Stevenson, Anne (Katherine)
STEVENSON, Anne (Katherine)
Nationality: American. Born: Cambridge, England, 3 January 1933. Education: University High School, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1947–50; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Hopwood award, 1951, 1952,1954), B.A. 1954 (Phi Beta Kappa), M.A. 1962; Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1970–71. Family: Married 1) R.L. Hitchcock in 1955 (divorced), one daughter; 2) Mark Elvin in 1962 (divorced), two sons; 3) Michael Farley (divorced); 4) Peter Lucas in 1987. Career: Schoolteacher, Lillesden School, Hawkhurst, Kent, 1955–56, Westminster School, Georgia, 1959–60, and Cambridge School, Weston, Massachusetts, 1961–62; advertising manager, A.&C. Black publishers, London, 1956–57; tutor, Extra-Mural Studies, University of Glasgow, 1970–73; counselor, Open University, Paisley, Renfrew, 1972–73; writing fellow, University of Dundee, 1973–75; fellow, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, 1975–77; writer-in-residence, Bulmershe College, Reading, Berkshire, 1977–78, and University of Edinburgh, 1987–89. Co-founder, with Michael Farley and Alan Halsey, Poetry Bookshop, Hay-on-Wye, Powys, 1979. Northern Arts Literary Fellow, Newcastle and Durham, 1981–82 and 1984–85. Founding co-editor, Other Poetry, Leicester, 1978–83, Mid-Day Publications, Oxford, and Other Poetry Editions. Member of the Literature Panel, Arts Council, 1983–85; board member, Poetry Book Society, London, 1986–88. Awards: Scottish Arts Council bursary, 1973; Southern Arts bursary, 1978; Welsh Arts Council bursary, 1981; Athena award, University of Michigan, 1990. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1978, and University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, 1993. Address: 30 Logan Street, Langley Park, Durham DH7 9YN, England.
Publications
Poetry
Living in America. Ann Arbor, Michigan, Generation Press, 1965.
Reversals. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1969.
Correspondences: A Family History in Letters. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, and London, Oxford University Press, 1974.
Travelling behind Glass: Selected Poems 1963–1973. London, Oxford University Press, 1974.
A Morden Tower Reading 3. Newcastle upon Tyne, Morden Tower, 1977.
Cliff Walk. Richmond, Surrey, Keepsake Press, 1977.
Enough of Green. London, Oxford University Press, 1977.
Sonnets for Five Seasons. Hereford, Five Seasons Press, 1979.
Minute by Glass Minute. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982.
Green Mountain, Black Mountain. Boston, Rowan Tree Press, 1982.
Turkish Rondo. Loughton, Essex, Piatkus, 1982.
Making Poetry. Oxford, Pisces Press, 1983.
A Legacy. Durham, Taxus Press, 1983.
Black Grate Poems. Oxford, Inky Parrot Press, 1984.
The Fiction-Makers. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985.
Winter Time. Ashington, Northumberland, MidNAG, 1986.
Selected Poems, 1956–1986. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1987.
The Other House. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990.
Four and a Half Dancing Men. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1993.
The Collected Poems of Anne Stevenson, 1955–1995. Oxfordand New York, Oxford University Press, 1996.
Once upon a Time This Morning. New York, Greenwillow Books, 1997.
Plays
Radio Plays: Correspondences, 1975; Child of Adam, 1976.
Other
Elizabeth Bishop. New York, Twayne, 1966; London, Collins, 1967.
Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, and London, Viking, 1989.
Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop. London, Bellew, 1998.
Between the Iceberg and the Ship: Selected Essays. Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Editor, Selected Poems, by Frances Bellerby. London, Enitharmon Press, 1986.
Editor, The Poetry Book Society. London, Hutchinson, 1991.
Editor, with Dannie Abse, The Gregory Anthology. London, Hutchinson, 1995.
