Brian Kim Stefans on "Storm Fields"

During electronic discussions with students in English 88, December 1999, Brian Kim Stefans offered commentaries on his poem "Storm Fields":

1. On the line "Ape a penny," a suggestion was made by one reader that "Being a penny might give us greater consciousness of the economic master narrative." Stefans' response to this was: "This is interesting, but I probably take it a near given that a typical office worker in New York, as I was at the time and pretty much still am, is already a penny. We just fill out more forms (and pay taxes). But so to simply "play" this role rather than 'be' it might be liberating and educational."

2. After reading various email messages from students interpreting the poem, Stefans wrote:

   Well it's been a very interesting morning for me receiving so many emails about this short poem which I've thought about myself quite a bit, probably because of the phrase "testicular violence" which I find kind of gruesome (I've written more gruesome things since -- I think there's a use for it) and also because of it's relation to Charles Bernstein's poetics, as I find the poem a bit of an homage to him, an imitation yet a statement of difference, and a more general statement on the nature his and his language peers discussion of poetry. This last point comes through most strongly in the final lines, which plays on several things, such as the valorization of parataxis versus narrative as a poetic structure, and the early approach to discussing poetics based on structuralist paradigms rather than humanist (partly "author"- centered) ones -- i.e. the poem is a here/now language structure that may be contextualized in a general historical or political situation but is more to be discussed as a language-event on a perpendicular relation to the historical timeline. My own training as poet, entirely self-inflicted, started with reading poets like Pound, Plath and Rimbaud in high school, and a consideration of how the various "stages" of their lives (to allude to Kierkegaard, who was also very important to me) created the opportunity for their poetry, etc. But a writer like Pound with his imagist dogmas (great stuff to me in high school when I was trying to read my friends' poetry and finding them just plain tedious, quasi-effete and highbrow, and trying to reconcile my class identifications and sense of having a social role with the general understanding of a poet being someone privileged with the position of basically having no rules but those of "expression") and Eliot (who always had some quality of the bildungsroman in his criticism, which I often felt was directed at young poets, such as the idea that no poet past thirty can be successful without an "historical sense", etc.) -- anyway, it's interesting that these writers, with their rather Victorian sense of history and the degradation of western mores, could construct such an heroic image of adolescence and poetic development, which is partly why I feel poetry thrived in the period immediately following them. To go back to the biography thing (since, this being an email, I've dropped several sentences in the middle of a thought), it's interesting to read Ron's note on reading "Spring and All" in the seventies and how the time lag made a difference of how this book related to his own writing; for me, a great thing was to sit down with the two heavy volumes of the Collected Poems and read them as a continuous mass, and to discern the "development" of this writer through his various struggles and incompletions -- I think, if this doesn't sound pompous, that Williams' "bad" poems, the failures and fragments, or the completely insane or ridiculously "naked" ones, are probably more interesting than similar experiments in most writers works, mostly because the path of discovery for Williams was, as we all know, so fruitful and (to anyone that could have tried) unanticipated (so those rather tedious early poems about the Lady on the Staten Island Ferry, or the little typewriter experiments that he wrote on the boat to Europe, I think called the Descent of Winter, Zukofsky may have edited them, which I consider quite daring in the context of, say, Pound's more obviously monumental Cathay poems or translations) -- anyway, I think the large up and down curves of Williams writing career (or careers) is part of the conent of the work, knowing how incredibly "low" he will go to reach the "heights" of discovering the value of the single word, etc.

   Ok, so there's a gloss primarily on the last line. These are just things that come to my head right now; I'm at work juggling phone calls and even a touch of hypoglycemia so it's not all coming back. I really think I was sleepwalking when writing this poem, it's practically "automatic", which is why I was so concerned that "testicular violence" ended up in there (!). One interesting point: Bruce Andrews hated the line about the oranges. It's the kind of dip into inanity that is anathema to him, but as we know Charles is riddled by it -- ha, so there's a little fault line of difference that is worth considering.

   To those of you who may not know, "Storm Fields" is the name of a weather man here in New York, and he even has a son, "Wet Fields." Actually, that's not true -- it's Storm Fields who has a father who has a more normal name, but I can't remember. But anyway I think the joke/meaning here is a sort of play on "prophetic" style history or even rhetorical tropes; what comes to mind is the group of "young Hegelians" that you read about in Alexander Herzen or the depiction of Herzen himself in Russian Thinkers, or Shelley or Blake in their anticipations of the approach of democracy, or finally the "spectre haunting Europe" -- Storm Fields rather more modestly, despite the bravura of his name, tells the weather, understanding it merely as a matter of physical phenomena (to which we give names like "Grace" and "El Nino"), much as we give our literary phenomenon names like "Lyn" or "Frank" or "Cage." Well so that's all very cute, but I guess there are other ideas there that can be teased out.

