Thirteen+Ways+of+Looking+at+a+Blackbird


 * Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird - Interview **

Have the interviewee read the poem several times (with dictionary if necessary) and encourage them to make notes of things they like, don’t like, get, don’t get, etc.  □  Tell me a little bit about your initial reactions to the poem?  □  What do you think or notice about it?  □  Is there anything in the poem or about the poem that confuses you? Tell me a bit about those aspects that confuse you.  □  Do you have questions about the poem?  □  Do you get any images or pictures in your mind when you read the poem? Can you describe them to me?  □  What do you think the blackbird means to the poem?  □  Do you have a favorite of the thirteen stanzas? Why do you like it best?  □  What do you make of stanza five? I wonder where the narrator’s experiencing these “inflections” and “innuendos”  □  I sense fear in a few stanzas. Why do you think there’s fear in the poem?  □  What is the overall feeling you get from the poem? □ Any final thoughts, impressions or questions? For my student interview, I chose to work with Kaylen, an intelligent, punk, poetry-minded freshman at Jefferson County Open School. From talking with Kaylen in class, I knew that she read and wrote a great deal of poetry, and I appreciate her hot-pink hair (having selected the same exact shade when I was her age myself.) I gave her the poem a week in advance of our interview and asked her to read it and take notes. On the day of our interview, she forgot her copy of the poem at home, so we were without her notes, but she had clearly read and reread the poem, so we still had a great deal to discuss. We met over lunch in an empty classroom, and talked about the poem for about 20 minutes, until she was summoned by her cadre of mohawked friends. We started with Kaylen’s initial reactions to the poem. Let me just say first off that she used the word “deep” about 100 times during our conversation. I was struck by the lack of vocabulary Kaylen had for discussing the way the poem affected her. Her first comment was that “This poem blew me away.” She (like everyone else) doesn’t understand the poem completely, but she did find herself amazed at the complexity and depth of the poem. We discussed the language of the poem, and she shared that while she did know some words, like pantomime and indecipherable, she didn’t know bawds, euphony or equipage. I told her that I didn’t know them before the poem, either. She hadn’t looked up any unfamiliar words when she was reading the poem, she we talked briefly about these terms to help her get more from the poem. Her other first response was that the person who wrote the poem must be very passionate. She said that the poem is quite different from any other poetry she’s ever read, particularly the structure and what she considers to be archaic syntax throughout. Her comments about the syntax reminded me of our discussions regarding Shakespeare. Kaylen found stanzas VII and X particularly difficult, as did I, but she still felt that the poetry seemed heartfelt and beautiful, despite the fact that she didn’t really understand it. Much of her conversation focused on how unique the poetry seemed to her. She’s never read anything like it and commented on having to develop a different strategy for reading the poem, as opposed to the way she approaches the poetry she reads for enjoyment. She returned to idea of the poet, wondering what his vocabulary would be like in conversation. I imagine that a great deal of her personal identity is connected to her self-perception as a poet, and she certainly focused on the identity of Wallace Stevens more than anyone else with whom I’ve discussed the poem. We talked next about the particular images that struck her in the poem, and she focused on two that were powerful. First, she talked about stanza XII. When I asked her what she saw, she described “a river running through this vast forest, like in Ireland. Green everywhere, with a huge rushing river. And there’s just one animal there… the blackbird.” I was amazed by how much she elaborated on this simple two-line stanza to create a powerful mental image. She also found a strong image in stanza VIII, which I found amazing, because it doesn’t describe an image at all. When I asked her what she saw in that stanza, she said that she pictured a person thinking about everything he knows, and how animals are woven in to what he knows. She saw a person thinking on how he is one with the animals. This, naturally, drew our attention back to stanza IV. Kaylen had two favorite stanzas in the poem—VI and XIII, which is everyone’s favorite I think. In stanza VI, she was particularly drawn to the image of the icicles hanging above the window. She said, “You have to look through the window __and__ through the ice, and you’re not sure what you’re seeing outside. You have to look closer and really concentrate to tell if it’s a blackbird outside or just a tree.” While stanza XIII appeals, I think, to most readers of the poem, Kaylen’s reason seemed quite unique to me. In discussing what she enjoyed, she focused on the fact that the stanza gave her the feeling that you get when get you get home from work and you have nothing to do. The narrator seems to have all the time in the world to just sit there and think. She got a strong feeling of time stretched out before the narrator, without anything to do but ponder what his life is and what it’s going to be. For Eryc and me, we also got a peaceful feeling from the stanza, but were largely drawn to the image. Kaylen, however, is more drawn to the strong emotion that the stanza evokes for her. What Kaylen seemed to enjoy the most about the poem as a whole was the fact that each stanza seems to give a unique emotion or image, that each stanza could stand on its own, but that there is some sense of continuity throughout the stanzas. The //feeling// of the stanzas, and of the entire poem, was a central theme of our discussion. She definitely came to the poem not as a reader but as a fellow poet, and found herself focusing on form a great deal. Kaylen said that poetry that she writes “has a flow, and it rhymes.” She had to adjust to the fact that the poem doesn’t flow from stanza to stanza, but instead presents thirteen unique ways of looking at a blackbird, or, as she put it, thirteen unique ways of exploring the different moods of the blackbird. Again, her focus was on mood, or feeling, instead of imagery, which was largely my focus. Kaylen expressed that the overall feeling that she got from the poem is of happiness, but also of discomfort. She said the poem