Aesthetics and Impossible Embodiment: Stevens, Imagery, and Disorientation

Abstract

HAT MIGHT READERS do with imagery of Wallace Ste- vens' poetry? What kind of imaginative and aesthetic experi- ences might his poems enable? Such questions have wide im- plications, not just because they may influence our understanding of ways readers encounter poems, but because of role Stevens has played in story of lyric poetry and role concepts of aesthetic experi- ence have played in that story, too. His nearly constant foregrounding of imagery, sensation, and imagination, and their relation to a special kind of aesthetic experience, make questions about enacting imagery—that is, about one's own creation of representations of sensation and movement in mind as one reads—central. canonical criticism of Stevens' poetry has thus emphasized not just importance of imagery, but also that Ste- vens orchestrates a delicate play with felt experience of art, insisting that the naked poem is the imagination manifesting itself in its domi- nation of words (CPP 639). 1 If domination of imagination pro- duces particular aesthetic ends, however, what are they, and how might they come to be? In this essay, I argue that Stevens gives readers opportunity, as they engage imagery of sight, sound, and motion, to experience a form of oth- erwise impossible embodiment: an alteration or disruption of physical ex- perience that carries a distinct aesthetic signature of felt disorientation. As I will explain in detail below, one key way in which we actively engage with arts is by way of physical changes that are mediated both by artwork itself and by our own sensory architectures. Poems come to be embodied as we read them, and they affect our bodily experience in real time: they tend to disrupt status quo, altering it in ways that are otherwise generally unavailable in conscious life. Such manipulations or disruptions might come in form of a palimpsest of impressions from multiple viewpoints (e.g., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird); seeming slowing down or speeding up of time (as with moment of light's vanishing in The Idea of Order at Key West); access to imagined bodies and minds radically different from our own (as with The Snow Man, watery back of Paltry Nude (CPP 5), or air of The