Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
Written by Wallace Stevens, illustrated by Noah Berlatsky
2002
Price: 25 cents
For more information: noahberlatsky@hotmail.com
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Wallace Stevens' poem "13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" has inspired lots of art, visual and musical. My Google search turned up one recent concert, an architectural treatise and a couple of museum exhibits, all jumping off from this one mystically minimal work. To this rather institutional family, we can now add an outsider art cousin -- a hand-drawn, photocopied pamphlet, about the size of an index card, which juxtaposes the poem with childlike stick figure illustrations.
It would be easy to dismiss this piece. The drawings, for one thing, are somewhat literal. For instance, the opening stanza "Among twenty snowy mountains / The only moving thing / Was the eye of a blackbird" is accompanied by a big white circle with a dot in it, the eye, and surrounded by penscratched darkness -- the blackbird. The koan-like simplicity of "When the blackbird flew out of sight / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles" sits facing a page with a tiny figure in the lower left hand corner, surrounded by concentric circles of blackbird wings.
The drawings are also fairly primitive. Saying "My kid could do that" is probably the last refuge of the ignorant, but the spiky line drawings on these pages do, in fact, look a lot like the ones that currently hang on my fridge. I actually have a doctor's handout that tells me at what developmental age kids start to put necks between their drawings' heads and torsos, and by this standard, we can assume that Mr. Berlatsky is somewhere between 3 and 5, at least in spirit.
So what's to like? The poem, for one thing. Written sometime during the '20s or '30s, it marks a real departure from the intellectual pyrotechnics of Pound and Eliot, using simple, transparent language to invoke indelible moods. The stanzas are haiku-like in their restful stillness, and their 13 takes on one subject invoke a Rashomon-esque multiperspective on what we see and how it changes from minute to minute, thought to thought.
There's also an unfiltered, goofy directness about the drawings that makes you laugh and think at the same time, just like kids' art. I love the elongated, bearded stick figures on the page with "O thin men of Haddam / Why do you imagine golden birds? / Do you not see how the blackbird / Walks around the feet / Of the women about you?" They are distinctly complacent and material-minded, despite the fact that they are drawn with a maximum of ten strokes each.
Is it art? I don't know, but there is some irony in asking that question. Lots of people didn't think that Stevens' work was poetry either. It was too prosaic and obvious, too dried out and literal. It was exactly the kind of work you might expect from an insurance executive, rooted in the mind and its relationship to reality, people said, not in the emotions and literary references of poetry. Obviously, we've revised our views on Stevens, so maybe we should also give Berlatsky's simple, whimsical drawings the benefit of the doubt.
-- Jennifer Kelly
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