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Poem of the week: Pantoum in Which Wallace Stevens Gives Me Vertigo by Oli Hazzard

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This playful tribute to the imaginative power of poetry is also a dizzying demonstration of it

This week's poem is by Oli Hazzard, whose first collection, Between the Windows has recently been published by Carcanet Press.

Hazzard's work is intriguing – playful and formally ingenious while engaged with serious philosophical questions. I've chosen "Pantoum in Which Wallace Stevens Gives Me Vertigo" for these qualities, and because it expresses without piety the delight of making meanings and experiences out of language. Its arc takes us from humorous exaggeration and implied argument with Stevens to homage. There's no doubt that Hazzard is able to write poetry which makes something happen in language, and in the reader's mind.

The source of the speaker's disorientation, as we're told immediately, is Wallace Stevens's "The Public Square." It's a brilliant small poem which packs immensities into its terse quatrains. Regrettably, it's still in copyright but you can read it here.

Hazzard borrows the following lines – "A languid janitor bears/ His lantern through colonnades/ And the architecture swoons" – making one-and-a-half lines of Stevens's three: "a languid janitor bears his lantern through colonnades/ and the architecture swoons… ". The verb "swoons", suggesting both faintness and ecstasy, leads to a new thought, and a less pleasant sensation: "I cannot read this poem/ without being struck down with vertigo."

The form Hazzard has chosen, the pantoum is strangely apt for a conversation with Stevens's poem. The latter is not, of course, a pantoum, but it employs some potent repetition, and has a dominant imagery of falling buildings. Hazzard's poem centres on the fear of falling down and uses a structure that would seem to guard against collapse.

The pantoum is an ultimately circular form, but, more importantly, its entire structure suggests a hesitant sort of progress. The repetition, in each stanza, of the previous stanza's second and fourth lines as first and third, gives the effect of retracing steps in an uncertain, slightly staggering gait – the way you might walk if you were feeling dizzy, or if you were navigating between obstacles.

"I can remind myself that it's only a poem, I'm not going to fall over/ whilst strapped into my chair" is reassurance for both readers and writers. Formal structures make us feel safe as writers: analytical tools, similarly, control and sometimes over-control the thrilling weightlessness of discovering a poem. Hazzard's literal scenario amusingly dramatises the risk. But the images associated with persons strapped into chairs are various, and some are distinctly disturbing.

The form is flexible enough to allow the repeated lines to change their syntactical position and punctuation. These shifts increase the effect of destabilisation. Many of the lines are enjambed rather than end-stopped, and embedded in a larger grammatical unit. But the syntax flows easily and cleanly. The idiom remains colloquial and the tone is gently, if knowingly, self-mocking.

The writer's agility produces some logical back-flips, and the substitution of one meaning with its opposite. So, at the end of stanza three, there's a qualification concerning "making it to the end" of the poem, when the speaker protests, "But this is not my ultimate goal". In the next stanza the assertion is adroitly denied: "'But this is not my ultimate goal,'/ I say – as if that were anything like the truth."

Other subtle variations are brought into play. "Fall over" slides deftly into "fall over/ myself". "Every day I celebrate// myself, because of one little achievement. (I don't really!)" loses the intensifier "just" which it first had (stanza 4, line 2) and, now in parenthesis, "I don't really!" become a comic aside. We probably shouln't believe it, though, because the form insists on a return to Stevens (stanza one, line three), "and the architecture swoons."

The last stanza assembles a larger focus, and a new ambiguity: "I cannot read this poem, / I say, as if it were anything like the truth." Is the speaker denying the truth of the statement that he cannot read this poem, or is he saying that the poem cannot be read "as if it were anything like the truth"? The latter seems likely, because of the change from "that" (stanza four, line four) to "it". Perhaps this raises the question as to whether any poem should be read "as if it were anything like the truth".

By claiming that the original poem caused the speaker such an extreme physical reaction that he needed to be strapped into a chair, Hazzard's speaker has had fun with the idea that a poem is the same kind of event as lived experience. Yet the exaggeration serves to remind us that "The Public Square" (and poems like it) may still act powerfully on a reader's perceptions. In the end, the teasing stops: the vertigo is banished, and with it, perhaps, a certain "anxiety of influence". The pantoum ends with a generous act of faith as it returns to its point of departure: a poem by Wallace Stevens. "Every day I celebrate/ Wallace Stevens' poem 'The Public Square'" seems less an exaggeration than a fact about living as a poet or reader of poetry, in that state of imaginative engagement.

Pantoum in Which Wallace Stevens Gives Me Vertigo

In Wallace Stevens' poem 'The Public Square',
a languid janitor bears his lantern through colonnades
and the architecture swoons. I cannot read this poem
without being struck down with vertigo. I can only read:

'A languid janitor bears his lantern through colonnades…'
before I start to feel sick, and suddenly aware of the earth's roundness.
Without being struck down with vertigo, I can only read
whilst strapped into my chair; I will read the poem, and

before I start to feel sick, and suddenly aware of the earth's roundness,
I can remind myself that it's only a poem, I'm not going to fall over
whilst strapped into my chair. I will read the poem, and
triumph by making it to the end. But this is not my ultimate goal.

I can remind myself that it's only a poem. I'm not going to fall over
myself just because of one little achievement. I don't really
triumph by making it to the end. 'But this is not my ultimate goal,'
I say – as if that were anything like the truth. Every day I celebrate

myself because of one little achievement (I don't really!)
and the architecture swoons. I cannot read this poem,
I say, as if it were anything like the truth. Every day I celebrate
Wallace Stevens' poem 'The Public Square.'


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