"A normal that I ought to achieve."

~1940 Wallace Stevens letter excerpt (Brown 1970):  . . . "Of course, I don't agree with the people who say that I live in a world of my own; I think that I am perfectly normal, but I see that there is a center. For instance, a photograph of a lot of fat men and women in the woods, drinking beer and singing Hi-li Hi-lo convinces me that there is a normal that I ought to try to achieve."

Merle E. Brown attempts to explore Stevens's shift or changes in writing and writing style and content between Harmonium's content "of the mind in the act of finding / What will suffice." and Owl's Clover "to achieve" this normal [described in Stevens's letter]. Yet Brown suggests that Owl's Clover is a failure; that Stevens without validation of the substance found in "The Comedian", attempts to explore "the thoughts of all are the same thought. The ideal is to be pure being, devoid of becoming, a life lived"

For the gaudium of being, Jocundus instead

Of the black-blooded scholar, the man of the cloud, to be

The medium man among other medium men,

The cloak to be clipped, the night to be re-designed,

Its land-breath to be stifled, its color changed,

Night and the imagination being one.

Brown suggests that Stevens eliminated the influence of the poet (90), or in my understanding the blue guitar and its playing. Brown also asserts that in The Man with the Blue Guitar (~1935) Stevens "seems to have acquired a strength of will and ease of mind that are not at all apparent in his early work (85) / It is a world of things as they are, of men like mechanical beetles never quite warm, but played upon the blue guitar, in the blueness of the historical imagination (84)."

So why is it, I do not see Owl's Clover as failure. My first reading of Owl's Clover, minus insights of the others, was almost a mirror to the characters developed in a 12-minute screenplay titled "Picasso's Hands" (2009) situated in the present about Picasso's experience losing his friend Carlos Casagemous to suicide and Guillaume Apollinaire to the war. The screenplay parallels two stories that intersect the present with the past as an Afghan war veteran explores without words how to grieve the loss of his mother and his fathers' quest to erase the past. Owl's Clover buzzes and twanges what reads to me the same attributes assigned to actions, characters deprived of the words, expressing the senses of the scene.

Tone is paramount! It colors Stevens's words: an ultimate lack of substance in a sense of loss; a sense of unchangeable destiny; no need to create a "past card" that for them all would be the same "past card".  In my limited naive understanding of Stevens's vision, I gaze upon the blue guitar reading aloud a eulogy, Owl's Clover. I am interested in your perspectives and response to Owl's Clover, if you were influenced.

Works Cited

Brown, Merle E. Wallace Stevens: The Poem as Act. Detroit: Wayne State University P. 1970 Page 62

Hoopes, Carla. Picasso's Hands. Bozeman: InterMedia Productions. 2009. Print.

Sexson, Michael. September 17, 2012. Bozeman: Lecture. Past card as metaphor for Post Card from a Volcano].