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Harris Feinsod on William Carlos Williams ("To Elsie")
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Harris Feinsod joins the podcast to talk about William Carlos Williams, his great book of 1923, Spring and All, and one of its strange and unforgettable poems, "To Elsie."
Harris is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is the author of The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures (Oxford UP, 2017) and the co-translator (with Rachel Galvin) of Oliverio Girondo's Decals: Complete Early Poems (Open Letter, 2018). Harris's articles and essays have appeared in such publications as Comparative Literature, American Literary History, English Language Notes, Modernism/modernity, The Baffler, In These Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, n+1, and Post45. You can follow Harris on Twitter.
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Transcript
Introduction and Welcome
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and it's my great pleasure to have Harris Finesod on the podcast today.
Exploring 'To Elsie'
00:00:12
Speaker
Harris has chosen a poem by William Carlos Williams for our conversation. And the poem, well, the title that Williams eventually would give it is to Elsie, though, as I think we'll discuss soon enough, the poem was originally published in Williams's book,
00:00:31
Speaker
from 1923, the book Spring and All.
00:00:36
Speaker
And in that book, the poem doesn't have a title. So we'll say more about all of that soon, and we'll come back to Williams and the poem in a minute. Let me just say here at the outset, though, of course, as always, that for people who would like to look at the poem as we talk, or even to look at it now before we really get going in earnest, there's a link in the show notes to a text of the poem, so you'll be able to see it there.
00:01:03
Speaker
And this is one of those cases in which we have a recording and in fact there exists multiple recordings of Williams reading the poem himself. So you'll get to hear Williams read the poem soon and I'll make links to all of that available.
00:01:18
Speaker
in the episode notes.
Introducing Harris Finesod
00:01:20
Speaker
But first, let me tell you about our guest, Harris, who's a friend of mine and nice friendly face to see on my screen right now. Harris is an Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where he is a literary and cultural historian of the US, of Latin America, and of the Atlantic. More about that in a minute.
00:01:44
Speaker
He works on poetry and poetics, modernism and the avant-garde, multi-ethnic US slit, and transnational studies. Harris's first book is called The Poetry of the Americas, From Good Neighbors to Countercultures, and was published by Oxford University Press in 2017 with a paperback edition that came out in 2019.
Harris Finesod's Literary Contributions
00:02:09
Speaker
That book tells the history of relations between poets, poems, and the political and cultural, sometimes counter-cultural institutions that sponsored, attempted to define, and ultimately sustained those relations in the Americas from the end of the Second World War to the late 1960s.
00:02:33
Speaker
Harris is at work on a second book called Into Steam, The Worlds of Maritime Modernism.
00:02:40
Speaker
which is a global account of transoceanic and dockside poetry, narrative fiction, visual art, and radical history in the early 20th century. So Harris's first book, you know, really focuses on the second half of the 20th century or a portion of the second half of the 20th century. In his second book, he's going back in time to an earlier part of the 20th century, though keeping his focus on
00:03:07
Speaker
on oceans and on, well, dockside poetry, as he puts it. Harris' essays and articles, including things that are from the new book, can be found in journals like American Literary History, Modernism Modernity, English Language Notes, Comparative Literature, Modern Language Quarterly,
00:03:29
Speaker
And he's also written for places like the Baffler in these times, Los Angeles Review of Books, N Plus One, and Post 45.
Cultural Exchange and Waterways
00:03:40
Speaker
Harris is also a co-translator with Rachel Galvin of Oliverio Gerondo's Decals, Complete Early Poems, which was published by Open Letter in 2018 and which was shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Poetry. So let me say just a word about
00:03:59
Speaker
Harris's method and approach, which I think I first encountered several years ago at a conference, and it came there as a kind of revelation to me, like one of those moments where you think, oh, of course, this is how literary history should be done. That rather than siloing off poets into national literatures, particularly in an age where the poets understudy
00:04:25
Speaker
are themselves traveling globally and in which their poems are circulating almost instantly. We should pay attention not to the land, but to the waterways that connect those lands. So oceans, ships, docks, et cetera, become sites of exchange and encounter and meaning making.
The Invitation and Poem Selection
00:04:47
Speaker
and water itself becomes an image of history differently conceived. It was like suddenly seeing the photographic negative of an image you thought you knew, the image of the globe, and realizing that you'd mistaken figure for ground. That's what it was like for me to first encounter Harris's work, and I've been so pleased and excited to be able
00:05:12
Speaker
develop a friendship with Harris over the years since, and to have him here now on the podcast, something I've been hoping for for a while. Harris Vinesod, how are you doing today? I'm great, Cameron. It's great to be with you. Thanks so much for that beautiful introduction. I was trying to remember, was it the Hart Crane Society Panel at ALA? It may have been. I think so. Yeah, which makes sense. There's an oceanic presence for you.
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, it was that. But then, you know, there have been Modernist Studies Association conferences and meetings of the MLA, of course, too, where we've got to appear together and talk and where I've been learning so much from you. So, you know, I contacted you a while ago, I think, and I said, hey, do you want to come on the podcast? What do you think? And of course, the first thing that a guest has to do is to think about a poem and a poet that they might want to talk about. So
00:06:10
Speaker
I sort of knew going in talking to you that I really didn't know who you might select. With other guests, I thought, oh, I hope, I'm sure they'll probably select this poet or that poet. And sometimes I'm right, sometimes I'm wrong with you. I really wasn't sure. And so you said Williams. That did make a kind of sense to me, but I'd love to hear more from you about what led you to make this choice.
Fascination with 'To Elsie'
00:06:34
Speaker
Well,
00:06:37
Speaker
You know, this is a poem that we're going to talk about that I haven't, you know, sat there like writing book chapters about or something like that, but it's something that I constantly return to and that vexes me and intrigues me. And so I thought maybe it would be fun to try to work out some of that with you today. I also happened to be teaching it and I did think like, you know,
00:07:03
Speaker
Last year was the centennial of the wasteland, and we had a lot of attention to the wasteland and all of the typical thumping about it. And so far, spring and all, centennial has come in without a whisper, but we are truly in the midst of it right now. We are. Though, as you reminded me, you are on the record as being against centennials. Harris has written a lively and persuasive, I thought,
00:07:32
Speaker
I don't know what to call it, a blog entry or a short piece online that expresses his feelings about the impulse towards celebrating a centennial of a literary publication or of other things, I suppose, for that matter. You make a good case against centennial. So is this you reluctantly admitting that there is something to the phenomenon that's worth entertaining? I guess I'm just full of contradictions.
00:08:03
Speaker
That's good. That's good. You contain multitudes here. And maybe it's worth situating just before we get to the poem itself.
Historical Context of 'Spring and All'
00:08:18
Speaker
Maybe it's worth situating
00:08:21
Speaker
This poem a little bit in the context of the book in which it first appeared, so Spring and All, as you say, published in 1923, as you say, published, therefore, a year after The Wasteland and many other sort of canonical, high-modernist texts.
00:08:39
Speaker
Though The Wasteland really does seem to be a book that bothered Williams or vexed him and that he's responding to in some places in this book. That's a book that contains some of Williams's most anthologized poems. So people who know, for instance, The Red Wheelbarrow, that poem was first in Spring and Doll as well.
