Review of Jay Hopler’s Academic Discourse at Miami: Wallace Stevens and the Domestication of Light

Review of Jay Hopler’s Academic Discourse at Miami: Wallace Stevens and the Domestication of Light

Burrito means “little donkey” in Spanish, and conjures the image of a sturdy, stubborn beast of burden, perhaps as big as a small dog, who gets into comical situations because of his size and short-temper. His elders would call him “Little Burrito” and he’d have a few other animal friends to get into wacky misadventures with.

Now, the burrito, as everybody knows, is the best symbol for a good poem found in the natural world. Like a good poem, a burrito is complete in itself–a delicious warm tortilla wrapped around meat (or beans, if you’re a vegetarian reader), rice, lettuce, salsa, cheese (or without cheese, if you’re a vegan reader), with guacamole and sour cream as optional sides.

The notion that a volume of poetry, as opposed to an individual poem, is the restaurant to which critical evaluation should be taken is dangerous. It encourages poets to deliver not the entire burrito, but just the rice, or the cheese, or a bowl of sour cream. It presents a do-it-yourself burrito bar, where the rest of the burrito–that thing for which all lovers of poetry hunger–is located across the entire volume. “Academic…“, for instance, is clearly just flavorless shredded lettuce. It is filler, not filling. There is nothing nutritious here.

And yet we are told that such obviously lazy poems serve in providing tonal range to make the rest of the volume palatable. This is putting the burrito before the donkey. Be honest with yourself–what was the gate by which you entered into the Mystery? Where did you fall in love with Erato? Was it after stumbling through Auden’s The Shield of Achilles? Or was it after reading the poem of the same name, comprehending that chilling truth “that girls are raped, that two boys knife a third”? Who even knows what other poems The Shield of Achilles contains? It was the poem, not the book of poetry, that illuminated your future path.

Come up with your own example, but the fact is, even great poets are known by their individual poems, not their books. Critical looks at these volumes pick and choose a few individual poems that support their thesis, ignoring large amounts of weaker or irrelevant work that, when viewed in isolation, aren’t even up to the standards of Taco Bell’s menu, let alone those great burritos that inspired us all. A work should not have to be read in context with other poems by the same author–it should be able to stand alone. And a poet should be judged by the burritos he makes, not his ability to present raw ingredients.

That brings us to today’s lunch special–a bag of lettuce. Hopler even announces in the first line that he has “no beef with Wallace Stevens” before diving into a muddled reflection on the nature of Florida’s light that, like celery, probably burns more calories than it provides. He makes reference to a specific Stevens poem, “Farewell to Florida“, which he asserts would be “more essential” if Stevens had only known as much about tropical light as Hopler himself.

“Farewell to Florida” is full of the moon, clouds, and darkness–when mention is even made of the tropical light Hopler is so preoccupied with, it’s certainly not “beaming”:

…I hated the vivid blooms
Curled over the shadowless hut, the rust and bones,
The trees like bones and the leaves half sand, half sun.

Unfortunately, Hopler’s own idea of how “far more aggressive, far / more violent” light would behave (“…the light here in Florida is clanging, / Banging, rattling buildings, burning through the park’s green pelt”) isn’t particularly apt (perhaps I am not imaginative enough to picture how light could clang and bang), and certainly not an improvement over the simple, startling image that Stevens provides, a fact which Hopler unwittingly recognizes by poem’s end, as he concludes with “this never happens in a Stevens poem”.

For good reason.

Ron Slate, whose review of Green Squall can be found here, quotes “Academic…” in its entirety, but doesn’t explore the poem’s value beyond the manner in which it “services Green Squall…layering more calculation and provocation on the book’s vocal identity”. Even as Hopler refers specifically to a Stevens poem he critiques, his own poem is viewed only as a kind of support beam for a larger structure. The fact that Hopler refers to Stevens’ “summer-minded” poems is another reference to one of the Modernist’s best known works, “The Snow Man”, and again demonstrates that the manner in which people enter into poetry is through the poem, not the book.

That an entire poem should be of such little consequence is disappointing, especially considering that Green Squall won the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. How much more lettuce and pico de gallo must we consume? How shall this fatten us for winter?

What else can be said: Hopler’s poem leaves us hungry.

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