POETS Day! Things from William Carlos Williams

People who read a lot mispronounce words. There are a lot more opportunities to read obscurities than to hear them said. Rather than be embarrassed at the mangling, they should be proud at knowing how to use a word they’ve never heard. They’ve expanded beyond the town square. That’s good. But people still get embarrassed.

To help, there are thousands of ten- to fifteen-second YouTube videos titled something along the lines of “How to Say Qatar” or “How to Pronounce Siobhan.” Handy stuff.

The other day I was reading and came across synecdoche, which isn’t tossed around at the lunch counter all that often. I’ve been all over that word for years, throwing stress forward and backward. I finally went to YouTube’s “How to Pronounce Synecdoche” and it made me so happy. You have to go listen.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Don’t waste a Friday afternoon working. Go do that. Put something funny somewhere to catch people unaware. Be an acid free merry prankster. Synecdoche.

First, some verse.

***

Paterson is William Carlos Williams’s great work. He initially planned four books, added a fifth, and died with a sixth in the works. The poem is set in Paterson, New Jersey, with a one-third-dropped Nicene conception of Paterson as man and city, separate and inseparable depending on book or stanza, as the protagonist.

Most towns were not founded by Alexander Hamilton. Paterson comports with the majority, but Hamilton envisioned the city as an industrial center with the falls as its early engine and encouraged its growth into such. Hamilton got D.C. designer Peter L’Enfant involved and though there was some disagreement causing L’Enfant’s departure, his plan to harness the river’s power was implemented. Immigrants followed, more so than to most of the rest of the country: Germans, a bunch of English, Scots, and many, many Irish.

The Passaic River flows through the town, in whose midst lies Paterson Great Falls State Park, green for a block or so spreading from each bank. The Passaic Falls strikes just east of where Wayne Avenue and Maple Street intersect, if Google Maps is true. Assuming I’ve read properly, the settlement began below the falls and spread south, east, and west before eventually engulfing the wilderness to the north. Williams presents a beautiful image of water drawn from disparate sources in that wilderness, mixing violently, but running towards something common. Past eddies, shore lapping, with impediment rocks washed away long ago, right before the falls every drop is of a singular energy.

from Paterson, Book I

Jostled as are the waters approaching
the brink, his thoughts
interlace, repel and cut under,
rise rock-thwarted and turn aside
but forever strain forward—or strike
an eddy and whirl, marked by a
leaf or curdy spume, seeming
to forget   .

Retake later the advance and
are replaced by succeeding hordes
pushing forward—they coalesce now
glass-smooth with their swiftness,
quiet or seem to quiet as at the close
they leap to the conclusion and
fall, fall in air! as if
floating, relieved of their weight,
split apart, ribbons; dazed, drunk
with the catastrophe of the descent
floating unsupported
to hit the rocks: to a thunder,
as if lightning had struck

All lightness lost, weight regained in
the repulse, a fury of
escape driving them to rebound
upon those coming after—
keeping nevertheless to the stream, they
retake their course, the air full
of the tumult and of spray
connotative of the equal air, coeval,
filling the void.

That’s not a typo at the end of the first stanza. He did that weird thing with the period, like he meant to type an ellipsis but forgot until the end. He did it often and I’ve not figured out why. His poem.

Pause inducing punctuation aside, he presents an incredible image. I wish I could tell you all he intends to do with it, but I’ve only read book one as of right now – probably be through two this evening as I’m enjoying the poem a great deal. My understanding is that the falls is central, recurrent throughout. As a long poem it’s not well suited beyond excerpts for this series, but I’m stirred so I’m going to show off a couple of his more famous poems and a final that puts an explanation point to much of his work.

I’ll wager “The Red Wheelbarrow” is his most recognizable poem. Williams was associated with Ezra Pound’s bare Imagism school in his earlier public life. It’s unlikely he subscribed to the principles of Imagism so much as he saw fellow travelers and flirted with their band briefly. “No ideas but the things,” he wrote in his autobiography. The excerpt above was published in 1946, too far along in his career for mentorship or imitation. The first stanza has “jostled,” “rock-thwarted,” and “curdy.” Not many. He’s often sparing with adjectives, giving the few power.

