AARON FOGEL

The Hoax and the Hex


  Elizabeth Bishop's title "Manuelzinho," Hart Crane's "Black Tambourine," Audre Lorde's title The Black Unicorn (and the goddess Seboulisa in her work), "Faitoute" in Williams's Paterson, Austen's Persuasion, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Erasmus Darwin's invocation of his "Botanic Muse"a list, a pastime. They're all "modernists," no matter when: they knew how to joke about yet enjoy and use complete visual vowel distributions, an elementary-school event-to-the-eye. Gershwin's title, notably, has y also: all six, once: a tour de force in this history of modern entitlements. Once you see that, and recognize how sarcastic Gershwin was being, you get the whole tone of "modernism" in a way that more prosaic, philosophical, explanatory systems just miss.
  The scholar can start to take it too seriously, calling it something like "vowel plenitude" (missing the echo to "bowel"), and maybe even propose a dictionary of such words and phrases to some publishing house. That scholar would not be a modernist but a dupe of modernist laughter. His entries would be interesting, though. They'd include common drab ones like "dialogue" and "education" and "euphoria"; newer ones like "eusocial" in E. O. Wilson (it is a keynote of his book on ants); and some obvious French words, like oiseau, or best of all the verb secouaient, where all five appear in a row, as can't happen in English; or, the most pretentious one, jouissance. All the literary theory of the past thirty years has been too mild, a misreading of modernism as jouissance, an unconscious hypnosis by vowel plenitude: it's been a tragedy. I don't know Oulipo well enough to know whether that group studied this set in any depth. Gérard Genette's book Mimologiques mentions the set briefly ­ but smart English readers, songwriters, and ad-writers noticed this minor tradition long since without French help.
  It has, to begin at least, little to do with sound (although the phrase "sound image" runs o u i a e) and everything to do with typography and prose writing as a luxury item. It seems statistically likely enough, and compositionally null, for such words, or bridges among words, to exist and to occur on every page. Obviously aeiou patterns each vowel once with no repetition might bridge words and phrases, as in "Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la trilou" [ my italics] in Mallarmé's famous line. It's no magic trick to come up with some semi-rare or neologistic ones for prose. A writer who uses "undiagnosed," one would see immediately, isn't necessarily awake to this element. "Undiamonded," though, much more rare,

12  AARON FOGEL

would be more likely to have been a conscious gem. Somewhere in Finnegans Wake that I can't refind Joyce turned periodicals into payrodicules.  
  Ain't we got fun: A reader on the watch, vigilant twenty-four hours a day for this event, has to be a retreatist from the contactful work of serious historical study or major artistic issues into "petty bourgeois" crossword mania or empty counterformalism, many would say. A reader who believes they "mean something"-even that they have some choral force in their use
by different writers-has fallen even further into a kabbalistic or just infantile disorder of reading and thinking. It's either Sunday morning National Public Radio wordplay, not poetics; or gross mismeasure of interpretation to stop too long at this station. So if the question becomes portentous-"Q:Name Seamus Heaney's word of this order suggesting the Hobbesian quality of metaphor itself. A: 'manoeuvrings"'-that's a fall into an incurable error and triviality.
  Those objections against this momentary little place within popular kabbalah hold: but foreclosure on the issue might also be wrong. We might as well be Casaubons of modernism for a while. What's the possibility that,in the twentieth century, the most definitive and in fact unconsciously influential features of "modernism" were in fact small, unnoticed, idiosyncratic formalisms like this one? Does poetic work in English have various slight, ordinary, but telltale counterformal kindergarten procedures, not yet categorized clearly, in some sense hidden from professors on purpose, shared by poets "over or under the heads" of the serious critics, below their attention? That poets have been talking chorally to each other, audibly to eachother and to their nightclub audiences, through counterformal modes like
"the five written vowels both as a notation with and without artistic and political meaning, sarcastic but also beautiful" or "the nine-syllable line as pure exercise with no meaning except as a sign of awkwardness-as-grace"? Mandelstam scorned Rimbaud's vowel sonnet as a barbarism. But, like the nine-syllable-line poem (worked on by poets as different as W. C. Williams and Geoffrey Hill, Plath and Apollinaire), setting up the idea of something
like "tone rows" of visual vowels (and obviously there are much more complex vowel-sequences than this elementary one) might bring together in one figure the work of some poets officially taken by academic classification to be of different schools, but in fact listening to each other more than official
criticism dares admit.
  The oldest example I can find, and a very funny one, a meditation on demonic typography, is Milton's invented name for the Devils' kingdom in the bowels of Hell: Pandaemonium (the elementary visual-vowel-noise of which word seems to be a comic visual print metaphor: all the vowels in one polysyllabic name = Chaos). If there in Milton, the figure of "having all five vowels in the brief space of one mock-Latin word" would be intentionally funny, not grotesque or terrible, in an odd way not usually thought of as Miltonic but in fact very close to his sense of humor. For the reader to get it, and to think that way about Milton's belly laughter ­ the belly

13  AARON FOGEL

laughter of Jonah if nothing else-is to participate in a long-practiced and long-forbidden mode of carnivalesque interpretation of English, quasi"kabbalah." Milton as a laugher? Milton's burlesque? Doesn't the opening line, "Of man's first disobedience and the fruit," with its sense of tragic plenitude, move along on strong syllables of a i o e and u? ­ an announced fullness?
  Milton may have been doing the joking, hoaxer's version of the sort of thing Jacob Boehme was up to, a "popular cabalism," as Nicholas Hudson calls it, when Boehme identified, maybe sinfully, the name of God itself, Jehovah, as a complete sequence of the "breathed letters," adding h to i e o u a. This way of seeing printed words, for the Jonsonian tradition, would fall somewhere between the slightly scandalous, the gnostic and endangering, and the incurably mad ­ all of which Jonson himself practiced though he thundered against it. One-word vowel-completeness has negative force here. Wallace Stevens's first title Harmonium obviously signals the concern for the story of vowels as distributions throughout his poetry.
  "Words for music perhaps." A gentle enough title from Yeats: "perhaps" is, on first reading, semantic, a delayed qualifier. Links between verbal and musical art, words and performance, are always tentative. But if the reader dares to "see" that the e-a in "perhaps" completes an elementary requirement that the phrase have the notation of "all" the "five" vowels, the notion of a melody-to-the-eye is established, comically, in counterpoint to that skepticism.
  We might "score" that phrase, in a rudimentary sub-metrical way, different from scansion, as "o-o u-i e-a," and then of course note how each written vowel has its own sounding.
  Of all the ways to read probably the most famous modern opening lines of twentieth-century English, "April is the cruelest month, breeding," we might wonder if the vowel-order wasn't the statement: an elementary tone row to eye and ear, announcing that it's going to be a major five-part poem by pressing strikingly on the visual-aural key of all five vowels. A five-part poem; all five vowels announced in the first nine-syllable line. The pentameter may be (half) broken into a damaged nine-syllable line but fiveness is still there. A theme (negative plenitude, fertility) is scored. The partly visual device of orchestration of all the vowels briefly introduces variegation, not clearly a pandemonium or a harmonium.
  Is talking this way schizoid? It is. Is it flight from history? That I'm not so sure of. On the contrary; it could be an attempt to see and decode a form that has great unconscious force on the ways we read and think, including politically.
  Pound had insisted on variegation, not assonance or alliteration, and there's nothing obscure about that. Still, this visual-vowel order is closer to new distributions of the sort the Russian Velimir Khlebnikov projected, especially if you risk attributing historical meanings to letter patterns. A rule of visual, dense non-repetition, often meaning nothing more than lively contact with color and life, nevertheless leads toward other meanings ­