   "Blowzy" with age: sounds like "drowsy" sounds like "blowing it" Also the general image of the dyspeptic writer; was it Samuel Johnson who wrote that good prose styles often depend on poor (we would say today "problematic") digestive systems? Anyway as a diabetic I've often linked the quirks of my prose style to my moments of inefficient or "non-normative" (to spin Bernstein's phrase) moments of cognition, often linked to moments of having to produce language ineffeciently, as I am having to do now. This ties into moments of having to work inefficiently in general -- indeed, I wonder if I hadn't this hypoglycemic moment I would have spent so much time rambling as I did above. Diabetics also have a particular relationship to the health care industry somewhat distinct from other people with illnesses but more and more similar as "maintenance" drugs become a more common thing, even with AIDS. Anyway, so that colors my own thinking on the "economies" of poetry. Oddly, my whole attempt with this poem was to write something perfectly useless and "dumb" as in inarticulate and non-discursive, but it turns out, perhaps sadly, to be a good "teaching" poem -- eghad! (Do you think the poem would be able to obtain this sense of dumbness if I cut off the last line...an act of violence, I suppose?)

   "Matta Fact": personification of matter of fact I think of Enlightenment reason versus any sort of emotive or mystical sense of order, but, in a tangential way, with Cage/Pound relationship, as I think Cage's "facts" were presented with much less baggage than, say, Pound's. But I can't think of anything interesting to say about this right now.

   "contemplated testicular / violence": thought about castrating himself, or thought about the violence his testicles caused See above, but this is also a play on the depiction of, say, Pound and his "phallic concept of history" which Bernstein himself writes about in Pounding Fascism, and the allusion to self-violence has much to do with my own sense of helplessness in the face of these options -- the method of the Cantos, not so different than say the method of the Canterbury Tales or Faust in their inclusivity, their attempt to order the inchoate matter of the universe (or the discursive universe). Re: that phrase "the violence that his testicles caused", this could be a moment of male self-loathing (which comes through in other poems of mine more strongly) or perhaps discomfort with the psychic qualities of the "male", but also, indeed, a rather basic depiction of the complications of sexual politics or "relations" in general (especially in this Age of Clinton, in which the parsing of phrases for depicting sex, in the context of a committee of the elect, is probably the most salient feature to the general public). Blah blah blah. Poetry does, I think, change with the presidents, just as it did with the Queen.

3. Shawn Walker had written the poem makes her consider options:

   1) Write more and more ineffectual "disruptive" poems, or
   2) Do things that matter.

   Stefans wrote:

   This is a big question, of course -- I asked Charles [Bernstein] these very questions at a New School panel a few days ago, hosted by David Lehman! I keep you on the edge of your seats about what he said, but I think, in general, that his work raises these questions in very interesting ways specifically because his aesthetics are so complicated. It was the day after the Tuesday of the WTO march and "violence" that I found so important for our generation -- to have the abstraction called "global capitalism" materialize in the form of 135 heads-of-state in Seattle is, well, pretty amazing, and the fact that this march just developed for the occasion and was so wide-spread points to the possibility of great political action when the circumstances are right -- not that they always have to be right, but to get out of the malaise required some sort of specific, unusual phenomenon. It's part of the reason why all of our statements on poetry are merely provisional; things happen to change these relations all the time.

4. One of the students, Joan Boonin, wrote:

   I see the final line ("Nobody talks of development, anymore.") as possibly being a statement about where we are in our society, now, after moving through all the stages named in the first part of the poem--actually, up through the line that ends with "confidence in hype." In other words, the first part talks about where we've been, which we can examine now that we're older, wiser, or "Blowzy with age". We've "contemplated" doing various things. We achieved certain things, maybe, with our "festoons of frankness." But the fun of it("laughter") is behind us now ("going gone"). And we're "stuck", "pale as seeds", disappointed that we put so much "confidence" in the "hype."

   Stefans wrote:

   Maybe there's an implicit critique of Baudrillard's simulacra, and his statements along the lines of "nothing really happens".

   One of the students had written:

   "I think that starting with "Ape a penny", the poet is now giving us advice on what to try doing. But he either doesn't have confidence that these imperatives will help. Or he doesn't really think people will do them. He wants us to DO *something.* He doesn't even care whether the oranges are "hot or cold". Just *try*."

   In response to this, Stefans wrote:

   This is interesting, never thought about this for this particular poem but for others of mine which don't seem to say much more than "let's do SOMETHING," usually in a fairly excoriating way (if I even know what that word means). But if a note of this, moderated and friendly, comes through in this poem, then I like it. As for the "ape a penny," beside the sound value of this phrase (it sounds incredibly silly), I would mention one line from an Ashbery poem, the one that ends something like "on the large bed / husband and wife / man and wife" (a rather subversive imitation of the tidy hetero resolution to movies and novels), there's a line in there of people having the consciousness of "dandelion fuzz", which he sorts of enjoys -- well, anyway, the rather surreal question would be does a penny have a consciousness? This ties into the idea of literary economies, etc.

   Joan Boonin wrote:

   Or, if it were coming from the President, it might be a kind of "state of the union" address.

   To this Stefans wrote:

   I like the idea of it coming from the weather man like Storm Fields with nice teeth. But outside of that, yes, it does have that feel. I think it's more celebratory, though, in that it is sort of an homage to Bersteinian poetics, though I tend to be much more prone to ring those pessimistic tones, probably due to the Pound/Eliot influence.