 20th century poets of Italy, Spain, and Greece, as well as dozens of eastern European poets, the Russians and the classical as well as contemporary Asians. Great as they are I always come back to Stevens as the ultimate thinking poet of our century. Of course I've read my Yeats, Hopkins, Rilke, Dickinson, and other fine poets. Yet, when I want to obtain a modern sensibility, I always return to Stevens.
        Recently I encountered his Opus Posthumous, which, somehow, I had never studied before. Marvelous words and worlds flowed from every page and poem. Like a young child who looks up from the earth and sees the sky, I was stunned into epiphany, and moved to formulate my ideas about the aesthetics of modern poetry, which had been brewing for so many years, to put them into an essay.
        William Carlos Williams said, "No ideas but in things." Stevens countered, "Not the Idea of the Thing, but the Thing Itself." These are the two poles of my discussion. I've come to the conclusion that yes, Williams is "in the American grain," which considers the material value of a thing greater than its intrinsic or spiritual worth. This is a terrible mistake. It's not the naming of a thing, or the ability to speak what a thing is called that is crucial, but knowing the essence of the thing -- what's inside its form that makes it what it is -- its seed, its intrinsic quality. This is the point of Stevens' statement.
         The contrasting metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle offer another approach to this problem. Plato believed in the world of ideals and ideas -- a world above or elsewhere -- where each object had an ideal archetypal form, from which every other object in the human world sprang. Aristotle was interested in naming and categorizing everything. He wanted to put things into phyla and divide them into different species. Plato had a holistic view of the universe while Aristotle had a pigeonhole. It seems that Stevens was a Platonist while Williams followed the dicta of Aristotle.
        With the rise of totalitarian governments, from both the left and the right in the 20th century, it appears the world leaders want to name, separate, number, and conquer the individual. I am certain this was not Williams' end view when he uttered his famous quote. It seems what has been done in his name has bastardized US poetry for fifty years and given power to the most undeserving and least intelligent generations of poets in a long time. Now the most popular poets in Europe are Bukowski and the lesser Beats. This process has much to do with selling a product, crass commercialization and over simplification, by the powers of today's US poetry peddlers.
        Everywhere in the world people want to be like Americans. They emulate us in their food, dress, in their sports, and the use of their language. America has overshadowed vast cultures and even when they hate us they end up being just like us. This is also true in world poetry. In most contemporary translations the poets try to sound American. Not Latin, African, Asian, European, mid-eastern or any other -- to sell it must be idiomatic, or at least be translated in some way that sounds as if it were spoken by a barely literate US tourist. This is exploitation to the worst degree.
        As far as poetry in the working man's idiom, as expressed by Wordsworth and Coleridge in their famous Preface of 1798, I say bunk. This manifesto extends the myth that "common" people are incapable of understanding and evaluating the "higher" forms of thinking and language. It is patently classist, perhaps unconsciously so. The language of poetry should be original. That does not mean it has to exclude the working class. In fact it should lead everyone into realms not formerly available to them. The notion that regular people are not interested in thinking is an unforgivable error. Also, if the early Greek criterion is applicable, a work of art should be beautiful. It still holds true. Of course, the beautiful can also be terrible. As Rilke says in his First Elegy, "For Beauty's nothing/but beginning of Terror." Almost anyone who has lived can testify to and understand that statement. Beautiful work can be done in an idiomatic style (read Pessoa or Pavese or many of the other Europeans including Ritsos). But poetry should elevate (or degrade) our experience out and away from the normal and mundane facts of daily life. I don't want to read poets who tell me what they and I already know. I want to be lifted like one of Rilke's angels into a new state of consciousness, an epiphany of sorts (or taken into the gutter a la Baudelaire).
        In life and poetry I have come to value the mindset brought about by meditation or contemplation, with the material world placed in the Hindu concept of maya. I believe the universe was formed by some higher knowledge -- and if we humans are to reach an enlightened conclusion to our lives we must comprehend the world beyond our daily drudgeries and extend ourselves into "Some sphere on which the mind might blunder." As a friend of mine once said about Stevens "I don't always know what it is, but he's always talking about something important."

Published in House Organ #25, Winter 1999 and The Redwood Coast Review, Vol. 1, Number 1, Winter 1999.

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