*Critical Studies: By Dorothy Donnelly, in Michigan Quarterly Review (Ann Arbor), fall 1966 and April 1971; by Jay Parini, in Lines Review 50 (Edinburgh), September 1974, and in Ploughshares (Cambridge), autumn 1978; "The Transitory Walker: Feeling for Continuities in the Poetry" by Dewi Stephen Jones, in New Welsh Review (Lampeter), autumn 1989; "The Plath Myth and the Reviewing of Bitter Fame" by Olwyn Hughes, in Poetry Review (London), 80(3), autumn 1990; "Dark Corners: On Poetry and Melancholy" by Stephen Wilson, in Encounter, 74(3), April 1990; "A Chev'ril Glove" by the author, in The Poet's Voice and Craft, edited by C.B. McCully, Manchester, Carcanet, 1994; "A Woman of Letters: History vs. Fiction in Anne Stevenson's 'Correspondences'—A Family History in Letters" by Tiina Sarisalmi, in English Studies and History, edited by David Robertson, Tampere, Finland, University of Tampere, 1994; "Responses to Elizabeth Bishop: Anne Stevenson, Eavan Boland and Jo Shapcott" by David G. Williams, in English (Leicester, England), 44(180), autumn 1995; "Poems of Innocence and Experience" by Richard Tillinghast, in Michigan Quarterly Review (Ann Arbor), 37(4), fall 1998.
Anne Stevenson comments:
Each of my collections, I suspect, represents a chapter in a quest for a poetry both personal and responsible, at once truthful, passionate, and carefully crafted. In the 1960s I was questioning the assumptions I had grown up with: what was good, what was evil, what was love, what was responsibility, by what freedom of will could I choose my life? In Correspondences I set forth the drama of my own (and some of America's) internal contradictions. I emerged into the near nihilism of Enough of Green when I was living in Oxford and then rejected academia for the visionary release of Minute by Glass Minute in the Welsh border country. For a time I considered myself to be a "religious poet," but ultimately I decided the attractions of absolute belief were a delusion. The Fiction-Makers is a set of variations on a theme by Shakespeare-cum-Bentham: all the world's a stage, and all we can truly believe—even, perhaps, in mathematics and the natural sciences—are our own ideas. Writing a biography of Sylvia Plath convinced me that poetry today is at a turning point. Nostalgic wistfulness, individual self-pity, political idealism, angst, fury, vindictiveness, all the emotional magnets of the romantics, are, in the last analysis, fictions. They have been replaced in poetry, in the twentieth century, chiefly by abstract experiment with language, which, of course, is starvation fare for poets. The Other House is an attempt at a new departure; it is a slender book of poems, but I like to think it makes its peace with language and that it finally turns away from the mirrors of self-interest and begins to look out the window.
* * *"We were the very landscape / We walked through," Anne Stevenson wrote in her first volume, Living in America. The correspondence of physical and moral landscapes has recurred throughout her work, whether the "landscape without regrets" of the Sierra Nevada (Reversals), the modest frugality of Cambridge and the Fens, or the isolation and asperity of the northeast coast of Scotland, which is the setting for most of the poems in Enough of Green. "Living in America" describes a continent that threatens its residents, its two shores "hurrying towards each other" while "desperately the inhabitants hoped to be saved in the middle, / Pray to the mountains and deserts to keep them apart." "The Suburb" gives human face to this fear—a sullen and domesticated defeatism that says, "Better / to lie still and let the babies run through me"—while "The Women" quietly records a similar suppression in its picture of "women, waiting, waiting for their husbands, / sit[ting] among dahlias all the afternoons, / while quiet processional seasons drift and subside at their doors like dunes."
