The Wonder Show of the Universe

I sat down today to try to read some of Marcia Nardi's actually published poetry. I have tried before, but it was too off-putting. Maybe because the genteelly thin poems seemed somehow shamed by the excess of her letters to Williams, as if she was deluded in inventing more crafty modes to squirrel away unacceptable emotions. However today the poems seem strangely compelling--you can hear the resonances of her anger and poverty between the lines, the bitterness twisted up into a bittersweet rhyme, and a kind of Buddhist approach to emptiness and death (although she seems not to have the tools to sugar-coat it as such--this is before the Gary Snyders and the Allen Ginsbergs inform the scene--so there is an interesting unqualified vacillation between despair and resignation; after all, as her letters imply, she still very much wants to be a part of the world that has abandoned her; she has not, for all that, become detached from her desires).
One interesting discovery had to do with her odd repeated references to Thurston or Thurstons, used as one might say something like "the Shakespeares and Homers of our time." It was difficult to search on Google, given that our communal digital brain does not confer the same sort of esteem that Nardi seemed to have for this figure. It couldn't be Thurston Moore or Thurston Howell III for purely historical reasons. Perhaps some legendary robber baron or scientist whose obscure advance became posthumously revolutionary? When I saw this picture, I knew who she was talking about





























Knowing this, these lines become clear:

"And how that magic hat, invisibly
With rabbits filled,
That charmed her in her childhood will suddenly be
Some tattered schoolroom map of six by four
From which new Thurstons wonderfully draw
Real Aetnas"

+++++++++++++++++("Femelle de L'Homme")

"Your thought running from you
Just outside your window
At your call turning by running on
Because you have no face yet
Because it does not know you
Because you are the original Thurston
Waiting
For a world of his own making
In order to be born,
The creator creating to be created
The womb within a womb--"

+++++++++++++++++("Alone with a Poem")

In honor of Marcia Nardi, spend some time with unloved poetry.

The Uncontainable

This past summer, I talked to Rachel Blau DuPlessis at the Kelly Writers House about her long-term engagement with Williams' Paterson particularly, and long-form poetic works in general. Her "life-poem" Drafts, described by Ron Silliman as "one of the major poetic achievements of our time," continues an engagement with and challenge to Williams' aesthetics; numbering close to 100, DuPlessis' Drafts are more open, polysemic, multiple, and provisional than perhaps Williams' could have let himself perform, but which, it seems, he dreamed in his own imperfect way. DuPlessis has also written critically about Williams in her book The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice, which, like her poems, challenges generic considerations, and expands what the critical essay can be. (And by the way, listening to audio of her performances, available on PennSound is a really great way to start navigating her work).
I feel like this audio interview will be one of the last I will be collecting before attempting a reconsolidation of the various materials. As you can probably tell, the content for this blog has been steadily petering, with some renewals here and there, but nonetheless on the fade. It has always been a question for me whether any consolidation is worthwhile or advisable, which is why interviews like those below have been kept in as close to their rawest form (with some mild editing) because I have felt it is better to make them available during the process, rather than to wait and wait for an ideal form that never comes. What would be the ideal? There are so many objects that this blog can be translated into (so then, why not keep as blog?) In fact, there is an application now where I can press a few buttons, enter a few passwords, and voilà! the blog is "slurped" into a book. (This application here may be easier, all you have to do is enter the url impossibleobject.blogspot.com and see what it would look like without having to download any software.) Obviously, that option only would be some kind of conceptual parody of blog specificity, although it may be worthwhile as a textual trace--evidence, like performance photos, and ultimately useful in case Blogger decides to suddenly cease operations or their data gets wiped out in an electromagnetic singularity. Nevertheless, there will be at the very least a few more postings, including an interview (text only) with Jennifer Scappetone, before Impossible Object makes a leap into another medium or into the void.
The following interview with Rachel Blau DuPlessis took place on June 10, 2010 in Philadelphia.
I heard this was a really bad poem: (4 min. 23. sec)
Nobody cared about Williams (or the long poem): (2 min. 51. sec)
Marcia Nardi and the lost women of the 50s: (7 min. 11 sec.)
This is the thing that can never be contained: (6 min. 02 sec.)
Unicorn versus plethora: (4 min. 42 sec.)
Paterson's opening passage: (3 min. 50 sec.)
Eros and plethora: (4 min. 26 sec.)
The triadic line, eros, rape: (4 min. 28 sec.)
Staggering identification with beautiful thing: (2 min. 45 sec.)
Language poetry and Paterson: (2 min. 51 sec.)
Visiting Paterson: (1 min. 30 sec.)

