The Ordinary Women is a poem from Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

's first book of poetry,
Harmonium

Harmonium (poetry collection)

Harmonium is a book of poetry by U.S. poet Wallace Stevens. His first book, it was published in 1923 by Knopf in an edition of 1500 copies. He was in middle age at that time, forty-four years old. The collection comprises 85 poems, ranging in length from just a few lines to several hundred...

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The Ordinary Women  Then from their poverty they rose,  From dry catarrhs, and to guitars  They flitted  Through the palace walls.  They flung monotony behind,  Turned from their want, and, nonchalant,  They crowded  The nocturnal halls.  The lacquered loges huddled there  Mumbled zay-zay and a-zay, a-zay.  The moonlight fubbed the girandoles.  And the cold dresses that they wore,  In the vapid haze of the window-bays,  Were tranquil  As they leaned and looked  From the window-sills at the alphabets,  At beta b and gamma g,  To study  The canting curlicues  Of heaven and of the heavenly script.  And there they read of marriage-bed.  Ti-lill-o!  And they read right long.  The gaunt guitarists on the strings  Rumbled a-day and a-day, a-day.  The moonlight  Rose on the beachy floors.  How explicit the coiffures became,  The diamond point, the sapphire point,  The sequins  Of the civil fans!  Insinuations of desire,  Puissant speech, alike in each,  Cried quittance  To the wickless halls.  Then from their poverty they rose,  From dry guitars, and to catarrhs  They flitted  Through the palace walls.

Opinion is divided about whether the poem expresses Stevens' distaste for romanticism in art, a "mordant satire...of all the things that other poems hold sacred"; or whether the poem is about "the refreshment that art, in its palace, gives to reality."

In support of the ironic reading, the stanza that includes the inscrutable line "Ti-lill-o!" suggests insipid observers of vulgar soap-opera art. The surrounding stanzas find the women bathed in silly moonlight that "fubs the girandoles", leaning out from "the vapid haze of the window-bays", listening to a guitarist who drones on and on — the whole proceedings rendered "faintly or overtly repellent". Milton J. Bates speaks of the "Ti-lill-o" of titillation, the guitars as Hollywood fantasies, "beta b and gamma g" as a love scene between a boy and a girl, the women as leading humdrum and sexually unfulfilled lives.

Stevens' use of the verb 'to fub' may be an interpretive choice-point. If that use isn't taken as ironically dismissing the romantic aura surrounding moonlight's effect on candelabras, there is an opening for the "refreshment of reality" reading favored by Buttel as well as Sukenick. "Presumably, " Buttel writes, "the women, having read the 'heavenly script' in their visit to the palace of art, return to reality renewed, 'Puissant' of speech and filled with
'Insinuations of desire.'"

In 1982, Los Angeles art rock

Art rock

Art rock is a subgenre of rock music that originated in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, with influences from art, avant-garde, and classical music. The first usage of the term, according to Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, was in 1968. Influenced by the work of The Beatles, most notably their Sgt...

 band The Fibonaccis

The Fibonaccis

The Fibonaccis were an American art rock band formed in 1981 in Los Angeles. The band consisted of songwriter John Dentino , Ron Stringer , Magie Song , Joe Berardi and later Tom Corey .-Overview:...

 recorded a spoken word

Spoken word

Spoken word is a form of poetry that often uses alliterated prose or verse and occasionally uses metered verse to express social commentary. Traditionally it is in the first person, is from the poet’s point of view and is themed in current events....

rendition of "The Ordinary Women" set to music on their EP (fi'-bo-na'-chez).