00:09:01
Speaker
But Harris, what would you want us to know about that book's place in poetic history or this poem's place in that book? For people who have heard of Williams and maybe have read a couple of Williams poems, what should they know about this poem's placement in that book? I think it's really important.
00:09:28
Speaker
In some ways, I mean, we're familiar, perhaps your listeners are familiar with the kind of powerful decontextualization, say, of a poet like or sort of dematerialization of a poet like Emily Dickinson. I saw that Jenny Jackson was on the podcast a couple weeks ago. And but I think something similar happens in the anthological process of turning Williams's weird modernist books into standalone poems that can appear and whether in his collective poems or in
00:09:58
Speaker
anthologies and the like. We're on a subway car or something like that. We're on a subway car exactly or on the Poetry Foundation website or whatever. And so Spring and All was a book that was published by William's friend Robert McCallman in 1923 on contact editions was a small press that he started in Paris. I believe it was with the money that came from his spouse Briar who
00:10:29
Speaker
I mean we don't have to get into the complicated relations of everybody but I think it's worth noting because that means that not only was the Cunard line
00:10:43
Speaker
kind of heirs to the Cunard line sponsoring modernist production, but also the Ellerson lines, which comes into the JP Morgan shipping cartel. So at the end of the day, if you want to kind of follow the money for small modernist books, it's mostly
00:10:59
Speaker
big shipping magnate money. That's fascinating. Anyway, that's not the kind of interest here, I think, for us, but a very slender little book published in Paris, like many books of that moment shipped to the U.S.
00:11:16
Speaker
Robin's Egg Blue, beautiful little book, but not published, not republished in facsimile until 2013, I believe, in a nice edition that New Directions did with a lovely introduction by the sadly deceased CD poet, CD Wright.
Experimental Structure of the Book
00:11:33
Speaker
And that initial publication, I think a couple of things that are worth saying about it is there was only maybe 200 or 300 copies of it, half of them impounded by the
00:11:42
Speaker
post office immediately so this book had almost zero circulation right really within a very small coterie and there i think is a moment in the like an important moment in the 1950s when a lot of younger poets kind of went to Rutherford to visit Williams and reckon with his legacy and try to think through what the that that earlier generation of modernists was up to where that sort of small press
00:12:09
Speaker
It's kind of legendary, small press quality featured as an important kind of light. But it didn't really have a life as a book. But it is a book of what we could call Prosymetrum, a mixture of prose and poetry that has a very long tradition. It's an experimental book that clearly is breaking a lot of traditions, but it also is something that
00:12:36
Speaker
Boethius and Dante and others had written. So he's kind of working in the venerable tradition of prosy-metrum. And so there are prose sections that alternate with sections of verse that sort of flow into and out of each other sometimes in sort of coherent ways, but often sort of disjunctively.
00:12:56
Speaker
That's right. It's written in chapters that it starts with chapter 19. It goes immediately to chapter 13 with the title upside down. And then it goes to chapter 6 and 2 and then back to 19. And then the poems start. The poems are numbered in Roman numerals. They're numbered accurately, I think, from 1 to 27 or something like that. The Hawaii chapter 19, I don't know whether that is a kind of in media res 20th century thing or a joke about
00:13:24
Speaker
Victorian codes of poetics about the 19th century that he's making. There's something, because 19 repeats and he puts it in Roman numerals once, and it's a kind of funny set of gestures that you can follow. So you may be against centennials in calendrical time, but it seems like William's at least is thinking about the sort of structures of centuries maybe.
00:13:47
Speaker
Maybe a little bit. I don't know. He's poking at them a little bit. He certainly had a sense of what it meant to be on the brink of a new kind of feeling about the 20th century. And we should probably say that though, as you say, the book didn't have a big impact when it was first published, that Williams was not, at least to the other, I mean, Williams was friends with, right,
00:14:11
Speaker
you know, all of the other sort of canonical modernist, you know, high modernist poets and was known by them. And this wasn't his first book, right, either. So, yeah.
00:14:22
Speaker
Oh,
Williams' 1945 Reading of 'To Elsie'
00:14:23
Speaker
yeah. So it's not that it had no reception, but it did not have a, I think, I mean, it certainly did not have a wide reception. Right. Fair enough. And, you know, I think a lot of poets in the Williams tradition kind of will say things about, you know, I write for 10 people or something. And at this point, I think that's a little bit the structure of his
00:14:45
Speaker
imagination of an audience. Although it's a moment where he's really committing himself to his poetry. It wasn't obvious given his career as a family doctor. I think that this kind of
00:15:01
Speaker
habit would be a sustaining practice across his life necessarily. Across the previous decade, he had spent a lot of time like weekending with everyone who was anyone in the kind of American avant-garde and the exiles from the European avant-gardes that were there during
00:15:22
Speaker
World War I and so on, and was really around that moment. Already a decade previously, he had recited his poems at the Armory Show, as I understand it. So for the scene of the modern in the United States was something that he was very intimately connected to, also through his college friends Ezra Pound and HD and Charles DeMuth. So he's intimately enmeshed in that world, but also at a little bit of a remove in his suburban family
00:15:51
Speaker
practice and so on. Right, in New Jersey, right, where he was born, died, and lived basically all his life. That's right. And you said something about his influence to poets, say poets in the 50s. It's an interesting case, right? Like it can be measured in different ways and between poetic camps that we think of as opposed to each other. So Williams was
00:16:19
Speaker
like a crucial poet for people like Allen Ginsberg and the Beats, but then also he's a crucial poet for Robert Lowell and other poets. I think Jarell too, for instance, takes a lot from him about kind of the reality of the poem and all that stuff. Right, right, right. Okay, so the poem that you've chosen for us, the poem, like I say, that gets called to Elsie, which didn't have that title in the book,
00:16:43
Speaker
It's an interesting title that he gives to it, even sort of after the fact, in collected editions of his poetry, and I think we'll hear him call the poem that in the recording that I'm about to play, which is from 1945, from a recording that he made at the Library of Congress.
00:17:06
Speaker
And just to, you and I were talking about this before we started. Williams was born in 1883. He died in 1963.
00:17:16
Speaker
So 1923 comes at exactly the midpoint between birth and death as a 40-year-old man, he publishes this book.
Themes and Aging Voice in 'To Elsie'
00:17:27
Speaker
So the recording, in other words, that we're about to hear is from another 20 or 22 years on from there. So by the time he's reading this poem, it's not really fresh, but it's rather more
00:17:40
Speaker
a kind of canonical piece of his own of, I think. Harris, anything else to say before we play the recording about, I mean, we should certainly feel free to come back to talk about Spring and All as a book or Williams' career or a place more generally, but is there anything else you'd want to say setting this up? Well,
00:18:04
Speaker
Maybe we can just play it and then keep going. I don't know. Yeah, that's good. Let's hear the poem. So you're about to hear William Carlos Williams read to Elsie. Again, the poem was first published in 1923 in Spring and All, but the recording you're going to hear is from 1945 in the Library of Congress. Here's Williams. To Elsie.
Analysis of Opening Lines
00:18:28
Speaker
The pure product of America go crazy.
