The Desire for Literature

I stopped into Jeanne Heuving's Approaches to Textual Studies seminar the other night to discuss Books I and II of Paterson. Starting at about 44 minutes in, Jeanne had some valuable insights into the Marcia Nardi letters of which I have a short clip (I'll have to have more of a one-on-one interview with her to pull these insights out a little more). As well, the class provided some lively points along the way. If you would like to hear the rest of the conversation, click here.

What's There?!: Herb Blau on Paterson

I asked theater legend, writer, and Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington, Herbert Blau if there was a quality of consciousness in Paterson that has analogies to what goes on in experimental drama. He took this question for a ride, uninterrupted, resulting in this hypnotic read of Book One, without me having to say much else. The interview took place on 8-8-08 in his Seattle home. I’ve known Herb for close to 15 years, but that is just a sliver of his career, which has included directing some of the first productions of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter and Genet in the US. He was also co-founder of San Francisco’s Actor’s Studio; co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York; one of the conceptual architects of CalArts; artistic director of the experimental theater group KRAKEN; and author of numerous books that, with a blooded prose that he considers theater in itself, take on theater’s impossible limits and the indelible impact of the image on thought. He is also an indefagitable teacher; while some fancy professors are phoning it in at 50, Blau continues to be a tireless and available resource for his students at 82.
Theater, Consciousness, Paterson, & Various Readings of Book I: (34:58)
Bonus Fragment: (2:35)

The Archeology of Sluice

I’m beginning to read Paterson again (assuredly this is the end . . .) and so, whereas the last re-read looked for overarching design not readily perceivable in the first reads’ struggle with thingness, now I am back to the thing, its minuteness, with a vengeance. I wondered how specific was Williams about the “mechanics” of the “sluice” evoked on the poem’s first page (the pre-page, the extended subtitle starting “: a local pride . . .”) “Sluice” is undoubtedly the first vaguely complex technology on this page, predominated by “a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands.” Confession comes first, the primitive radio booth of guilt linking mouth to silent ear of authority; then a basket, and then—whether it be for tabulation or architectural support—a column (is this a very sketchy pan of history from neolithic to classical times? From the loosely gathered to the artistically or actuarially organized? I’d rather, as in my comments in an earlier entry, consider it more surreal non-sequitur rather than overinterpret the history of the world onto these fragments. Nevertheless . . . Williams is not a surrealist, nor is he yet a language poet. And there is a consistency with these technologies as kinds of “gathering up.”) Then we get: “the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice.” Footwork in the city of Rochester—which, like Paterson, is another northeastern city which owes its life to the powers of the falls, and the webwork of canals, factories, raceways, and railroads that extend from their harnessing, which here, mirable dictu then becomes the fount of all photographic images, creating a double of the world via Eastman's photographic processes—delivered me, serendipitously, to an actual sluice which fed a waterwheel still extant (pictured). Now, while a sluice controls and regulates flow, it doesn’t normally accommodate clouds, unless of course, Williams is skipping as many steps here as he does between neolithic basket weavers and classical aestheticists. It is an ellipsis that is “poetic,” yet not sluicelike (since the sluice depends on an active surface-to-surface connection of contiguous parts—such as gears—in order to do anything; or rather, it is the place where this process starts out from an undifferentiated flow.) Perhaps poetry's penchant for ellipsis is why the outcome is sandy. Unless you are Sam Patch, a poet can’t go from the clouds (mystical transcendence) to the sought-after gold in one jump, just as the sluice (which one normally thinks of as “sandy” when designating the filter used for panning gold) is best used to power a kind of plodding continuity—the weight of water falling, the slow grind of gears, and the painstaking transformation of that into various powers (triphammers, furnaces, and a “beyond” not metaphysical, but organized up to its gills.)

(5/10/08: Belated discovery . . . the Rochester falls pictured above are not merely a random stand-in for the Passaic Great Falls, but were the place where Sam Patch met his demise, as mentioned in Book I.)