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not only for obvious radical but for what are called canonical writers, mostly:Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Eliot, Stevens, and some others. They're all joking, they're all serious, and they're all evading the labels that would confine them to one of the two alternative misreadings of modernism, as either hoax or hex, either chance-obsessed joke or religious apotropaic gesture. Raising a question like this is in principle "counterformal": it assumes that, however much other critics might want to turn now towards history,since close reading is, it's said, at best exhausted and at worst a vile escapism, there are in fact still modernist forms "we" in our critical majesty haven't seen, recounts we have to do. These are worth looking at for them- selves but also because they teach us history, and the limits of prose thinking, in a new light. "Canonical" writers have always used "non-permissible" forms about which they were often pretty silent. Had they let on,they'd have been called mad or silly: when they did, they were.
  To ascribe political meanings to these openly is to rush to judgment or to spill the beans in a way one shouldn't do. But shared counterformal devices bring Elizabeth Bishop and Audre Lorde, say, into contact, about "vowel-color and race" in a way that neither "aesthetic" readers nor "political" readers now might like to see when they make those components pseudo-contraries. Poets in the twentieth century have hidden these "adult kindergarten" political and artistic compositional keys from scholars because their relations to each other, when they echo the devices of contemporaries or near-contemporaries, have been for them chorally important, not least in an excessively competitive environment ruled by competition-obsessed critics like Harold Bloom, who miss out on the way artists have worked together. To collectivize, in this case, is sometimes to individuate ­ to listen to one's supposedly opposed neighbor poet, not an ancestor. I want to suggest that, for all Bloom's theories about struggle and agon, there is another more dangerous fact, both artistic and political, of writers that is not only ignored, but in effect has to be censored by prose ideology, and by a covert consensus among academics that includes both historicist readers (who generally try to show these poets to be conservative) and their "opponents," older-style close readers (who generally also now defend formalism in conservative terms). The purpose is to deny other orders of collective signs, the way they work, to keep poetry's insights into group work and the implications of counterformal distribution invisible.

 

*


There are only three titles by Elizabeth Bishop-"Manuelzinho," "At the Fishhouses," and "Crusoe in England"-that fit the aeiou pattern, though "The Mountain" also meets the technical requirement. Let's set "The Mountain" aside. That there are so few, out of more than a hundred titles, adds to the challenge: it seems statistically certain that to her the accidental grouping meant nothing. Anyone who hasn't thought about this pat-

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tern,and looks back over his or her own writing, will of course find "vowel plenitudes," moments of unintended a e i o u.
  Even so, by the time Bishop writes it's familiar, having come into English via what was in France the cliche of synaesthesia and Rimbaud's "vowel-colors," less of a cliche for American and English imitators like Crane, and popularized in the unconscious via Gershwin or a title like Hemingway's. Titles which had this feature as comedy were, though it's problematic to say it aloud, dealing very indirectly with a certain complex of themes: notably assortment indirectly and adroitly politicized as racial "mixed" "color," along with order and disorder.
  The most famous example of that brassy political humor among high modernists may be Hart Crane's "Black Tambourine." The a-o-u-i-e of the musical instrument-a tambourine is a simple enough instrument to stand for the reduced set of "five" vowels that write its name-is set against the word "Black." The poem's story of The Black Man puts him "in the cellar"-historically in the ship's hold, in prisons, and in basement nightclubs. The title also stands for black-on-white print on the page. Like many things Crane did compactly, that gesture is enough to make for a tradition. The question the poem asks in the abstract is this: whether themes of color can be rendered in the black and white of print, which is a sort of cellar or prison: the poem is a black tambourine, a printed black and white attempt at percussive color, or political seriousness, in its jangling and sarcasm.
  Bishop's title, the name "Manuelzinho," having the vowels a u e i o each once and (by comparison to a e i o u taken as the "elementary order") in slightly scrambled order, may then not be arbitrary, but a comment on and inside the tradition a gesture like Crane's also scores. The simple compact completeness of vowels in the name "Manuelzinho," once seen, after trying to interpret the poem, is funny by itself. The title teaches us how to read that poem obliquely, against contemporary "political versus artistic" readings, combining them with skepticism about the maturity of beliefs and signs. It sends us back to other moments in Bishop and other poets. Sad, silly, quasi-mystical, bohemian, irresponsible, and imaginatively brilliant in its mock-childishness as it is to read and see his name that way, the character Manuelzinho himself is all those things. The name enacts the medley of the person called Manuelzinho by the poem better than some more intellectual explanations might. We're very close to one branch of secular kabbalah, but also to play that can be done in the classroom without having to teach a half-true theory like Pound's notion of Chinese ideograms. The letters of a name are its action, but in the gently ridiculous form that poets from Blake to Stevens have liked to enact jokingly.
  To make an oblique digressive comparison, I'd say also with a touch of heresy that for Yeats's "Among School Children," in the first four lines, the schoolchildishly naive fact there are four o's in the spondaic word "schoolroom" becomes the poem's "silly scene" typographically: the four o's, which "only an idiot or a child" would stop to notice-they are beneath the professor or the sophisticate-become the poem's organizing theme in an

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ascent from calculated silliness to adult thinking and feeling. Here the theme is not the completeness of vowels but the monotony of them.

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning.
A kind old nun in a white hood replies.
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything . . .

The four o's in "schoolroom" are themselves a child's fact, easily ignored. They have something like Brueghel's round elementary-school silliness. In this first stanza, the o's drop down, by rudimentary poetic arithmetic, to the verb "cipher" in line 3. Later in the poem they become its sardonic-platonic circles. All of this is playfully mock-intellectual. But finally, in a shift with less humor, they become the vocative O's that close the poem. O itself, as a letter, like S, is always a naive and trite theme for analysis. The o's in "schoolroom" can only be noticed in a child's voice ­ how a child learning might delight in a simple fact like that. It's in the third line, though, that we hear Yeats's polemic. The key word is "and"-"The children learn to cipher and to sing." This line becomes clear in its anger when we hear that the and is divisive. The line starts to mean something
serious enough: that, in school, children are taught to segregate mathematics from Iyric. The first segregation is the one that separates song from math. As Yeats always says, that false division of math from song is thefirst move in false consciousness. Teach that, and you'll keep everybody convinced of the elite lie that, for example, high poetry and high prose are
closer than poetry and folk music-that Wallace Stevens simply and indisputably has everything in common with Henry James's prose and nothing with rap music. That is the precise division of consciousness about Iyrical art that Yeats's prosody works hardest to get past: the idea that prosodic devices are "only" devices, are only sweet melody (as they are), have no dramatic force, and have to be ignored for the higher imagination. What Yeats, at times in spite of himself maybe, does with prosody and similar
formal choices is make us feel that they are radical about the dramatically political scene of counting.
  The name "Manuelzinho" has, likewise, a marked place (like "tam-
bourine" and "schoolroom"). To review for those who don't remember the poem clearly (though here we have a text that has to be reread),"Manuelzinho" has a narrator said to be a "friend" (actually based onBishop's companion Lota). This friend speaks, with a combination of delighted affection, indifference, condescension, guilt, fear, and artistic envy, to and about her half-tenant-half-talented, half-zany-gardener Manuelzinho. He belonged to the property when she bought it. He has a gift for seemingly uncanny and mock-ignorant gestures, feigned, sugges-
tive of resentment, calculated playing-the-fool, and of saintlike artistry; he has an artistic sense typical of "the people" or "the folk," it seems, and he's painted, lots of readers think, in a patronizing key of bohemianism, buf-