leaves her in an “uncomfortable place.” She likes the uncomfortableness, but it leaves her wanting to read the poem again and again (which I think is great!). I told her that I felt exactly the same way. I keep sensing that there is something in there “to get,” but I just didn’t get it. We ended our conversation here, because I could tell that Kaylen’s followers were anxious for her company. She asked if she could keep my copy of the poem (of course I said yes), and I left feeling happy, having turned someone on to a new poet and a new genre of poetry. I am confident that Kaylen will seek out other Wallace Stevens poems. My husband, Eryc, a high-tech guru, songwriter and fellow English major (he went to Vassar College), agreed to discuss “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” with me after dinner one night. He had already read the poem with me as I worked on my paraphrase, and I believe he was somewhat familiar with the poem before I selected it. However, it was not a work he had studied, and he came to the interview with an open mind. I gave him a few minutes to read the poem (and a beer to sweeten the deal) and asked that he make notes as he read of things he liked, didn’t like, understood and didn’t understand. After 15 minutes with the poem, the dictionary and the beer, we sat down to work. I had prepared a list of questions (see attached), which we used to guide our discussion. We first discussed our initial responses to the poem, both focusing on the feeling of haiku, as each stanza seems concerned with specific images and creating some tension in the reader. I made the brilliant, rhyming statement: “That was my first thought, too. Haiku,” at which we both laughed, because we are word nerds (which also rhymes—I can’t be stopped!). Eryc’s other first reaction was that there were many moments in the poem that he didn’t understand. The poem felt like a riddle—something that required decoding. In discussing the stanzas that seem particularly lucid or in need of less interpretation, Eryc pointed out that stanzas I and XIII seem like bookends to the poem. To him, they both create vivid, memorable images that seem to stand on their own. While I, too, loved the imagery in each stanza, it had not occurred to me that they might serve as counterparts in shaping the opening and closing of the poem. I asked Eryc to consider the meaning of the blackbird throughout the poem. Did it have a consistent meaning? Any meaning? His feeling was that it represents many different things. Depending on how you look at the blackbird, it can have an entirely different meaning. The only places he felt the symbolism of the blackbird was clear, however, were in stanza XI, where it seems to be an omen of death, in stanza VII, where it signifies the common, ordinary things that you’re not paying any attention to but should, and stanza XII, where it serves as an affirmation of life, demonstrating the inevitability of the world continuing to go on about its business. When discussing our favorite stanzas, we both zeroed in on stanza V, which neither of us understands but both of us appreciate for the language. Eryc made an interesting point that despite the parallel structure, inflections and innuendos really aren’t opposites in the way that the blackbird whistling and just after are. After trying to get at the meaning of the inflections and innuendoes, I asked if perhaps this stanza could merely be about the sound of poetry. We thought this interpretation had merit—we love the words, but don’t know what they mean. Maybe that’s what the stanza is about—merely the sounds of the language. The most interesting turn to the conversation came when we finished with my questions and returned to the notes Eryc made as he initially read the poem. When he came to his notes on stanza VIII, he commented that it seemed like the poet was being “bratty” in using overly circular language. However, as we reread the stanza a second time, his feelings changed. Does the blackbird somehow create some kind of knowledge? Like we discussed in stanza V, we both commented that this stanza uses words that again refer to aspects of language devoid of meaning—accents and rhythms. Is this stanza (or even the poem as a whole) about poetry itself? This question inspired Eryc to discuss the nature of haiku as he has always understood it, and I have provided his comments here verbatim, because what he had to say was so fascinating and eloquent (one of the million things I adore about him): “One of the things that haiku tried to do was to create ambiguity… It arose out of Taoism. The idea was how you see the oneness of all things by having two lines that are about something and a third line that seems totally unrelated. There was this notion in Buddhism of a feeling similar to epiphany in Catholicism, the sensation of having your third eye open. The word, I think, is satori [he looks it up in the dictionary as he continues]. It’s meant to cause you to see some continuity in things that are apparently unrelated. [We learn that satori is defined as ‘a state of intuitive illumination’. I am impressed! ] It’s not logical and it’s probably ineffable. Satori is something that can’t be said… a lot of what this poem is like.” I had never heard the term satori, but was fascinated by his application of the concept to the poem. This discussion really pushed me far along the path to understanding the poem. Here are my comments to his analysis: “You do get a feeling from each stanza, although the meanings aren’t that clear. It’s as if you develop a knowing from the language. Maybe that’s what the poem is about. Also, it flouts the hypercritical reading of poetry. There isn’t a clear reading to be done. You simply understand the feeling of it.” Lastly, we discussed Eryc’s overall feeling from the poem. Again, I’ll quote him directly: “There’s a sense of melancholic solitude. Partly because you get the sense throughout the poem of a solitary individual observing the world around him. Also, the first and last stanzas have such a powerful evocation of cold, lonely solitude.” My initial feelings were similar, although I don’t think I would have used the word melancholy. All in all, we talked for about 45 minutes, we laughed a lot, and both enjoyed the activity so much that we’ve considered taking turns selecting other poems for future post-dinner, on-the-couch poetry discussions. We are not television viewers and love to discuss life, literature and language, and this was in many ways an ideal end to the evening. As a bonus, the conversation deeply enriched my sense of understanding of the poem.
 * Student Interview **
 * Peer Interview**