00:18:32
Speaker
mountain folk from Kentucky, or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its death mutes, thieves, old names, and promiscuity between devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure.
00:18:49
Speaker
and young slatterns bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday, to be tricked out that night with gods from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character, but flutter and flaunt sheer rags, succumbing without emotion, save dumb terror, under some hedge of choke-cherry or viburnum which they cannot express. Unless it be that marriage, perhaps with a dash of Indian blood,
00:19:15
Speaker
will throw up a girl so desolate, so hemmed round with disease or murder, that she'll be rescued by an agent, reared by the state, and sent out at fifteen to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs, some doctor's family, some Elsie.
00:19:31
Speaker
voluptuous water, expressing with broken brain the truth about us, her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewellery and rich young men with fine eyes, as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky, and we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth.
00:19:52
Speaker
While the imagination strains after deer going by fields of Goldenrod in the stifling heat of September Somehow it seems to destroy us it is only an isolate flex that something is given off No one to witness and adjust no one to drive the car So once again, that's William Carlos Williams reading
00:20:17
Speaker
the poem that we're talking about today to Elsie reading it in 1945. Harris, what goes through your mind as you listen to Williams's recording there? I mean, I'm struck by so many things in this poem, and it's a poem that I think
00:20:42
Speaker
first came to my attention as a sort of young poetry student in college and there are sort of mantras in this poem that you just can't
00:20:53
Speaker
the pure products of America go crazy, no one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car, those kinds of moments. So it's bookended by what become these... That's right. ...isolate flecks of poetic thinking that lodge in the idioms of American poetry so powerfully. Yeah, I don't know if it's just projection on my part, but I feel like I can almost hear in Williams's voice his awareness of the
00:21:23
Speaker
of the totemic status that those lines would acquire, had by 45 already begun to acquire?
Poetic Traditions and Intertextuality
00:21:30
Speaker
I don't know, at the beginning and end of this poem. Yeah, that's a great point. I think that there's some sort of process of recreating their impact, and recreation is an important word for Williams across. Good. In this later moment, whether or not
00:21:48
Speaker
The poem is really quite singular within the textures of the poetry of spring and all. And I guess one other thing to say about spring and all as a volume is I think we have a lot of habits of reading poetry that resolve themselves on the single poem. This podcast is called Close Readings. I think the format very sensibly is organized around the reading of a single poem.
00:22:16
Speaker
You can offer a critique, please. But that is one among several ways of organizing one's attention to the poem. And there's a scholar that I love, of course, he's my dissertation advisor, I particularly love him, but Roland Green, who's written, I think, compellingly about some of the other ways of organizing one's attention to poems. And one of them might be what he calls the integrationist school of reading poems, which is to just be fundamentally interested in how poems are related to other poems.
00:22:45
Speaker
which is a different activity. And so reading across the poems of Spring and All would be one way of doing that, thinking about Williams's poems in relationship to other comparative dimensions across US modernism or something. But also for me, a kind of fundamental interest is to think about how this poem fits into other ways of thinking about what he calls here America. We might call the Americas because I think the situation
00:23:14
Speaker
of or predicament of this poem is one that many poets across the Americas faced. So, I don't know, maybe that's one that sets up a few things we can
00:23:27
Speaker
follow up on. Yeah, well, why don't I just take the last thing you said and ask you to elaborate on it in a way, and this returns us, of course, to the first, conveniently, to the first line of the poem. I want to bracket that for a second and say that maybe one ambition that's been a kind of emerging one for me with the podcast is that though the units of attention here are being paid to individual poems,
00:23:52
Speaker
that there might be some kind of a creative phenomenon that's ongoing where we sort of allow ourselves to refer to other conversations about other poems and develop these strands of connection because I'm totally persuaded by the value of doing so.
American Poets' Cultural Identities
00:24:08
Speaker
It's clear that there's a universe or a galaxy of inter-animating phenomena that are here in this podcast. But there is a kind of schoolroom tendency towards the single poem and I just wanted to kind of mark a possible difference. And for people who aren't as sort of firmly in this world as Harris and I are and sort of laughing with each other about
00:24:35
Speaker
that tendency is very much like a product among other things of the new criticism and of a certain form of pedagogy in which the poem, not even the poet, but the poem sort of decontextualized, is the object of study.
00:24:52
Speaker
And I'm both kind of indulging in my desire to do that kind of pedagogy, but also find my own attention sort of straying away from it here and there. Okay, but let me bring us back to the, I'm like a good new critic, let me bring us back to the first line of the poem. The pure products of America, and then we get a line break, go crazy. And then there's a dash.
00:25:20
Speaker
and the second at the end of the second line. So, Harris, you said something a moment ago about how what Williams calls America there, we might want to call the Americas because if I was hearing you right, what Williams is,
00:25:40
Speaker
responding to is, I think you used the word predicament, a predicament or a kind of situation that would have been, that was preoccupying poets more broadly throughout the hemisphere at around this time. So say more about that. What's the predicament?
Irony in 'Pure Products'
00:25:57
Speaker
And what does that have to do with the concept of America or of pureness or purity?
00:26:03
Speaker
The anthropologist Jim Clifford used this poem at the beginning of a book called The Predicament of Culture to name what he described as, in the 1980s, an important contribution to anthropology's self-recognating about what the ethnographic project had been.
00:26:23
Speaker
So he saw one version of that predicament here in this poem about what, I mean, Williams is a physician, a family physician in this poem. He is also leveling what we could think of as something of an ethnographic gaze at a nursemaid who worked for him, who came to his home from the state orphanage in New Jersey. And he's, I think,
00:26:51
Speaker
replicating and also perhaps questioning some of the dimensions of what that kind of an ethnographic gaze looks like. He's doing that in a way that is thinking through what the problem of a kind of
00:27:09
Speaker
authentic or autochthonous American culture might be at the outset of the 20th century and whether or not it might be predicated on among other things on the fact of a multiracial society, the fact of a society structured by histories of coercive interracial
00:27:38
Speaker
you know, self creation and, and, and so he, so the pure products of America, of course, pure is, is, I think, a word that he is putting under a ratio, even as he invokes it, of course, when
00:27:55
Speaker
of Indian blood that comes up later in the poem signals that, among other things. So what it is to be a pure product of an impure place or a place that's defined by its impurity is to be impure then, right? Something like that, like a kind of constitutive impurity, I think. That has a variety of residences, I think, for Williams. One is the specific histories that
00:28:20
Speaker
He might be said to refer to the mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey. Scholars have suggested that the maid whose name we were talking about earlier, we can get into that. It may or may not have been Elsie or someone named Sadie, but that she
00:28:45
Speaker
probably came from the Ramapo Mountain Indians, who are a group of, for a long time, an unrecognized tribe, now federally recognized, that brought together the Lenape and Dutch settlers and so on. And the Kentucky thing, I don't know, he wrote a lot about Daniel Boone in the American Crane, and I think the kind of settler Kentucky,
00:29:15
Speaker
world is something that's in his imagination there too, and the displacement of the Shawnee. And so he's really thinking about like, I think indigenous removal, intermarriage, these kinds of questions, like the problem of what in his time might have been coded as my such a nation as a problem. And when I think about his putting that at the center of what kind of
00:29:41
Speaker
the problematic foreign American modernism. I think of the fact that that problematic is structuring so many ways of thinking about national culture in that moment, the mestizo modernism of like the Mexican revolutionary state is like the official sanctified image of with its own set of constitutive exclusions or the
00:30:06
Speaker
ideas about metissage in the French Caribbean or transculturation in the Cuban context, the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz wrote about. I believe that Williams is very much trying to imagine a United Statesian version of
00:30:25
Speaker
of a problematic that is under intense pressures across the Americas in this moment. But yeah, so what it means to live in Creole societies, basically.
