“Spissant” Lyric: Stevens at the Limits of Speech and Song

Abstract

“Spissant” Lyric: Stevens at the Limits of Speech and Song Zachary Tavlin “IF THE POETRY of X was music, / So that it came to him of its own. . . .” Wallace Stevens begins “The Creations of Sound” with a conditional that brings us back to the absent origin of lyric verse, expression’s plenitude in melody now just a proposition instead of a presupposition. The X of those lines is a person, though the reference to “him” could indicate a listener instead of a maker, and it is not until the third tercet that X is named “an obstruction, a man / Too exactly himself,” and thus designated as a problem assigned to poet or composer (CPP 274). But the poem’s pattern of address is complex. X marks a poet, but not necessarily the poet, and then there is the overarching and unnamed lyric voice, the addressee (“Tell X that speech is not dirty silence / Clarified”), an artificial “separate author” or “secondary expositor, / A being of sound,” and, in the final stanza, a “we” who may or may not be some or all of these personae (CPP 275). Stevens compresses a lot into a little. The lyric’s solo speaker has recently been subject to critiques implicating it in ideological malfeasance; but here voices blend and separate. My aim in what follows is not to unpack Stevens’s lyrics as so many dense and polyvalent scores but to think through his lyricism as a sort of stress test, a poetic attempt at discovering the limits of the troubadour voice—at once expressive of compositional and performative selves—from inside (relatively) conventional lyric forms. In doing so, I treat Stevens’s poetry as an interface through which we might encounter the poetics of song at its limits, as in the aria, motif, jingle, whistle, hum, scat, and other subsemiotic vocal ejaculations. Every song has an X that passes beyond that which is sung. Perhaps every lyric poem does too. In “The Man on the Dump,” Stevens gives us a bad bird, his primary example of the avian vernacular, the unlyric “blatter of grackles” (CPP 186). “Snow and Stars” further isolates the grackle as its lyric speaker’s (poor man’s) nightingale: [End Page 218] The grackles sing avant the springMost spiss—oh! Yes, most spissantly.They sing right puissantly. (CPP 108) Maureen McLane calls it one of Stevens’s “thinking songs,” poetry as “musical thought.” She tracks how Stevens translates multiple linguistic registers into a verse as “native” as the grackles are to the New World (118), moving from the French in the first stanza cited above to the Latinate “regions” and “legions” of the third, to the Old Norse “bing” (a heap), to the final line’s semi-onomatopoeic “ding, ding, dong” (CPP 108). What strikes me most in the condensed translational brio of such a passage is the Stevensian invention of the second line: “Most spiss—oh! Yes, most spissantly.” Probably twisted from the Latin spissus (thick, compact, dense), the new word accurately evokes the grackle’s tune, which is adulterated by the awkwardness of spit, piss, and spittle. It performs the linguistic compression of the verse it exemplifies. Like the half-sung, half-spoken art of scat—where the voice imitates nonvocal instruments by rhythmically improvising wordless melodic phrases—what I hereby baptize Stevensian “spiss” is not nonsense, even if it is not conventional song either. It is ugly only if you take the nightingale as your sole ideal of transcendental beauty and transparent expression. Spiss and scat are catchy, tongue-twisting, semilinguistic vocalizations. Spiss is semantically dense, its units existing on a sonic continuum with one another rather than as isolatable parts of a system of discrete, oppositional meanings. Assimilating it to Bakhtinian heteroglossia, and referring to it as a “sound system” that privileges “the wrong word over the euphonious, and the clickety-clack over the pom-pom-pom,” Bart Eeckhout describes Stevens’s homemade linguistic hash as “a hybridized language that jumbles diction from incompatible registers and backgrounds” (60, 58). But while it may be closer to pure sound than to sense, spiss never gives up its lifeline to the latter. In “Autumn Refrain,” he hears...