Week 6.1: Ideas of Order

This one has to go in the conditional, on account of our interrupted class—I would have been so interested to hear where some of our other rearrangements of “The Idea of Order at Key West” took us. I thought the two we did talk about made for a very interesting pairing, Cassy and Selena drawing out the language of sound in reconstructed lines that Stevens might have written; Sam and John abstracting from the poems thematics into a kind of diagram of the relation between the female singer and the sea. Two large opportunities in criticism opened up: the first, a sympathetic participation in the poem’s language, paraphrasing it in its idiom; the second, an act of radical translation, disjoining phrases from the texture of the verse, shaping them into an argument in a very different idiom (here, something like a diagram). If we had continued, I would have taken us through another couple of exercises, rendering the poem as dialogue (in the manner of this week’s exercise) and as a picture/diagram (which Sam and John already approached in their collage). The general idea was to draw on our repertoire of adjacent arts to see what we could discover about “The Idea of Order,” especially its structure, which I think can be variously illuminated by 1) dis- and reassembly, 2) “casting” (or separating out its voices, its dynamic of self-response), and 3) visual representation, of several possible kinds, including diagrams of structure, pictorial representation of scene, etc.