Williams' Multicultural Influence
00:30:35
Speaker
Right. Right. So so I have a number of follow up questions, but maybe they're linked in some way. One is it occurs to me like, well, we're talking about a poet who in whose own name we hear a kind of mixing of linguistic traditions, right? William Carlos Williams and whose whose background is
00:30:56
Speaker
is perhaps by the terms that this poem would itself offer impure in some sense. So that's one observation I want to make, and I don't know if it's a meaningful one to you or if there's something you'd want to say about it by way of sort of talking about Williams's background. But then also in terms of poetic history,
00:31:20
Speaker
If, as I think we said in the intro to this conversation, that one of the things that Williams is responding to in Spring and All is the wasteland. The wasteland might present us with a very different model of what a mixing of cultures should look like.
00:31:43
Speaker
You know, the wasteland is, though, among other things, like a multilingual poem. Right. So, you know, is is is Williams like somehow interested in. I'm trying to think of the right terms to put this in an ambition that seems to have been encoded in certain kinds of like European
00:32:13
Speaker
modernist projects, but defining it in a kind of defiantly American or Americanist way, which
00:32:24
Speaker
is winds up looking quite different. So those are sort of two questions I have. And then the third question I had is like, what does go crazy mean? You know, what does he mean by crazy in the second line? But so take any of that. Let's try to do I'll try to do the first one, William Carlos Williams. Right. And I'll then try to do the second one. Yeah. And then we can get to the third.
Comparison with 'The Wasteland'
00:32:47
Speaker
Yeah. OK, so so
00:32:52
Speaker
you were referring to the fact that there appears to be a kind of, you know, kind of heterogeneous cultural background in William's own identity. So, William's parents, William George Williams was an Englishman who lived in the Caribbean from the age of five, Spanish speaking. His mother Raquel Helena Hoheb was a, I think her parentage was, her father was a
00:33:20
Speaker
was Dutch, Jewish, her mother was Basque. And they also were, you know, she grew up in Puerto Rico. She went to study in Paris a little bit, but it was basically in Puerto Rico. And then they moved to the US around 1981 or 82, which is about the same time, 1881.
00:33:40
Speaker
You said, oh, no, sorry, you said 1981. Oh, yeah, 18, excuse me, 18, 1881, which is about the exact same moment that Jose Marti ends up in New York City to just displaced in his exile from Cuba. But they are in different kind of political orbits. Marti and the Williamses, I think, Williams, William Carlos Williams, the Carlos comes from the uncle Carlos Hoheb, who was the brother of
00:34:09
Speaker
the mother. And he was kind of like a landowner in the Dominican Republic and was sort of ousted from his
00:34:19
Speaker
in 1879, I believe. And so it's within, it's shortly thereafter that they leave. And the Williams relationship, a lot of people have become interested, and I think rightly so, since the 80s, probably with Williams' bicultural identity. Is Williams a Latino poet? Does he belong to something called Latinx Modernism? My friend and colleague John Albert Cutler and
00:34:43
Speaker
Maria del Pilar Blanco have been asking this question in really wonderful ways. And before them Julio Marsan back in the 80s was asking this sort of question, Vera Kutsinski. And I think that as the like US
00:34:58
Speaker
kind of reckoning with the whiteness of the US canon came to pass. It was the case that William sort of felt like more of a sacred cow than ever precisely because he seemed to offer another possibility. Although it's clear in many ways that his thinking is structured by whiteness everywhere.
00:35:19
Speaker
And what the nature of his sort of like Latinidad was I think is interesting to explore. He talked about speaking Spanish with a like a choice hack and sack accent or something like that.
00:35:35
Speaker
And if he did grow up speaking Spanish in the home, he translated a lot of poetry from Spanish, but always with one of his parents, Jonathan Cohen has edited a volume of the translations a few years ago, but he's always working either with his dad or his mom or later with a professor that he knew and was, I'm going to forget the name.
00:36:02
Speaker
Okay. I give all this background in part because I think in the teens, you can think of Williams as like the American modernist, the one that stays in New Jersey while everyone goes to Europe. You can think of him as somehow representing the, but I think it's worth noting. Even Frost went to England.
00:36:20
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Williams goes and studies for a year in Leipzig medicine, and then later in the 20s, he goes to visit everybody one time. In the American Green, he writes about how just depressing he finds the whole scene with Valerie Larbeau and everything.
Aligning with American Culture
00:36:37
Speaker
I don't remember where I drew the quote from, but I have it in my notes so that in 1917, his old college buddy Ezra Pound reacted to the young Dr. Poe's first efforts at experimental poetry by sort of chiding him. He said, quote, An America, what the hell do you a blooming foreigner know about the place? And he goes on to say, in an early example of Pound's very sort of messy
00:37:06
Speaker
biological nationalism. You thank your blooming God, you've got enough Spanish blood to muddy up your mind and prevent the current American ideation from going through it like a blighted colander. I just think it's notable that those that are in William's own circle are sort of seeing that his efforts at a kind of Americanism are marked precisely by
00:37:31
Speaker
forms of difference that they're ascribing to him and so on. And so I think- Right, so that while he may have conceived of himself as white, I'm putting it more crudely than you did, that someone like Pound, his friend,
00:37:47
Speaker
you know, soon-to-be fascist friend, right? Nevertheless, would have marked and recognized him as not belonging in the same way that Pound did, for instance. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So the contradictions of his own kind of, kind of, identitarian claims are ones that I think he's never really, he never really works out
00:38:10
Speaker
For himself in as much of a kind of, I mean, there's a lot to say about how he works out for himself later, especially later on, but it's not on the, it's not on the surface of the book, like spring and all at all. But I think it is there just in a displaced way and what in what he's trying to
00:38:26
Speaker
Think through it terrific. No, that's really helpful. Now you were gonna say something maybe about like the wasteland and multilingualism If you wanted to still well, you know spring and all is one of the great kind of reposts to the wasteland for sure and It's all over the place, you know if we're if we're Elliott the you know
00:38:49
Speaker
roots and stony soil can't barely hang on. For Williams, the roots grip down and awaken. It's almost like a one for one response.
Language Use as Cultural Response
00:39:04
Speaker
The question of language that you brought up, the multilingualism of the wasteland is something that Williams
00:39:13
Speaker
spring and all quite actively. He says things like, let me see if I can find the page. It's early in the pros of the wasteland. Yeah, something about Sanskrit, right? Yeah, there's a couple of moments like that. So he says,
00:39:30
Speaker
If I could say what is in my mind in Sanskrit or even Latin, I would do so, but I cannot. I speak for the integrity of the soul and the greatness of life's inanity, the formality of its boredom, the orthodoxy of its stupidity, kill, kill, let there be fresh meat. And then he will say, you know, soon thereafter, again,
00:39:53
Speaker
And it is spring, both in Latin and Turkish, in English and Dutch, in Japanese and Italian. It is spring by stinking river where a magnolia tree without leaves before what was once a farmhouse, now a ramshackle home from mill workers, raises its straggling branches of ivory white flower.