No Ideas but in 3-D

3-D seems to be making a come-back in Hollywood, but if you prefer what I call “the other 3-D”—those low-tech experiments more enamored of technological deadends than jumping on supposed futuristic bandwagons (e.g. the stereoscopic works of Zoe Beloff and Vladmaster)—you will enjoy the Paterson stereoscopes in the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery. Just type in “Paterson” as your keyword. There is no way to synthesize these images into their intended depth here. Without the prerequisite googles of wood and ornamented tin, one can instead think of dopplegangers on winter days. Who are these various men—some clearly Whitmanesque and pensive, others shady and melancholic, another with a head as big as Peter the Dwarf's . . . and why are there always two of them? The falls breed doubles, if only the represented and its real. On the backs of these slides (not pictured—a double repressed!) there are various bits of doggerel that I guess work as a kind of soundtrack, helping one to resurrect an even fuller phantasm of the absent falls. To wit: “Where mighty rivers mountain-born/Go sweeping onward dark and deep,/Through forests where the bounding fawn,/Beneath their sheltering branches leap” etc. etc. Note that many of these scenes were fixed in (double) time by Paterson’s stereoscope artist “Doremus”—J. P. Doremus, that is, perhaps a close relative to P. Doremus, undertaker (see p. 192, Book IV), unless this is another case of doubles. An undertaker moonlighting as a stereoscope artist (or, probably more appropriately vice-versa) seems as conceivable a combination in the 19th century as a graphic designer in an emo band would be for our gentler era. The Doremus family makes another cameo appearance in Book I (p. 33), where Williams inserts a catalogue of the posthumous effects of Cornelius Doremus (d.1803) and their market value. Perhaps Williams liked the Doremus clan because their name, in Latin, meant something like “We will endure” or, if you want to give their name the geological resonance that Williams may have enjoyed “We will be hard.” In fact, on the back of some stereoscope slides (click verso), Doremus gives us a listing of Paterson views for sale, and the format is much like that of Williams’ geological cross-section passage. It is interesting to think of the accumulation of “views” of the Passaic—from bad poetry to unfocused instamatic shots—as a kind of geological stratigraphy.
By the way, as you know, I have a soft-spot for these Web 2.0 do-hickeys as used above, but I’m really annoyed how slide.com widgets no longer loop infinitely, but just stop dead and require you to click again, or . . . horrors . . . enter your email information. The way that block in the corner pulses asking you to be my friend, my fan: unless you find your place apart from it, you are its slave! Its sleeper!

It's Hard to be Hydrocephalic

Last week, New Jersey as an Impossible Object taped Graham Stowe singing his Patersong "The Skeleton of Peter the Dwarf" based off material from Books I and IV (pp. 10 and 192 respectively). The music is by Jonathan Sircy. More of their songs based on Paterson can be found on archive.org. Graham is a doctoral candidate here at the University of South Carolina, and is embarking on a dissertation about Williams' Paterson and Olson's Maximus Poems. Along with Kenneth Camacho, he's kept a blog, The Paterson Project, which documents their use of Paterson as raw material for new poems and songs.

The Skeleton of Peter the Dwarf

It’s hard to be a hydrocephalic.
54 inches, head to toe
(27 from my chin to scalp alone;
That makes me a marvel.)

Washington came to see me
(the man, not the city; or, maybe, the city is the man).
He looked at me; marveled at me;
I answered with inactivity.

I floated along, day to day,
endlessly rocking,
loving Jesus and preacher’s conversation,
swelling with pride at the show I could provide.

It was hard for me to move,
my head being so huge,
but I got by without going out;
keeping to the cerebral.

my head's got its own box now,
it's lost all its water!
and now they say my skull is a marvel!
but they say nothing of the parts of me everyone's had.

What I never told in my time
was that, more than theology or phrenology,
all I ever wanted out of life
was to not shit in my cradle.

A tiny outhouse with plenty of headroom,
straps to hold me up and a stand
from which I could read
my Bible or a dirty magazine.

Oh that would be marvelous.
“A marvel indeed,” they would say,
as they tied me in and
sang of my tenacity.

Beyond the Symbol: Bob Perelman on Paterson

A couple weeks ago, I talked to Bob Perelman about Paterson, language poetry, and the "grade school pageant" aspect of Paterson's symbology. I thought that the author of the poem "China"--which Fredric Jameson posited as an exemplar of postmodernism, in league with the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Body Heat--would have something to say about the referential gap between Paterson and Paterson. At the end, I ask Perelman to read some of his own "no ideas but in things" poems from his early collection The First World.
Approaching Paterson: (2 min. 32 sec.)
Paterson's mass of unarticulated sound: (3 min. 44 sec.)
The pitfalls of taking on the epic: (1 min. 33 sec.)
Perelman reads from Book I, part 3 and discusses: (10 min. 12 sec)
Perelman reads from his collection The First World: (3 min. 18 sec.)