Life, Love and Paterson: Jeanne Heuving on Paterson

Jeanne Heuving, who is finishing a book on the transmutation of love in 20th Century Poetry, talked to me about how she would apply her concept of "libidinal field poetics" to Paterson, when I interviewed her a couple months ago. Jeanne, with whom I teach as well as help curate her Writing for Their Lives literary series, is the author of Incapacity and Transducer, as well as a number of scholarly works on poetry.
Imagism as love poetry; Williams and love: (8 min. 25 sec.)
The Marcia Nardi letters: (7 min. 40 sec.)
Ecstasy in objects; Requited vs. unrequited love poems: (6 min. 45 sec.)

Return to Paterson

I spent a little time in Paterson last week, while participating in the William Carlos Williams Society's Annual Conference. The talks happened some remove from the chaos of the city in the more bucolic satellite campus of William Paterson College, mostly dead for the summer, although the focus was particularly on the relation of the poem to the city. As hoped, I unearthed some bits of knowledge not easily dislodged from academic books or internet searches. For example, my hunch that the Kevin McCarthy involved with a dramatic reading of Paterson at the Lexington Ave. Y was the Kevin McCarthy of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (thus, through pure hunch setting off the continuing series of Body Snatcher hacks) was given credence since someone pointed out that he was Mary McCarthy's brother, and thus would share her literary circles. I met the almost-allegorically named Dr. Peterson, distinguished for having written the first book-length study of Paterson, and whose collection of Williamsiana includes a manuscript with a mole Williams removed from Floss taped to it. He also had some David Lyle manuscripts and gave me some insight into Lyle's personality. While I couldn't get her to say anything on tape, one scholar mysteriously said something during a question and answer session something to the effect of "Marcia Nardi ruined my career!" So, some juicy bits from long-time travelers in the Patersphere. I took a few of the "greener" critics--including someone writing on ecocrit and Paterson--out to the more off-limits places, where the dead factories seem to have sagged and mulched a little bit more since my last visit. I wonder what will happen to these mysterious and historical abandoned spaces now that the falls area will become a National Park. I almost fear the worst, but hopefully they can get people who are smart about maintaining "preserved ruins" in the spirit of a place like the Eastern State Pen, rather than turn it into a tacky tourist phantasmagoria. Already they have painted the Looms-Warpers-Winders-Quillers-Coppers- Jacquards-&Supplies on the side of the old Paterson Silk Machinery Exchange. Ugh!

