Barque of phosphor. Boat of light. You can say one thing so many ways. You can endeavour to make it all make sense, to show a thing in the light as it is, or you can try something else and truly get at it. Robert Frost said he didn’t like Wallace Stevens’ poetry because “it purports to make you think”, meaning it doesn’t make you think, only gives the sensation of thought. Or he presumes that a thought should eventually settle upon something, whereas a thought in a Stevens poem makes ambiguous undulations, refusing to land. One night in Key West, the terse, efficient Hemingway fought Wallace Stevens and won handily, and I think whatever competing versions of Modernism the two of them represented also fought to the same result. And so we were left with a terse, efficient world.
I have never thought to ask what a Wallace Stevens poem was about. It is enough that they color my world as I’d like it to be colored. I think of the last line of his ‘Fabliau of Florida’ often. Be it my first night sleeping on a sailboat in Coconut Grove, the waves lapping against the hull, keeping me awake. Or camped out alone on Cape Sable, the spit of land where the Florida peninsula falls away into the Gulf, waiting for the tide to float my skiff and let me return home. Or Key West, the night of my elopement, sitting with my then-bride, watching the sunset cruisers return to harbor under sail and moon. “There will never be an end to this droning of surf”. I found and find myself repeating those words, and I don’t really know what they mean.
-Cory Penca