00:40:11
Speaker
And these are, I think, quite beautiful moments of response to The Wasteland. Well, and for people, I mean, I guess probably people, lots of people do know The Wasteland. But if you don't, just bear in mind, it's the poem that begins, April is the cruelest month. So it has its own sort of claims to describing spring.
00:40:33
Speaker
And Spring and All has always struck me even as the title to the volume as a kind of, I don't know what kind of gesture that's making in response to something like the grandiosity. It feels very idiomatic and American and sort of in a minor key.
00:40:47
Speaker
That's a great point. I was trying to think about that a little bit as well.
Cultural Imagery and Symbols
00:40:52
Speaker
This is a book that's full of et ceteras, et ceteras, and so on. And so Spring and All kind of has that cast off. I suppose one could take it as like Spring and All. And All. I do think that the totality is something that is actually at stake as well. I really do think that Frederick Jameson says that Williams, especially later in Patterson, is a great poet of social totality precisely because the figure of the doctor is one that allows
00:41:17
Speaker
you to kind of work through different, you know, kind of like the detective figure that can be on skid row and then on in, you know, the houses of the elite or something. Yes. Yes. The doctor figures one where that vision of the social kind of comes to you, I guess.
00:41:33
Speaker
Yes. And Williams is not just, as you've said, famously Dr. Williams, the poet who's the family doctor. And sometimes we think of modernism as the era in which poets had these other jobs, Stevens, the insurance
00:41:49
Speaker
executive or Elliot the editor or whatever, Williams the doctor. But Williams is not to anticipate ourselves because it's very interesting the moment where it comes up in the poem, but there's a kind of oblique self-reference here as some doctor's family. So there's a kind of self-awareness of that role that's built into the poem.
00:42:12
Speaker
But okay, I want to go back into the poem, into that third question I asked, but then maybe to accelerate our progress through its lines a bit.
00:42:21
Speaker
the pure products of America go crazy. So I had asked, well, what does it mean for Williams for something to go crazy? But then what follows from there is this kind of rough and tumble group portrait or something of, I suppose, the people who are the pure products of America and we see them going crazy or something like that.
00:42:44
Speaker
You know, taking those first, let's say one, two, three, four, five, seven, you know, seven or so stanzas of the poem as a kind of little unit here where we get that kind of group portraiture. What are you noticing in them, Harris? And what, you know, in what,
00:43:02
Speaker
what, you know, maybe how do they illuminate what it is that crazy means for Williams? Right. Well, I think the first thing to say is just products. It's important that we, I think, register both the kind of biological sense of products as essentially offspring, right? Or there's like the kind of mathematical A, B,
00:43:23
Speaker
is different than A or B. Like the product of a function or something. Exactly. But there's also at the same time as that, I think, overwhelmingly biological determination of product is there. I think it's hard for us certainly to hear it without also
00:43:39
Speaker
Hearing a kind of commercial culture got more held right the culture of commercial manufacturer or something i think it's i think i think even in the twenties it's hard not to hear that word without that being there as well so even though this is a human i mean.
Imagination vs. Cultural Traditions
00:44:01
Speaker
It's within a world of degraded commercial culture, right? As though birth were a product of capitalism or something. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
00:44:16
Speaker
The, from there, the, I think it's, we talked a little bit about the kind of Kentucky and the north ribbed ribbed north end of Jersey as particular spaces of like, of potentially like fraught settler violence. So you have the kind of the
00:44:40
Speaker
railroading out of sheer lust of adventure, for instance, is one precisely where, again, as in the word product, the libidinal drive is linked to capital accumulation. Lust of adventure. Adventure not just as
00:44:57
Speaker
not just as the kind of template of narrative, but as precisely as the venture, as in capital. And so I think he's playing with that. He's thinking through something like what, you know, Grill Marcus kind of will call like old weird America, that kind of configuration.
00:45:19
Speaker
And he's coming to a notion of that space in which this gets a little bit beyond where you wanted it to be. That's OK. You can take us there. He settles on this kind of hard image, potentially sort of misogynistic image, a young slatterns bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gods from imaginations, which have no peasant traditions to give them character.
00:45:48
Speaker
Right. So imagination is the word of this entire book. Imagination is the thing that he celebrates. He's against everything. He's against symbolism. He's against meter. He's against rhyme. He's against similes. He's against representation itself. This book is a kind of broadside against mimesis itself. But imagination is something that he constantly is defining, redefining, affirming,
00:46:17
Speaker
singing to. And so here we have a poem in which there is kind of a diminished capacity for imagination, right?
Societal Roles and Identities in the Poem
00:46:31
Speaker
There is an imagination which have no peasant traditions to give them character, right?
00:46:36
Speaker
So that question of like peasant traditions, of course, again, the 1920s is a time when there are efforts to fashion different kinds of cultural nationalisms.
00:46:51
Speaker
that's an older kind of romantic national model from the early 19th century. But he's wondering what happens to romantic nationalism in the United States and how does it work when the images of
00:47:08
Speaker
culture that one might settle on are defined by really difficult spaces of settler violence, basically. And it's at that moment that he then kind of imagines a rape scene. Yeah. So coming without emotion save numb terror under some hedge of choke cherry or viburnum, which they cannot express. Yeah. Yeah.
00:47:36
Speaker
The book's full of botanical and horticultural detail, chokecherry or viburnum, the stiff curl of wild carrot leaf elsewhere. It's striking to me that he turns to that kind of language as a, I mean,
00:47:54
Speaker
literally as a hedge, I think. So he's hedging around the scene of violence that he's just evoked. Although I have to say, chokecherry seems rather over-determined as a kind of violent name. I think that's right.
00:48:14
Speaker
that's for for a plant yeah yeah yeah so um and maybe it's just worth backing up because i don't know i mean i realize this gets into some of the least pleasant stuff in the poem but we should be honest about it and um try to take our measure of it the slatterns itself as a word may feel somewhat unfamiliar to people um so this refers to a kind of what likes slovenly or unkempt presumably sexually promiscuous
00:48:42
Speaker
young woman, it's a kind of derogatory pejorative term that's related, I would suppose, etymologically to a word like slut. So young slatterns bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday to be tricked out that night with gods, right? Gods, an interesting homonym there, maybe. Yeah. So there's some kind of
00:49:10
Speaker
rape scene involving, or it's not even, maybe scene is the wrong way to describe it because everything is here is being described and it occurs to me now, Harris, in the plural, right? Like it's not one scene. It's like a recurring kind of situation or something, a repeated scene.
