Poet Beats Fire at Its Own Game!

Some thoughts on listening to the recent PoemTalk on Williams' "Red Wheelbarrow:" I was sitting over the piano last night trying to compose something to Williams' "Descent Beckons" passage of Paterson, with Morton Feldman's Triadic Memories playing in the background as possible inspiration. Everything I tried sounded no better than something you might hear on an overwrought PBS documentary on Williams (even though the one that does exist is good!) And as I started to ventriloquize Williams' patter-song in lieu of some, again overwrought, "new music"-type vocalization, I started to think, "where have I heard this before?" Sure enough, that part of Paterson is among his recordings on PennSound, where there is not one but NINE different versions of "The Descent," compared to four for "Red Wheelbarrow," and five for "This is Just to Say." So we may have to reassess what we consider to be Williams' chestnuts.
As well, I noticed that Williams uses the word "glaze" with a particular valence in Book III of Paterson that in some ways makes it a pointed response to the "glazed with rain/ water" of the RW: "An old bottle, mauled by the fire/ gets a new glaze, the glass warped/ to a new distinction, reclaiming the/ undefined" (118) This aspect of the bottle, transforming from sand to glass then into some "new distinction" by a less controlled, destructive fire puts it in contrast to the wheelbarrow that is glazed with rain water almost decoratively, highlighting the quiddity of the wheelbarrow with a special, almost coy, atmospheric effect. However, by this point in Paterson, Williams is less delicate with the "beautiful thing." In Books III and IV, it is not the material object that the poet must "amen" ("selah!" "so be it!") but rather the transformative energies that destroy and metamorphize matter. Release the Gamma Rays! So, taking Grenier as his invitation to replace the word "chickens" with something more piquant, how about:

so much depends
upon
XXXX
the red
prematerial
xxxxx
glazed with
electron
xx
beside the white
vortices

My last Red Wheelbarrow reflection is brought to us by the gods of spam, through my Yahoo Pipes Williams/Paterson device. Here, a reflection on the RW, undoubtedly ripped from another, better formatted page, buttressed with posts on Adidas second quarter earnings and BEKO washing machine quality problems.
The name of the blog is "Letter," and somewhat bathetically, we are told that "Letter has'nt any friends yet." The tags for Williams' classic imagistic haiku . . . well we might as well just replace his original words with them, because they are . . . well, close enough . . .

and balls buy
child

clothes coat
eco

friendly hamper
hanger

hangers horse
laundry

mannequin metal
on

rack racks
ride

riding shelf
shoe

toy warehouse
washwooden

"So Much Depends on What You Mean by Failure"

"But assuming that the aim of rhetoric is to establish a connection between language and reality, this is rhetoric of the highest order--the rhetoric in the word itself. This is risky business, and it may explain to a large extent why when Dr. Williams fails he falls flat on his face. Depending on no artifice, he has no artifice behind which to conceal his failures to complete realization."
--Mary Ellen Solt, "WCW: Poems in the American Idiom" (13)

"147: The failure of Williams to go beyond his work of Spring and All and the Great American Novel seems to verify Bergmann's assertion that nominalism inevitably tends towards (deteriorates into?) representationalism."
--Ron Silliman, "The Chinese Notebook"

"[Marianne Moore] thought Williams' intention to find a redeeming language had been woefully sidetracked--Williams answered brilliantly that if the close of Paterson contained its own failure, that was because the very grounds of the search had implied a failure (indeed the whole American experience as he had lived though it had demonstrated over and over a tendency, a proclivity, toward failure). 'If the vaunted purpose of my poem seems to fall apart at the end,' he was willing to concede to Moore, 'it's rather frequent that one has to admit an essential failure.' In fact, what better strategy to assert the need for a redeeming language--a language that would reveal ourselves to ourselves--but 'by stating our failure to achieve it'?"
--Paul Mariani, A New World Naked (614)

