"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)

The Missed Encounter

DAY THREE
"The poet is one who can tolerate the missed encounter
and end up writing of it--overcoming his disaffection."
--Barrett Watten, correlation of Paterson, Book 1

Well, I knew there was some wisdom to be gained from waiting for my next special guest for an hour after driving two hours in the heatwave, then driving back after he no-showed. But I am still not completely convinced it is wisdom. Coming soon, another discorrelated replacement for the very city, which again we missed stepping foot upon. Is it always the power of the falls that sweeps us away? The powers of the false might get us closer. I really am trying. The wisdom of the graffiti found the next day tells us that it is difficult to fail, that one has to try at that too. Sadly, though, mulling over the genius on the wall, I think it is a product of faulty grammar (genius produced by its reverse) . . . to its left and right are other more unschooled evocations of something gone awry, without the hint of the spiritual exuberance of El Ghazali ("you possess what cannot be lost in a shipwreck") or the Buddha, so that, one can only conclude that she means "I try so hard and lose it all." I still think I'm in the world of this "and."