Secret Shrine

If you go to Paterson, you may now happen upon a secret shrine to William Carlos Williams' poem. Although, it might not be there anymore. Composed of trash the Education Department leaves in the abandoned Hinchliffe Stadium (e.g. busted file cabinets, waterlogged textbooks, wobbly bookcarts), the shrine is itself subject to the vagaries of what constitutes trash and what art . . . and what, for that matter, desirable furniture. After the first day, the "library" aspect of the shrine--a small bench facing a bookshelf under a tree sprouting from the concrete and stocked with English textbooks and xeroxes of Paterson in baggies--was disrupted when someone must have realized that the bookshelf was indeed still a good book shelf, and took it away (even though it may have been there for years.) It must have been a critic, because they also let their dog "have their way" in the shrine as well. The orange design is a shadow of the jacquard--the punch card that interfaced the vast worlds of labor, nature, and machine in the old silk mills.

Morir Sonando

In the beginning of Book I of Paterson, Williams describes the Paterson as a dreamer: “Eternally asleep,/his dreams walk about the city where he persists/incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.” This Paterson is an ancient Paterson, not exactly the city, but the reason for the city as emanation. And the citizens are not exactly sleepwalking but they are the insubstantial substance of another’s dream. What I always end up pointing out to people, even though I admit it might be a referential stretch, is that the mention of butterflies brings to mind Lao Tzu’s taoist parable about dreaming one is a butterfly. When you awake from dreaming that you are a butterfly, how do you know you are not a butterfly dreaming you are a man? Williams is dealing with similar paradoxes when he sets out the premise that we are all but dreams of some old giant under the falls, even though we can imagine this giant (and so why isn’t he our dream?). Ultimately, Williams sides with the reality of the giant: our imaginations are dwarfed and we suddenly become things, “thoughts sitting and standing” in the bus, thoughts who only exist because they are “listed in the Telephone/ Directory.” The reference to the butterfly is soon followed by the famous line “no ideas but in things”—a more strictly materialist statement that I think Williams overturns again and again in Paterson, especially here with his description of dreams, and is not to be taken completely seriously or simply. After all, towards the end of Book I, he writes something that celebrates the power of immaterial thought to transform squalid thingness: “Things, things unmentionable,/the sink with the waste farina in it and/lumps of rancid meat, milk-bottle-tops: have/here a tranquility and loveliness/Have here (in his thoughts)/a complement tranquil and chaste” (38). These, however, could still be the thoughts of the giant, and not that of a doctor making a house call to the tenements.

There is a drink at a Dominican, Ecuadorian, Colombian restaurant on 21st Ave in Paterson called "Morir Sonando," which translates as “To Die Dreaming"--a drink with orange juice and heavy cream. I didn’t order it, but during a particularly orange dinner of paella, plantains, and mango juice, I wondered how it came to be that all over the world, the flavor of dreams is orange-vanilla. Is it is some transcultural unconscious association, or is some giant Dreamsicle dreaming us into existence? The abandoned steel structures of this city have a similar color. Is rust the dream of steel, steel attempting to understand itself through a figment of what it could be? Is orange the pigment of what could be, of lost dreams which the material world steals from us (and steels from us)? I go to the old factories, get some orange rust on my tee-shirt. It looks good. Maybe I should stage a Chris Burden-esque performance whereby I rub the orange of oxidized metal all over my tee-shirt, get completely smashed and walk around Paterson at 3 am with “We Are All Bridge and Tunnel People” written on it. With lipstick. In French. I am in that kind of mood. “To die dreaming” indeed. But it is still just an orange smudge, only a hint of catastrophe on a mostly white v-neck, and I cross the bridge to New York. I think I will go to the Richard Serra show, and decide not to change my shirt: the orange smudge here will be chic, although as soon as I get to MoMA I realize that it immediately puts me under suspicion with the security guards, as if I had been stealthily frottaging Torqued Ellipse IV. There is a lot of very expensive rust here. It is uniform and smooth on some of his structures, more aleatory and environmental looking on others. It’s a pixie dust that makes metal less metal, makes it dream of air. Perhaps here in his labyrinthine structures I can find some secret portal to the dreams of Paterson, which may be my own dreams. Or be escorted brutally back to my single line in the Telephone Directory.

