Measure and Beyond

I've been dipping into Michael Golston's Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science. I've had a long standing interest in ideas of "musical soul" as they intersect with questions of technology and race. Golston is one of the few writers I've found who discuss early ethnomusicologists like Milton Metfessel and Carl Seashore, who created elaborate recording machines to analyze the emotional qualities of African American song. (Metfessel even made a graphic analysis of the "negro laugh.") After reading the first very interesting couple of chapters in Golston's book, I skipped ahead to his thin, albeit important final chapter on Williams' "measure." For Golston, Williams' concept of "measure" is his definitive, yet little explored challenge to the rhythmic ideologies of other modernists such as Pound and Yeats (and detailing these "rhythmic ideologies" forms the rest of the book's meat.)
Williams' move "beyond lyric" requires a dispassionate stance towards these rhythmic myths promulgated by other modernists, tied biomechanically to blood and pulse and fantasmatically to the inaudible consanguinities of race and nation. Williams' more constructivist notion of "measure" always struck me as non-musical, and Golston solidifies my hunch that its association with musical notions is misleading. The word conjures up both science and haberdashery, a numerical span or swatch held out at arm's length. If anything, Williams' "measure" is something you do with materials after the fact. The concept of rhythm, of the other hand, has an originary feel, making claims to a core authentic outpouring, which is why it encourages both the irrational plenitudes of "soulful" performance and the cultic violence of the fascist homebody.
In tandem with this book, I was reading Susan Stewart's essay "Letter on Sound." If the above sounds Derridean in its suspicion of the vitalist category of rhythm, it still maintains a clear dichotomy which Stewart's (more Derridean) approach seems to challenge. While Williams' "measure" is not really synonymous with meter, Stewart's distinction between rhythm and meter seems to evoke a creative tension between the planned, measured structure of a poem, and the various existential or performative iterations of it. "The sound of the poem emerges from this dynamic tension between the unfolding temporality of the utterance and the recursive temporality of the fixed aspects of the form. . . . Song, by virtue of its measure, is fixed and repeatable, although it is, like all utterances, subject to transformation. It is the tension between the unfolding semantic pressure of speech and the asemantic pulse of measure that defines the possibilities of lyric art." (34-7)

Still Not Convinced!

Poetry or intellectual blackmail? I spoke earlier of my dislike of Pound's Cantico del Sole, and I'm still not convinced after this recent PoemTalk. My ears are tinned to its alleged sarcasm!

NO IDEAz BUH . . . CHEEZBURger?

In the shower today, I thought "Maybe I should turn WCW into a LOL cat?" Of course, as one usually finds in the recombinatory world of the Internet, where one meme attaches on every possible apt object unto infinity, it was already done. Twice! And both times with the same poem ("This is Just To Say," of course, full of lol-cat sheepishness . . . although they would have been more funny if plums were replaced by CHEEZBURGER!) Stock photos of William Carlos Williams shift between the angry "tunite i peez on efrytin u oen" face and the "u gots new bird? ai hadn't noticed" face. But I decided to stick to cats cause iz bing lazee 4 ez funee. Paterson is not as ez to transform into lol-Caterson (although the Bible seems to be; maybe because no "ceiling cat" in Caterson. Say it, jus CHEEZBURGER.)













Of course, Ezra Pound was already speaking LOLcat-speak way back:

Word of the Day: Periplum

This past week at Conflux in NYC, I met Brian House, creator of the Yellow Arrow mapping project, who introduced me to the word "periplum" (click video link for definition). I'm surprised the term is not much mentioned in relation to Williams' Paterson, although, I also wonder how deep it's buried in the Cantos, and how long it took to harden into a concept that could survive its original context. After all, Pound didn't append each canto with a "word box." Any clues about the origins and trajectory of this term would be appreciated. One of Brian's projects is Periplurban: An Urban Experiential Dictionary, which was created with his students as part of a workshop at Columbia's School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

With Trick and Money Damned

Pound’s and Williams’ interest in the ‘money question’ has a special relevance for the ‘modernist’ style of their poetry because it involved them in similar (though not identical) theoretical efforts to reconcile poetic and economic theory at the linguistic level and not just through criticism of capitalism or society. The money question prepared them to see money as another form of representation much like a limited form of language. If the solution to the economic crisis lay in the conundrum of money, it was therefore wrapped up with the problem of speech. The power of money was, in fact, money’s power to utter the otherwise inchoate wishes of social, political, and economic power that far exceeded the traditional poet’s linguistic and literary resources. (Marsh 5)