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foonery, and evasion. But then there are artistic facts about him-like the painted hat which he wears-which are just great and moving, and which can't be fit into any smirky or guilty judgment against bohemianism or patronizing "beauty of poverty."
  In the poem, the patronizing and loving narrator has trouble getting him to fit any categories-the sly populist, the invisible ordinary man as saint (cf. the zaddik), the obnoxious fool, the bad sentimental irresponsible father, the denier of death, the passive-aggressive rebel, the fecund one, the vestige of feudalism, the wise fool, the beatnik, the parasite, the mystic, the anti-enumerator, the patronized peasant, the revolutionary, the pseudoartist, the real artist, and so on. Even while he fits into these he dissolves the typology of lower-middle-class aesthetic revolt as seen from an uppermiddle-class angle. Translated, Manuelzinho isn't exactly proletarian but something like poor lower middle class in the United States. The culture desperately tries to assign him, that is, a set of fixed attitudes (resentment, buffoonery, nittygrittyism, naivete, dismissiveness, passive revolt, plainness) that I would call in sum the LMC, or the official caricature of the lower middle class. Meanwhile the actual class is too broad to define, and remains, like real art, resistant to upper-middle-class prose's patronage. He is neither just the ornery, nor just the ornate, but the ornery ornate, a class statement of taste and judgment alien to prose's supposedly complete but in fact very narrow and constricted decorum.
  Who then was Manuelzinho? To answer by not answering in the historical and sociological terms favored by our current upper-middle academic "historicizers" and "politicizers"-he is his name and its order, he is what it would mean if we had the smarts to see the five vowels in scrambled order, and to grasp what that tells us about our serious reading. That is to get something clear that's otherwise elusive. It belongs only to modernized kabbalah, and is a class position-the lower middle class refusing to be caricatured and fully in possession of its ornateness. He is open local economy in scrambled form, at once comic and tragic, as the term "carnival" is and isn't. Bishop's poems as a group may be read as defiantly careful studies of "local economies," microeconomies as against and yet as emblems of the world's actual macroeconomies, reversing Pound's sense of things. Even a large cityscape, like the Rio of "Burglar of Babylon," is finally a confined stage of up-down economic ironies. She sets up her seemingly old-fashioned artful canvas in front of many seemingly discrete economic scenes-bakeries, gas stations, and so on-and then with exceptional patience, and awkwardness, repeats and defies the grandiose macroeconomics, especially of Pound's school, from which she in fact learned a particular variant of economic poetry. When late in her work the bus in "The Moose" passes momentarily by a set of islands called "The Economies," it's a moment of synopsis of her own past work, each Iyric poem or narrative poem a study of a local economy that globalizes reluctantly. That gas station taught to undergraduates is Blakean, the oil-driven economy of the twentieth century on a doily.

18 Aaron Fogel

  For someone writing a poem (or even prose) there's nothing more islandedly economic and close-up than the unconscious economy of letters in the words as they will hook the reader. John Updike's prose, for example, also in the New Yorker as Bishop's poems often were, uses aeiou densities lavishly and brilliantly. There they are signs of luxury, upper-middle-class sarcasm about itself, thoughtful materialism, and prose mastery. In my view, for all my qualified admiration for Updike's prose, and the New Yorker style, it is a plastic surgery performed on the English language to enhance it. One of its materials is vowel-stuffing. Bishop takes the same luxury in her poems and makes it different-a much more ruthless, spare economy of comedy and tragedy in writing as class facts of abundance and scarcity. Despite what it's unconventional to call Bishop's economism, critics generally feel embarrassed by her politics, and very strongly by "Manuelzinho." It is politically off-key, it's felt now, liberally condescending and entertained, colonialist, ideologically suspect, to look so closely and with such controlled irony and elite pleasure at anyone not of one's own class or nation, no matter how much the speaker's voice is itself morally distanced and self-critical. Critics in the line of Edward Said have made it impossible to go back to a safe emotional class reading of a poem like this: the intersecting imperialist reading has to be seen. But the embarrassment, I'd argue, still tells more about the critics' class guilts and limits concerning the truth of class-relations than about some failure in Bishop's art: in fact she means, as the awkwardnesses in part indicate, to embarrass. In "Manuelzinho," the speaker's tortured, comic attitude towards her tenant, inhibitedly passionate affection, has been treated as if it were some sort of discovery on the critics' part-as if Bishop were unaware of the defensive condescension as the poem's theme.
  "Manuelzinho"'s reflection on political form takes place on various levels. There's an allegory of prosody as quantification, for example, in the poem, when the speaker and Manuelzinho get together over his narrowcolumned account books. They resemble the narrow columns of much of Bishop's poetry and also her great prose essay about the way mathematics columns in schools scared her. Manuelzinho brings the ledger to the owner, for review, and has revised her debts to him for materials and labor by imaginarily leaving out decimal points. (All the new poets leave out pentameters and think themselves radical-and are.) Her debt to him becomes immense. Clayton Eshleman unfairly thinks this is a slip-up in Bishop's work-a rare moment of political radicalism not repeated. Reciprocal allegorization of prosody by other figures of numerical figuration, of calculation and arithmetic in a Iyric-secular kabbalah-with Iyric then also setting itself up as an economic critique of the culture, is in fact standard modern Iyric practice. Bishop would understand it not just from Pound's own powerful if grandiose lifelong revised calculus of prosody's implied relations to other accountings like banking, but as a standard enough device, not since Pound or since Whitman, but perhaps since Langland's figure of Mede, later becoming Shakespeare's "measure for

19 Aaron Fogel

measure" and "commodity." Enough of her later poems look, predictably, like thin columns of "numbers" (verse) in turn associated with anxiety. Since the conservative poetry critics who "defend" but also monopolize and silence Bishop would tend to dislike or disparage an Olson, say, the idea that she would subtly allegorize calculation though prosody and images of prosody as economy visually has to be excluded. Her art and her politics have to be split in the new dissociation of sensibility, i.e., the academic "war" for turl between so-called historicists and so-called aesthetes, as if the two were easily separated in any art work itself. Manuelzinho's account book, his anti-census, his anti-muniment, with its thin columns of "numbers" exaggerated into impossible plenitude of debt to himself, is an obviously conscious counter-image of meter as an exchange relation and a political counting which also doesn't matter.
  The speaker and Manuelzinho collaborate in the kitchen on the fantasy that she owes him her estate. In the meantime, inbetweentime, Bishop's own phobic dream of columns of numbers is and isn't being overcome or psychoanalyzed by poetry, as always,with regard to numbers.
  When teaching "Manuelzinho," of course, it usually and inevitably comes up that we've got to have an official anxiety attack about imperialism and condescension, our form of "moral" anxiety. Again, the speaker seems condescending to Manuelzinho, people say-and so we're obliged to worry. Class is in fact all-important, but hypocrisy about its tones is hard to get past, especially the academic hypocrisy now that is genteelly "shocked" to see it rendered. Terrified of class now, we pretend that we are thinking past it. We want to moralize about it, forget about it, or demographize it, not to look at it.
  Bishop knew her own name, as poets do and most critics don't, and sees comically in a Joseph Cornell-like way that "an Elizabeth" would go and end up by some retrograde-liberating assignment in a "Brazil" to find a mirror-place for herself, a south to her north; and she would mention lizards, etc., in the composition describing early penetration of the landscape. These sorts of fatal mock-kabbalistic jokes-done in keys that dissolve the difference between hoax and hex that I'll discuss again-are hard to pin down. These ironic objectified pseudo-signatures that show up so often in modernist writing, but also in Shakespeare's not just witty struggles with the word "Will" or Dickens's interest in words like his name "Charles"- "character," "chars," "charity."
  How teach a class, then, before it judges the "political" tone, to "see" the poem, if not by paying at least some attention to language as seen and to typography as hypnosis unless we break the spell? If the upper-middle class style, typified by Updike, casts a hypnotic spell by devices like aeiou richnesses half-hidden in prose, then a poet's lower-middle-class revolt against that, in titles like "Manuelzinho," is the very sort of art that, tragically, our whole profession is now refusing to think about in its eagerness for quick political fixes on every question. Vowel scrimmage: a u e i o. Now at least we're doing a reading that is patient and that counts: starting

