What Mario Aquilina and Ivan Callus accomplished in their "13 Ways of Looking at Electronic Literature", Lisa Swanstrom does for Ecocriticism. Taking as her starting point, Cary Wolfe's book on Wallace Stevens, Swanstrom explores each and every one of Stevens's "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." What emerges, alongside Wolfe's ecocriticism is a resurgence, in literary studies, of the art of close reading.
Part 1: Introduction
In Ecological Poetics, or Wallace Stevens’s Birds (Chicago, 2020), Cary Wolfe offers a deeply probing and densely theoretical engagement with the poetry of Wallace Stevens. The thesis of this project is deceptively simple: in it, Wolfe asserts that Stevens is an ecological poet. Those familiar with Stevens’s poetry might be tempted to assume that this is because of Stevens’s affinity for describing in detail features of the natural world, including birds, landscapes both domestic and wild, and other attributes commonly associated with an environmental sensibility (however many things this capacious term might mean). Those more familiar with Wolfe’s work in Posthumanism in general (and the question of the animal in particular) might be inclined to think this thesis is designed to alleviate a persistent tension between Animal Studies and Ecocritical discourse. As valuable as both of these approaches might be, neither is the tack Wolfe takes to convince the reader of Stevens’s “ecological” status. Rather, in this work Wolfe uses Stevens’s poetry as a way to bridge the poststructuralist theory of Jacques Derrida and Niklas Luhmann’s articulation of systems theory. Readers familiar with systems theory or postructuralism (or Derrida or Luhmann) will apprehend in an instant that the thesis is no longer “simple.”
What Wolfe advocates with this thesis is not so much a re-consideration of Stevens but a re-evaluation of what constitutes ecopoetics in the first place. “Above all else,” Wolfe writes, “I am arguing here for a reconceptualization of ecopoetics by seeking it out in a poet not often associated with the terms ‘ecology’ and ‘environment’” (viii). This—that is, “a reconceptualization of ecopoetics”—is an urgent undertaking. Ecocriticism, which provides us with a large umbrella term under which to categorize and analyze any poetic enterprise of an ecological bent, has changed rapidly since its origins in the late nineteenth century, especially in the context of literary studies. While early works in Ecocritical discourse call our attention to the importance of the environment, setting, and the representation of “natural” features within literary texts (cf. Lawrence Buell’s Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Belknap, 1995), Ursula Heise’s Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (Oxford, 2008), Bill McKibbin’s End of Nature (Random House, 2014), etc.), more recent work has directed our focus to the social issues at play in the same (cf. Robert Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard UP, 2011), Kathryn Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Verso, 2019), Max Liboiron’s Pollution Is Colonialism (Duke 2021), etc).
And while one can still catch the occasional (and musty) whiff of nature writing within the Environmental Humanities,1There is not a clear line to draw between Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities. That said, I am grateful to use language provided by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE): “When ASLE was established in 1992, ecocriticism was an emerging interdisciplinary field in literary and cultural studies. Over the past two decades, ecocriticism has developed across a range of historical periods, literary and artistic genres, cultural histories, theoretical frameworks, and research and teaching methods. Today ASLE offers a center of gravity for ecocriticism as well as a growing international community of scholars and teachers across the humanities and arts––representing disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy, film and media, cultural studies, religious studies, cultural geography, and anthropology. This vibrant area of research and teaching falls under the umbrella term “the environmental humanities.” there have been exciting intellectual exchanges that have pushed it beyond a nature-culture binary, curtailed its indulgence in the nature-as-transcendence trope, and instead provoked it to reckon with the larger systems at work in any space, and in any text. It has benefitted from Actor Network Theory, from Ecofeminist thought, and (some aspects of) Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Materialism. Recent work in Science and Technology Studies (STS) also helps push it outside of well-worn terrain; Karen Barad’s work on entanglement, for example, moves beyond frequently employed metaphor and is grounded squarely in Physics (see, for example, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke, 2007).
Wolfe’s approach is largely consistent with such efforts. That is, to the extent that he makes use of Second Order Systems Theory to think through ecological poetics, he helps nudge the field into urgent terrain. An ecological poetics, with Stevens as its poetic exemplum, is one that demonstrates a paradoxical “distinction between system (or organism) and environment” (ix). Why paradoxical? Because in Niklas Luhmann’s system’s theory, the distinction is one-sided, a “product” of the system itself. As Wolfe notes, “‘self-reference’ and ‘hetero-reference’ are themselves a product of the system’s (organism’s) self-referential schema” (ix). This sounds more complicated than it is. Translated into a more simple syntax, we might say instead that what I know about myself and what I know about things that are not myself both come from myself. Both emerge from my “self-referential schema.” Wolfe’s innovation is to connect this paradox to the paradox of poetry. It is not concerned with natural ecologies, per se, although it is capacious enough to include them. Rather, it is about any bounded system’s relation to the larger environment within which it operates.To pin down the thesis even more: although Wolfe argues that Stevens is an ecological poet, he does not mean by this that Wallace Stevens demonstrates (or subscribes to) an environmentally activist ethos. It is, rather, meant in the sense of Second Order Systems theory. This invokes Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, and Complex Adaptive Systems more generally, along with Maturana and Varela’s notion of autopoiesis in the biological sciences, and theories of emergence system. It also conjures up a specialized vocabulary that includes words like organism, environment, open and closed operations, first and second orders, autopoiesis, etc.
In the preface to the book, Wolfe concedes that a reader might apply the same set of criteria to any number of poets: “Now one might well object that if this foregrounding of the paradoxical nature of the organism/environment relationship is what makes Stevens “environmental” or “ecological,” then all poets may be called ecopoets in a sense, whether they are interested in the “green” world or not” (ix). Wolfe asserts that it is Stevens’ orientation to places, the particular “nature and texture” of his relation to them, as well as to his (Stevens’) self-confessed claim that, for him, ‘life is an affair of places’” that makes him an ecological poet (ix).