Triumph of the Bill

A while back, Albert Min mentioned to me that Williams’ “so much depends” resonates with the common Spanish phrase “todo depende.” These translational resonances are afoot in my retooling of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers into Los Ladrones de Cuerpos with Williams’ Paterson in the subtitles. I had originally intended to get the dubbed Spanish version, and hack the English subtitles. When a mislabeled BitTorrent served up the original English versions with a Spanish subtitle file, I was initially disappointed. However, by using poorly understood Spanish as the source text, I was able to inject a little more indeterminacy into the process, especially when I kept myself from looking at the actual film (I have yet to watch more than half of the whole movie, even though I’ve been watching it for the last couple months). While I’ve had to shape the subtitles, to a certain extent, to the speed and logic of the image, I’ve not been slavish to these requirements, sometimes gleefully inserting flashes of text that could not possibly be read within the temporal constraints of the film, as if the subtitles were a foreign language, an ambience of exotic chatter. And this is poetry, after all . . . not as foreign to Santa Mira as are the pods. Doctor Miles Bennell not once but twice gives way to reciting some bit of doggerel to charm his constituency; in some of the next episodes, we’ll meet his literary buddies. But Miles—or in the translation, Dr. Bill—does not recognize language’s body-snatching powers for what they really are. He toys with them a little too casually. It thus seems appropriate for the repressed to return in the form of cameos by William S. Burroughs (the police and the psychiatrists, natch) and Jack Spicer (we’ll meet him in future episodes). So far, if you caught them, there was a bit part played by Marcia Nardi, some quick homages to the early subtitle art of Frank O’Hara and Guy Debord*, and nods to The Matrix. Keep your eyes out for other special guests. I’m working on Duchamp and Genet right now. Some early plans not put aside just yet included a William B. Williams character (he’s probably the first DJ, the guy who came up with “Make Believe Ballroom”). While we’re at it, why not William D. Williams (you know, Lando Calrissian?) and maybe William E. Williams, William F. Williams, and a William X. Y. Z Williams? The Bill is in the mail!
By turning William Carlos Williams back to “Carlos,” we can maybe get at some body snatching at the heart of not merely Paterson but Williams’ language practice in general. However, I don’t imagine any return to some authentic resonance with a Spanish origin, but rather hope to multiply the possibilities for movement of the poem. When Danny Snelson was in Seattle this spring, we worked through some of these possibilities with Milton’s Paradise Lost and Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os for a performance we put together. I have been thinking about these issues a lot since our confabulations, inspired by his particular take on the act of translation. I’m sure if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have tried to translate a poem in Cyrillic this morning. Now that’s hard, although we all know that that the most common English translation of that funny little Russian “x” is “spider-vehicle.”
*actually I didn't realize until now that "Can Dialectics Break Bricks" is Vienet's not Debord's, although I did know that it is more of a redubbing than a resubtitling, even though the subtitles will of course seem at first the locus of detournment to English viewers.

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.

Paterson Data no. 35

Nardi, M. Meeting you on the street today [poem]. Ladies' Home Journal v. 73 (October 1956) p. 162

2	Nardi, M.Was it the honey-hearted vowel? [poem]. Poetry (Modern Poetry Association) v. 84 (July 1954) p. 212-13

3	Nardi, M. How the rich move softly [poem]. Commentary v. 15 (March 1953) p. 243

4	Nardi, M. They said it is all clear now [poem]. Poetry (Modern Poetry Association) v. 75 (March 1950) p. 331-2

You Need This Kind of Unhappy: Filreis, Lowenthal, and Couch on Paterson

New Jersey as an Impossible Object brings me to University of Pennsylvania again, which makes sense since we can probably map Williams’ cosmos as a quadrilateral connecting Paterson/Rutherford, New York, Paris, and Penn (he went to medical school and met Ezra Pound at the university, and his impact is still felt there today). In fact, this interview took place at Penn’s Kelly Writers House, where they consider Williams their patron saint. His poem “Quality of Heaven” is etched in its pavestones, and as Kelly Writers House director and Kelly Professor of English, Al Filreis says, “Williams is what underwrites so much of what we do. He is absolutely central. He’s accessible, in small pieces (not Paterson). He is liked for his crazy geniality and he is very much hip to the language-centered people who inhabit the space. He does it for everyone.” I talked with Al—a native of New Jersey, who did his undergraduate thesis on Paterson (to the dismay of his advisors); as well, joining the conversation are Kelly Writers House director and poet Jessica Lowenthal, and poet, teacher and translator Randall Couch. They are all regularly involved with Poem Talk, a new podcast series which is probably what will force me to break down and get a new iPod. For the life of me, I can’t sit in front of the computer and listen to anything longer than a few minutes, so, if you are like me, I would suggest too these long clips more for loading and listening on your mobile media playback device of choice. As always, pieces of these relatively raw conversations will be worked back into the mix at a later date.
Teaching Paterson: (11 min. 20 sec.)
Paterson, Keep Your Pecker Up!: (3 min. 8 sec.)
Ginsberg and Nardi: (13 min. 51 sec.)
Sam Patch and General Privation: (6 min. 25 sec.)
The Discovery of the Triadic Line: (10 min. 5 sec.)
Approaches to Knowledge: (2 min. 11 sec.)
Paterson and the World: (3 min. 24 sec.)