20 Aaron Fogel


to admit who we are. To see that luxury, even to dare to ask that question at all about a word, one must be more than a little like Manuelzinho oneself, though stranded on the upper-middle-class side of the equation, as reader. He indulges in the luxuries he can. He is very hard to locate and categorize as an agent: naive yet too clever, mystical yet a little too concrete about words, scrambled, crazy, opportunistic, kabbalistic, artistic but
suspect as pseudo-artistic, superstitious, and so on. The name's construction as a vowel-cluster is inseparable not only from the "multicolored" (aesthetic or political term? don't worry-look) personality Bishop is trying to show us, but from a class economy: the luxurious pleasures of vowel-prolific words (as in New Yorker prose style) is also something to which lower middle classes of ornery ornate people have a right in their own keys.In her letters, Bishop notes that she's been reading all of Dickens and
would like to compress all of his novels into one sonnet. She comes closein "Squatter's Children."


*


"At the Fishhouses," a great, relatively early poem, is about the meeting of populations, human and animal, in a Nova Scotia fishing village. The question, not of class, but of what we now call "demographic" vision, is painted, in the most lavishly beautiful terms, as nevertheless, as against Whitman, tragic rather than hopeful in its implications. Large groups, seen or mis-seen not as classes but as biological and economic populations, can only be seen through painting of a local economy.
  Abundance as economic versus artistic, shimmerings, infinites and infinitesimals of life run throughout the poem. Here after intensely multiplicitous description is a passage that drops into a deceptively prosaic conversatlonal tone:


We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumbs.


  "He" here is the old coastal fisherman who has scraped off scales, "the principal beauty, from unnumbered fish." The last line is deceptive: note the vowel groups in "are sequins on" (a e-e u i o) and "vest and on his thumbs" (e a o i u). The line's "plain style," very different from most of the poem not quoted here, is undermined but enforced by the plain vowel order, a retroactive re-seeing of the seemingly flat sociological phrase "the population" (e o u a i (o)). The common phrase, "the population," is converted into a painting of fish scales and sequins. Am I joking? The question is beyond hoax or hex, joke or seriousness: the poem itself is unsure of the tonality of this device: but it sees it for us. "Are sequins on" is an extra- ~ ~
ordinary sequence of vowels.

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  Turn back to the poem's plain title. Put too abstractly, "At the Fishhouses" (a e i o u [e]-the simplest order almost) as a poem registers visually the idea that there is always some tragedy in simpler, grade-school economies and notations of abundance and de-abundance, population and depopulation. The order of vowels in the title means: "What does it mean to have simple abundance? Is it glorious, as in Whitman (or his shallower imitators), or is it plainly tragic in more unseen ways?" The poem is done in a rudimentary key of one of the main but unnamed genres of writing, which I'd call anti-census: the writer takes on the census-scene, which takes all sorts of issues of counting somewhat for granted, and revises those through prosodic and other gestures. Aeiou is, in the title "At the Fishhouses," what is, like plain populationality and abundance, always there as the ordinary (and not simply satirized) count: the order that doesn't even need to be worked on or seen. Still, for the plainest order of the alphabet's vowels to appear in a phrase is paradoxically a slightly rare event, rare enough in its ordinariness that an incidental cluster cannot be, but is, a "statement." And so, the lines enact, depend on, but distance themselves from the ordinariness of counts, of talking about populations, and of populational consciousness itself about history, a "demographic historical" way of talking more tragic, either in its hysterical Malthusian or its optimistic American form, than we usually admit.
  Relations between humanity and animals are not "ecological" in our more politically sentimental sense, and certainly not demographic, but saturated with class recognition of the way we build the signs of population. We make animals or plants into "populations" in order to talk about them. It sounds more scientific than older vocabularies that project kinship structures or political systems onto animal groups, but it is not. That is one reason "the decline in the population" is ambiguous in reference-is it the human population in the fishing village that's on the decline (syntactically likely), or the population of the catch? The language of populations has become so much a part of spoken convention that we don't hear it as a projection. The word "population" needs to be seen so that its letters look like a series of buttons or sequins on the page, and on the vest of the non-clown who strips the scales, and has to do so. It would-perhaps-be less projective to consider animals as social classes.
  In the last movement and even more the final lines of the poem, this problematic economy suddenly announces itself as a historical one. The sea is so cold one cannot put one's hand in it, and that is like "what we imagine knowledge to be." Populational-historical knowledge, like Whitman's, can no longer be even remotely warm: instead it's like putting your hand in the immense sea, which causes it to go numb and burn with cold. The last three words in the poem tell us that while knowledge is itself "historical," impossibly cold to the point of numbness, it is "flowing, and flown." This amounts to a violently understated correction of Heraclitus much more stark than anything in Pound or Zukofsky, who also both "corrected" Heraclitus ironically. Pound famously: "All things are a flowing / Sage

22 Aaron Fogel

Heraclitus says / But a tawdry cheapness / Shall outlast our days." Pound was expressing his usual broad contempt for mass culture (though using the advertising jingle ironically to do so). And Zukofsky more beautifully, I think, has Celia remark in "A- 18" re a bank ad that said "The one permanence is change": "Think my dear of Heraclitus' fee were he alive."
  For Bishop, by contrast, it's too easy to say that all things are a flowing, however great the old saying, and too easy to be ironic about the commercialization of it, like Pound or Zukofsky. Her introduction of the past tense corrects that: flowing, and flown. In the midst of this question about positive and negative abundance ­ and I haven't even touched the many great images of multiplicities, dialogues, choruses, and solitudes as all the same in this Iyric poem, and its resolute rejection of the simplistic question whether populations are scarcities or overabundances ­ the title helps us see the theme of simple abundance not as Whitmanesque pleasure and delight but as ordinary tragedy. The old man who decorates himself unconsciously like a tragic non-clown with sequins represents economy itself. He is uncategorizable, and it is falsehood to apply simple optimism or pessimism, comedy or tragedy to questions of "population." It is no accident that the phrase "the population" has an e o u a i sequence, an accidental fullness, unconscious of its own signs. Population thinking is simplistically full, like aeiou itself. Both simply follow out the child's first order of the vowels with childlike simplicity-a e i o u, with an extra e at the end-"At the Fishhouses." The title says, in this form, what the poem partly asks- what is the quality of the simple, factual language of populations, artistic, economic, and political at once? Is its factual character itself so ordinary as to be (contra Whitman) unexpectedly tragic? Does plenitude itself reverse automatically into tragedy?
  Finally, a startling and lastingly difficult, or impossible, poem with a helpful title of vowel cluster is "Crusoe in England." Here we might think the eccentric kabbalist's thought: "This poem, which has vexed so many critics, and is so difficult, might be in its action an 'At the Fishhouses' in reverse-the vowels go backwards, if we silence the silent e: u o(e) i e a." This seems to me possibly Bishop's most psychoanalytic poem, though not her best, and also another poem which analyzes the relation between poetic numbers as compressions and the dialogical expansions of nove]s. The ambition to translate Defoe's famously quantitative novel back into a complex requantified verse is still more surprising-to do it without obvious meter, but sti]l make a poem (a requantification of a novel) that is jarringly aslant the history of prose. As she joked in her letter that she wanted to take on Dickens's work, which she loved, by reducing his 30,000 pages to a sonnet, she wants to take on Defoe's prose and its even more daring economies.
  Explaining the relation between Defoe's great tensions between prose quantifications and prose disquantifiers, as I'd call them, and Bishop's versification, which in its way includes meters and non-meters also, would become too hermetic. But without going into a close reading of that, look