Rigor of Beauty

Book I of Paterson starts with what seems like an epigraph:
“Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance” (3). But who is speaking this? As Lexi pointed out earlier, Paterson is a multivocal text. Yet Williams signals different voices with quotations only rarely. Strangely, the note to the text tells us that this is Williams himself speaking: “WCW’s own prose. On the 1945 KS galleys WCW cut two additional sentences that were also contained within the quotation marks: ‘It is not in the things nearest us unless transposed there by our employment? Make it free, then, by the art you have, to enter these starved and broken pieces’” (253). So, it is perhaps not an epigraph as much as it is an invitation, but it is still unclear why Williams would want to set it off like he does, since he does not use quotes normally in this way; is it merely to create a physical, graphic separation, to literally signify the “locked in the mind past all remonstrance”?
I’m hesitant to buy the explanation of pure graphism here. I still wonder about the way in which these quotes elicit the voice, especially in such a crucial place, the place of beginnings (however much a readerly desire for a beginning is thwarted by Williams), the place of “arma virumque cano” [“of arms and a man I sing”: Vergil]. A reply to the Greek and Latin with the bare hands would get rid of the arma (maybe replacing it with the silk factory or writing itself), but to a certain extent Williams gets rid of the virum and the cano too. What’s left? Que? I think there is definitely some singing left in the midst of the play of things, in the mist of the Passaic falls. After all, the famous line “no ideas but in things” is actually “say it: no ideas but in things.” Not that saying is singing, but saying might be enough of a song in the face of the brute materiality of Paterson (he mentions in his 1951 statement about the poem that it will only be with Book III that the poem will attain language; ironically, this is the book with the mute geological cross-section.)
So is it Williams that suppresses sound in his text or, as Garrett Stewart claims, is it the critics who have suppressed the phonotext of modernist poetry? Perhaps both. For Williams, the white noise of the falls overcomes sound and song, even as they emerge from its cosmogonic chaos. Whatever the song of Paterson is, it is not as easy to hear as in the other modernist epics, where “sounds cut in, rise, then fade away as other sounds intrude, as if we were tapping into a party line on a municipal phone exchange, spinning down a radio dial, or sampling a stack of records.” (Adelaide Morris)
If anything, the quotes here—as citations go—imply the already-said of past and memory. Whatever is said or sung of the “starved and broken pieces” to come is a function of the present-tense activity of reading (or singing, if you wish to interpret his concretisms lyrically.) The rest lacks citation as if—and this goes even for the archival passages—it hasn’t even been said yet.

Notes on the Paragram: Poetry and Comedy

Sometimes the best insights come while watching television in hotel rooms. I had a minor Raymond Williams moment the other night in Ardmore, PA, watching Family Guy after coming across the word “paragram” used to describe certain poetic effects (see Perloff, McCaffery, Kristeva, Roudiez, Marsh.) The episode begins with Peter playing Wheel of Fortune and it’s clear that he is so oblivious to the basic rules and generic conventions of the show that he calls the host “Regis,” rattles off a string of hilariously useless “letters,” and doesn’t understand that the “fat man in the circle” is a keyed-in video image of himself. If you look up paragram, you’ll see that it merely means a “pun.” But, I think it is used in the context of poetic theory to imply more broadly what happens when the meaning of a word oscillates because of the unstable rules by which we are to understand it. We appraise the word through a montage of contexts, rather than a montage of words themselves. Compare, for example, the use of a word in Futurism and one in Language Poetry. The Futurist word is a verbal piece of shrapnel, an object-in-itself, flung; whereas the Language Poetry word radiates in multiple dimensions precisely because we are not sure how to take it. Lytle Shaw talks about this dynamic in the Williams-inspired work of Robert Smithson, whose word pile we saw in the last entry. Shaw says that Smithson engages multiple genres such as “science fiction, geology, travel narrative, philosophy, poetry, art criticism, pulp drug novel, cartography, and film treatment” (124) to force the extreme dislocation of his non-sites, his various concrete poems (“concrete” in various dimensions; “poem” in various dimensions). So it is that, for Williams' Paterson, we are immediately given directions how to “take” the book; those directions are just as immediately thwarted. At the beginning of Book I, Williams sets out a kind of subtitle to Paterson:

“: a local pride; spring, summer, fall and the sea; a confession; a basket; a column; a reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands; a gathering up; a celebration;
in distinctive terms; by multiplication a reduction to one; daring; a fall; the clouds resolved into a sandy sluice; an enforced pause;
hard to put to it; an identification and a plan for action to supplant a plan for action; a taking up of slack; a dispersal and a metamorphosis.” (2)

Subtitles tend to place and frame the work, but this list of genera is more like Borges’ example of the Chinese encyclopedia. What is Paterson? Some of the answers veer towards the surreal (Paterson is a basket) some defy the basic grammatical premise (Paterson is in distinctive terms). Rather than an exploration of the materiality of the signifier, this type of humor banks on the immateriality of the premises which give sense to the signifier. After all, Paterson can be spring, summer, fall and the sea, the batman symbol and Alex Karras in Webster.