Fundamental to this argument is Wolfe’s assertion that ecological poetry offers a non-representational ecological aesthetics. That is, in contrast to the conventions of nature writing, in which features of the nonhuman world are depicted in extensive detail, and even in contrast to the conventions of social realist writing, in which ecological forces might loom large, ecological poetry in the sense Wolfe means it does not direct its efforts towards creating an accurate depiction of reality or the natural features that help constitute it.This aspect marks an important bridge between more conventional approaches to ecocriticism and how Wolfe articulates it here. Insofar as Stevens is interested in tracing relations of place, of space, of environments, and systems (organisms) in favor of those among people, he already gets us closer to an “ecological” ethos, in both senses, as well as closer to a “posthuman” positioning of the literary subject that is consistent with Wolfe’s larger project. As Wolfe writes, “Stevens’s characteristic ecopoetic mode is to focus intensely on a particular place, or feature of a place, and then ask, ‘what is its relationship to this thing we call ‘reality’” (x), even if, as Luhmann notes, “[r]ealityis what one does not perceive when one perceives it” (qtd. In Wolfe, 39). A focus on place, local or distant, is also fundamental to ecocritical discourse—from Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic” (the final piece of A Sand County Almanac (1949)), to Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s The Everglades: Rivers of Grass (1947), to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), to Timothy Beatley and Kristy Manning’s The Ecology of Place (1997), etc.
I, too, am interested in thinking about an ecological poetics that is not defined by environmental activism or representational aesthetics. I share with Luhmann (and presumably Wolfe), a skepticism about the efficacy of activism. When Hans Bergthaller writes that “Niklas Luhmann made no significant contribution to environmentalist thought. He was one of the most radically ecological thinkers of the 20th century,” I am inclined to agree with him, especially in the sentence that follows: “If these two statements seem contradictory, this is largely because environmentalism has successfully positioned itself as the only adequate expression of ecological thinking” (np).
I am especially interested in ways that Stevens’s poems might function according to the principles of systems—social, biological, linguistic, and otherwise, not for what they might tell us about Stevens, but how they might direct us to a more expansive notion of ecopoetry. But I am less interested in trying to use theory as a roadmap to navigate a text and much more intrigued by where a text itself might lead. To my mind a text need not lead us to Luhmann exclusively.2That said, there is certainly much more to discuss vis a vis Wolfe’s engagement with Luhmann via Stevens, Derrida, Heidegger, Maturana and Varela, etc. That is, if representation is no longer the bedrock to which language must be anchored, ecological poetry can provide a space within which other modes of communication—as well as their means and ends—become increasingly urgent.
Wolfe approaches his thesis through his close, thorough readings of theory, carefully braiding Luhmann, Derrida, and Stevens. But what if we reversed the process? What if, instead of proceeding from the demanding abstractions of theory to the particular instance of the poem, we were to test these claims through a careful reading of a single work? What work might be rich enough to capture the sense of ecological poetics as Wolfe defines it, one that captures the observational tensions between self and system, yet one that will still be sufficiently tied to the place-based aesthetics of ecocriticism in its more general sense? As Wolfe suggests, there is perhaps no more fitting specimen than “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (x), a poem to which Wolfe returns repeatedly but never grants his complete attention. In what follows, I read this poem closely, section by section, in order to tease out its ecological implications. And in this essay’s conclusion, I attempt to condense the insights gleaned from this undertaking even further, though the presentation of an algorithmic mode of analysis.
Can Wolfe’s approach be adapted to form a more general template or set of criteria for a new ecological poetics that is attendant to place as well as to larger systems? Does Wallace Stevens’s unusual poem provide us with a model for “ecological poetry” as a genre that extends beyond Stevens’s work, and in a manner that advances Wolfe’s long-running engagement with literary posthumanism? This essay is an attempt to answer such questions.
Part Two: 13 Ways of Looking at a System (Organism, Poem, or Otherwise)
I.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
The verb is “was,” so the time is past; the place is unspecified, but alpine and expansive—perhaps even a range (twenty mountains is twenty times more than a single peak). The climate is cold, as evidenced by snow. We move from the multiple to the singular, and from the very large to the very small: a tiny eye provides our focal point. It, rather than the blackbird itself, is the only thing that moves in this tableau. The bird, then, is not in flight. But its eye sees (we presume) and moves (we know). The bird is both a part of its environment—“among” rather than “above” (the preposition is important—so much depends upon, with, or beside it, whether there are chickens or blackbirds to be spatially parsed), and bounded fairly precisely by it (twenty peaks—not nineteen, nor twenty-one). The contrast between the whiteness of the snow and the darkness of its body, and the extra dark glossiness of its roving eye, is sharp.
Although the ecological features Wolfe de-emphasizes are present—the snowy mountains, a single bird, its single eye—already we have a fine confirmation of the attributes that he has adumbrated for us. Here is writing about nature without some of the more tedious conventions of nature writing. There is no “I” in this highly observational moment, no human witness inserting himself, like Wordsworth, into the scene; no roving Emersonian I-ball. There is only the tiny eye of the blackbird. We see the mountains in relation to that tiny eye; and we see that tiny eye in relation to those mountains. We transition between the two without a human intermediary; the process is more like that of a camera panning, slowing down, then stopping, in an invisible but machinic establishing shot.
So with the first stanza already we can add to the broad template Wolfe offers these more specific patterns for extraction: a curious and mechanical method of seeing, as well as an interest in contrasts—in scale, in color, in number, in stillness, and in motion.