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at that reverse order of the vowels in the poem and how it's appropriate to its main action. In the poem, Crusoe relates not only his life on the island but his feelings of emptiness once he has been forced to go home. A quietly horrifying double regression is the action of the poem. Bishop refutes both cliches, the Rousseauist one about retreat to nature, and the antiRousseauist, Trilling-like one about the need for institutional and civil life. These are both of them myths-of savagery and civilization. In our time, Rousseau dethroned, it may be the great Trilling-like myth that we all are creatures of civilization, of urbane civil participation, and of politics that may be the more subtly sentimental one. If Crusoe's forced solitude on his island was indeed, as every anti-Rousseauist and anti-romantic has to admit, not a liberation but a regression from culture, not the discovery of individual freedom, still his forced liberating return to civilization, in Bishop's terrifying account, was not a progress or an improvement, whatever the great sane social critics in Trilling's line might want to teach, and however rightly. Crusoe's return, in this poem, was not resocialization, but a second, even worse repression-that is the surprising plot of the poem, as, Bishop is saying, of her own life. She went to Brazil, where she was happiest, whatever the withdrawal; and her forced return to America after Lota's death was a double regression, not simply maturation. The sane Trillingesque critics with their sense of tragic responsible civil participation are great enough, but trivially right for themselves, the poem says, not for "us" more solitary, more destroyed people. It's true that the withdrawal into one's solipsism, artistic or otherwise, is a loss, a repressive regression, for all its mis-scaled and disproportioned, and finally disappointing and self-deluding, imageries. Artists may well sit on imaginary small volcanoes like giants on bidets or toilet-seats, and it's putridly false: the ugly image of Crusoe brooding on a small volcano is intentionally disgusting and Freudian. Still, for such a person, who by psychological history or given nature is an isolato or a solipsist, to force upon oneself a return to group life or polity or community, to make "as if" belonging to Trillingesque humanity, is to repress still further.
  This judgment in and by the poem is what the title says through nothing besides its order of u o i e a (Crusoe in England). This action can be read "from" the kabbalistic title's implied math in this spare form of poetic reason rather than set theory or symbolic logic. What context was there for an Elizabeth Bishop to have told her civilized readers, the famous and brilliant poetry critics, for example, with their very sharp, certain, and ultimately shallow ideas of what is and is not sane, what is and is not real feeling, that she would perform such a regressive kabbalistic trope itself? There was none, and there will never be one: it must be predictably rejected by institutionally sane critics as mad or trivial-by those who belong to the cults of prose.
  Now for a prose bedtime story: The vowels in "Manuelzinho," at the happiest period of Bishop's life, the midpoint in love in Brazil, taught an unordered plenitude of delight, a happy acceptance of all colors scrambled

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even though the class tragedy remains there and the worry that she herself is a "bohemian," a parasitical gardener wearing the most beautiful painted hat on earth ­ and why not. Manuelzinho is the oddly unquestioned hero of the poem ­ there's no other reading. The movement in the earlier poem, "At the Fishhouses," had raised as admonition the question of American Whitmanesque plenitude. She had seen past the American population myth and was able to leave. The verdict, after her lover's suicide and other losses, is that to reverse a reversal, to go back to the city, is still complete tragedy. There is no negation of the negation, or dialectics, in personal life. That is what "Crusoe in England" tells us. The title, like some miniature in a Joseph Cornell box, tells us that within its vowel-order. In each case vowel-order is a scalar and directional event, artistic and political, not "aesthetic" in the upper-middle-class sense-an illumination of a universe of class feeling unknown to prose.

*

The generally allowed approaches to modernist poetry might be divided, with some purposely playful reduction, into the modernisms of the hoax and the hex.
  The hoax modernists are seen as the radicals, the hexers as the religious conservatives. The Waste Land, supposed key to conservative modernism, first seemed a hoax to Time magazine, we're told, but now we know how stupid that was; obviously the poem was a great profound Hex, the apotropaic sign of aborted apostrophe over the entire twentieth century. For all his humor, Pound only early ­ "Homage to Sextus Propertius" is closest to the hoaxing spirit of the modernist left ­ had the highjinks and the freshness of the dadaists or the goodly hoaxers. Contemporary serious poets like Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney seem closer to "hexwork."
  The hoax figures are, once you start counting, strangely more numerous and obvious: Stein seems, and it's nine-tenths a misreading, close to pure hoax in language, hoax meaning not that she's really putting one over on us, let alone being a bad artist-on the contrary, she's got supreme compositional skills and is endlessly flexible and various-but that she pulls the rug out from under all the false registers and propositions of reading for analysis, and therefore looks like a hoax to those who demand stand-up "meaning" in its conventional forms.
  Stevens has more of the hoax in this sense than of the hex-much more. The title "Sunday Morning," to hexographers, refers to religion; for hoaxographers, it clearly refers to the morning after Saturday Night, and is a poem about the metaphysics of dialogue about sex and postcoital feeling in marnage.
  The hoax spirit, the defiance of false meanings through the introduction not of deconstruction (that village explainer), but of other forms than those we're trained to see, runs through to Ashbery, for example. ("You mean there's an image of an upside-down folding-chair in every 117th line, with

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upside-down folding thrones in every 802nd? I hadn't caught that.")
  Obviously this division breaks down for any fair description of any poet; and though you might want to, it's hard or impossible to cancel the pejorative meanings in both words "hoax" and "hex" to let them stand as humorous rather than solemn "critical" contraries.
  But it's helpful to see that it might be false to connect Eliot too much now to hex-his hoaxes, and not only in the footnotes, remain as important as his "prophetic" or false-prophet scoldings and warnings. And there is an apotropaic or hexlike element in the purest anti-meaningful hoaxes themselves-a warding off of the evil of false seriousness as it's perceived, that turns them also, unwillingly, into hexes. If one hears one more unconsciously solemn lecture from a New York School poet on the importance of happiness and not being solemn, one will be converted permanently away-the sermon in favor of happiness could be the worst sermon of all. The hoax and the hex make, the silly modern mind would say, a double helix ­ they "interdepend," the academic would add, for illuminating clarification. Still, I think, this minor-key barbaric binarism works to help us understand the pathos and failures not of modernisms themselves but of the way we still mis-receive them through our allegiances. We have to consider not the differences between the supposed artistic left and the supposed artistic right but the similar kabbalistic modes.
  Here I want to look at a number of moments in poets generally taken for non-kabbalists by the more or less conservative critical establishment ­ Eliot and Bishop and Stevens in particular ­ and show how their counterformalisms, not just their ingenuities, allusions, and formal jokes, are generally ignored or underplayed for fear of introducing an element of gratuitous or hermetic radicalism into them which the public will distrust, and which might arouse public fears that poetry really is "that crazy." Public poetry critics who write prose for the major journals usually work on some level to reassure the audience that poetry is a sane public art, not given to romantic gratuitous resistance and alienation. In practice each of them as a critic also likes to do very ornate things. In reaction against this I sometimes tell my students the reverse: Everything you've heard about the craziness of poems and how they ask you to read is true and worse: the problem with the "language poets" is that they're just too middlebrow and moral. The public "slam" poets are fun but in their preaching of the plain style they're full of shit-they're killing off poetry's real populist force, its secret difficult codes. Slam poets are phony to the extent that they perform talk-show-style for populations they patronize, with an unconscious envy of the radio and talk show hosts like Ezra Pound's. Poetry itself knows how smart "the people" are, how much quicker than critics to pick up on difficult new codes ­ and poetry is for, by, and of the people in all their genius, which is why the state has to keep insisting that it's a terribly unpopular medium.
  Likewise on the other side: the politics by which we as academics misread a Bishop poem now, making her just a trace less of a difficult and anar-

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chic "dadaist" or Stein-like or Cornell-like writer than she is, canceling that element from her work entirely (and the same goes for Eliot and Stevens) is the politics of the philosophizing appropriation of poetry for mede-mind reassurance: Dada and Stein being only names for the early versions of the resistance to academics we do not want to hear in their work.

*

Who is Stetson, in the last section of Part I of The Waste Land? To quote this famous passage a litt]e unnecessarily:

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: "Stetson!
"You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
"Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
"Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
"O keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
"Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!
"You! hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable,-mon frère!"

  Critical commonplace makes Stetson a grim-comical name for an ordinary man. The name means nothing but the common "little man," going to work clockwise, while fee]ing (without acting) counterclockwise- Chaplin or Keaton. Perhaps, some said, from the opposite corner, it's Pound-but that was denied. Attempts to allegorize him wou]d be academic pickiness and heavy-handedness at its worst. Set it aside, good taste says.
  Earlier in "The Burial of the Dead," though, the Son of Man is referred to, and who could Stetson be, if not, in a peculiarly self-scorning comic key, too hermetic, symboliste, and poetically self-lacerating to have been discussed in Eliot's milieu, too seemingly annoying as a bad pun to be discussed recently for other reasons, but the grotesque Son of Stet? Stet's son-an ironic editorial name for Eliot himself as self-restorer-preserves and redeems his own scraps and notations and recombines them into poems, stetting himself and thereby "imitating" Christ as self-resurrector, but in a particularly contemptible literary way.
  As a public statement, the self-accusations in this whole purposely awful passage seem to be directed outward, and away from himself, at the vile "digging up" of the corpses of WWI for poetic elegy. The Dog, it seems too clear, with heavy irony the "friend to men," is the humanist-sentimental war elegist Eliot doesn't want to be. That poet would write and elegize WWI and other mass tragedies to create "moving" works of art with unChristian nails. He digs up the dead he himself killed and buried, reversing and grotesquing the crucifixion, using nails to pretend to resurrect via art. The corpse "he" or "we" planted last year, the historical atrocities, are going to bloom into "art" as elegy and so on.

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  But it's also private notation to himself: Stetson is not somebody else, but the broken Eliot, meeting himself on the daily commute of poetry's back-and-forth-to-work, stetting his old works, and putting them into beautiful but potentially pretentious notational order and disorder. Without the bizarre pun the passage seems a mawkish outburst of poetic guilt over the hypocrisy of historical poetry. With the pun on Son of Stet, the action becomes crazier, more kabbalistic, even more linguistically grotesque, and more accurate. "It's," shopworn cleverness says, "almost Dadaist," and here the slipperiness of "almost" matters. Eliot in The Waste Land was fence-sitting about Dada's abstract reproaches of history through craziness. "High modernist" criticism won't hear it because it's too contorted and by now trite. Eliot, though more grimly than Stevens, conceives a Name-Self not otherwise available except (and this borders on parody of Christ and false prophecy) to those who can hear. But those who can hear who Stet is aren't professional professors or other responsible critics and readers. They are other crazy (not "mad" in Alvarez's melodramatic sense) readers and artists. "Stet" as a word includes an odd awkward near-anagram of his writing name T. S. Eliot. A ludicrous one-time figure, Stetson is Eliot's Chaplinesque slander of his own recovery.
  Stet in the margin of a work of course tells the printer (or oneself) to restore a passage lined out. It is the editing of editing. The closest thing to resurrection, Eliot seems to be saying with self-hatred, that a loathsome writer like me can do as an action. The name "Stetson" at the end of Part I, then, savages the whole much-prized technique of Part 1. He's been of course putting The Waste Land together out of older Iyric scraps which he has stetted or "saved." Stet's Son, Eliot himself, knows this collage as travesty of Christ ("one I knew" is particularly ironic and bitterly hilarious since it's himself), and at this point already it is a highly Christian moment, even though or because Eliot wasn't yet a clearly devoted Christian. The word "Stetson" unties and reties materials of "The Burial of the Dead" in a square-root-of-minus-one way that would not have seemed possible. Everything in that most incoherent and beautiful prelude has been scrapped together, only to be seen in retrospect as a loathsome "stetting" of his best lines for a musical performance that, for all its fineness, only travesties Christ.
  One residual problem was that to have punned this way was also, in Eliot's world, to have been oddly Judaic, to do yet another secretive, semiprophetic Christian kabbalah-in-English of the kind English poets had been doing in many distinct ways for centuries. Kabbalah here is not just a lazy trope and anything but shallow gamesmanship. It's the closest name for the tradition in writing that works with "counterforms"-new, somewhat hidden, extremely formal modes that are conventionally unannounced and that change the reader's life. These are important because they include some of the most idiosyncratic reinterpretations of the history of English itself. They resist belonging to the obvious formal traditions like elegy, pastoral, sonnet, or even sestina. A counterformalism is an invented ultra-formal

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gesture that may (or may not) have forebears but is radically unfamiliar to the audience. Eliot's poetics was in practice at this time stranger, more "original" (the word he repudiated) and more kabbalistic-more Judaic, by his own lights-at this moment than it seems or than he could stand, personally or of ficially. You could call Stetson, even if accepting my reading, a mask or persona. But that's too tamely arty. What it asks the reader to do by way of empathy with bad-punning, catachresis-into-understanding, is more like Shakespeare's or Blake's or Dickens's most outrageous and violent gestures than like the Metaphysicals.
  It's not just a witticism to say that Eliot's later argument, as he developed still more musically and also became more resigned, was that Christianity is the truest religion because the most mannerist. But not here. He was still a tracer of kabbalisms, not the disturbingly defiant mannerist he became later. Had you asked him at any point about Stetson as related to the editorial command he would, my guess is, have come as close to uncivil violence as he ever did, denying it with contempt. But he knew it was true-my Borscht-circuit fiction now-and he and similar famous feted poets have had to lie to their publics about the processes of their own art, oddly to hide how bad real great poetry has to be in some of its holding-stitches in order to find itself or even just to get by. In his explanations, Eliot was not only what the press says he is, the patient lover of the highest work, the grim Scold, requiring the public to raise itself, and not only the startlingly great critic you find when you reread him: had it been so he would not have been so famous. He was in fact an accommodator, making poetry middlebrow-and obliged to hide the kabbalistic peculiarities of his own devices. Stetson, like Stevens's emperor of ice cream, who does not "call the roll" but is the Roller who's comically called (who's the Roller?), is a momentary person who exists, like some subatomic particles, too briefly to prove. A person who exists in a syllable of a word and is gone. The official persona Eliot was creating couldn't acknowledge the more kabbalistic part of his sources which creates fantastically momentaneous Persons like this in an odd region between hoax and hex. Ben Jonson was ill at ease with acknowledging his own crafty kabbalah but honest enough to do it on and off. One can't think the "plain style" is anything but great, but in some ways it's the big lie, down to sad and great Yvor Winters: it doesn't exist except as an imposed, extremely coercive model of false plainness and tight-lippedness, directed most of all at the lower middle class.
  I don't know of any other moment in Eliot exactly like this and therefore cannot prove that it's there by comparison. That's why it's art, and not science, sociology, or logic; and why it has to be read poetically and not by any verifiable official criticism. The single event in poems, forcing the reader to take the risk of believing something others will not agree to, and that no profession can endorse as historically provable, is one of the things that differentiates art from professionalism and careerist reliable statement. Are there other important events that happen in Eliot's poems that are never

