Should poetry require a specialized knowledge to be understood and enjoyed? I teach poetry to third graders, and to university students. And with both I stress the importance of feeling the poem. And what I mean is taking the poem on its own terms, giving the poem space to touch them intellectually and sensually. Usually I don't have to coach the kids so much. They really can be one of the most accepting audiences for a poem. The older students, however, suffer from Preconceived Hierarchy Syndrome. At some point of their lives, they were told that poems have a secret language to them, some grand symbolic hierarchy, and if they are really going to understand poetry, they need to know all those pieces. It's maddening sometimes to listen to their intellectual shoehorning. This must mean this. I can say that it's not their speculation that discourages me, it's the absolute certainties they frame them in.
What, then, to do with Terrance Hayes' poem "Snow for Wallace Stevens" in the recent issue of Harvard Review (No. 36)? Should I need to know that Terrance Hayes is black? Should only black people find offense at Wallace Stevens' open racism? Can a white person ever really know the nature and depth of this offense? Does this poem limit its audience then, to black people, who are capable of feeling the poem on these terms?
I understand that this issue of specialized audiences is not raised for the first time in this poem. I can never be housewife in the 1950s, so does that mean I can never relate to Adrienne Rich poems? But I wonder how much knowledge of this moment is necessary to understand the love hate relationship Hayes is describing here. I came to the poem knowing Terrance Hayes is one of the editors at jubilat, that a diagram explaining how to read Wallace Stevens wraps the cover of the most recent issue. I can guess, without knowing he participated on an AWP panel related to Stevens, that he has a deep commitment to his poetry.
So then I wonder, when I read the poem in the Harvard Review, whether dropping the title of one poem, "Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery," is enough offense to force the crisis, "How, with pipes of winter / lining his cognition, does someone learn / to bring a sentence to its knees?" I don't think I'm being naive in asking this. These "pipes of winter," that refer as much to the italicized lines earlier in Hayes' poem allude also to the snow in the cemetery, touch on Stevens' racist attitude. And Hayes wonders here how it's possible someone so close minded could be so capable of wisdom or resonance or understanding, or whatever the power is that Stevens passes in his poems.
The point of this blog entry, then: is this mention of this one poem enough to establish Stevens as a racist? Or should more information be required. As I started to write on this poem, I searched for any other links between Hayes and Stevens, and I found Major Jackson talking about Stevens' insulting reference to Gwendolyn Brooks. That finally convinced me of the crisis in Hayes' poem. But shouldn't something of that caliber be in Hayes' poem? This poem succeeds most at the love/hate dynamic Hayes has with Stevens. He admires Stevens' poems, there is plenty of love. How could he make me understand the hate better?
Related Links:
Harvard Review poetry editor Major Jackson speaks of race and Wallace Stevens.
Harvard Review
Wind in a Box
