"Where's Wally?" Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), to so many America's most difficult poet to grasp, is the 20th century's first major writer to seriously scrutinize the aura and splash of Florida. Stevens wrote about twenty poems wherein appearances by the sunshine state range from cameo to stereo to very high fidelity. He was a tourist, snowbird, frequent flyer, whose imagination found the contrast between Florida and his somewhat native New England a riveting and curious study. Whether lurking or blitzing, the Florida muse moved Stevens to odd and various impressions: primitive to breathtaking, Edenic or maybe purgatorial, wet and wild, balm laden, and so on. In 1943 he wrote to Samuel French Morse, "… you may find that you have picked up an individual Florida of your own which will keep coming back to you long after you are back home. I used to find the place violently affective." Remember this quote.Two poems from his early blockbuster, Harmonium (1923), rock the foundations of the poetic imagination with their word play and bold ambivalence toward the Citrus Serfdom. "Fabliau of Florida" begins with strokes of subtropical allure -- "Barque of phosphor/On the palmy beach,/Move outward into heaven/Into alabasters/And night blues." -- only to dissolve into visions of "Sultry moon monsters". Finally the poet notes, "There will never be an end/To this droning of the surf." It is as if Stevens is simultaneously delighted and suspicious, also skeptical about the absolute lushness of the landscape, that it may conceal a natural demon or two.
But Mark Strand, former USA poet laureate, claims that the word play in "Fabliau …" suggests that the poem is about "the poet's dedication to poetry," a safe guess with almost any Stevens verse. Barque is a pun on bark, and thus "represents the transformation of raw utterance into polished speech." In addition, surf is a pun on serf, or the poet who versifies and mystifies forever. So the poem is really about the poet's eternal bark. Barking recalls the dog-like sneers of Diogenes and his Cynics. It may be that Mark Strand, a remarkable poet, has ruined "Fabliau of Florida" for a lot of people.
That Stevens titles this verse a fabliau is also suggestive in a way symbolized by the Amtrak hitting the bull moose at eighty-six miles per hour. Of course the poem is not a fabliau, fabliau being a medieval species of low class tale that blends farce, hyperbole, and prejudice with soft pornography (Cf. "The Miller's Tale"). But there is a point to the nomenclature, and that is that the poet fears that Florida is a bit of a dirty joke.
"O Florida, Venereal Soil" continues Stevens's yingy-yangy bewilderment over the sunshine state. Anne E. Rowe writes in The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination (LSU P, 1986), "Of all the poems in Harmonium the one that most strikingly juxtaposes images of attraction and repulsion is …. Just as venereal may refer to love or disease or both, so does the poem contain both the beautiful and the horrible" (129). In the closing stanza Stevens casts Florida as a woman who can seduce or destroy.
Donna, Donna dark,
Stooping in indigo gown
And cloudy constellations,
Conceal yourself or disclose
Fewest things to the lover -
A hand that bears a thick-leaved fruit,
A pungent bloom against your shade.
So, Hartford, we have a problem: How does a promising poet break the evil spell? Answer: Dump the witch. Exorcise. Just leave. Thus in Stevens's 1936 collection, Ideas of Order, we get "Farewell to Florida," a longish rant wherein the poet denounces the weird lure of the state and declares his intentions to remain up North henceforward and forever. But it is all baloney. It is unconvincing hype and blah-blah, like the woozy protests of the reforming nymphomaniac on ecstasy. Note the lame lament of the poem's closing stanza: "My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime/ Both of men and clouds, a slime of men and clouds." Really now. Why would any hip poet (except maybe Sylvia Plath) wish to return to that? As John MacEnroe says, "You can not be serious!"
Also in Ideas of Order is one of the most anthologized of Stevens's poems, "The Idea of Order at Key West," where the poet seems to say that now we're getting somewhere, that a breakthrough has come. However, it is just another inferior sausage with no preservatives added. Quite a few interpretations of this poem circulate, but prevailing critical wisdom is that here the poet's imagination enters into coitus (on at least three levels) with America's southernmost point, and comes away with an almost unspeakable insight, imperfect illumination - as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen - of found order at last, an unexpected feeling of Oneness with the visited environment that at once stifles and delights, fools and fondles, not necessarily in that order. It is Romanticism gone bad. Now Stevens surely did not know that in 1936, being so titillated by the awesome ambivalence of Florida, and still desperate to come to terms with this almost surreal niche of the natural world. Florida after all thrilled and bewildered Wallace Stevens.
So the joust did not end with the famous Key West poem. There is more. For F. Knox Elgin, the famously planetoid Chicago critic now retired to an acre near Miami, has acquired a posthumous Stevens chapbook from the early 1950s which the poet's estate refuses to make public, and has even tried to destroy. How Professor Elgin got the priceless text is vague, although he hints that a few of his former graduate students, academically endangered by the professor's notorious modern poetry seminar of 1999, resorted to perilous "extra credit" activities, wresting the chapbook from a young Portuguese cleaning woman in an office building in Hartford one midnight in November. Enough said.
Of the thirteen poems in the slim book, two contain observations on Florida, again. The most direct and derelict is "No Ice Cream, No Pop, No Gators," a piece so dreadful and unpolished that it must be an embarrassment to the frugal, proud, and difficult Stevens clanhood of the 21st century. Reprint here would surely constitute an aesthetic felony. However, in "Savoir in the Key of Baroque" the poet revisits through his mind and memory the dazzling horror of his Florida once more, and finally slams the door on that goblin of his imagination that proves to be too much allegory to handle. Behold the poem:
Savoir in the Key of Baroque
What is it now:
A cajillion, vermilion hibiscus;
Mockingbirds bombing the rhum pots;
Myriad, jaded aromas from mucilaginous swamps;
Perchance palmetto bugs worming beneath fierce pineapples;
Enter foggy bartenders with bedighted tumblers -- mutant
Crystal born of waves, ravenous oceans,
And the lust of a billion black mosquitoes?
Florid girls slink through the dewy fronds of
Cleopatra palms, parrot rhythms of love, while
Serious blooms of the night are, by morning,
Drooped across sodden floribunda,
Deflowered by goody mist and merkins.
Check, please!
While the diction here flutters between the abstract impressionism of his earlier work, and the somewhat plain yet arresting statements and syntax of latter poems, again the arch ambivalence of Florida rules. The form of "Savoir …" is that of a postmodern sonnet, an octave and sestet that add up to fourteen lines of metaphorical cocaine containing a problem and its somewhat metaphysical and cowardly solution. The imagery of the octave is pure, stinking Florida: Gaudy flowers; ugly, noisy birds; festering, smelly swamps; and filthy insects. Then like bingo come ghostly mixologists (the bartenders of so many tiki bars and dreams) who materialize through the powers of cocktails, water, and more bugs. It is likely that the bartenders are not the creators of mixed drinks here, and not poets. They are in fact ubiquitous specters spawned like the cocktails from land and sea. They just ooze out of the environment, and they are not human. The glassware is suspicious too.
The noun lust ignites a transition into the even weirder tones of the sestet, where according to formula the poet must find or imagine (even fabricate) a way out of the mess in which he flounders. One suspects that the "Florid girls" of line nine are more than stereotypical, beflowered beauties out of so many Caribbean torch songs. And one is right. They do represent the secret to understanding and salvation (savoir means knowledge). But they are sisters to "Cleopatra palms," and the botanical nomenclature here - so femme fatale archetypal - is all at once appropriate, prophetic, and warily apocalyptic. Mere shadows too, the girls can only imitate and mock love, play games. In fact, the love and beauty that appears to be a natural by product of Florida proves sadly and ridiculously fleeting, if real at all. One even wonders if total surrender to the age old carpé diem paradigm, this time writ larger than life, can save you from this voracious subtropical entity that is surely out to slurp your essence, suck up your soul, and render you borderline comatose.
Serious blooms of the night are, by morning,
Drooped across sodden floribunda,
Deflowered by goody mist and merkins.
Check please!
Nowhere in Stevens do puns and symbols strike so monstrously as in those lines. The "Serious blooms" are certainly those of the breathtakingly beautiful night-blooming cereus, a rare flowering species of climbing cacti that occasionally produces an enormous and staggeringly pungent flower that opens briefly at night to attract some disgusting, specialized beetle for pollenation purposes. It is a particularly blatant Florida metaphor. Think about it. But by dawn the bloom is withered and dead. So the "sodden floribunda" are more than the hybrid rose floribunda. They are people, humans, the estranged and expatriated who become too intoxicated to leave, to return home. Florida, then, is no true home to anyone. It is too resplendent in ungodly, unfathomable beauty that is too extreme, that cannot be ordered by poet or pervert. Such invaders are dealt with, then left to die, their decomposition more fuel for the gurgling marshes.
Enter Irony, with handmaiden Paradox. "Deflowered" indeed; and "goody mist" mirrors the minimalist cliché that there is something in the air. Finally, the word merkins contains the essence of Florida for Stevens as nothing can. It is his objective correlative gone wild. While merkin in an obsolete sense means cannon mop, more appropriately here it denotes the pubic wig worn by actors or prostitutes. It is, then, a mask designed to cover something taboo, or shocking, or unremarkable, or maybe sinister. To the alert it is a warning. The semaphore here says that Florida is a venereal entity in the dark sense; one that infects, corrupts, and induces madness just as the progress of unchecked syphilis, whose pustules and scars may be hidden by so much Cover Girl, Clearasil, relatively flesh-tone first-aid creams, or dry wall spackling. Look closely or else.
So, after a good meal, the wise gourmet (serf, visitor, carpetbagger, poet, encyclopedia salesperson, freelance biologist, troll) knows when to pay up and leave. "Check please!" You do not dare eat there all night because you could be dead by morning, or something like that. The table is too rich, and like absinthe it turns poisonous on you by the middle of your ignorant lark. Down you go. Ambivalence indeed. Wallace Stevens was finally able to see and articulate the horror, the horror. The creeping madness that he sensed lingering in the Florida breeze, out there and ever ready to cream you, he was lucky enough to avoid. Just as fortunate is the contemporary novelist Thomas McGuane, although the characters of some of his early tales are not so lucky, as you shall see.