<i>Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets</i> by Ange Mlinko

Reading Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets in Key West is an exercise in exacting magic, in checking the physical place with its textual representation and re-living it in a sort of triple vision: from Ange Mlinko’s poetic descriptions to the actual Florida Keys and back to the poets’ ornamental fecundity that attracted me in the first place.In winter 1989 during an undergraduate modern poetry seminar led by Professor Kathryn Chittick at Trent University, I fell under a linguistic spell cast by Wallace Stevens as I prepared a presentation on his “Of Modern Poetry.” After two weeks of immersion in his poetry, and essays about it in The Wallace Stevens Journal, I was hooked by the kaleidoscopic linguistic color of a hedonistic Eden—one that is particularly attractive to northerners infused with the sub-tropics. Mlinko captures this fascination in chapter two, subtitled “Green Cocoanut Ice Cream,” through Stevens’s poetry and letters. Here is his arrival in Miami, 1916:After quoting this passage, Mlinko continues: “Then in 1922, beholding the Keys for the first time (with [Arthur] Powell and company): ‘This is one of the choicest places I have ever been to.’ [Stevens] describes the soil again, Crispin’s motto incipient in his avid noticing: ‘The ground is white coral broken up, as white as this paper, dazzling in the sunshine. . . . The place is a paradise—midsummer weather, the sky brilliantly clear and intensely blue, the sea blue and green beyond what you have ever seen’” (33; Stevens, Letters 225).Mlinko synthesizes Stevens’s letters, Florida poems, Peter Brazeau’s Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, and other poets’ materials effectively into what she deems “the peacock style” (25). Her book’s title leads readers into it: “Difficult ornament, I conclude, names the quality I love so much in Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, James Merrill, Harry Mathews—the word play, the labyrinthine syntax, the patterning, and most of all the metaphors that, with tendrils invading every part of speech, blossom into full-blown metonyms” (18). There’s joy in those extensions as well as years of sustenance for like-minded readers.Why “difficult?” I suspected it might involve modernism. Mlinko effectively exhibits Stevens’s complex wordplay and rhetorical ornamentation through “The Comedian as the Letter C,” but I wonder whether her emphasis on Stevens’s personal difficulties is necessary. Mlinko quotes Elsie Stevens:Perhaps I’m protective of Stevens, but I wonder if other readers also tire of this personal narrative; the last sentence seems an unnecessary pile-on that overemphasizes Mlinko’s title in a way that strays from her astute poetic analysis. There are a few other annoyances in this book, but these are mere blemishes in the larger scope of most often “getting it right” eloquently:Stevens, and Moore, are the masters that teach Bishop this. Chapter three, on Marianne Moore, is not as engaging as surrounding chapters on Stevens and Bishop, but that could partly be because I am not as enthralled by Moore as the other two poets. As with poets such as Auden and Pound, I admire Moore’s skills more than feel her words. However, Mlinko does a wonderful job with Moore’s animals as they are technically wrought in her unique manner, as she wrote in “Poetry,” of constructing “imaginary gardens with real toads in them”:Stevens-Moore-Bishop is an amazing triptych of poets because of their rendering of the natural world. Each poet enables readers to see language in action to re-form nature so that we participate in creation stories; at once we see the thing itself and the artificial construction of it:Mlinko charts “Stevens and Moore’s artistic kinship” (67) by delving into their essays about each other such as “The Accented Syllable,” “On Wallace Stevens,” and “A Poet that Matters,” as well as their published poetry in the avant-garde journal Others. She effectively compares “The Steeple-Jack” with “Domination of Black” to show how the artistic transformations resemble the “majesty of peacocks” (50).“The aesthetic triangle between Bishop, Stevens, and Moore traverses Florida at its base” (67). This is a loaded sentence that might have readers wondering about all the people inhabiting the state as tourists, artists, and colonizers. As these north easterners traverse Florida we might think about colonial repetition. Such political and geographical trespass is intrinsic to Florida unless travelled by the Indigenous people whom Bishop recognizes in “Florida.” Mlinko reads this poem and its revelations of ugliness and abjection as differentiating Bishop from the other two poets. Bishop’s free verse allows for unruly tropical disorder. Mlinko also attends to Bishop’s eventual dissatisfaction with Key West as a “base” increasingly taken over by the Navy, so much so that people were evicted from homes, slept in cars and lots, and even—in a few cases—killed themselves. Key West is a stomping ground in many ways. From my walk down Duval Street to bar talk with a local while watching the Florida Panthers and Toronto Maple Leafs playoff game, I heard that nobody in Key West cheers for the Panthers or the Miami Dolphins because everyone’s from the northeastern states. I saw some team flags in town, but it is mostly true. “The real is only the base. But it is the base,” wrote Stevens in “Adagia” (Opus Posthumous 187).While Mlinko convincingly reveals Bishop’s base better than most by adding real facts to the worn story of Bishop’s increased drinking in Key West, she can also exaggerate when demonstrating how Bishop built upon the poetry she memorized “almost by heart” in college:Does Bishop really project Stevens’s Florida as such? Isn’t Mlinko going too far in the last sentence to imagine Stevens’s voice bellowing out of Bishop’s throaty alligator? That fancy takes away from the alligator’s warning of retribution to the colonizer who left the Indigenous skirt in the sand. However, the occasional interpretive mis take is compensated by carefully wrought syntheses. I have always admired Bishop’s compressed and synesthetic imagery in this poem, and I didn’t realize until reading this book that it’s partly due to Bishop’s Stevensian music. Mlinko explains:Other early poems such as “Wading at Wellfleet” and “The