Williams: A Very Sexually Suc-sexual Young Man

I’ve been trudging through the Williams material on PennSound, trying to log the material that may be useful to my purposes, and it has not been fun. Like celebrities are apt—especially celebrity old-timers—we hear the same pat formulations, the same stories. It may be that the famous just lack imagination in general (at least outside of the spheres of their imaginative control) or that we live with a notion of fame that points to our own lack of imagination (we make people famous because we need these human signposts, and require them to turn out these same stories about themselves). Nevertheless, here are some of the more juicier moments dealing with Williams’ relation to sex, which of course is really what we want of our celebrities:

“I don’t like jazz. It’s tiresome. I hear the people, the artists, in Paris would rave about jazz, but it’s too tiresome! It’s too much of the same thing! . . . Not subtle. If you’re going to be sexually excited about it, it shows you to be a boob. But if you want sex, go and get a colored gal, and she’ll teach you sex, but don’t be kidded. Erections mean more to me than rhythm.”

“I was very sexually successual as a young man [sic], but I did not believe in going so far that I lost my head. I wanted always to be conscious, quite. I didn’t want to indulge in sex so much that I lost my head!”

On Ginsberg: “I’m disgusted with him and his long lines . . . . [The Beats] tend towards homosexuality. For God’s sake what is homosexuality but a variant of sexuality? It’s the same thing. There’s nothing new about that. It’s been done before. No enlightenment!”

On Toulouse-Lautrec: “I was attracted to Toulouse-Lautrec by his social position, which I sympathized with. But the whore’s just as much a human being as a saint. And I wanted to emphasize that, that he was the man who respected the truth of the design. For God’s sake, what the hell difference is it to him that she’s a whore? He was indifferent to it! And the poet is also indifferent to it.”

These all come from an interview with Walter Sutton that he did late in life; something about that interview situation must have brought out the cranky old man in him, and it’s more revealing than the genteel commentaries and interviews that were recorded. The reason I’m fixating on these fragments is more than just idle salaciousness, or playing to Williams-bashing. Since I’m reading Paterson once again, I wanted to take on a challenge. Since I, like many other readers, find his formulations “man like a city, woman like a flower” etc., inane and glance over such with embarrassment or intellectual indifference, I wanted to take them seriously, since they are part of the structure of the poem. How did Williams theorize sex and how does this theory inform the poem? By passing these passages over, we are lacking the type of vigorous imagination that Williams is calling for—that which sees what is before you clearly. Even though these little biographical tidbits give us a sense that—though he be suc-sexual in things sexual—he has quite a bit of issues with sex (and race), we might be giving the poem short shrift by taking references to sex with too much literalness. Again, I’ll admit I might be perversely generous here, but it seems a productive, counter-intuitive inquiry to take up. I’ll probably approach this issue in later blog entries, but I think one thing to think about is that he’s obsessed with this notion of unity, design, and the one, and that identity categories that take on the guise of “difference” (starting with the idea of “woman”) are an instance of a kind of divorce (a favorite word for Williams). So Williams’ poetics, which implies an intense unity with the object, a kind of spiritual-optico marriage with things, also implies the “unity of man” ideal of the Enlightenment to make it work. And as was troubling for Enlightenment thought, he is troubled by that which splits from his optics, and exerts difference, desire, and distance. I think he does not ignore these splits, but makes them very palpable (as with, for example, the Marcia Nardi letters), so that his poem is able to be a performance of the problem rather a symptom of his anxieties.

