The first known use of the word beatnik is 1958 (Merriam
Webster). If Wallace Stevens was not one since he died in 1955, might it mean
that to be a beatnik in 1958 was to embody the un-embody-able in that elusive
space between Stevens's meanderings in reality and imagination? And, was to be a beatnik to seek within oneself beyond the hegemony
of the domestic enclosure for what is real in what is not but was there, much
like dying in the act of leaving one room or space for a different room or
space? Of the influences Wallace Stevens has on American living and the world in its allness is the
act of giving something only he can give, himself, over and over again. No
space or time constrains Wallace Stevens's body of words, which in the moment of
speech changes the world in which one lives.