Before the Whatsit, The Gist

Eleven years before “The Great Whatsit” made its apocalyptic debut in Kiss Me Deadly, the more science-factual, tiny and (seemingly) less deadly glow of Marie Curie’s luminous “stain at the bottom of the retort” in Mervyn LeRoy’s Madame Curie inspired Williams’ quest for the “radiant gist” in Book IV of Paterson. This 1943 movie comes from a more innocent time, when radiation was not accompanied by extreme atomic-age anxiety, and when a new type of romantic couple could be imagined under the pretext of scientific collaboration. . . . Or rather, we should say that romance is pretext for science, but without any sense of perversion or ill-faith. The film has all the sentimental pleasures of a 1940s “woman's film,” while conveying a disdain for sentimentality towards past knowledge, conventional attitudes, and romantic love. I guess this is the signature mix for these films . . . proto-feminism vying with the dictate to be a homemaker and nurturer. (Marie is told by her father-in-law that “women without babies are parasites;” coming from Henry Travers, who we know as the failed angel of It’s a Wonderful Life, it seems a little harsh.) Regardless, Marie and Pierre are one of the great nerd-couples of film.
It seems there are a lot of things about their relation that may have appealed to Williams’ sexual, as well as poetic, imagination. When Pierre proposes to Marie, he compares their bond to NaCl: “so if we marry on this basis, our marriage would always be the same, the temperature would be the same, the composition would be the same.” There are other numerous, more obvious ways that Williams probably saw his desires mirrored in the film. For example, the first scene he details in Paterson IV is a description of the film’s epilogue when this “frail stubborn eager woman who carried on her great work for a quarter of a century” walks onto the stage at the Sorbonne to receive her honors. The movie, after all, is about hard work. . . . really hard, unappreciated, but ultimately revolutionary work. When he writes this bit in Book IV, he’s already plowed through the geological cross section passage, can’t really see the end (which may be his own), and maybe suddenly remembers this movie that he must have seen in some dinky Paterson moviehouse during the war, on a rainy day before even Paterson I was completed . . . I initially thought that Williams went to the premiere with Greer Garson, which I think would have been great PR for both camps. Now that I look for the reference, that image was just a wishful misreading. When Paul Mariani says Williams saw Madame Curie with Greer Garson he must have just meant she was in the movie, not in his entourage (or he hers). No, it was probably just a Saturday matinee with Floss.
Some facts about radium: it takes 400 tons of Colorado ore to isolate 1 gram of radium. You can learn this in the DVD’s extra feature “Romance of Radium” directed by Jacques Tourneur and narrated by a guy who sounds like nothing more than an OTB cashier. Tourneur’s reportage is probably more in line with Williams’ poetics—it is stripped of melodramatic cues and distinguished acting. While every character’s performance in the feature reeks prettily of historical gravitas—that is, except for the cameo by Van Johnson, who seems to have unwittingly stumbled into history—Tourneur leaves the Curies flat and distant like half-tones from the C volume of the encyclopedia. Yet Tourneur still maintains a wonderment towards the subject, by moving into the more macabre and outré episodes in the history of radium. What the Mervyn LeRoy feature uniquely offers . . . and need I say that Williams missed an opportunity to reference LeRoy’s Golddiggers of 1933 rather than the social credit pamphlets in this section? . . . is a palpable sense of the extremities endured by the Curies, as they reduced tons of pitchblende by hand in a miserable shed, and without any sense of what they were looking for. So this film is for Williams not a merely a haphazard collaged reference, but a complete statement of his poetics from beginning to end. It is yet another clue that, for him, the “materiality of signifier” was not mere brute tonnage, more than just thing. The slow drama of working through tons of material is placed in the service of the discovery of a new form of matter, one that is not dead, but “alive, dynamic,” yet exceedingly rare. That this matter forms only a 1000th of a percent of actual matter—mistaken by the Curies as “extraneous” impurities because it did not fit the expected Mendeleev schema—is only more invitation to perceive material more clearly, without despair.