00:49:32
Speaker
I'm glad you brought that up. I think that gets us to the kind of unspecified quality of this poem, which is a strange feature. So we come soon thereafter, you know, maybe we should just read on a little bit more. Go ahead. Unless it be that marriage, perhaps with the dash of Indian blood, will throw up a girl
00:49:53
Speaker
so desolate, so hemmed round with disease or murder, that she'll be rescued by an agent reared by the state and sent out at 15 to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs, some doctor's family, some LC.
00:50:08
Speaker
that turned to some hard-pressed house in the suburbs, some doctor's family, some Elsie. We get later a repeat of the somehow and something in the final stanzas of the poem.
Dedication to Elsie and Gender Implications
00:50:22
Speaker
But I was thinking a little bit about the some because you mentioned his invocation of his own role as a doctor here. But it's one that at the same moment,
00:50:36
Speaker
specifies and fails to specify. He's turning these categories into generalities. He's making himself a generality. He's making the maid a generality. And I don't know what's at stake in that grammar of specification, basically. Well, I don't either, except that it seems to me, Harris,
00:51:05
Speaker
Just at first, thinking about it right now in real time, it seems quite different from the gesture of the first poem in the book, you know, by the road to the contagious hospital, the poem that sometimes gets the title afterwards, spring and all, et cetera. One by one, objects are defined, you know?
00:51:30
Speaker
um where what's you know clarity of leaf I'm not like I'm not going to get the the um the lines exactly right though I have the book here I could just look yeah um where you know one gets the sense that you're getting a kind of crystal clear um one by one objects are defined it quickens clarity outline of leaf um where it seems um
00:51:56
Speaker
like where Williams' attention wants to go is on the singular and on the kind of pristine noticing of the object or something. Here, this seems to be content with a kind of sociological tension or something, you know, offering her as a type or something like that, and himself too, as you say.
00:52:25
Speaker
some Elsie, some doctor's family, some Elsie. So one thing that you'll hear, listeners, dear listeners, one thing that you'll, one way you'll hear this poem often described is as a poem that Williams wrote about Elsie, a young woman who worked in his home and took, I think helped to like take care of the two young children, his and his wife's sons.
00:52:53
Speaker
So from what I can tell, Elsie is a kind of name that's invented for the poem. I might be wrong about that, but all the sources I've looked up have suggested that, like Harris, you mentioned earlier, there was a woman named Sadie whom this LC may have been modeled on. And maybe that explains some of the gesture of some Elsie, right? It's a type, not a person that he's after here.
00:53:22
Speaker
But then it also seems odd also to me that the poem, even when it's retroactively titled, is titled to Elsie rather than, I mean, he's not addressing her, is he? No. In the poem. So in what sense is the poem to her, in your view? I mean, I feel like I think in the sense of a dedication rather than an address, I do think that there's a kind of dedicatory function there that is supposed to be,
00:53:52
Speaker
perhaps even exculpatory for having put her in the poem in the first place or something. That's kind of what I hear. Can you say more about what's at stake and the distinction between dedication and address? Because we might think of those as very related gestures, but I take it and I think I understand how they might be different, but I want to hear you talk about it.
00:54:14
Speaker
Well, I don't know. I mean, a dedication is... I'm thinking this through for the first time in terms of the kind of occasional functions of... But if we think about the poetics of address in general to speak to...
00:54:31
Speaker
and the turns that it takes towards real or imagined speakers and the whole function of say apostrophe and poetry as a turn away from those real or imagined speakers towards other kinds of things. The function of a dedication isn't quite that, it's like
00:54:57
Speaker
You might dedicate a poem to someone and not think they're ever going to read it. Yeah. In fact, in memoriams would be precisely that. So there's a kind of, it's a short for dedicated to rather than so that just the function of the
00:55:12
Speaker
Right. And I guess what follows for me then is the question of what is the impulse that's being satisfied by a dedication to rather than an address to. And you were suggesting, I think a moment ago, that perhaps it's exculpatory or something, it's some kind of
00:55:31
Speaker
Well, Williams had bad ethics about the way he wrote about women in his poems, I think, overhaul. Good, yeah. There's, I think, several things to say. One is, I mean, this poem participates in these kind of, I think, some of the hardest moments in this poem are the scenes of, like, or the moments of corporeal description.
Critiques of Cultural Representation
00:55:54
Speaker
Should I take the burden off of you and read them right now? But it's actually, I'm just going to interrupt you. Hang on to your thought, Harris. So some doctors' family, some LC, voluptuous water expressing with broken brain
00:56:13
Speaker
And between broken and brain, we get not only a line break, but a stanza break. Expressing with broken brain the truth about us, with great ungainly hips and flopping breasts addressed to cheap jewelry, like as though what her body, from the poem's point of view, it seems kind of grotesque body,
00:56:36
Speaker
is expressing something essential about the us, from which, I don't know if she's excluded or not, but I think probably she is. It's like him and his wife and their family or something.
00:56:47
Speaker
Maybe? I don't know. We should track the first person plural through the poem because I think that it sort of takes over as we go, I believe. At least it comes in here quite strongly. We degraded prisoners and so on.
00:57:09
Speaker
So, I absolutely agree with you about that kind of co-involvement, and this is what I think we've been talking about with the kind of predicament of culture paradigm. And so, at the same time, it's very clear that he's allowing himself to participate in a kind of form of ethnographic description there.
00:57:32
Speaker
And that something that he's risking in other poems, Williams is very funny about avoiding doing that. He has a wonderful poem called Portrait of a Lady, where he sort of undoes the conventions of the blazon as the
00:57:50
Speaker
the kind of poem that describes the woman's body in parts, right? Part by part, right, yes. Part by part, and he's really quite funny in parodying that process there. So I think he's very aware of the forms of the representational logics that he's evoking and participating in here, and something like what you're saying about, but at the same time,
00:58:19
Speaker
Forgive me for not completing that thought, but at the same time, I think it's important to say that Williams is
00:58:35
Speaker
evoking that ethnographic problem, he's co-involving himself in it. But he has a kind of bad record of just including details about women that he knew in his poems. Later on, for instance, in Patterson, he'll
00:58:52
Speaker
him, I think, Marcia Nardi that he knew. And there's just like, forgive me if I have the details exactly wrong, but I think he struggled with the ethics of what, in his attention to the real and his desire to kind of fill the poem with what he imagined to be a kind of anti-representational real. Sometimes I think that came with a
00:59:17
Speaker
difficult ethics. And so it's in that sense that I think, and he's ascribing the poem a title to Elsie later and has, I don't know how much later, but later I think is when he's sort of thinking these problems.
00:59:33
Speaker
or maybe, so, yeah. Like rereading his old poems and sort of thinking about some of, perhaps some of what we've been talking about here. But we're speculating a little bit, I think, at this point about this, so. Yeah, sure, we are. Well, one thing that's not speculation, but it's just an observation about the poem is so that moment where some else see voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us, the word expressing,
01:00:03
Speaker
that verb had come up earlier in the rape scene, quote unquote.
Imagination vs. Reality
01:00:08
Speaker
The succumbing without emotion saved numb terror under some hedge of chokecherry or viburnum, which they cannot express. The numbed terror, I guess, is the thing that cannot be expressed, but is like merely endured. But later it's as though the body itself is expressing something, something about us. Well, so,
01:00:31
Speaker
Okay, now what I want to know, so you said that that first person plural pronoun that we degraded prisoners really sort of takes over near the end of the poem. I'm curious how you might make connections between what's happening at the end of the poem with respect to the material that we've talked about already.