II.
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
Here the “I” intrudes but is immediately divided, then multiplied: via a single prepositional phrase (“of three minds”), one becomes three. The strangeness of that takes some time to sink in. It is a commonplace to say one is of “two minds” or “divided,” but such statements assume a single identity in a state of conflict. Of “three minds” suggests three discrete entities rather than the typical conflicted unity. The comparison branches out (a pun!) even further into a tree, itself a branched and branching being, but still a trunked and grounded one (albeit one with sprawling roots, which shares intimacies with soil, mycelium, and dirt-dependent organisms). And immediately again the simile is displaced into a new line, last of the stanza, to settle on another multitude, equal in number to the first (three minds, three blackbirds in a tree). How does this work as ecopoetic verse? The conventional notion of ecopoetics still is present, insofar as we have birds in a tree, but so is the systemic teeter-totter between organism and environment that is fundamental to Systems Theory.
Yet there is a tension at play between what Wolfe wishes to express about Stevens and how Stevens himself expresses it in this poem. That is, for Wolfe, “only a non-representational understanding of ecopoetics can enable us to grasp the most profound sense in which Wallace Stevens is an ecological poet” (viii).This is, Wolfe continues,“a sense that does not exclude but reaches well beyond the thematics of imagery of seasons and climate, palm trees and snowy scenes” (viii). But we are far here from reaching the outer limits of language, of meaning. The most abstract entity is the “I,” of three minds. Anchored to the tree, and then to the blackbirds, it is tangibly, realistically evoked. The language is figurative, to be sure, but the syntax isn’t stretched, let alone tortured, and these real-world living beings create a tight ecological unit. That is, the abstractions here are grounded in concrete objects. These provide a launch pad for moving beyond them to the concepts of plurality and division they invoke.
With stanza two we add two more points of contrast to our list of features of an ecological poetics: singularity in contrast to multiplicity and division in contrast to unity. To this we can add two tools of prosody, including repetition and the use of simile to compare a human mind to nonhuman groupings.
III.
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
With the third stanza we begin to approach some limits to language, even as these same limits create an opportunity to surpass them—and even though the first line seems to be overtly “poetic” in ways that the others have not. The third stanza displays a rhythmic cohesion the first two lack. In the first line, with the words “bird, “whirled,” and “winds,” the short vowel “i” and the semivowel “w” repeat; the assonance of the former is just shy of rhyme. The stanza sounds like poetry, independent of its content.
But the pleasant prosody of the first line stands in contrast to the mysterious implications of the second. “It” in this line refers to the blackbird, therefore the syntax suggests that it is the blackbird that is a “small part of the pantomime.” So far, this is fairly straightforward. But what does pantomime, as a noun, suggest? In common usage, it means mimicry or imitation. But according to its dictionary definition, pantomime does not denote falsity or fakery. Rather, as a noun it is a “conveyance of a story by bodily or facial moments especially in drama or dance; as a verb, to pantomime something is to communicate by gesture (“pantomime”). It also names a theatrical genre in ancient Rome that was comprised of a “solo dancer and a narrative chorus,” or any such performance (or art) which relies upon gesture. Nowhere in any of these definitions does gesture imply dissembling or deception, and yet the shock of the second line of the stanza stems from precisely the commonplace connotation of a pantomime as an inferior mimicry of an original. Pantomime in the context of the poem suggests creation itself, rather than simulation, and unfolds as nonverbal process. The fact that, connotatively, we have come to view pantomime as a poor replica—a Punch and Judy show that satirizes what it conveys—speaks to the prejudice in favor of verbal communication. What this stanza manages to capture, then, is the beauty, originality, and wholeness of pantomime, of gesture and action rather than the shifty and unreliable meanings of words.
With stanza three, then, we can add the elevation of gesture-based communication to our list.
IV.
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
Here we leave behind the aural pleasure of prosody. To be sure, we have repetition and simplicity, but so abstracted as to be de-specified, de-gestured. Rather, stanza four is an exhibit in the form of an assertion: “A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one”—not a trinity, but one.3This is a concept that repeats in Stevens’s “Connoisseur of Chaos,” with the opening stanza: “…A great disorder is an order. These / Two things are one…” (CP 215). We cannot help reading this stanza sequentially, dependent upon the last. If the blackbird in flight is a part of the gesturing material world, and if a man and woman are one with the blackbird, then transitive logic suggests that they, too, are part of the pantomime. Additionally, as with stanza two, the paradox of unity through multiple actors is present. In the case of the former, the singular “I” became several. Here, three become one.
Apart from the mention of the blackbird, there is no familiar entity to anchor the stanza to nature or reality. A “man” and “a woman” are familiar, but they are generic categories rather than specifics. As a single unit, then, the stanza moves us towards the non-representational expression that Wolfe highlights. Here there are not even “snowy scenes” to latch on to. At the same time, however, the stanza lacks motion, as does the second. But in the second at least we move from one mind to three, and then to a tree, and then to the birds sitting in it. A progression of a kind occurs. The second stanza also offers a simile, which requires a sort of movement or transfer. There is no such progression here, apart from a process of aggregation; instead we have seemingly literal non-metaphorical equivalences (two equals one; three equals one). But neither are we in the realm of Aristophanes’ outrageous spherical and doubled androgynes in the Symposium. Rather, the lines in the fourth stanza are not unlike biblical statements—i.e., “I now pronounce you man and wife.” The blackbird adds an intriguing addition to the conjugal celebration. The repetition, with this addition, heightens and complicates the religious connotation.
So to our growing list we can add another feature: the performative speech act, estranged when mingled with an unexpected item (the blackbird).
V.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling,
Or just after.