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repeated? Do poets do things in Poem X, without ever re-using the same device elsewhere, so that it's impossible to make a formal claim for the importance of that particle, or even its reality, because it happens once? Of course there's a paradox in this question: is there more than one onceness in Eliot?
  Let me give a much less heavy and less kabbalistic example. The famous question in "Prufrock," "Do I dare to eat a peach?" might help. Like Stet, it is dialogized, not literal. The conventional interpretation of the line, I believe, relates it to indigestion and existentialism. Prufrock is either middle-aged, or a young man feeling prematurely old and foreseeing a middle age in which he will get the runs. It's purposely anal, prissy, scatological, and embarrassing. The line also, though, I think, calls up something more tactile and visual and fleshy, lower-middle-class burlesque and even Falstaffian: a peach is fuzzy, and Prufrock is obsessed with being bald. The poem has told us he's preoccupied with his baldness: his emblem of shame for being an old young man. Now we're entering a real, a ridiculously recognizable popular drama. Prufrock-and this asks us to see the world with him-doesn't dare eat a peach because in the moment he's biting into it someone else, especially one of those girls he wants and can't approach, will be looking at him, will see the visual analogy, or simile, and burst out laughing. It's strong though because he imagines them seeing him eating the peach and becoming poets, comparers. This is more like a contemporary TV sitcom of ours, or the sort of comedy Eliot praised in his essay on Marie Lloyd, the music-hall comedienne, than it is like falsely high art.
  Still more: That the line is in what might be called catalectic tetrameter, Blake's line for the Tiger ("What the hand dare seize the fire?") and one of Yeats's favorite meters, compressing as it does the ballad rhythm (4/3) into a prophetic narrative sevenness in one line, is a fact for the prosodic highbrows. In order to get the line we don't have to think about mirror stages or even the dialogic-only to see through feeling how the announced obsession with baldness is not just a joke, but in fact at the dramatic core of his world. His early baldness is in fact a metaphor for something he feels about himself as prematurely old and rottenly virile.
  The Eliot, however, of these strange self-hating mirrorjokes about stet and the peach, the Eliot more of the hoax than the hex, isn't the Eliot of official sound judgment about literature, pro and con. He escapes. He's more youthful than the later Eliot, a trace more daring and silly (though you could argue that the Quartets are the best and most youthful poems). The later mannerist of all mannerisms who sees meta-mannerism as itself the Christianness of truth probably was taking even greater risks, but the younger artist had a suppressed Rabelaisian side. Even the late belief in the identity of mannerism and faith in Eliot is so powerful because it combines hoax and hex more than is usually admitted. But there's something instead redeemingly and momentarily kabbalistic about this earlier particular man who, so much the worse for him, hated the kabbalistic Jew in himself, and as a result later (perhaps) diminished his own art by not doing some more

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open kabbalah. Since Ben Jonson, the great English poets have often hated themselves for their best kabbalistic strikes. It's been their loss.
  Wallace Stevens obviously didn't side with that self-hatred. The ornery ornate style that Stevens builds is not just a minor entertainment gaudying things up so that he could talk seriously about imagination and reality. Whatever his thematic scope and sound range, his sound-and-print counterforms are more important than his philosophy. Something as silly as this, now hard to quote because it may be taken to be culturally biased, is a key:

In Yucatan, the Maya sonneteers
Of the Caribbean amphitheater
Still to the nightbird made their plea . . .

The phrase "Caribbean amphitheater" is a tip-off to something central in all Stevens, and though it's most clear in the poems of Harmonium, it shows up throughout his life work: flamboyant distribution of visible (not auditory) vowe]s in pretty easily seen symmetries and asymmetries, not quite assonances, that shift the entire lexicon of English into his own keys.
  A sense of vowels in excess augments gaudiness and mock-romanticism and the desire to make English sound and even more look like a (parody of a) romance language. Oiseaux: there's something French and decadent, from the standpoint of an English plain style, in the richness of vowels in "those" continental languages. The a-i-ea of Caribbean becomes the a-i-ea of amphitheater. It's also mock-precious-reduction of the whole Gulf of Mexico to a 3/4 semicircle (a C) like that of the Greek or Roman theater.
  More than that, however; let's get down to it: the really typical Stevens words in these three early lines are "Yucatan," "Maya," "sonneteers," and "nightbird," because they have what could be called "vowel-symmetry" to the eye, the same vowel wrapped around some consonant, with a different sound. In a sense that's the contrary of vowel-plenitude, along with some degree of asymmetry to the ear: the same written vowel around a consonant, markedly, as in words he likes such as "iris," "oboe," "virtuoso," "ever," "tanager," "barbarous." I don't have to make the list and won't: Check it out in his poems, and you will see it if you haven't already: the emphasis on vowel-patterns, partly to the eye, a love for mock-Italian words, or imitations of the rapid-staccato word, and a rereading of the whole English language that forces our attention onto the question, regarding each word, whether it is an example of vowel-symmetry. "Interesting," that uninteresting word, becomes in Stevens' invented, implied poetics interesting again because it has the vowel symmetry: i - e - e-i.
  In Stevens, words we've never looked at before suddenly look that way, and others (consider "never" in this sentence as well as "sentence" itself as

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muted, once-drab instances of vowel-symmetry we just don't see) suddenly show up as vowel-series, whether symmetrical or not. The dull word "sentence" starts to be interesting, and even funny, because all the vowels are visually the same, but are a decrescendo of soundedness: soft e, schwa, silent. This is so decadent it must be moral. Put "interesting" against "oboe" and "tanager" and "barbarous" against "were" and look at them as visual-vowel effects and you start to get at one first mode of Stevens's art, his transformation of the entire lexicon of English into a music of visual vowels.
  This is, to be heretical, maybe his really secret "first idea" which high critics mistake when they go looking for a philosophical or gnostic theory or something from Shelley or Peirce or Simon whatnot. English is converted, not exactly with irony, but with broad reforming playfulness, into a new set, as the internal visual appearance of its usually symmetrical aurally asymmetrical sequences of vowels.
  I'm not saying, of course, that this could be the cause, exactly, of Stevens's Shakespearean range of feeling and thinking (I don't accept the critique by Halliday, and think Stevens has terrifying access to reality, to personal relations, and even to political themes in poetic terms). But maybe it is more important to his freedom of feeling than any philosophy about the real and the imaginary and all those other high-school questions. It matters to see it, because it is new in English. English is to be "made over" into a mock-romance language, especially since French, for example, has a whole stock of words like "jouissance" and "secouaient" that have "all" the vowels available to them. English in Stevens zanily and comically envies Italian, Spanish, and French their vowel rows, and tries, usually self-mockingly, to sound "like" them, or like a parody of them and of its will to sound like them. (The mock-European tone of the populist American ad for spaghetti sauce, where the crowd cries out "That's Italian!" when they taste the right brand, is closer to one of Stevens's mock-populist tones, one missed by his serious critics, than we admit.)
  What may make no one happy, but what must be done, is to make a bridge between this ultraminor event-comically (a)symmetrical distributions of visual vowels-and major themes like the political self. But it does turn out that this bridge exists. Stevens's spoof of English poetry's many attempted absorptions, in more serious keys, of other languages-Latin in Milton, Blake's Hebraism, Pound's Chinese, and so on-is one subject, but just as important is his spoof of the chronic use of Italy in drama and poetry as the political stage onto which to project unfaced English conflicts. At the time Stevens wrote, Pound was still doing this-and literally, in his worship of Mussolini. In a Dada-like reading, a hoax more than hex reading, the vowel comedy Stevens raised is far more important than the political universe and poetic Begriffsschrift Pound tried to build. Anybody can talk about reality and imagination and their always shifting ratios, or can put together a collage of world languages and semiotics, this position would say. Very few poets can write the words "eve" or "paratroopers" so