01:00:59
Speaker
I'll read these final lines. And we degraded prisoners destined to hunger until we eat filth while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod in the stifling heat of September. Somehow it seems to destroy us. It is only an isolate flex that something is given off. No one to witness and adjust. No one to drive the car.
01:01:28
Speaker
I mean, surely we'll want to talk about the final lines, and let's reserve the opportunity to do that for a moment. But just for now, how do we get so quickly from this sort of words like excrement, degraded prisoners, eat filth, to the imagination straining after deer going by fields of goldenrod? If you had only that stanza, you would think that it belonged in a very different poem, I think.
01:01:57
Speaker
So what sense does that, how can you make sense of that, Harris? Again, here I go back to the question of how we read this poem against other poems because all of these kind of discourses are coded throughout the book in different ways. There's a
01:02:19
Speaker
There's several enjambments that are quite strong enjambments that are about being under the sky in some way or another, and hear this kind of the earth as the thing that the sky shits or whatever is one version of that.
01:02:39
Speaker
But you're right that there's this huge jarring break with the imagination straining after deer going by fields of goldenrod. And there, again, is the second invocation of the imagination in this poem. The imagination here seems to be a bit of a space of, I mean, almost romantic space of imaginative fancy that's allowed to take free play at the moment that the kind of
01:03:08
Speaker
poem has called itself into crisis or something. And I think he's suggesting to some extent that the imagination has the structure of the kind of evasion here while the imagination strains after deer going by fields of Golden Ralessa kind of way of actually
01:03:26
Speaker
back on the real or something. That's interesting. Maybe so, but it was funny. I was surprised to hear you use the word evasion though. Now I understand why you did because what it sounds to me like is the imagination there also sounds like predatory or something.
01:03:42
Speaker
straining after deer almost sounds like pursuit. I mean, you're thinking of like an action in Diana or something. Something like that. Yeah. I don't know. So certainly the imagination there is entailed in a great effort. And it's worth us saying that he gives many definitions to the imagination in this book, one of them that
01:04:06
Speaker
sticks with me is that the imagination is a kind of force like steam power or something. It's like the motor force of word production and words are the material out of which poems are built. So the imagination is the steam and
01:04:25
Speaker
words or poems are like the wheel that the steam turns or something. Something like that. I think they're actually producing words. It's a producers thing and that gets us back to our products earlier perhaps. He also refers in some of the pro sections of this book to quote unquote the plagiarists of the imagination and there I think he has someone like Eliot in mind or at least I've always thought so. There's something kind of derivative about the poetics that he's seeing happening over there.
01:04:54
Speaker
This is part of his problem with the entire kind of...
01:05:00
Speaker
I mean, he's really trying to get after something that is against figuration as such. He's not interested in, I mean, certainly, symbol. There's a poem, The Rose is Obsolete. It's like no crude symbolism can be allowed. There's a similar thing happening with simile, likeness, imitation, all of these discourses of like, the poem cannot be a mirror to nature is what he's getting at.
Theoretical Implications of Anti-Mimesis
01:05:28
Speaker
And this is the kind of anti-memetic dimension of this poem. And of this poet as he would go on, no ideas but in things, right? Exactly. And a poem is a small or large machine made of words and all of the shibboleths about poetry that we'll take from him.
01:05:52
Speaker
But here, I actually, you know, I guess why I'm bringing all this up is because I don't quite hear that theory of imagination marked in the invocation of imagination at the end of the poem. And anyway, yeah. Well, that's so, okay. Right. I agree with you, I think. And that's part of why I'm struck by it, in a way. Yeah.
01:06:18
Speaker
It's the imagination strains after deer going by fields of Goldenrod in the stifling heat of September. Somehow it seems to destroy us. Take those two lines. What's the stifling heat of September or the imagination? What seems to destroy us?
01:06:45
Speaker
Or is that like a kind of indeterminate, undetermined? I think it's definitely indeterminate. There are many moments in this book where he leaves off a line, where he doesn't complete a thought. In fact, the break in syntax or a kind of failure of syntactic closure is part of what he kind of wants to do and pointing to the real, basically. It's at the moment that
01:07:14
Speaker
line takes you to the edge of the real. It's like pointing to the real. So I think that a little bit his like willingness to just sort of start over again with somehow it seems to destroy us is a version of that. I do think it's worth us again thinking about like horticultural specificity, Goldenrod. I just read a wonderful essay by a landscape urbanist who is going around
01:07:38
Speaker
Planting golden rod and crack parking lots and things like that in the massachusetts area but golden rod is a kind of you know self seeding um kind of weedy flower um that uh that gets into the cracks um he has uh
01:07:56
Speaker
Oh, God, the no ideas, but in things, it comes in, Saxifrage is my flower, that's the rocks, right? And so there's always something to the kind of particular
01:08:10
Speaker
horticultural specificity and I don't know. I don't know. It's not just the word he liked, you mean? Exactly. Yeah. So there's that.
Tercets and Visual Prosody
01:08:19
Speaker
But we have to get to know when to witness and adjust, know when to drive the car. But I don't want you to, I want you to start with the penultimate stanza, you know, that it is only an isolate flex. Why don't you,
01:08:31
Speaker
Yeah, talk to us about what's happening there. So it comes right out of like somehow it seems to destroy us and then it is only an isolate flex that something is given off. And again, I don't want to keep talking about the wasteland in this conversation about Williams, but it does seem like maybe there's an alternate model there of like, you know, being reduced to these fragments I've sure against my room. Yeah, something like that.
01:09:00
Speaker
So go on, we talk about these ones. I think you can take it as a kind of rebuttal to these fragments I have short against my room and I think that's a plausible reading. I want to stress again in the context of our conversation the way that
01:09:16
Speaker
these unmarked words somehow and something take over these lines in light of some doctor's family, some LC, some hard-pressed house and something that we've heard before. So they have a sound echo that is perhaps more powerful than their apparent grammatical
01:09:37
Speaker
you know, lack of specificity. And both of those words somehow and something are given a line all unto their own, I mean, which seems to promote their significance in some way. And we haven't talked about the weight of the stances across this poem, which are all sort of like, you know, it's like five words, one word, four words, or that sort of thing. It's not exactly, but we could talk about Williams, the way that he's very interested in
01:10:03
Speaker
in strong stanzaic order, even though he's casting off meter and rhyme and all of these things. Well, maybe we should say another word about it briefly, right? He's writing in tercets. They're not metrically regular. It does seem like their appearance on the page matters to him in that they sort of resemble each other in just the way you were saying insofar as the second of the three lines tends to be a very short line. I mean, all of the lines are short, but the second line of each stanza is very short.
01:10:34
Speaker
Um, exactly. And are those like isolate flex or something? You know, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I, he would, I think he would, I think he would, uh, when you said like, I think he would say, let me stop you right there. But, but actually that's not entirely true because he does start to think about his prose blocks and in the American grain, as though they are like, um, like almost like Incan masonry or something. He sort of, he's willing to metaphorize the form of the visual.
