Introducing Wallace Stevens in 2012

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.