In sterquilinio putredinis

I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science-fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams.
--Robert Smithson

The essential starting requirement is in the shit-heap of our putrefaction.
--Morienus, the Roman

Somewhere between Smithson's kodachromed futurism and the epiphanies of ancient alchemists, one can find one's way through Williams' Paterson. However, in getting together some materials for another talk I'm giving on Paterson, I'm finding that trying to unify all these transhistorical strategies for perceiving the everyday has many rabbit holes to fall through. At one point, I thought it might be interesting to think about the univocity of being (as it manifests itself in German mysticism, Spinoza, Deleuze) as a way to think about the ways in which Williams confounds a clear notion of his own position, and its relation to the city and poetic "transcendence." That didn't really pan out. I think, in the end, things get too "profound," full of secret underlyings-- difficult to pin on someone who said "the surface/glistens, only the surface./Dig in--and you have/a nothing, surrounded by/a surface, an inverted/bell resounding." (124) This is a long cry from "aaa ooo zezophazazzzaïeozaza eee iii zaieozoakoe ooo uuu thoezaozaez eee zzeezaozakozakeude tuxuaalethukh"--a gnostic password that immediately gets one into VIP lounge of angels and archons.
In any case, throughout May I'll be working on the more large-scale portion of this project as a resident at the Visual Studies Workshop. Not sure how much of that will pan out in blog entries, but we'll see. I'm still hoping to get a reading group together in Rochester (not sure if this will happen yet either), and I bet I can find an all-female thrash band who will do the Marcia Nardi letters. One can only hope. Some more Paterson visits?: not sure. I think Richmond, Virginia is closer to Paterson than Rochester is, even though I fooled myself into thinking that Rochester would put me in close contact.
This much, however, I know so far about Rochester: chair 223 is a deathtrap.

Gould, Lyle, Nardi

Because Williams pastes Marcia Nardi’s pleading, convoluted, obsessive letters full of high dudgeon right into Paterson, we normally think of her presence as the one that uniquely pulled Williams out of the formal constraints of the poem and into a vast territory outside his control. However, as Paul Mariani shows in A New World Naked (1981), Williams was also inspired by David Lyle, whose work did not ultimately make it into the pages of the poem. Mariani describes Lyle as:

an old radio operator who had settled in Paterson . . . to devote all his prodigious energies to one extraordinary project. By dint of hard work he had turned himself into a one-man information station, reading and digesting everything he could get his hands on in an attempt to discover in that aphasic river of random words just what were the central energies and patterns of the times. Blake-like, he moved into the tonnage of news media pitchblende in order to extract what Williams had called the radiant gist, the luminous center. . . . Lyle mailed off his missives—sometimes five or eight or ten pages long, single-spaced and glossed—to artists, musicians, poets, politicians, engineers, in short, to whatever names he found in the news. It was as though he had managed to freeze the very radio waves themselves and make their energies visible in ink as they flowed through the thousands of names and places and especially verbs that were in the air at any given moment. (468-69)

Nardi’s prose, in light of Lyle’s influence, does not necessarily point to some more authentic, democratic, “real” world outside poetry. Rather, its inclusion dramatizes the role of poet as a manager of data—a filter of sorts, rather than creator ex nihilo.
In the same chapter, Mariani off-handedly notes a trip Williams takes to Manhattan to visit Joe Gould on his birthday. Here, perhaps, was another secret well of inspirational company that Williams kept, since Gould was allegedly interfacing massive amounts of live data to produce his Oral History of the World. Joseph Mitchell describes Gould’s vast trove of cheap composition books as “a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey, the fruit, according to Gould’s estimate, of more than twenty thousand conversations. In it are the hopelessly incoherent biographies of hundreds of bums, accounts of the wanderings of seamen encountered in South Street barrooms, grisly descriptions of hospital and clinic experiences . . ., summaries of innumerable Union Square and Columbus Circle harangues, testimonies given by converts at Salvation Army street meetings, and the addled opinions of scores of park-bench oracles and gin-mill savants” (Joe Gould’s Secret 12-3).
Mariani tells me that the Lyle letters are at Yale, where, sometime this fall, I hope to go to get a look at them. The Gould books, for a long time believed to be baled up and buried in a cellar on Long Island, are not so retrievable, their substance dispersed into the “infinitude of bushwa.”