“Red Wheelbarrow” is about building an image. He tells you so, gives an object, an aspect, another. We’ll all see red, wet, and chickens as we’ve been given. The wheelbarrow and all its dimensions we fill in. I see a one wheeled barrow where others might see two. It’s big. It’s small. In a field. Etc. He requires you do that, because he’s more interested in conveying red, wet, and near dinner. The point is pressed when you recognize that. The uniform three word / one word stanza form is meant not to distract or emphasize any one line or descriptor. Paradoxically, by splitting “wheel” and “barrow” in the text but not in the title, he draws attention to the fact that he had to fiddle to achieve what you’re not supposed to notice. He points it out so you can be sure and oblige by ignoring. He needs you to take care of the object so he can make it the instead of a.

There’s emphasis on the importance of defined imagery, the “so much” being poetry. The Imagist says “direct treatment of the thing.” Williams says “No ideas but the things.” Both imply that objects convey concepts better when presented with no or minimal editorializing. Poetry “depends” on the thing properly rendered.

The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

If not “The Red Wheelbarrow,” as I suggest, then “This Is Just to Say” would fit the bill as his most recognizable (My wife says, “Definitely most memed.”) I’m playing fast and loose with his dictum, but that’s his fault for stating a poetic maxim in his autobiography. The poem is – per my reading – about an idea, only here the idea is the thing.

I know, but hold on. An idea can be a thing. Just don’t go baroque hanging all sorts of other ideas on it. In this case, the thing is a relationship.

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Taking someone for granted has gotten a bad name. I want my wife to take me for granted. Other way too. Nobody wants to live in fear of abandonment. An “icebox” that’s accessible at breakfast tells us this is domestic. The bond is such that little transgressions won’t threaten, liberties can be taken. You wouldn’t do this to a stranger and that’s the point. Don’t worry about it. Eat the plum, but offer up an apology for form’s sake. There’s resiliency and comfort implied in the act that makes it intimate; a marital state.

I didn’t read either of the last two poems in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. I was astonished to find Yeats didn’t include Williams in the anthology at all. The two men knew each other and, I was under the impression, held each other in mutual respect since first introduced by Pound in 1910 (or 1912 – I just read about this but I’ve already returned the relevant book to the library but I’m pretty sure they met first in 1910). Eventually I got around to reading Yeats’s introduction to the anthology.

“A distinguished American urged me not to attempt a representative selection of American poetry; he pointed out that I could not hope to acquire the necessary knowledge: ‘If your selection looks representative you will commit acts of injustice.” I have therefore, though with a sense of loss, confined my selections to those American poets who by subject, or by long residence in Europe, seem to English readers a part of their own literature.”

He had to be referring to Williams. I don’t know that there was animosity between Willaims and Eliot, but Williams thought The Waste Land was a disaster. I believe he respected the poem, but its implication and effect was “the great catastrophe” that “returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt we were on a point to escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself—rooted in the locality which should give it fruit.”

From Richard Ellman’s Introduction to The New Oxford Book of American Verse,

“[Williams] wished in his verse to capture the very breathing of Americans, the rhythms of speech which were different from those in England. Eliot and Pound were too myth-conscious and philosophical, as well as too international. Against what he regarded as their portentousness, Williams celebrated immediacy, ‘contact’ with ‘those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose.’”

One of his the goals in writing Paterson was to identify an American poetic language. It was there in this chaos at the bottom of the falls, newly erupted and wholly different from the chaotic waters that came briefly glass-smooth.

from Paterson, Book I

the river comes pouring in above the city
and crashes from the edge of the gorge
in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists—

(What common language to unravel?
.   .   combed into straight lines
from that rafter of a rock’s lip.)

This last is front-loaded to distraction with modifiers. It was published in 1923 and I’ve read he was interested in the proliferation of mass market things. Here we have a list of stuff variously described but without syntax until “They enter a new world naked.” Everything above that line could be changed, replaced, or eliminated. It’s important because it’s unimportant. Below there is “stark dignity.”

I’m off to read more Paterson. Enjoy.

Spring and All

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast — a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines —

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches —

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind —

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined —
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance — Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken