About William Carlos Williams, one of the best-known
American poets. I’ve always thought of Williams as the great minimalist: “The
Red Wheel Barrow,” “The Great Figure,” “This Is Just to Say,” and more. When I
ran into his work back in school, this was the impression I carried away. But
he wrote long poems too, and his Paterson
is a book-length poem. Whatever the length of the work, his voice is always
unpretentious and conversational, but that still can lead to striking moments.
The final word of “This Is Just to Say”
changes the poem from a simple, humble apology to a tacit acknowledgement of
the subtle everyday callousness involved in eating something you knew a loved
one was saving for something special. I actually had this poem in very much mind
when I wrote “Your Parsley and the Swallowtail Caterpillar” (#269), which could
just as well be read as a response to Williams’s poem as much as a response to
Berryman’s Dream Song 269. The speaker of my poem doesn’t himself eat what was
being saved, a caterpillar does, but he let it and subsequently wrestles with a
different take on a similar emotion—though I try to push past where Williams
ends his poem. This is one of my favorites of the nearly forty poems I’ve
written as part of this Dream Songs project. “The Great Figure”
is another poem I love, in no small part
because it’s the basis for one of the really beautiful couplings of poetry and
painting that I know of, Williams’s poem with Charles Demuth’s painting, I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. The painting is more than an illustration of the poem, it’s an homage to it, and
the painting is just brilliant in the way it so beautifully captures the dynamic
spirit of Williams’s deceptively simple minimalist poem. I’m not alone in
loving Art Deco design, which Demuth’s painting is such a perfect example of,
and I declare that it’s more than simple nostalgia to think that not enough in
contemporary design approaches the excitement and elegance of design from the
1920s.
This Dream Song is about more than an elegy for William
Carlos Williams, though. It’s that, but it’s also a longing for the state of rest
that Williams has attained with his easeful death. Henry has much work left to
do, and it’s still an open question whether he has the energy for it. His later
work doesn’t have the verve of his earlier work, and I think he understands
that—his body and along with it his mind are dimming. No choice but to press
on.
This is a sweet DS, missing the fawning of his other homages.
ReplyDelete"you had so many girls your life was a triumph"--ugh. That makes his life a triumph? And, the "book like babies" stuff--ugh, again. This kind of business doesn't hold up any more in the political environment that has arisen. I hit B. on this kind of stuff often enough, but in rereading a couple years after writing this, I need to say it again. B., who was so invested in his artistic legacy, would be rolling in his grave to know that his legacy is fast eroding now because this kind of sexist material has exhausted its currency. 2018 is already way different from 2015, which is eons past 1965 or whenever B. wrote this. I just don't think this flies anymore. It doesn't walk. Because of it, this work is blowing away like a pile of dry sand in a windstorm. Artistic creativity and procreation are analogous only at a level of meaningless superficiality, but that comparison had influence once because it implies that women aren't as creative as men because their ability to bear children makes artistic creation unnecessary. It's essentialist nonsense, it's based in misogyny, and I have no more patience with it. A tribute to WCW is fine, but when it's couched in these terms the goal becomes either to use the elegy as cover for a misogynistic claim, or else to use the misogynistic statements as (at least partly)the substance of the tribute. Actually, they work together. In the end, the poem becomes dated because of it. It dies and dries up and blows away, becoming more of the dust of our shameful history. Did B.'s time provide for this mode of political understanding? Yes it did. Fashion and received convention ran against this, which is the groove where B. chose to run because it satisfied his appetites. But it was wrong then just as it's wrong now. He and all the other men like him chose to act as if it wasn't, and that's why a poem like this dies. If there's more to the work, then we can amputate the dead parts. In the case of this short, deceitful, misogynistic poem, too much is lost. Let it blow away.
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