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that they redefine English, and take their place in a new politically witty order of all English words reorganized and redisplaced by their relation to the theme of vowel-(a)symmetry. Stevens's alphabetical Italy of letters is in fact an objectifying critique of the literalized, pseudopolitical, projected Italies of the long history of English and American dramatic poetry. Marjorie Perloff defends Pound's historicism, but she and her opponents seem to agree that Pound was objectively more historical than Stevens: but it may be not true. Stevens in some respects may have had a more exact and less fantasized, less private understanding of history as it has appeared in English and American poetry historically than did Pound.
  But the reader who knows how to read against the academic obsession with sanity and epistemological "knowledge" will see exactly the next unacceptable step I want to take-reading in a willfully schizoid way what I think is a great schizoid poetry, a poetry that uses the energies of the schizoid to become surprisingly more sane than prose. The name "Wallace Stevens" itself is made up of two words, each of which has visual vowelsymmetry but asymmetrical sound. Like one of his favorite sets of words, "iris," "oboe," "Maya," and so on, his name is symmetrical-asymmetrical. The poems, in wildly varied ways, reinscribe the format of his own given name to appear in other words which also have both symmetry and sound asymmetry. The balance-imbalance metaphor, symmetry-asymmetry, which is actually much closer to his central compositional obsession (the eccentric as the base of design) than his more banal concerns about reality and imagination, is "given" to him-not "in" or by but as he would have it "of" his name. "You are," he ends one of his best and most cryptic poems ("Certain Phenomena of Sound"), "that white Eulalia of the name," with "Eulalia" meaning something akin to but contrary to "glossolalia," the utopian and purely poetic form of that glossolalia found in American Whitmanesque ecstatic worship.
  If we stay with this question of the poet's name, and its reappearance as a displaced, purposely schizoid or mock-schizoid signature dispersed throughout his poems in the form of a mocking, abstract, iridescent interest in the whole possible set of words in English that resemble his name in their vowel symmetries-asymmetries, we arrive at a difficult position about the vexed and maybe meaningless question concerning what is personal and impersonal in poems. In one sense the word "personal" means almost nothing. Helen Vendler is right to see the personal finally everywhere in Stevens but powerfully displaced-but she also represses, as she often does with poets, the crazier and therefore more healthy and unofficial side of his daring. The personal in Stevens, however, though it's accessible from available ways of reading, also shows up in supposedly abstract relations like the vowel-symmetries, a great counterformalism that, paradoxically, comes closer to historical statement than a premature leap towards history: we can't talk about it. It's too schizoid. It's too precious. It's too stupid. It's too slight. It seems apolitical. And so on, and on, and on. Stevens's greatness and hoaxiness as a poet is a little too contained by Vendler's

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moving and sane psychologisms and narratives and even by Bloom's ostenslbly wllder gnostlc but ultimately prosaic Nietzschean intensities. If Stevens is everywhere also covertly and schizo-ically "signing" his name in his immense emancipation proclamation for poor old English scattered in ten thousand pieces into his poems, in his remote way, not by talking about himself (though he does that obliquely often enough), if he is a stractlng his own name, that does not amount to a "personal" statement so much as to the reverse, a comic artistic detachment from the pseudo-personal and a giant freedom from and in his own namedness. If Stevens is conscious of playing with this, hasn't he to some extent succeeded in this para ox: m de-personalizmg himself into his poems? "He" is depersonalzedly, not personally, there in the poems as the idiosyncratic delight in words wlth vowel symmetries. And that sort of objectifying-but-humorous thmg was his "personality," though we don't in fact need that word.
  Stein and Dada were prerequisites, and all the hoax revolts. Once more if, against the standard identification of Stevens as personal and Pound as stoncal, for example, we posit that Pound, who punned on his own name economlcally (the English cunrency), and in others ways (phallically as pounding), was nevertheless probably unconscious about it in one respect (he did not know how it meant to him the "pound" of flesh in Shakespeare or castration by the Jews, and that this horrifically embarrassing little onomastic Freudian overdetermination of the "great man" led or contributed ­ indirectly to his anti-semitic psychoses and gorgeously glazed world), then It could turn out that all Pound's historical "objectivities" and witty transactional-translational tropes of a thousand cultures were nevertheless inflamed by personal-onomastic word-hallucinations (not to say they re not great poetry?) while all Stevens's supposedly private meditations, or all their shocking personal narratives hidden in abstract meditations, really are successfully abstracted from himself, on some third level more in touch with history and the history of English. Stevens is closer to the historical poet. He approaches the problems of history in poetry through the problem of the limits of the English language, visual and aural and its namings.
  But this again is of course a story about these figures as doing a sort of thing we don't want to allow them. Only a story, but a different one in tone from the shared definitions concealed as "profound" conflicts now in academlc dlscusslon. Faitoute, Williams called it, a little more fatalistically.

*

  To summarize. there is a little history of visual-vowel-order in twentieth-century American English. Eliot announces it in one form in the opening line of The Waste Land; Crane compresses it in "Black Tambourine" into the problem of writing color in a racist (and racialist) culture, but also scatters it through his conscious aeiou lines in The Bridge; a poet like Bishop heard It consciously, refused to let on that it was there, and used it

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for unconsciously powerful and immense effects about population poetry, bohemianism, and regression; Audre Lorde made it clear, I think, in a title-The Black Unicorn explicitly an answer to the tradition of Black Tambourines, Manuelzinhos, and shady unicorns, trying to take back the figure; and Williams, maybe last heard or noticed, used it with his usual throwaway subtlety in the ironic name for himself and Sam Patch, Faitoute ironic name for his diagnostic pragmatic utopianism, the poet-doctor who wants to get it all done, to be a man of action and a poet, to diagnose everyone, and heal. If Faitoute is a little bit Stevensian as a name, Stevens did not do vowel plenitudes significantly, but because for him symmetry-asymmetry was the principle.
  The false conclusion would be that these "combine" the "aesthetic" and the "political" in a way we can analyze in prose. We can't. The academic words "aesthetic" and "political" are themselves both tyrannical and stupid prosaisms of the upper middle class. They exclude the practices of the arts. As a result they mean nothing, though in practice they make good careers possible. This essay is not really about analysis or close reading at all, but about issues of teaching, of the classroom and helping students to see and hear, for a moment, with some lower-middle-class oppositional shamelessness, something that can't be reduced to resentment. For what it's worth, I've found that pointing out events like these, pedantic as it sounds when written down in an article for an academic journal, can wake students up, or used to and recently doesn't: maybe I've lost interest in it. It helped them to see lively contrarian things about poems under construction that are harder and easier to see at first than the more responsible and of course more important categories, whether speakerdom, or genredom, or
ideogramdom, or syntaxdom, or prosodydom. By the time this essay is published it won't be useful any more. Other counterforms will have to befound. There's no danger in my pointing it out.* But in the meantime this other recollection will have been jotted down.

*There is probably a danger of this essay's being misread as anti-academic, when in fact I believe scholarship, all-important, is often unfairly lampooned. I dislike easy satire on the academy and want only to challenge the limits of judicious, "responsible," factual prose that claims to know poetry adequately. Among many excellent scholarly and critical studies, Chaim Wirszubski's Pico della Mirandola's Encounter With Jewish Mysticism and Jonathan Freeman's recent The Temple of Culture could be consulted as antidotes to this essay-or to a too-solemn reading of it as a plain prosaic argument that the deep structure of modern poetry is really to be found in "the" Kabbalah. The history of the actual Kabbalah is of course an entirely different thing from our comic appropriation of it as a figure. The creative laughter of English "Kabbalah," conscious of that comedy, is what I would defend.