Sherwood – Handout                ENGL783                     August 31, 2004

from "Some Questions About Modernism," David Antin, Occident Vol viii, N.S., Spring 1974: 6-38.

Two Conflicting Pictures of Williams:

Local Pediatrician and Poet

q       everyday, rural, emphasis on the visual, anti-intellectual; a natural, "individualist" and voice-oriented poetics; leads to the new American lyric.

Avant-garde Poet

q       thought-oriented, foregrounding language and constructedness, challenging readers perceptual and conceptual capacities, refashioning possibilites for poetic form, through visual, syntactic and rhythmic disruption.

1. "A World of Ideas, A World of Things" From Shucard, et al: (Modern American Poetry 1865-1960 152-58,  169-70)

            It was [Williams's] lifelong desire to invent a poetry rooted in American speech and experience, to convey a sense of felt life in his work by bringing poetry down from the pedestal of high art and locating it firmly in the familiar terrain of the poet's immediate environment. Far from heightening the experience of reality through exotic and highly refined language, Williams sought to express it directly, as artlessly as possible.  Of course, he knew that it requires a great deal of art to achieve the effect of artlessness, and he was constantly troubled by critics and readers who saw his work as lacking poetic intensity. […] How to convey imaginatively the world directly before you, 'close to the nose,' became the imperative of Williams, his radical and distinctly American style emerging more and more assuredly with each successive book. (139) [….]

            William Carlos Williams invented a poetry of heightened visual attention, rooted in a keen sense of place and expressed through the American idiom. In 1929, when the editors of the Little Review asked what he considered his strongest characteristic, he replied: "My sight . . . . I like best my ability to be drunk with a sudden realization of value in things others never notice." […] Williams consistently tried to write down-to-earth poetry that grew from the perceptions of everyday experience. (152) […]

            Williams made a major contribution to American Poetry; he taught a younger generation of poets to trust their experience and to write about the world they knew and felt. […] In both his poetry and prose, Williams gives us writing that is thoroughly "In the American Grain," as the title of his book on pre-Columbian American history [sic] announces.  His invention of the variable foot, his painterly eye, his incessant attention to the physical world, and his ear for the American idiom mark his work as distinctive and set a tone, style, and direction for a later generation of American poets. (170).

2. "Influence Dr. Williams" from The New Sentence, Ron Silliman (128-36)

Influence, that mediation which occurs during the composition of a text through its authors' awareness of other writers and writings, is a process so particular to the individuals and works in question, that it is impossible to discuss in any but the most crudely reductive terms. Yet its impact on poetry, particularly in this century, would seem to be pervasive. It is the active element in the political transformation of writing into Literature. [. . . .] Nothing demonstrates the power of this process—which, to reiterate, is at once both psychological and ideological—more clearly than the universalization of the influence of William Carlos Williams.

            No poet in the 20th-century has come to be seen as more "All American" than this Rutherford pediatrician, a phenomenon that may obscure, ironically, recognition of his Puerto Rican heritage, and which may be reducible (if the somewhat similar aspect of the public images of both Allen Ginsberg and Bruce Springstein are any indication) to an identification of the stereotypical national experience with the culture found in the smaller cities and tows of New Jersey.  Williams' verse is also taken to be the apotheosis of clarity, the "unmarked voice" against which every other poet's work can be compared for its stylization and artifice.  In a variety of capacities, his writing has been an active force within poetry for 60 years. […H]is presence made inevitable the eventual popular rediscovery of a number of other authors, particularly the Objectivists, whose reintroduction into the foreground of the canon in the 60s not only gave form to much of that decades writing, but also forced a re-examination of Williams' work in the light of their own, the result of which has been a multiplication of possible readings and a diaspora of impacts, to the extent that that question "Do you read Williams?", so fundamental to the fifties, can be replaced now with "Which is the Williams you think you read?"  [….]

When I was an undergraduate at San Francisco State and Berkeley in the late sixties, there was an assumption on both campuses that the revolution, in literature at least, had been successful.  It was commonplace by then for instructors to send students to certain works of Williams (and it was not mentioned that such pieces represented only a fraction of his total output or concerns) as exemplars of clarity in verse-statement and of the strict subordination of form to function:

As the cat

climbed over

the top of

the jamcloet

first the right

forefoot

carefully

then the hind

stepped down

into the pit of

the empty

flowerpot

This poem, older than its readers, was to be the gesture of the utterly contemporary! With its jamcloset designating an object few, if any, of us had ever seen. With its false parallel between right and hind.  With its two run-on words, a stylistic flourish that places its author squarely in the generation of Faulkner and Joyce.  With its equation of line length to the physical movement of the cat, a devise so deliberately cute as to be cloying.

            Often poems such as this were accompanied with some background information suggesting that prior to 1950 Williams had been considered marginal and obscure. Yet, as Paul Mariani's biography demonstrates, this was not the case[….] What once had been opaque was now the essence of lucidity.  Looking backward with an educated and biased eye, it was impossible to do more than wonder at the nature of the cataclysm. That conservative poetry which, we were told, had once cast Williams in the shadows now seemed linguistically dead and spiritually pointless. [….]

            There is of course a critical element of oppositionality in the work of William Carlos Williams, as indeed there is in Stein, Zukofsky, Olson, or Creeley.  In each instance it lies in the identification of method with content. Opposition to the horrors of daily life in the twentieth century, whether or not these are equated with any given social or economic system, is expressed through opposition to the normative or inherited practices of that literature which embodies the status quo. One need only read Spring & All, The Mayan Letters, or Proprioception to see that this writing presumes that perception itself is not possible within the confines of cultural norms.  Poetry, according to Williams, is defined as "new form dealt with as a reality in itself," or, again, "the perfection of new forms as additions to nature." Even in the distorted version offered by Pound, it is evident that this "poetics of the new" represents a fundamentally utopian project. [. . . .]

            Thus, even if the poetic revolution was a momentary success, its fruits were remarkably problematic. [. . . .Discussion of the institutionalization of poetry, MFA programs, etc.] In many instances, these younger writer/teachers have further contributed to the decentralization of poetry by creating out of their patchwork influences a new poetics of the "middle ground," a neo-academic verse in which the most profound literary influence is none other than William Carlos Williams.  What remains are the surface features of Williams' poetry. What is profoundly absent is the identification of method with content, and any recognition of a linkage between this and a broader social vision.  In dramatically extending the message of Williams over a period of three decades, what has been lost is the essential oppositionality of his work.  What is missing is precisely its challenge to the perceptual limits of the reader.  In an nation in which any literate individual can, unproblematically, read much of William Carlos Williams, that which has become truly opaque, even invisible, is the work of William Carlos Williams.