Illustrated Wallace Stevens: Madame La Fleurie

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I recently devoured two of the excellent collections of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates assembled by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell for IDW. It seems appropriate to apply my feelings about Caniff’s narratives to a Wallace Stevens poem. The piece shows the difference between illustration and interpretive cartooning. Stevens’ work roils with imagery, but it is very easy to step on the words, so my incorporation of the text with the art in the form of a faux-Sunday comic strip balances between literality and a parallel path of my own. The finished strip gives me deja vu, as if somewhere in time I have seen something like it before, perhaps in an old National Lampoon, or maybe in a pop art collage of old Terrys.

 

 

Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index
James Romberger’s Website

 

Illustrated Wallace Stevens— Flyer’s Fall

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Flyer’s Fall

This man escaped the dirty fates,
Knowing that he died nobly, as he died.

Darkness, nothingness of human after-death,
Receive and keep him in the deepnesses of space —

Profundum, physical thunder, dimension in which
We believe without belief, beyond belief.

 

 

 

Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index
Bert Stabler’s Website

 

Illustrated Wallace Stevens — Frogs Eat Butterflies. Snakes Eat Frogs. Hogs Eat Snakes. Men Eat Hogs.

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It is true that the rivers went nosing like swine,
Tugging at banks, until they seemed
Bland belly-sounds in somnolent troughs,

That the air was heavy with the breath of these swine,
The breath of turgid summer, and
Heavy with thunder’s rattapallax,

That the man who erected this cabin, planted
This field, and tended it awhile,
Knew not the quirks of imagery,

That the hours of his indolent, arid days,
Grotesque with this nosing in banks,
This somnolence and rattapallax,

Seemed to suckle themselves on his arid being,
As the swine-like rivers suckled themselves
While they went seaward to the sea-mouths.

Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index
L. Nichols’s Website

 

Illustrated Wallace Stevens — Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

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Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

 

 


 

 

Illustrated Wallace Stevens Index
Edra Soto’s Website