I need to pick up Alec Marsh’s Money and Modernity where I left off a couple weeks ago. I always enjoy reading things with a detailed sense of economic theory, if only because it pains me to hear vapid phrases from artists and pundits like “it’s a capitalist society” to justify any and all forms of asshole-ness. How it tires me! But listen, there are as many brands of capitalism as capitalism gives us potato chips, even though the kind of capitalism usually invoked by such phrases is just a hair's-breadth from rape and pillage. And hey, there’s also socialism, which still exists, or else the vaunted 9-11 firemen would not have made it to the towers without those trapped inside having to swipe their credit cards or revealing their mom’s maiden name to telephone operators in Bombay. But I digress. Marsh’s book arrays the two primal forms of American capitalism against each other. On the one hand, Jeffersonian notions of wealth, stemming from the beliefs of the French physiocrats, posit a kind of natural wealth (which, although premised on an agricultural society, are alien to notions of bean countin’); on the other, the Hamiltonian system—upon which the entire raison d’etre of Paterson, NJ rests—establishes money itself as the ultimate value (deracinated from land value in the form of exchange value). Marsh claims that Williams is more interested in Jefferson, but I think that there can’t but be a fascination with the kind of non-referentiality of value that the Hamiltonian city, like modernist poetry itself, encourages—even though it is roundly agreed that Paterson, NJ is the disastrous outcome of Hamiltonian planning (like the Cantos are of modernist poetry). Marsh goes as far to say that Williams and Pound write “Jeffersonian jeremiads and partly experimental structures through which Jeffersonianism can be renovated and modernity reshaped in such a way as to allow for a truly American independence” (14). I’m still not convinced, if only because even the idea of “two capitalisms” is in the end still reductive: the true versus the false; one close to the spirit, the other pure artifice; one for the poet, the other for the plutocrat. Williams’ relation to the real and to artifice and language is too complex to merely ally him with Thoreau who dreamt of having a Realometer at his disposal “that future ages might know how deep the freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time” (qtd in Marsh 17). Maybe I give Williams too much credit. credit. credit. After all he does twice make the analogy "money : joke" in contrast to some inalienable "radiant gist." So I will have to read on in Marsh. Indeed, the relationship between the coin of language in poetry and money itself is an intersection worthy of much discussion. If you look at some early language poetry, in fact, notice how the word “capital” comes up again and again. Is it an elaborate joke on referentiality (presuming that our ken encompasses its entire system in a single utterance) or is it a more earnest attempt to foreground questions of value at the frontiers language-making?

I Never Told You To Read It

Those who have followed this blog know that I am not a fan of Pound, although, of course, when dealing with Williams there’s somehow no avoiding Ez and his pretensions. The newly archived sound recordings of Pound on PennSound, reveal that he was as much if not more a voice than a writer, but it’s a voice that has erased all the original Jersey in it, replaced by some monstrous fake-bardic brogue. I prefer the simple, cracker sing-song of Williams next to the oracular posturing of Pound spouting the indecipherable or the patently ridiculous (an example of the latter is the insufferable whine of “Cantico del Sole.”) The reason Pound has been on my mind again is that, while rereading Paterson, I am paying attention this time to the overall design, and it’s interesting to me that the geological cross section passage which has fascinated many of the writers associated with this blog (Shaw, Lunberry, Wontham) is preceded by a passage culled from a correspondence with Pound. It seems that the “unreadability” of the geological cross section is montaged with Pound talking about the readability of Artaud. It’s as if Williams is saying that the mute geological depths are just as unrelentingly silent as the classics Pound is telling him to read instead. So, I’m reading it as a diss of Pound, but you tell me. While Pound seems to be criticizing Williams for enjoying Artaud, Williams is siding with the vitalism of Artaud (note the higgeldy-piggeldy of the text on pg137 before the Pound page, which is regimented more like a sales receipt.)

From One Old Coconut to Another

I checked out Ezra Pound’s Cantos the other day. I had read excerpts a long time ago, and didn’t understand them and didn’t like them. Mind you, I did not not like them because I didn’t understand them. I both did not like and did not understand. I thought, however, that age might have changed things. I had recently had dinner with a retired English professor who talked lovingly of Williams’ relation to Pound and H. D. at Penn, and had had coffee with a critic with a more peevish claim that Paterson was just a watered down attempt at the Cantos. After giving the Cantos another go, however, it seemed to me a high-class form of Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t like it for the same reason I don’t like Spenser’s Faerie Queene or Roddenbery’s Star Trek.
In his autobiography, Williams is generous with Pound (even though Williams’ descriptions, contrary to his assertions, give us the sense that his dear buddy Ez was a bit of a nightmare). Yet, Williams' assessment of Eliot’s The Wasteland—“the great catastrophe to our letters” (146)—is more to the general point: “There was heat in us, a core and a drive that was gathering headway upon the theme of a rediscovery of a primary impetus, the elementary principle of all art, in the local conditions. Our work staggered to a halt for a moment under the blast of Eliot’s genius which gave the poem back to the academics” (146). I would like someone to school me as to Pound’s place in this description: part of the work that staggered to a halt, or a return to the academic, Eurocentric tradition that Eliot saved from the trash heap? Perhaps both. In the Cantos, there are some interesting sea and sailing images, which I always like; spars against the vast blankness of the ocean remind us what poetry does, degree zero. Williams chooses the river, instead. And he gravitates towards the close at hand:

[T]he critics would have it that I, the poet, am not profound and go on with their profundities, sometimes affecting to write poems in their very zeal as thinkers. It all depends on what you call profound. For I acknowledge it would, in dealing with man and city, require one to go to some depth in the form for the purpose.
The thinkers, the scholars, thereupon propound questions upon the nature of verse, answering themselves or at least creating tension between thoughts. They think, and to think, they believe, is to be profound. A curious idea, if what they think is profitable to their thinking they are rewarded—as thinkers.
But who, if he chose, could not touch the bottom of thought? The poet does not, however, permit himself to go beyond the thought to be discovered in the context of that with which he is dealing: no ideas but in things. The poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity. The thought is Paterson, to be discovered there. (Autobiography of WCW 390-91)

(Pound’s pet-names for Williams: My Old Coconut, Bull, Bullll, My Dear Old Sawbukk von Grump, Ole Son, WillYam, Willyum the Wumpus.)