Until now, observations and assertions. Here we have a crossroads, a choice to test our communicative commitments. The poet begins with this moment of indecision. He does not say he does not know which he prefers but rather uses the infinitive: he does not know which to prefer. The distinction is subtle but important. Were he to say, simply, that he does not know, it would suggest uncomplicated indecision on his part. Saying “to prefer,” however, complicates the agency. “To” suggests an “ought” might be missing.
And what are his options?
Option one: Inflections. Inflection is like infection. It carries itself within what it inf(l)ects. “Her voice was inflected with anger,” we might say; or, “His speech was inflected with tenderness,” or “She spoke with a highly inflected French accent.” Another way of saying it: in inflection in speech, word and connotation co-occur. As Ezra Pound notes in ABC of Reading (1934), in inflected languages, “nouns, verbs, and adjectives have little tags, or wagging tails, and the tags tell whether the noun is subject or predicate; they indicate that which acts and that which is acted upon, directly or indirectly, or that which is just standing around, in more or less causal relation, etc” (50). Students of Latin get drilled early on: Nauta puellae multos fores dat is different from Puella multos flores nautae dat. The case co-occurs with the word. The stem is the vehicle but the ending steers. That is option one.
The second option is innuendos, the suggestion of meaning, its elusive perfume. Innuendo can co-occur in language. Channeling Mae West: “Is that a pistol in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?” The innuendo occurs on multiple levels: in writing, for one, we get the joke. That is, the innuendo is obvious but still not directly denotative. But innuendo also comes from sound itself, devoid of words, and lingers. West’s cocky drawl lets us know where we sit. In this example, inflection and innuendo might even overlap. That said, inflection is more directive. Innuendo, suggestive. Inflection carries its instructions bundled up on the utterance. Innuendo is time-released and speculative.
Taken together, the two create an xy axis that is familiar to linguists. Horizontal and vertical modes of reading allow one to consider reading as both a temporal flow of a diachronic nature, as well as a vertical drilling down, considering one word after another in the process of paradigmatic substitution. While this is cited as a primarily linguistic schema, it has much broader applicability in the arts. For the surrealists, in particular, paradigmatic substitution is a fundamental tool. And while it is Stevens’s own assertion that his poetry is not to be included among the “din made by the surrealists and surrationalists” (qted in Wolfe, 50 ), there is an important aspect of surrealism that is useful for tracing a fuller ecology throughout the poem. This is a technique of semantic, linguistic analysis via paradigmatic substitution. As Rachel Wetzler writes in Art in America, “One formula for a memorable surrealist artwork goes like this: take a familiar everyday object and change one of its elements so it’s no longer useful but instead fantastic or absurd.” Lips become flowers, doorways open to dreams, etc. “There’s the telephone that Salvador Dali transfigured in 1938 by affixing a plaster lobster to a handset cradled atop a rotary dial…You’re supposed to imagine yourself using these things, and then catch a case of the giggles or heebie-jeebies” (Wetzler online). If Dali’s lobster prompts laughter, Stevens’s birds produce a less overt but perhaps more unsettling affective response: fissures rather than fault lines. But the process of substitution is at work in both. In Stevens, one must read carefully to notice it. It occurs most effectively at the level of the preposition, at the tense of verb, with the selection of the definite or indefinite article. Perhaps it lacks a surrealist panache—no lobsters—but it does point to the overall tensions and dependencies that inhere in language.
Our single decision has become a three-fold process:
- between A) the way of choosing—that is, to know which option one wants to choose versus B) the option one ought to choose.
- between A) inflections and B) innuendos, both of which possess a kind of beauty.
- between A) “the blackbird whistling” or B) “just after”
And this final choice is perhaps most interesting. It moves us from the larger question of ethics—the “ought” implied with the infinitive verb and towards what the whistling suggests about itself, devoid of linguistic directives or semantic certainty. Rather, as the “pantomime” unfolds, the bird’s whistle forms a part of it, as does the poet, who has a modest role to play, as one who selects and isolates images, experiences, and their after-affects from the vast field of information.
With stanza five, we can add the following to our growing list: choice, selection, sound, suggestion, and the vertical (paradigmatic) substitution of elements.
VI.
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
As with very first stanza, a descriptive tableau greets us. In the first, the movement is metonymic. The whole is suggested through the description of the part: the eye of the bird gives us the bird as a whole. Here, the movement is indexical. The movement of the blackbird is displaced onto its shadow. This moves “to and fro,” in a manner suggestive of a zoetrope. It is a simple scene, yet several features confound our perception of it. There is the window, yes, but the window is not the source of the “barbaric glass.” The icicles are. And why are these “barbaric”? Not, perhaps, in the sense of a negatively valanced uncivilized status—although, perhaps, a positively charged one. According to linguistic lore, barbaric refers to the (perhaps) onomatopoetic depiction of a “person speaking a language different from one’s own” or “barbar—echoic of un-intelligible speech of foreigners” (“barbarian”). The window gives us a false sense of transparency, suggesting that through it we might see what is clearly present and hence clearly perceive it, without any noise or visual interference. But the icicles make it clear that no such clarity exists in any representation. The icicles are barbarous because they block the view, refract whatever we might be seeing through that window, and while they echo the glass they cover (or it, they), they render that original vista unintelligible.
The word “mood” is linguistically ambiguous; it could be the subject of the sentence (i.e., “The mood traced…”) or the object that has been traced (i.e., “The mood [which was] traced). English usage permits both. In either case, the “cause” remains “undecipherable.” This whole visual presentation, so neatly organized that one could easily draw it, as I have clumsily done, illustrates the deferral of meaning. An attempt to trace meaning through image fails; through language also fails. Even the word “mood,” so often tied to personal or environmental emotion or the affect it provokes—or as it is used in linguistics, to pin down shifting modality—is located in that shadowy index of the bird in flight, and not, ultimately, legible. The stanza directs our gaze to ice, to glass, to the blackbird and its shadow, and rests its case.
