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

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!

enter these starved and broken pieces

I don't know I don't know I don't know. Managing to forge a "whole" work out of this mess, the operation keeps getting interrupted for long stretches of time. As always, the underlying intuition is that this is the whole, that there is nothing to wait for, here we are, etc. I withheld certain parts of the mix that I put together in May while at the Visual Studies Workshop, since I thought posting them would preempt any release of this "whole;" but now listening to what I had managed to put together, while taking account of what has been collected in the meantime, I know it will all change again. Or maybe I'm closer to the end than I'm letting myself admit. In any case, I've decided to post the significantly new parts of the bigger work here, given they will probably entirely change or be folded into a different continuum. Current misgivings annotated.
Possible Intro (1 min. 35 sec.)
well, even though it's intentionally clunky, for something that I've spent so much time on it's probably not an appropriate opening, especially since the pandering, sterile beat gives it the feel of a public radio PSA on monitoring your cholesterol.
It's the locality! (1 min. 33 sec.)
I love Williams' quote that art is not "putting sugar on cake." A crucial bit from the PennSound bytes. Exposition, exposition so . . . yawn? (one person has told me it's boring for those who already know Williams-- the core audience; evidence of constant my schizophrenia concerning who it's for and who will listen. But wait, it's not all sugar on cake, buddy!)
Have you ever been to Paterson? (2 min. 5 sec.)
Cloying? Also, when editing, I had a lot of trouble making the Carole Maso samples really sound like they fit; I still think they might be a little off, even though they provide some crucial connective material and diversity of voice (I found myself overusing Bob Perelman and Lytle Shaw throughout, so any chance I had to get other material in, I took it.)
Blocked (4 min. 31 sec.)
I think this section is the most successful at doing what I wanted the piece to be doing, a mix between informational and musique concrete elements. I do think that, as it goes on it succumbs to the banality of overused effects, which, while may have some place in a more live setting, I think falls a little flat here after a while. For some reason, I think the loops and delays and filter sweeps went on for so long because I wanted to get some particular sound bites in, but but by the time that they fade up into the mix, it already feels like they've been "said" on a subconscious level.

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.

Green Bottle Blues

In the first installment of the new podcast project PoemTalk, three poets discuss William Carlos Williams’ short poem “Between Walls.” It seems that since PennSound has posted all of Williams’ available readings, people are starting discover with dismay that his reading performances do not give any clue as to particularities of the line as he wrote it.
One could speculate whether he knew what the heck he was doing. Maybe he felt too constrained by the genteel context of the pre-Beat-era public reading to really perform his lines as written. Regardless, I liked the almost petulant flavor of his home-recorded reading: he projects the word “nothing” as if he wanted it to be an object . . . a "something" beyond him. “Broken” and “bottle” are flung far enough from the body so they could stand off and judge it; or rather, not even that far—it’s more like spit in the wind. (Cf. Marinetti, whose flung words transform the provincially trapped poet, merging into an international technosphere.) The poets had a good laugh at the improbability of doing a podcast devoted to Paterson: Do it!
My only criticisms at the onset of this well-produced and interesting project are the tag line and the intro. The idea of “close but not too close reading” is a cute phrase that conceals a lot of culture war ressentiment—and it has always seemed to me disingenuous for the poetic avant-garde to disavow the theoretical practices that have helped over the years create its core audience. And the intro sounds much too much like that of Martin Spinelli’s Radio Radio (which, because Al Filreis sounds almost exactly like Spinelli is just . . . weird): so Al, if you need someone to design a new intro for you, call me!

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.)