William Carlos Williams

            On Wednesday at 11:00 I went dark on social media and just started going into the 24-hour stretch of working on my Philosophy essay. I took a siesta as usual and grabbed a snack, but other than that I worked until it was time to leave for my English class.

            When I arrived at the Fitzgerald Building I went upstairs to use the washroom. On the way out I did a double take on the sign on the door across from the men’s room. It said “Moriarty Lab”. I was wondering if it was a joke. Professor Moriarty of course was an evil genius in some of the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories and was played up as Holmes’s arch nemesis. But he was a mathematics genius and based on the Canadian astronomer, Simon Newcomb. The Moriarty Lab turns out to be an infectious disease lab and it’s run by Assistant Professor Tara Moriarty.

            I stood outside the door with all the other students, waiting for the previous class to get out. They seemed to be running late though. Finally a young woman from my class cautiously opened the door to discover that there was no class in there at all.

            In the first part of the class we watched a very well made movie about William Carlos Williams in which Williams read his poetry sometimes and there was a lot of footage of New York City and New Jersey.

            The film begins with white lines on a highway at night lit by the headlights of a car and shot through the windscreen. The car passes a house and we see the silhouette of a young woman wearing a negligee in an upper floor window. Morning comes and we see that it’s a car that’s probably a 1930s model. The car stops with the New York skyline in view and the driver begins to write poetry on a prescription pad.

“a dream

we dreamed

            each

            separately …

           

that fused

in the night-

in the distance …

            the city …

a dream

            a little false …”

            Now we are downtown among the skyscrapers.

            We hear the voice of William Carlos Williams say, “Don’t try to work it out … Let the thing spray in your face.”

            He speaks about and to ordinary people.

            Allen Ginsberg, reading from his foreword to Williams’s autobiography, “He tips us off as to his … role of Eros …”

            Williams was a baby doctor.

            “ … some of those apartment houses, we’d be going down those stairs, and he’d say, did you hear this, did you hear that? Or we’d go into that car of his, and he’d scribble little words, and I’d say, what is he doing? … at times you’d feel this man is just too much … he was too much. But he never missed a trick. And all that stuff would come home, either in his head of on pieces of paper … in the evening, he’d assemble it.”

            Williams says, “ … I take the language as I find it … everything in our lives, if … it is authentic … and touches us deeply enough … is capable of being … a poem.”

            Between 1900 and World War I … when Williams was about 20 years old, you have the invention of not only the airplane … the automobile … high speed trains … the Marconi radio, you had for the first time the possibility of beaming radio waves around the world … you could be in two places at once … I don’t think we’ve had in the 20^th Century anything like the kind of acceleration like you have in the years before 1914 … the typewriter. If you compose on the typewriter, you’re obviously going to perceive very differently than if you write by hand … the look on the page … the whole feel of short, fast movement.

            Williams is trying to make making a poem an American activity. Americans … spending their lives putting machines together. He saw putting poems together in the same way … his idea that the poem is a thing made out of small parts.

            Williams says, “It’s what you do with a work of art … Poems are not made of beautiful thoughts, it’s made of words, pigments, put on, here, there, made.

            There is a scene on the streets of New York where people are given Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” to read for the camera.

            For Williams, the poem sitting on the page is a visual object.

            Here was a man who had a really sexual energy … tension between that sexual energy and desire, and fear and safety.

            Footage of Dr. William Eric Williams, the poet’s son, who is also a paediatrician, in the same community as his father.

            The best thing that ever happened to Williams was being a medical student, because he was always being taught to observe.

            Traditionally the doctor went to the home:

           

            They call me and I go

            It is a frozen road

            past midnight …

            The door opens.

            I smile, enter and

            shake off the cold.

            Here is a great woman

            on her side in the bed …

            perhaps vomiting …

            I pick the hair from her eyes

            and watch her misery

            with compassion.

            He stayed in New Jersey and stayed with the people whose lives he tended.

            The poet’s son: I’ll take you up in the attic where he had a part-time studio … The stuff on the walls was his … the record of the stock market from ’28 to ’32.

            Williams was born in the same town in which he lived all his life.

            He was the quintessential American poet in that his father was of old English stock, the mother, born in Puerto Rico, was part Basque, part Jewish, mixed Mediterranean French stock …

            When he was about 14 he and his brother were sent to a very fine school in Switzerland for one year. He returned to Rutherford and commuted every day to New York to attend one of the finest schools of the time, the Horace Mann School.

            Williams says, “ … we took the Chambers Street Ferry, walking up Chambers or Warren Street, taking the 6^th or 9^th Avenue El, riding up to 116^th or 125^th Street and walking up Morningside Heights and getting to Horace Mann High School in time for the 9:00 bell … I had some very good teachers at Horace Mann. There was an Uncle Billy Abbott … the first one who really led me toward English, toward writing.”

           

            When I am alone I am happy …

            When I reach my doorstep

            I am greeted by

            the happy shrieks of my children

            and my heart sinks.

            I am crushed.

            There was a split in Williams’s life. He was devoted to his family… but at the same time there was this urge to have a little liberation … He would go into New York Friday evenings or weekends, and there he could meet with writers, and a lot of artists … they helped him a lot to modernize his poetry … because when he first met them he was writing Keatsian poetry.

            Sweet lady, it seems a thousand years

            Since last you honoured me with gentle speech …

            I reach, with memory’s index o’er the stretching tears …

            Strict chiding reason …

            He remade himself. The art world became his example out of lack of other examples.

            Williams was interested in the visual arts. He visited the 1913 Armory Show and saw Marcel Duchamp’s scandalous “Nude Descending a Staircase”. He saw Cezannes and Picassos and Braques. He realized here was what he wanted to do, namely to deal with words just as these people were dealing with paint and not representing something.

            “No ideas but in things” was his way of insisting on the particular, the concrete, the palpable. That which is there and refusing to move into abstractions that distance one from life. He shunned the brandishments of an abstract mind.

            Williams says, “You can make a poem out of anything. Anything that is felt deeply is material.”

            In Williams’s day, the writers who couldn’t bear America would take off. Ezra Pound had become a very good friend of Williams and was always writing to tell him that he was wasting his time in New Jersey. So in 1924 Williams and his wife went to Paris on an extended visit, and this was one of the most important trips of his life. He met Hemingway and Gertrude Stein and saw Pound again. He defended Pound to his dying day. Although he had a very exciting time meeting these people and a lot of French writers, he decided that his life and work were in New Jersey and that was the best place for him to write the kind of poetry that he wanted to write.

            Accompanying a reading of his poem, “Spring and All” was the film of a woman giving birth and the doctor delivering the baby.

            Williams had a great taste for the cult of the new … intimately bound with the feeling about America as the new world … and with his being a paediatrician and bringing babies into the world.

            He felt an extreme psychic alienation … the simple, persistent fact of loneliness.

           

            I lie here thinking of you.

            The stain of love is upon the world.

            During the middle period of Williams’s work he started writing his long poem, “Paterson”. He was writing prose and superb short stories.

            Williams had a great influence on younger poets because he was talking a language that was fresh. Ginsberg had originally been reading Whitman, but he found in Williams his immediate parent.

            Ginsberg says, “To Elsie” is in some respects the predecessor to my opening line in “Howl”: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, mystical, naked …” “Elsie” begins: “The pure products of America/ go crazy.” “He is imagining the emotional or erotic life of some maid that has been sent by the state to work in his house. Seeing the poverty of imagination where desire is hidden. He was able to penetrate the blanket around our consciousness and point out that we were settling for less than we were born with.

            The long poem, “Paterson”, for many is Williams’s great poem, is a definite retreat, and it’s ironic that it made him famous because unlike his other poems it wasn’t ahead of its time. It was not that different from Elliot’s long poems.

            In “Paterson” it is frequently ambiguous whether he is writing about the city or a person called Dr. Paterson. It’s a poem without a story. It’s a panoramic view of urban American life.

            He wrote a letter, “That god damned poem has got me down. I write and destroy, write and destroy. The technique, the manner and the method are unresolvable. I flounder and flunk.

            It finally came to him how to do it. He came up with a paratactic construction without closure. The poem is collage of bits of New Jersey history with lyrical passages of his own composition. He uses letters that some of his friends like Allen Ginsberg wrote to him.

            Ginsberg reads the letter, “Dear Doctor, In spite of the grey secrecy of time and my own self-shuttering doubts in these youthful rainy days, I would like to make my presence in Paterson known to you, and I hope you will welcome this from me, an unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county of the world.”

            Ginsberg says that Williams’s line, “No ideas but in things” means that there’s no god.

            Williams died in 1963.

            … skyscraper soup –

            Either that or a bullet!

            We took a break, during which I was feeling exhausted from working on my essay.

            After the break, Scott said he’d broken a tooth earlier that day and he wasn’t sure how long he would last.

            We did close readings of a few of William Carlos Williams’s poems, starting with “The Young Housewife”.

            She is an object of desire. She is a fallen leaf already. Newly married. Before that? He compares her to a fallen leaf and then he symbolically runs over her with his car.

            Of “Portrait of a Lady”. It is inspired by “The Swing”, a painting by Jean Honoré

 Fragonard. It depicts an elegant garden scene in which a well-dressed young woman is swinging while a young man hides in the bushes and looks up her billowy dress while she swings above him.

            There is also a Henry James book entitled “Portrait of a Lady”.

            Williams describes the woman in a literary style called a blason which usually cuts women up into parts.

            Who is the interrogative voice in the poem? Is it the woman on the swing?

            All of Williams’s poems concern women.

            Of “Spring and All”, this is the poem that put him o the map. He followed Pound’s advice and made it new. Scott reminded us of the video of a woman giving birth that accompanied the poem and informed us that Marjorie Purloff was responsible for the video and all the videos in that series.

            The contagious hospital first line creates a sense of distaste from the start. There is a description of a wasted landscape. This is his answer to Elliot’s Wasteland, which Williams hated. This waste is not presented as symbolic. It’s a real, dead field. The first sign of life in this wasteland is reddish and purplish, like the colour of a newborn baby. There is the feel of time-lapse photography.

            The final poem we looked at was the one that came to be called The Red Wheelbarrow, though it was not supposed to have a title. It’s a visual composition. It’s not about a red wheelbarrow. It is a red wheelbarrow.

           

The line, “So much depends” is upon the word

“Upon”

“glazed by rainwater” means the sun has just come out.

The syllable count is perfectly balanced.

It ruins the poem to put in a title.

Scott let us go at about 20:15. I went straight home, and ate a quick dinner while continuing to work on my essay. I put in a couple of hours and then I went to bed an hour early.

           

           

           

           

           

           

           

             

           

           

           

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