As with the first stanza, stanza six mixes stillness with motion; additionally, like the first and third stanzas, there is something cinematic about the machinery behind it. It demonstrates the limits of visual representation through images. Additionally, it highlights something that has been latent in prior sections: the importance of traces and afterimages—the importance and limitation of vision.
VII.
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
Stanza seven introduces a new topic: romance, desire. For the first time, as well, the poem invokes new characters through direct address—not of author to reader, nor from “I” to “you,” but from author to these “thin men of Haddam.” Here the blackbird contends for the romantic conquests of the men—young men, perhaps, because they are thin; American men, because Haddam is in the Constitution state, as was Stevens; and clueless men, because in their pursuit of “golden birds” they do not appreciate the bounty of women “about” them (although the blackbird does). But does this jockeying about for birds negate the assertion of stanza four: “A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one”? That stanza unfolds like a speech act of a sacrament. This is an earlier phase of the courtship—should I confess to bristle at the “women about you,” as if women were prizes to be won or possessions to be defended or improved upon? But in antiquity, at least, the story is inverted in terms of gender. In book nineteen of The Odyssey, Penelope dreams of geese. As the geese—like her suitors—feed at her feet, an eagle swoops down and slays them. These golden birds—phoenix or firebird or golden-egg laying—are not real. They are human fantasies overlaid upon the “pantomime.” They do not occur as a part of the unity. We might compare this section to“Invective Against Swans,” another poem by Stevens, which similarly dismisses overly symbolic or excessively determined signs.
With the seventh stanza, we can add the following features: direct address, specific and local places, the foolishness of exotic fantasies.
VIII.
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
Stanza eight presents a poetic microcosm. It touches upon agency, creativity, and the making of poetry itself. Meta-data in the form of a stanza, it bares its own (literary) devices. “Noble accents” can refer to a refined or aristocratic way of speaking—a heavily inflected British accent, for example, or a “received pronunciation.” But “accents” and “rhythms” (next line) are also the tools of the trade in the making of poetry—from iambic feet to dactylic fingers. But this stanza (and the poem as a whole) is metrically hard to pin down, with spondaic trigrams in the first, third, and fifth lines(“I know noble,” “I know, too” and “what I know,” respectively). To be sure, the poet knows how to make clear, enticing verse. We’ve seen the skill on display throughout. But he also knows to defer responsibility for this knowledge to an external force, however mysterious (or avian) that force might be. The spondaic phrases that accompany this insight about provisional knowledge are well chosen. That is, the spondee does not merely arrest the poem (any poem, any utterance) in its tracks (“Stop! Thief!” is an excellent example). Put more poetically by Ruskin, it consists of “[t]wo syllables of equal length, uttered so deliberately that they may correspond to the time in which a man, walking firmly and serenely, takes two paces” (4). As a metrical device, it resets whichever meter has preceded it (in this case one line of anapestic bimeter in the previous stanza) and whichever meter follows it (in this case I find it impossible to specify). The spondee is also linked etymologically to ritual, “from Greek spondeios (pous), the name of the meter originally used in chants accompanying libations, from spondē ‘solemn libation, a drink-offering’ hence ‘to engage oneself by a ritual act’” (“spondee”).
By now, the blackbird’s presence is well established. Its appearance links together the poem’s disparate pieces, even as its presence is specific to each stanza. So here, when the poet acknowledges that what he knows is “involved” with the blackbird, it is the blackbird as an emissary of the larger environment, the “pantomime” to which the system (organism) is adjacent, and to which the poet is also adjacent. Poetry, its recognition and creation, is a knowledge shot through with the larger environmental system it inhabits. Here, the poem invokes and describes this larger process, not by articulating it clearly but acknowledging its author’s own limitations. Knowledge occurs as a process of accumulation, via a presentation of the blackbird’s piecemeal traces: its shadow, its whistle, its roving eye.
The eighth stanza introduces self referentiality about poetry making itself. Additionally, as with the fourth, a sense of formality emerges. In four this came through the familiar speech act; here via a metrical—albeit more oblique—referral to ritual.
IX.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
The ninth stanza engages elegantly with abstraction. From the shapes of sounds in the previous stanza we move to bare-bones shapes in visual form, repeated circles. As in stanza number six, it inspires an illustration. The circles are likely not concentric, or the blackbird’s passage from inner to outer circle (or reversed) would be narrowly prescribed. But they might overlap, or be evenly distributed. Symbolically, the circle marks the edge of knowledge, but it also suggests the limits to how it is that one can know it. It suggests sensory limits—the edge of vision, when the blackbird flies “out of sight.” But if each piece or domain of knowledge/epistemology is represented by a bounded shape—a circle or a sphere—it’s also clear that such boundaries are far from inviolable, for the blackbird moves freely among them.
In the context of the larger poem, the circle might signify any number of domains, such as nature in a conventional sense (stanzas 1-9, thus far), romance (numbers 4 and 7), reality (as in 3, 6, and 8), etc. But in the history of poetry more broadly, the circle also functions as a form of constraint through which creative content might flow, in the form of explosive natural forces, as within Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome; but also magic, as with Prospero’s cell in The Tempest; necromancy, as with the actions of Roger Bolingbroke and his companions in Henry VI, Part 2, who “do the ceremonies” and “make the circle” (I.iv); and witchcraft—a lowly caldron is the circle that serves to make the “charm” turn “firm and good” in Macbeth (IV.i 35-38).
As with the use of spondaic meter in the previous stanza, the presence of the circles here is associated, albeit in oblique manner, with ritual, with a larger organizing structure that ritual attempts to communicate.4As A. Seidenberg writes in “The Ritual Origin of the Circle and the Square,” “the circle was sacred because it was the shape of the ritual scene, and that this scene is identified with the earth” (275). The blackbird’s flight moves us to the edge of sight, but the bird can be in more than one circle or domain, or at least has the ability to move among them. This stanza speaks to our desire to organize via partition, but it speaks as well to the aesthetic pleasure we take in making such partitions, even if we may make them in order to transgress them, or even if we make them in order to understand our own limitations. The blackbird’s ability to mark or move between these realms speaks to an easy mode of connectivity. That is, that the bird flies out of sight does not mean that it’s flying directly from one bound bowl to another. Rather, it moves across them, among them, over them, in them, through them, almost as if to point out its complete disregard for them. It affirms the larger environment by sweeping across its boundaries.
With the ninth stanza the poem cements its practice of abstraction through the visual representation of simple, streamlined forms: circles and edges.
X.
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
This one’s intriguing for the way it shifts registries. It begins with a vision and ends in sharp sound. Between the two moments a green light acts as a medium within which the blackbirds fly. A scene presents itself: a dark, greenish fog, milky in texture, like the Northern Lights.5What could this green light signify or gesture towards? A possible clue might be found in a different piece, “Candle of a Saint,” in which “green is the night, green kindled and appareled…Green is the night, and out of madness woven” (CP 223). The fact that we cannot pin it down reminds us of its not representational status. The black against green is not shocking, but something about the light prompts these “bawds,”6An odd word, “bawds.” According to Google’s n-gram viewer, its usage peaked in 1809. But even if its use is already out of favor when Stevens uses it, it is metrically efficient. madams of sonic bordellos, to cry out (suggesting an involuntary act), sharply, which is to say discordantly or in an unpleasant manner, contrary to their professional obligation to “euphony.” Is it that the sight is so beautifully rendered, visually, that they cry out in appreciation? The “sharp” aspect of the cry suggests otherwise. Does the sight, so striking, compete with their sonic realm? Grammatically, the action unfolds in at least two different temporal modes. In the first place, this could be a hypothetical scenario. The bawds would cry out sharply at such a sight, should such a sight be seen. But there is another possibility. In English, “would” also signifies repeated action in the past. Read this way, hypothetical turns habitual.
In either case, if the third stanza pushes against the primacy of language and instead affirms the importance of gesture, and if the sixth and the ninth make use of visualizations to show the limits of knowledge and our representations of it, the tenth makes sound its primary focus, even if its presence serves to affirm its vulnerability to sight.
XI.
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
Stanza eleven moves us away from the strange, green-lighted abstraction of stanza ten to a few recognizable specifics. The time? Once, a single moment. Place? “over” Connecticut. Mode of transport? Train or (less likely in 1917) airplane; although neither is glass, both have glass windows. He could be the driver of a car—the glass the windshield. But then the better verb would be “drove.” More likely he is a passenger in a train. “Coach” suggests a pre-automotive time, and the spun-glass stuff of fairy tales. Coach also evokes class: One flies coach because first class is too expensive. And position: one makes his way to coach, a place designated as such on a train. What happens? A train passenger rides over New England and suffers a moment of fear because the shadow created by his glass-walled ride appears to him as birds. Why would this cause fear? A literal reading: birds crash planes, may well derail trains, and upset other modes of transport. But this seems absurd. Rather, given the way that the birds appear throughout the poem, his response makes a different kind of sense. The blackbird appears at the limits of knowledge, and at the edge of sense perception; it functions as a privileged entity, able to access various aspects of the larger environment, as well as, perhaps, its totality, without ever expressing human language, desire, or intent. Put another way: although the blackbird is its titular star and occurs in thirteen of the thirteen sections, the poem never lapses into anthropomorphism.
With this behind him, poetically speaking, perhaps what the rider glimpses is a brief, pre-cognitive peek into the machinery of his existence. The “equipage” of the physical, material apparatus that moves him across Connecticut is mistaken for the components of a larger, more mysterious, and more intricate choreography. This is Kant, in reverse. In The Critique of Judgement, Kant demonstrates how the sublime occurs when the subject experiences a moment of terror or other kind of incommensurate moment that he cannot process or understand, but that nevertheless points to a larger system of understanding, which his power of reason manages to reconcile. In Stevens, the moment of fear stems from within the man himself.7Another poem by Stevens, “Prologue to What Is Possible,” approaches this more directly, as in the following: “The metaphor stirred his fear. The object with which he was compared was beyond his recognizing. …What self, for example, did he contain that had not yet been loosed, Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread” (CP 516).
Stanza eleven illustrates the tension between system(organism) and larger environment that results from attempting to recognize itself in relation to the larger, totalizing system of its own “self-referential schema.” This attempt at recognition comes in the form of a vision.
XII.
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
Two lines offer two related images, causally linked by the words “must be.” The blackbird is indexical of the flowing river. The flowing river is indexical of the blackbird’s flight. One is a sign of the other. But the stanza is also linguistically linked, through parallel verb structure—the present progressive tense suggestsa simultaneity, not just of movement, but of its unfolding duration. Visually, the poem directs the eye down to the water, up to the sky; it could be the same sky that is above-adjacent to the river, but it is not likely, since, if it were, the poet would not need to speculate with the modal “must be,” for sight would confirm the flight. They are out of sight here, but their impression lingers. I imagine the circles described so vividly in section nine: a patchwork quilt of circles, with the blackbirds’ recent, fleeting presence creating a throughline across each section, a whip stitch to close the seams.
Stanza twelve introduces a simultaneity of motion that seems to be intrinsic to the machinery of reality.
XIII.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar limbs.
The concluding stanza complicates its own finality: Evening supersedes its predecessor. The snow“was snowing”—past progressive—but also future oriented in that intriguing way English makes use of the past to suggest the future: “it was going to snow.” It’s a temporally open-ended declaration. In contrast to this temporal confusion (both the time and the weather stretch beyond their lawful boundaries), the “blackbird sat”—simple past, an uncomplicated act—in the branches of a fragrant tree. The cedar suggests a freshness of scent and the resting box of the dead.
Stanza thirteen reminds us what the poem as a whole has suggested about time, duration, and the partiality of knowledge, even as the presence of a bird, however mysterious, fleeting, and elusive it might be, manages to connect them in a way that is not representational but is associative.8Contrast this to “Invective against Swans”:
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks.
And far beyond the discords of the wind.
…listless…bland…
And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies
Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.
The swan lacks the integration with its landscape that the blackbird enjoys. The swan is too precious to blend in. And the chariot of its body? Too chilly to invite these fleeing souls to land. The poem diminishes them by referring to them as “ganders,” male geese, rather than with the more lofty sound of star-bound Cygnus. Put differently, the swan is no system in Luhmann’s sense in this poem. Rather, it is a symbol, and its symbolic import, its excessive beauty, is that of the overly cultivated—“parks”—and bounded by winds and weather. It cannot teach us anything because its meaning has been overdetermined.
Part Three: Lines of Sight
In this essay, I have been prompted by Cary Wolfe’s study to consider Wallace Stevens’s status as an ecological poet. Wolfe’s important work offers a potentially useful way of opening up the field. At the same time, however, the book is also somewhat retrospective in its methodology; it is ruthlessly focused in its effort to triangulate Luhmann, Derrida, and Stevens. Rarely does anything else enter in; nor does the book look outside itself towards, for example, the larger social issues with which ecocritical discourse continues to contend, to the extent that the results of Wolfe’s undertaking might not be immediately recognizable to those familiar with ecocritical discourse, which, even within today’s changing landscape, still focuses on connections among ecological systems, “nature” as a broad (if contested) category, and humanism. And yet the argument is well worth translating into broader terms.
My analysis above has been the first step in an attempt to provide such a translation. I have largely eschewed theory. Rather, by proceeding stanza by stanza and plucking out the features most likely to contribute to an understanding of ecopoetics, I have attempted to distill the poem to its most potent attributes. The following is a summary of these efforts:
SECTIONS I to XIII
I. a curious and mechanical method of seeing; contrasts in scale, in color, in number, in stillness, and in motion.
II. contrast between singular and multiple; division in contrast to unity; via image
III. the importance of gesture-based communication
IV. unity in the multiple; the performative speech act, estranged; image of a trinity.
V. choice, selection, sound, suggestion, and the vertical (paradigmatic) substitution of elements—associative logic.
VI. the mixture of stillness with motion; machinic vision; the limits of visual representation through images; the importance and limitation of vision.
VII. direct address, specific and local places, the foolishness of exotic fantasies.
VIII. self referentiality about poetry making. Power of sound via a metrical, if oblique, referral to ritual.
IX. abstraction through the visual representation of simple shapes: circles and edges.
X. sound a primary focus, even if its presence serves to affirm its vulnerability to sight.
XI. a tension between system(organism) and larger environment that results from attempting to recognize itself in relation to the larger, totalizing system of its own “self-referential schema.” This attempt at recognition comes in the form of a vision.
XII. a simultaneity of motion in the machinery of reality.
XIII. associative linking via images.
While there are many more things to unpack, what I have put in bold above highlight the importance of vision—of seeing—to this piece. Again, to re-affirm Wolfe’s point, this is not the same as saying that in this poem Stevens favors a visual representation of the world. Nor is this an argument from Camp McLuhan. The use of visual language in Stevens does not in fact promote the serialization of the written word and the subsequent diminishment of mankind. Rather, the language of seeing, sight, and vision, all act as a means by which to explore alternatives to representational art, no matter where such an exploration might take us. And where might that be? Rather than presenting us with a faithfully rendered picture of the world, the work foregrounds its semantic play. It demonstrates an intriguing take on vision, on ways of seeing, and of sound; it offers a novel depiction of motion, and of stillness, and provides a novel performance of the importance of gesture. And it also demonstrates its dependence upon reality, upon the natural world, even if it does not attempt to depict these things accurately or directly.
And yet while abstraction and wordplay and linguistic virtuosity may well be more important than the “snowy scenes” that appear throughout Steven’s oeuvre, I contend that such moments, be they seasonal, avian, rooted in the soil, or blowing in the wind, provide the necessary launchpad from which nonrepresentational aspects might spring. Put another way, while it is true that Stevens does not get much play as an “ecological” poet in a more traditional sense, it is surprising that he is not more often invoked as such. After all, his work is constantly, albeit often abstractly, reaching outside of itself in order to situate itself within a greater environmental structure. It never does so in an entirely clear fashion—one gets glimpses, moments of portent rather than illumination, moments in which the poem points outside itself to places it cannot know, to the larger ecology it inhabits. But this intriguing partiality is one of the central pleasures of reading Stevens. And this difficult-to-parse relationship that his poetry teases out, insofar as that relationship remains largely obfuscated, illustrates the central philosophical paradox Wolfe points to, both in Stevens’ work and in systems theory. That is, the system—be it human-organism, poem, or otherwise—is at once wholly distinct from, yet nearly entirely dependent upon, its environment. It cannot know it. It cannot help but try.
