A Conversation That Took the Place, Provisionally, of a Poem

Abstract

A Conversation That Took the Place, Provisionally, of a Poem Maureen N. McLane and Laura M. Slatkin A dialogue in the mode of a short play1 [Two people sit outside, overlooking the sea, or within its hearing. The opening bars of Georges Enesco's Violin Sonata No. 3, Op. 25, stream from an iPad which rests on the table between them, as well as a couple of books.2] SPEAKER 1: Oh but Georges Enesco— SPEAKER 2: "The greatest musical phenomenon since Mozart," Casals said.3 SPEAKER 1: Google said. SPEAKER 2: He wrote an opera about Oedipus—a lyric tragedy in four acts. SPEAKER 1: What are his dates? SPEAKER 2: 1881–1955. SPEAKER 1: They're almost exact contemporaries, Enesco and Stevens … [The music shifts, to the opening bars of Enesco's Konzertstück for Viola and Piano, which continues softly in the background of the conversation.4] SPEAKER 2: Well here's a question— Was it established that Stevens never got to France? SPEAKER 1: The trees are mended. SPEAKER 2: The trees had been mended. [End Page 67] SPEAKER 1: There are two things to consider here: one is the thing about meditation, and how that is not, no matter what you do, something that has to be stopped. SPEAKER 2: The other thing—in a way—is what Lisa is interested in: what composition is a kind of model for.5 SPEAKER 1: So some of this has to be about musicality. SPEAKER 2: She is composing herself, but he is composing the scene … SPEAKER 1: I mean, he's amazing— SPEAKER 2: But on the other hand— It can be kind of suffocating. SPEAKER 1: If you read a lot. SPEAKER 2: I mean it's like leave me alone. [beat] SPEAKER 2: Penelope—she has composed, so long, a self: it's interesting—because in one sense one might say that it is Odysseus who's been composing himself. SPEAKER 1: Though I suppose … SPEAKER 2: Composition and Meditation. SPEAKER 1: Composition as Explanation: Gertrude Stein. SPEAKER 2: "Meditation" as the essential exercise of a composer—nothing ever suspended or stopped that for me. SPEAKER 1: Compositeur: composer in the musical sense, or? SPEAKER 2: Mending Wall. Mended trees. SPEAKER 1: The barbarous strength within her would never fail. SPEAKER 2: Barbarous, savage: see too "The Green Plant"—the green plant which glares [End Page 68] with the barbarous greenOf the harsh reality of which it is part. (CPP 431) SPEAKER 1: "These are not banlieus / Lacking men of stone"—"One of the Inhabitants of the West" (CPP 429). SPEAKER 2: It's like "The Irish Cliffs of Moher"— SPEAKER 1: What you think is far is close etc. SPEAKER 2: I was going to say it's like "The Idea of Order at Key West" or "Sunday Morning." SPEAKER 1: Cretonnes: "with a hempen warp and linen weft." Says Wikipedia. SPEAKER 2: She's composing herself and composing herself. SPEAKER 1: That's in the Odyssey too— SPEAKER 2: The business of how to respond— He's zeroed in on the question of people's mysteriousness to each other—what the Odyssey then represents > namely the intimacy of memory. Friend and dear friend. Penelope says, I lost all my looks when Odysseus went away. He zeroes in on the telos of the poem. SPEAKER 1: The trees: interesting—how Odysseus' father identifies him by the tree—and the identity of the bed made from the tree: Look! There are the trees we planted together! And names them, the various trees. SPEAKER 2: This is a poem as it were without Odysseus. SPEAKER 1: This is a poem without Odysseus. SPEAKER 2: Is this a poem without Ulysses. SPEAKER 1: Is this a poem without Penelope. SPEAKER 2: Is silence a shape that has passed. [End Page 69] BOTH: There was a myth before the myth began.6 SPEAKER 1 [picks up one of the books on the table and reads]: "The Homeric poems, as I hope to show, constitute acts of interpretation as well as acts of creation."7 SPEAKER 2: Wallace Stevens's poems constitute acts of interpretation as...