Et in Paterson Ego

Perhaps it is appropriate to talk about displacement after driving over 4000 miles and never once passing through our locus of inquiry. Along the way, I talked to some fellow-travelers of the Paterson poem in Philadelphia--tk in a future entry--and sat through a rousing 4.5 hours of Feldman's For Philip Guston in Charleston--which gave me some ideas for the progressing audio piece, or at least some insight into the true nature of stamina (the pianist endured a surreal wardrobe malfunction for close to 20 minutes, and I really don't know how they venture into such an undertaking without Depends.) I fear along the way, as Charlestons became Missoulas, that I might have forgotten some of the insights gained along the way, lost to an amnesia of miles. But that may be for the best, a letting-go which both astronauts and Morton Feldmans know something of. What would constitute a pastoral for our age of astronauts? Because it is Williams' use of the pastoral which I held-to as the next entry, since one of my conversants in Philadelphia, Randall Couch, brought up the genre in relation to the pastoral parody in Book 4, and sent on this link to a precursor. The pastoral is a genre of displacement: a way for mostly city folk to imagine their more authentic shepherd counterparts, like Rush Limbaugh conjuring Dakota. Williams places the pastoral conversation that begins Book 4 in New York City--it took me a couple reads to get this, given that one at least imagines the points-of-view, however fractured, to be limited by the poem's titular city. It could be that this pied-à-terre on the East River, inhabited by a lesbian poet (and this I totally missed, but thanks to Randall for pointing it out) is, in a pointed reversal, the Arcadian hinterland where one can escape the actual reality of the city or cities or "things" in their terrible intensity. No ideas but in things: et in NYC ego. "The whirring pterodactyl/ of a contrivance, to remind one of Da Vinci,/searches the Hellgate current for some corpse" and this helicopter is the snake in the grass, the shadow of death that haunts this "idyllic" escape. While Randall pointed out book four's relation to an 18th-century tradition, I think Williams maintains a discussion with poets much further back, especially Theocritus and Vergil. One thing that brought me back to Vergil was a passage that I kept recalling when thinking of Williams' use of numbers and the passage on page 18 of the two girls and their ribboned hair. This is from Eclogue 8, depicting the song-competition of Damon and Alphesiboeus "at whose rivalry the heifer marvelled and forgot to graze":

ALPHESIBOEUS
[64] “Bring out water, and wind soft wool round this altar; and burn rich herbs and male frankincense, that I may try with magic rites to turn to fire my lover’s coldness of mood. Naught is lacking here save songs.

Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!

[69] Songs can even draw the moon down from heaven; by songs Circe transformed the comrades of Ulysses; with song the cold snake in the meadows is burst asunder.

Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!

[73] Three threads here I first tie round you, marked with three different hues, and three times round this altar I draw your image. In an uneven number heaven delights. Weave, Amaryllis, three hues in three knots; weave them, Amaryllis, I beg, and say, ‘Chains of love I weave!’

Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!

[80] As this clay hardens and as this wax melts in one and the same flame, so may Daphnis melt with love for me! Sprinkle meal, and kindle the crackling bays with pitch. Me cruel Daphnis burns; for Daphnis burn I this laurel.

Here is an early version of "no ideas but in things." While Damon frets over lost love and threatens to jump in the ocean, Alphesiboeus succeeds by busying himself with earth-magic and binding rituals. There also may be something to the relation between "in uneven number heaven delights" and Williams triadic line. Nevertheless, I think a look back into ancient pastoral points to a timeless struggle between vague lyricism and a materialist poetics, perhaps mistakenly limited to the innovations of the 20th century.

In Spite of the Grey Secrecy of Time

Since there was some talk recently on the web concerning Allen Ginsberg’s singing of Blake (here at PoemTalk), I decided to revisit my earlier plan to put some of Ginsberg’s letters in Paterson to music. Once I heard the drony, chanty quality of Ginsberg’s harmonium-backed quaverings, the project suddenly seemed more doable, but I think I ended up sounding more like a drunken Irishman than Ginsberg—cosmic troubadour and prophet of the Fall(s). You decide—and of course are welcome to come up with your own riff on Ginsberg’s letters for inclusion on Impossible Object! I took not a few liberties with the original, some of which are, admittedly, outright mistakes (I misread “phase” as “phrase,” although I still think I like “phrase” better, at least in the context of the song; it’s a word not as caught up in the extended weather imagery of the letter, so maybe it’s not such a sin?): Here is the original:

Dear Doctor:
In spite of the grey secrecy of time and my own self-shuttering doubts in these youthful rainy days, I would like to make my presence in Paterson known to you, and I hope you will welcome this from me, an unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county of the world. Not only do I inscribe this missive somewhat in the style of those courteous sages of yore who recognized one another across generations as brotherly children of the muses (whose names they well know) but also as fellow citizenly Chinamen of the same province, whose gastanks, junkyards, fens of the alley, millways, funeral parlors, river-visions—aye! The falls itself—are images white-woven in their very beards. . . .
I do not know if you will like my poetry or not—that is, how far your own inventive persistence excludes less independent or youthful attempts to perfect, renew, transfigure, and make contemporarily real an old style or lyric machinery, which I use to record the struggle with imagination of the clouds, with which I have been concerned. I enclose a few samples of my best writing. All that I have done has a program, consciously or not, running on from phase to phase, from the beginnings of emotional breakdown, to momentary raindrops from the clouds become corporeal, to a renewal of human objectivity which I take to be ultimately identical with no ideas but in things. (172-73)

And here is the song,
I am accompanied by the piano and sleighbell talents of the immaginarium light outreach inner~youth center, with whom I share a rusty county of the world (. . . well actually, we are in contiguous rusty counties.)
“Brighten/ . . the corner where you/ are!”