01:11:03
Speaker
Visual Prosody is the name that I think Marjorie Perloff gave to this function a long time ago. It looks like a certain kind of sound order. I knew I was getting that idea from someone. It's Perloff, right? Something is given off. Yeah, all right. No one to witness and adjust. No one to drive the car.
01:11:27
Speaker
There's that great image of Williams behind the wheel of a car. Do you know that photograph? It's funny. I don't know if I have seen that. I'll share it with you. Anyway, what's going on in this final statement about the lack of a kind of authoritative or guiding intelligence or what's being gotten at to return to your
01:11:54
Speaker
your earlier term, like what predicament is that identifying?
Catastrophic Imagery and Creative Vision
01:11:59
Speaker
I mean, he has this fantasy of annihilation at the beginning of the book Spring and All. It's everyone in Europe and then everyone in Mexico and then everyone in Canada and then there's a kind of
01:12:16
Speaker
global cataclysm. And of course, you think, why is he fantasizing this global cataclysm? And then you think, oh, wait, it's already happened. He's not the one that's done it. It's in the wake of World War I. But in the midst of that, he says, children laughingly fling themselves under the wheels of the streetcars. Airplanes crash gaily to the earth. Someone has written a poem. There are a lot of scenes throughout the poem of like kind of
01:12:47
Speaker
like, Machinic Disaster, basically. I said the poem, but the book, I mean. Yeah, I thought that's it. Yeah, good, yeah. Of Machinic Disasters, and we could associate these with the avant-garde gestures of futurism or something like that. The, you know, F.T. Marinetti's foundation and manifesto of futurism begins with him getting in an automobile accident.
01:13:11
Speaker
So I think that and he's also attracted to the perceptions that are enabled by the motor car. There's a kind of motorist poem I went spinning in the in spring and all. So there is a kind of registration of all that here that the car can't not evoke. The car also seems like to me like a
01:13:42
Speaker
the family vehicle, and I don't know how much of... I suppose it must always have felt that way, at least to some extent, right? That is, as opposed to, say, mass transit or other kinds of...
01:14:04
Speaker
inventions of modernity, it seems like the vehicle that carries the family at whose wheel would sit the father in a kind of patriarchal society. And then this poem seems to have a lot to say about how familial reproduction
01:14:35
Speaker
I'm just riffing here, so feel free to interrupt me. But how families get reproduced and LC seems like a kind of foreign, not in the sense of nationality, but like a kind of foreign intrusion into the family, but like a helper into the sort of artificial
01:14:57
Speaker
you know, like a nanny figure or something like that. But I don't know what is, is there some anxiety here about, um, I feel like I'm reading this in a kind of mid-century way rather than, you know, I feel like I'm misreading in other words. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we'd, I think we'd have to, the kind of family car question, I don't know. I think we'd have to excavate the social history of driving. Yeah, that's right.
01:15:21
Speaker
You know, my friend Cotton Seiler wrote a book called Republic of Drivers that would be the place I would go looking for the answer to this question. And I don't know that it's that...
01:15:36
Speaker
I don't know if the Williams family participated in that kind of- Got around in the Volvo or whatever. From Model T or something. No one to witness and adjust. No one to drive the car. I guess what I want to suggest is that there is the brink of a kind of catastrophe there.
01:15:58
Speaker
And the form of catastrophic thought is one that Williams returns to over and over and over again. This is why I mentioned the airplane crash at the beginning and the kind of scenes of annihilation all the way through his great poem, Patterson, which takes the
01:16:15
Speaker
of the plummeting falls, which is a literal catastrophe of falling down. And he was obsessed with these images of cultural destruction. In The American Grain 2, it's about like, you know, you burn the, Cortez burns the ships, Scuttleson burns the ships, so he can't go back to the old world.
01:16:36
Speaker
Then he goes and burns Tenochtitlán, and it's not that Williams was celebrating, per se, these images of destruction. It's that he was attracted to these conflagrations as images of how something like the modern
01:16:53
Speaker
or the new in art was made. And they become images of mind for him, basically. So the scene of sexual violence in the middle of this poem, the kind of brink of catastrophe with the car at the end, I think are all him just constantly struggling against the sort of catastrophic form of thought that he was given to.
01:17:18
Speaker
Is it possible that that catastrophic form of thought is, in some sense for him, perverse as this may seem, like also generative in a genitive kind of way? I mean, what I found myself wanting to ask is you were just talking, Harris, was like, is there a meta poetic reading of no one to drive the car, like a kind of authorless poem or something, you know, like a self-driving vehicle in some words, you know?
01:17:46
Speaker
Well, I think that would really make sense, actually. I think that's a lovely reading. The generative force of it is absolutely there. I mean, he comes close to a notion of creative destruction in the way that Joseph Schumpeter would define capitalism in the 40s.
01:18:13
Speaker
certainly is interested in what the machine of the poem, the mechanics of the words as they create the kind of poetic self-creation through the mechanics of the words on the page. The stances once you get them going, they'll start replicating and, you know, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think there's something like that. It's not an assembly line by any stretch of the imagination. Yeah. Okay.
01:18:43
Speaker
Good. Well, Harris, if there's nothing else you wanted to say about the end of the poem, I wanted to ask you if you could, again, I'm asking this now in full awareness of my indulgence in the poem as unit of meaning kind of thing.
01:19:07
Speaker
If you would be so good as to put the whole poem in our abstracted as it has to be inevitably from the book, the whole poem in our listeners minds one more time by reading it aloud. Would you read the poem for us again?
01:19:25
Speaker
The pure products of America go crazy. Mountain folk from Kentucky, or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its death mutes, thieves, old names, and promiscuity between devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of a sheer lust of adventure.
01:19:46
Speaker
and young slatterns bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday, to be tricked out that night with gods from imaginations which have no peasant traditions to give them character but flutter and flaunt. Sheer rags, succumbing without emotion, saved numb terror under some hedge of choked cherry or viburnum.
01:20:08
Speaker
which they cannot express. Unless it be that marriage, perhaps with a dash of Indian blood, will throw up a girl so desolate, so hemmed around with disease or murder, that she'll be rescued by an agent reared by the state and sent out at 15 to work in some hard-pressed house in the suburbs, some doctor's family, some LC.
01:20:29
Speaker
voluptuous water expressing with broken brain the truth about us. Her great ungainly hips and flopping breasts, addressed cheap jewellery, and rich young men with fine eyes, as if the earth under our feet were an excrement of some sky.
01:20:46
Speaker
and we degraded prisoners, destined to hunger until we eat filth. While the imagination strains after deer going by fields of goldenrod and the stifling heat of September, somehow it seems to destroy us. It is only an isolate flex that something is given off. No one to witness and adjust, no one to drive the car.
01:21:10
Speaker
Well, Harris Finesod, thank you so much for reading the poem, for coming on the podcast and talking to me about it for the last hour. So it's been a real pleasure for me. Thanks so much, Cameron. It's great to be here.
01:21:21
Speaker
And thank you listeners for making it with us. Please make sure you're following the podcast and that way you'll get all the great new episodes that we have in the works. It's a never ending gift to these conversations. So I'm happy to have you along with for the ride. And I'll be driving the car I guess. Bye everyone.