To Lead the Mind Away

Joanne Hsieh and Jesse Roy, who last year regaled us with their song of Sam Patch, have produced another Patersong especially for New Jersey as an Impossible Object. From Book III (The Library), their rendition of Locust Tree would beat Williams reading it hands down, although were he to be backed up by Allen Ginsberg on harmonica, Marcia Nardi on bass, and Joe Gould on the spoons, he might have provided more competition.

For there is a wind or ghost of a wind
in all books echoing the life
there, a high wind that fills the tubes
of the ear until we think we hear a wind,
actual .

to lead the mind away.

Drawn from the streets we break off
our minds’ seclusion and are taken up by
the books’ winds, seeking, seeking
down the wind
until we are unaware which is the wind and
which the wind’s power over us .
to lead the mind away (96)

(Click on image for song. Joanne Hsieh on piano and voice; Jesse Roy on guitar and voice; Recorded and mixed by Jesse Roy).

The Wonder Years: Carole Maso on Paterson

Novelist Carole Maso was born in Paterson, NJ and in many ways is a writer deeply informed both by the stylistic licenses Williams took, as well as by the aura of his presence in her first city. Maso talks of Wonderbread trucks, grammar school pride, Armenian silk workers, and other Patersoniana in this recent interview, again fairly unedited. I regretted later on not asking her about how she felt about the Marcia Nardi passages, especially after reading her say in another interview: “Only a college-educated white man can write enormous, sloppy, sometimes unreadable books and be labeled a genius. If a woman attempted such a project she'd be laughed or scorned or ridiculed off the scene. Or worse, ignored.” I did later see her at a reading, and we briefly talked about how Williams was canny to fess up to such power dynamics by including the Nardi letters to him, warts and all.
Maso talks about her upbringing in Paterson: (3 min. 24 sec.)
Moving through a modernist masterpiece: (4 min. 25 sec.)
Hardship in Paterson: (3 min. 9 sec.)
Paterson and Paterson: (1 min. 56 sec.)

Between Athens and the Amphioxus

Now’s a good time to reread book III (esp. parts 2-3), taking place in the cold April on Garret Mountain. It’s structured around the open-aired harangue of a preacher, his nacreous pate glistening in the still wintery sun, benches and harmonium set out pell-mell on the plateau of the overlook. Williams is taking a walk and, while listening to the preacher (whose thoughts seem to echo his own), his mind strays to the history of a hanging in the same place, and to the magnified detail of black cloth on the coat that Washington wore at his inaugural, and to the abstract notion of the system of debt and capital, and to the woman who writes long letters pleading for his attention (Nardi). In some ways, this section is about exploitation, the way in which “Cash is mulct of them that others may live/ secure.” But it’s clear as he beats things around in his mind that the preacher who preaches giving all his money away is the only beauty there, a beauty that may be “torn to shreds by the/ lurking schismatists” (the latter is actually a word meaning “non-believer,” although at first I thought it was some portmanteau word with a geological pun embedded.) As such, the preacher is another avatar of the noise and chaos of the falls, which preach their own sermon of return to the nothing that founds the chaos of Paterson. “—with monotonous insistence/ the falls of his harangue hung featureless/ upon the ear, yet with a certain strangeness/ as if arrested in space” (70). This section is a progressive building up to a moment of clarity when, almost in song, Williams delivers his magisterial advice (channeled from the preacher and sung to Nardi and the reader) to “Look for the nul.”