Now that I have extrapolated from the previous section’s list of attributes and identified a key pattern—namely, that language related to seeing, vision, and sight is the poem’s primary strategy of seeking to explore itself in relation to the world outside itself—I am now interested in a related form of extrapolation. I am curious as to what extent this insight might be transformed into an automatic process. I confess ulterior motives. As someone who studies the “Digital Humanities,” I am fascinated by the ways in which computational systems are contributing to our overall interpretive “ecologies.” At the same time, however, I find claims about distant reading, or “literary sociology,” to be overblown, and the claim to outsource the reading of “millions” of texts to be absurd. This is not to say important insights haven’t been gleaned by taking suchan approach, but by definition the approach fails to engage with a single text, a single author, or an individual exegesis. By cutting out the reader from the process of reading, the whole enterprise is short circuited. Reading is largely associative. My reading of Stevens will not be the same as your reading of Stevens, although I would wager that there would be meaningful overlaps. But the same tools employed for distant reading can help us read more closely, and even more carefully, by outsourcing counting rather than reading. And, although a lofty goal, by tracing associations an individual has with a word, and banking them, we might one day have a useful method for connecting associative thinking across minds, as far fetched as that may now sound. But my ambition here is more modest. I have created a simple Python script for extrapolating some of things I’ve teased out in the previous section: thirteen functions for looking at blackbirds, but it will work for any text, really. The script is called 14fn.py, and it includes searches for prepositions, punctuation, words of affect, words of motion, etc. The vocabulary is tied to the language used in Stevens’s poem. It’s accessible on the project’s website, http://13blackbirds.org, in a folder called 13blackbirds. To run it, you need Python 3, and a copy of Stevens’s poem as a .txt file. This (the poem) is also included in the folder. If you know how to run Python from your terminal (or command prompt), you’re all set. If not, I recommend python anywhere, which is free and browser based. In addition to this script, I have made a fourteenth function that I am making sharable, via a simple flask interface. This app focuses on ways of seeing and uses a more extensive vocabulary than the first. This, too, is accessible on the project’s main page. The code for this project will be made available once it’s been refined.
Works Cited
“Barbarian.” Etymology Online. https://www.etymonline.com/word/barbarian?ref=etymonlinecrossreference#etymonlinev_52529
“Bawd.” Google ngram viewer. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Bawd&yearstart=1800&yearend=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2CBawd%3B%2Cc0
Bergthaller, Hans. “Beyond Ecological Crisis: Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems.” Electronic book review 1 April 2018. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/beyond-ecological-crisis-niklas-luhmanns-theory-of-social-systems-2/
“Pantomime.” Definition of pantomime. Merriam-Webster online. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pantomime.
Ruskin, John. Elements of English Prosody. Sunnyside, Orpington, Kent: George Allen, 1880.
Stevens, Wallace. Collected Poems. NY: Vintage, 1990.
Wetzler, Rachel. “What Was Surrealism?” Art in America 4 April 2022. https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/features/surrealism-beyond-borders-historiography-1234624000/.
Wolfe, Cary. Ecological Poetics, or Wallace Stevens’s Birds. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2020.
End Notes
[1] There is not a clear line to draw between Ecocriticism and Environmental Humanities. That said, I am grateful to use language provided by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE): “When ASLE was established in 1992, ecocriticism was an emerging interdisciplinary field in literary and cultural studies. Over the past two decades, ecocriticism has developed across a range of historical periods, literary and artistic genres, cultural histories, theoretical frameworks, and research and teaching methods. Today ASLE offers a center of gravity for ecocriticism as well as a growing international community of scholars and teachers across the humanities and arts––representing disciplines such as literature, history, philosophy, film and media, cultural studies, religious studies, cultural geography, and anthropology. This vibrant area of research and teaching falls under the umbrella term “the environmental humanities.”
[2] That said, there is certainly much more to discuss vis a vis Wolfe’s engagement with Luhmann via Stevens, Derrida, Heidegger, Maturana and Varela, etc.
[3] This is a concept that repeats in Stevens’s “Connoisseur of Chaos,” with the opening stanza: “…A great disorder is an order. These / Two things are one…” (CP 215).
[4] As A. Seidenberg writes in “The Ritual Origin of the Circle and the Square,” “the circle was sacred because it was the shape of the ritual scene, and that this scene is identified with the earth” (275).
[5] What could this green light signify or gesture towards? A possible clue might be found in a different piece, “Candle of a Saint,” in which “green is the night, green kindled and appareled…Green is the night, and out of madness woven” (CP 223). The fact that we cannot pin it down reminds us of its not representational status.
[6] An odd word, “bawds.” According to Google’s n-gram viewer, its usage peaked in 1809. But even if its use is already out of favor when Stevens uses it, it is metrically efficient.
[7] Another poem by Stevens, “Prologue to What Is Possible,” approaches this more directly, as in the following: “The metaphor stirred his fear. The object with which he was compared was beyond his recognizing. …What self, for example, did he contain that had not yet been loosed, Snarling in him for discovery as his attentions spread” (CP 516).
[8] Contrast this to “Invective against Swans”:
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks.
And far beyond the discords of the wind.
…listless…bland…
And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies
Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.
The swan lacks the integration with its landscape that the blackbird enjoys. The swan is too precious to blend in. And the chariot of its body? Too chilly to invite these fleeing souls to land. The poem diminishes them by referring to them as “ganders,” male geese, rather than with the more lofty sound of star-bound Cygnus. Put differently, the swan is no system in Luhmann’s sense in this poem. Rather, it is a symbol, and its symbolic import, its excessive beauty, is that of the overly cultivated—“parks”—and bounded by winds and weather. It cannot teach us anything because its meaning has been overdetermined.