(image of unknown young poets meeting older known poets courtesy immaginarium light outreach inner-youth center)

On A Clear Day, You Can See Secaucus

Sometimes the farther you get from Paterson, you wind up there anyway. Last month while I was in Brussels, I took an unplanned trip to the Palais des Beaux-Arts, not knowing that therein was an important inspirational source for Williams, turning up in, among other places, Paterson Book Four. “I salute/ the man Brueghel who painted/what he saw—" (224) I think the weakest parts of Paterson are Book Four's references to “high” art, precisely and paradoxically because Williams wasn’t writing “what he saw,” or rather that “what he saw” was once or twice removed. This is perhaps why, while in Belgium, I didn’t take heed that I was being pulled into a Paterson vortex at the other end of the world. It makes sense that Williams would have been drawn to Brueghel’s penchant for painting birds instead of holy revenant, his decentering of the Nativity to include the ahistorical bustle of the masses. There’s an interesting point in Book Four's description of a Brueghel Nativity that feels like Williams has had it with the word, that he’s envious of the innocence of paint, since he describes “a Baby/ new born!/ among the words.” And these words are equivalent to the (s)words present: “Armed men, savagely armed men/armed with pikes, halberds and swords/whispering men with averted faces/ got to the heart/ of the matter.” Their knowledge seems to pale in the face of the “Baby (as from an/ illustrated catalogue/ in colors).” (here there is almost a Joseph Cornell-type fascination with the image rather that what might be interpreted as a snarky reference to pop culture undermining it.)
The Palais des Beaux-Arts seems haunted, as does Williams, by the break that Brueghel makes from the representational practices of the past and the move towards the everyday. I seem to have fallen into the right frame of mind as soon as I entered—bored with paintings of biblical events and smirking patrons, I was looking at how different painters dealt with the sky. I thought that, by determining where these painters mapped transcendence, I could easily tell if they were a court toady, a closet alchemist, or an outright heretic. And these questions come from whether one sees gods as bejeweled floating bobble-heads or rather as something implicit in the whole picture. There’s a big pay-off for this in Palais des Beaux-Arts, because the argument extends from Brueghel and Bosch up through the surrealists (e.g. Yves Tanguy’s “Avion;” Magritte’s “The Secret Player;” and Dali’s addition to the history of "Temptation of St. Anthony" paintings . . . I had entered, in a sense, into the museum for the history of the UFO). So when I came to Brueghel’s "Landscape with Fall of Icarus," which Williams writes about elsewhere, I had the full effect. Looking into the golden-milky sky—that seemed like it held something of import—I kept on asking myself “where? where?” A shepherd looks skyward, bored; the worker in the foreground keeps to the plow. The “humor” of the painting lies in the fact that hapless Icarus’s fall has not been registered, and is a minor element of the composition, the “splash quite unnoticed/this was/ Icarus drowning.”

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.

End of Discussion!

Before we were able to begin our last discussion of Paterson in Paterson, we were locked out of the Ivanhoe Arts Center for about an hour. We took the time to slowly get stoned on Smirnoff Ice while gazing intently at the falls of the raceway. Was this the true experience of Paterson--following the twisting braids of the waters, focusing on this layer, now that, as the patterns fell into their destined pool? Once inside, perhaps begrudgingly, we took up the discussion of bird mnemonics, Williams' virgin-whore complex, pastoral poetry, and Alexander Hamilton's final demise on the Weehawken shores (the subject of Williams' unfinished Book VI, and pictured above). The discussion series ends with a rousing version of "But Not For Me" with Mike accompanying on the piano. This mp3 is another long file, perhaps best suited to loading onto an iPod and listening in traffic. Or you can just go to the end of the file to the "musical number," which includes includes the brilliant intro that no one, except maybe Bobby Short, sings, because of the all-pervasive influence of the Chet Baker version or its dated reference to Beatrice Fairfax.