But much of Stevenson's poetry has been a revolt against this tyranny of the environment over the self. Correspondences: A Family History in Letters traces 150 years in the life of the Chandler family on both sides of the Atlantic. In the last letter of the volume the fictitious poetess Kay Boyd writes to her father from London of her flight from the United States: "'Nowhere is safe.' / It is a poem I can't continue. / It is America I can't contain." Flight here involves refusing "the tug back" of "allegiance to innocence which is not there," deliberately leaving it unclear whether it is innocence or allegiance that is lacking. The "correspondences" of the title are in one sense those between the unsustainable poetic project and the unimaginable magnitude of America. But in the letters themselves new correspondences emerge as successive generations live through corresponding dilemmas, flights, and returns, sometimes unwittingly using the same language to describe their plights. Thus Kay's sister, Eden, writes to her of a recurring nightmare after their mother's death, asking her to come home in words that echo their ancestor Reuben Chandler, a prodigal son writing in 1832 to his father, a Vermont minister, of his own wish to return. Kay's desire to "make amends for what was not said," not just in her own relationship with her parents but also through all the fraught generations of her family, to "do justice to the living, to the dead," likewise recalls the earlier father writing to his errant daughter in Yorkshire, mourning a husband lost at sea. Preferring, in her father's words, "the precarious apartments of the world / to the safer premises of the spirit," his daughter nevertheless chooses a fall from grace that brings a profounder suffering than he, in his naive self-righteousness, can ever know. Kay Boyd, having the last word in the book, makes it clear that this is a price worth paying.
Travelling behind Glass attempts to justify this peripatetic living as a conscious moral choice. The title poem toys with residence, imagining "a heart at grass" among the "predictable greens" of an accepted landscape but opts instead for "the paranoid howl of the / highway," where the "carapace" of the car becomes a symbol of the freewheeling will that prefers even the risk of madness to domesticity. The theme of renunciation is reiterated in Enough of Green. This volume makes it clear that it is precisely the green world of the senses ("love grown rank as seeding grass") that has to be renounced in favor of the steely, ascetic discipline of an art that has replaced the Christian God as taskmaster. There is in all of Stevenson's poetry an extremist's desire for the sterility and outrage of the puritan's scalpel. What makes the Scottish landscape so attractive is its sense of life as stress and erosion, an attrition that uncovers the essential contours of a mind and a place.
There is a certain relentlessness of imagination, a dogged, insistent quality, to Stevenson's poetry, but it is protected from the stridency of those "intense shrill / ladies and gaunt, fanatical burnt out old women," whose fate she clearly fears in "Coming Back to Cambridge" and elsewhere, by both an elegiac sadness and a sly, wicked wit. The former is revealed in those poems that speak of love as the "remorseless joy of dereliction" ("Ragwort"), a song made out of deprivation and loss; the latter appears in a poem such as "Theme with Variations," with its cool worldliness.
Minute by Glass Minute uses landscape as the embodiment of contrary impulses. The sequence at its heart, "Green Mountain, Black Mountain," contrasts the cold, green mountains of Vermont, where Stevenson spent her childhood, with the "lusher Black Mountains of South Wales (rich in history and myth, but new to me)" of later residence. In part an elegy for her American parents, it speculates on the dialectical tension of Old and New Worlds, puritan and hedonistic impulses, a landscape threaded with history compared with one still apparently inviolate. "Threads," as a trope that links meaning, handwriting, stitching, and affiliation, runs through the sequence, raising questions about the larger impulse to establish connections, stitch together significances, that pervades the volume. The landscapes of the volume are damp, bedrizzled, and misted, and even summer is "steamy" with wet. Weather gets in the way of an eye that wants simplicity and transparency of meanings. In one poem Stevenson charges Blake with romantic obfuscation: "How dare you inflict imagination on us! / What halo does the world deserve?" But Stevenson also recognizes her own incompetence before a world that refuses meanings, where "even my cat knows more about death than I do." She is driven to quiet fury by the inadequacy of words, unable to paint "the mudness of mud" or the "cloudness of clouds." But this poem, "If I Could Paint Essences," sums up the antitheses of her vision, admitting that just as she arrives at the "true sightness of seeing" she unexpectedly wants to play on "cellos of metaphor": "And in such imaginings I lose sight of sight." Whatever else might be said, it is certainly true that Stevenson does not, in Minute by Glass Minute, lose sight either of words or of things.
—Stan Smith