Imaginary Iceberg” display Stevensian sound imagery and thought respectively. Mlinko is strong at expressing Bishop’s differences:Well, I suggest that Stevens remained mostly a tourist while Bishop lived there. And while their differences are endemic to their stylistic writing, the progression from Stevens’s wondrous ideas of order to Bishop’s beautiful inclusion of ugliness takes readers on a sweet ride of Florida through the first half of the twentieth century. Consider “The Idea of Order at Key West” and then “The Street by the Cemetery.” Both poems exhibit night light so bright it’s almost neon, or phosphorescent, or photo negative. Life-in-death and death-in-life, the old Romantic poles transform sensory intensity into friendly dialogues—a difference being that Stevens harkens back to mysterious creation where Bishop makes us look at the waste. Both poems present a Key West harbor exceptionally.Mlinko writes: “Known for both her nomadism and her exquisiteness—in the etymological sense of ‘seeking out’—Bishop both springs from a Stevensian aesthetic and serves as a correction” (72). She adeptly explains how Bishop’s development of “proliferal style” in Florida initiates her prosaic poetics. This book focuses on Florida, but the poem that best illustrates Bishop’s dialogue with Stevens, and how she transforms his “blank verse moo” (Poems, Prose, and Letters 740) into a contemporary prosaic poetry—as Vidyan Ravinthiran, Penelope Laurans, and Bonnie Costello have shown—is “The End of March,” set in Massachusetts.Moore’s influence on Bishop is traversed through their well-known disagreements about Bishop’s “Roosters.” Moore “recoiled from ‘Roosters’” while Bishop maintained its “sordidities” (87). Yet Mlinko has us rethink Bishop’s depiction of Key West’s ubiquitous cocks by showing how the poem resembles Stevens’s style rather than Moore’s:Deep from protruding chestsin green-gold medals dressed,[. . .]glass-headed pins,oil-golds and copper greens,anthracite blues, alazarins,[. . .]The crown of redset on your little headis charged with all your fighting blood.Yes, that excrescencemakes a most virile presence,plus all that vulgar beauty of iridescence. (86; Poems, Prose, and Letters 27–9)Mlinko writes that Bishop “has referred to it as her ‘war poem,’ and the language is more overtly Stevensian and peacock-like, as well as more violent in its decoration” (86).Mlinko ends the Bishop chapter, subtitled “A Queer Antique Musical Instrument Floating in the Sea,” with the 1946 sale of her beloved house at 624 White Street (which we can now tour thanks to Arlo Haskell and the Key West Literary Seminar). She then includes a Coda suggesting an alternative location of “The Bight”: Garrison Bight rather than the local consensus of Key West Bight. While this spot is impossible to pinpoint, Mlinko is most often contextually accurate:This review is long already so I’ll be quick with the chapters on James Merrill, Harry Mathews, and Laura Riding Jackson. They are worth reading, especially for nuggets like this: “In Florida, as in the Mediterranean landscapes of Greece and Italy, a limestone karst is filtered by rainwater that erodes deep caverns and underground streams” (98). These coastal geologies are magical, and Mlinko helps explain why in this elemental synthesis.James Merrill’s father Charles “adopted a coat of arms featuring the head of a peacock” (99). Merrill’s youthful poetry has “the difficult ornaments of intricate syntax sinuously overlayering a rhyming stanza pattern combine[d] with the metaphorical language to give an impression of frozen baroque grandeur” (100). As Merrill’s poetry matures “we intuit a fluid medium in which the anxiety of death, or ‘drying up,’ is mollified by a recourse to ramification, those palm roots that keep putting out tendrils under duress and, with enough patience and faith, are eventually rewarded” (103–104).Chapter 6 on Harry Mathews is exceptional, and rivals earlier chapters on Stevens and Bishop. Mathews continues the gorgeous tradition of superimposing the Mediterranean on Florida with “poems that glittered with the dazzle of Mediterranean sunlight on sea: poems from a life lived in Mallorca, Spain, France. Mathews seemed the embodiment of an ideal: the man who knew how to live” (112). He’s also steeped in classics such as the twelfth-century sestinas of Arnaut Daniel, also admired by Pound and Eliot, from whom Mathews learned much of his poetics. Mlinko focuses on “Cool Gales Shall Fan the Glades,” which embodies an ultra-hot Key West climate tempered by wind. Riding a bicycle is comfortable on the flats of Key West. It’s only when one steps inside to air conditioning that a sweat-drenched shirt becomes noticeable. Mlinko concludes that “the thrill of Mathews’s poetry lies in its subversive gorgeousness with apology — and maybe, too, in the near-masochistic pressure of a temperament disciplining itself” (128).What better way to end a book on florid poetry than with an all-consuming obliterator? “Laura Riding Jackson was the bad fairy of Modernist poetry, denouncing it exactly for the peacock traits celebrated in this book” (133). Riding Jackson was praised by W.H. Auden in 1942 as one of “the four best American poets” (138; Jenkins 48) alongside Eliot, Moore, and Louise Bogan (with whom he was speaking). In 1943, Riding Jackson “gave up her vocation for good, and for almost fifty years Florida sheltered her silence” (132). Although she did not write for long, she had great influence on poetics, such as William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, and on her lover Robert Graves’s The White Goddess. Riding Jackson was the only poet in this book to remain in Key West; yet in “‘The Flowering Urn’ she speaks of ‘fertility’s lie’ the way she will later speak of poetry’s lie” (143) à la Keats, to forge eternal beauty as a life force to ward off death.With the exception of Riding, the other poets “escaped to Florida [. . .] to fecundate their imaginations” (143). “The state with the prettiest name” (Poems, Prose, and Letters 24) was a magnet of desire, for “The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world.” Mlinko uses those lines from Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal” as epigraph (Stevens, Collected Poems 325). What a physical world is captured here, and potentially freed.

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