Junk Shot 2! Jennifer Scappettone and The Eye of Disaster

(Junk Shot 2 continues our on-going conversation with Jennifer Scappettone on "The Poetics of Enormity")

Milutis: Given this poetry requires a lot of research, is there a sense of regret that such a signature is not enough, and that your filtration process leaves out material that could be used to educate or elucidate? Or does it? Again, maybe the issue is one of the perceived smallness of device: poetic versus, say, prose-journalistic. You’re at an interesting intersection between informational value and poetic value, which are many times seen as completely antithetical.

I notice, too, that your list of the comico-tragic solutions to the BP oil spill has the heading “a taste of regret.” Keeping the same sense of regret as above—the regret for what’s left out, for knowledge that cannot be framed because of constraints of temporality, medium, form—at least the first four terms in this list had the status of buzz-words, calculated as incantations of American can-do. Junk-shot. Corexit. Top-kill. Sea-Brat #4. How do we create our knowledge of an enormous event out of these arguably poetic terms? Or do they block knowledge? Similarly, there is the popular concept of the “talking-point,” which is another tool to wrench out meaning from an enormity. We could say that this phenomenon is something news media shares with poetry, if we think about talking points like “no ideas but in things.” You wouldn’t be able to play with that in "Poetics of Enormity," and activate an enormous dialogue with Williams in the bargain, if it hadn’t become this take-away line, and hence, ultimately, a kind of flat, unthinking piece of text passed around from agency to agency. So, are these blockages or do they have some enabling capacity? How do you conceive of what you call the “post-slogan?”

Scappettone (Sent March 15, 2011): I realize there is an alas pervading each snippet of the whole, now that you pointedly ask. The results of every stab at research into seemingly shapeless miasmata of data are bound to fall short of the sublime knowledge base necessary to address the current social, environmental, and speculative emergencies in a concrete fashion. I like your use of the term "signature," which however redolent of a predigital age, reminds us that we are after all still mere flawed human individuals, writing pieces that are in some way bound to ourselves, no matter how many operations we launch as artists to escape, kaleidoscopically, our own experience.

We suffer in fact from a superabundance of information and a deficit of knowledge. How do we trace the systemic triggers of such emergencies? We would need to perform an operation such as that of Dziga Vertov in the Kino-Eye newsreels, to trace the sources of the common hamburger in its bun back to the farms and the wheatfields and the people working there: to try clarifying the tracks of production in a context that forces us to lose our grasp on the path, umbilical, that yokes one source of nourishment or crisis to the next.

Since I began composing this answer, in bitter confirmation of the urgency of addressing such questions, an earthquake at sea has triggered a tsunami which has triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, of proportions that remain to be seen and clarified. I think about the memoirs of hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that I pored through when editing the translation of a collection aimed to halt nuclear development 15 years back, the most painful attention to language I've ever paid. All of the survivors of Hiroshima interviewed mentioned the Aioi bridge. The mothers, siblings, children that had been left on the other side. The water or food that had been isolated to the other side. The people jettisoning themselves into the water to seek relief from the pain of burning, floating. It was a shared point of trauma punctuating the whole hell of horrible memories resisting any form of organization or even elegy.

When I returned to the US after two years of living in Japan, I went to an exhibit at the National Air and Space Museum devoted to the 50th anniversary of the Enola Gay bombing. It was astonishing. I had imagined that even if apology were lacking from such an institution, a taste of regret would pervade the whole. Instead, what resulted (apparently following a huge controversy, I later learned) was celebration sterilized of any trauma inflicted on the ground. One walked in to find the T-shaped bridge, the target of the bomb, captured as a still from a bird's eye view. Then the triumphal recording of the flight crew as it struck. The aestheticization of horror.*

One aspect of poetry as vocation is, it seems to me, to seek justice in the present or a redemption of history by forcing these radically disparate points of view to cohabit, if not fuse. To testify to the material fallout of actions, ours and those from "on high," with the cultural breadth that we are trained to file down little by little in the service of professionalism. The bridge in a poetic text of the sort I'm talking about becomes a focal point of concentration in an environment that is apocalyptically hybridized, yet which does contain a logic to which we can point.

Poetry can, moreover, confront interested obstructions of knowledge by using the language of obfuscation against itself, its jingles and buzz-words and slogans and spins—returning the control of knowledge in the form of the take-away line to the page or screen as a shape palpably displaced, deformed—so that the fog of rhetoric, triumph and advertising emerges as just that, rather than as common sense. I am exceedingly interested in the performative power of lyricism, of sonorousness; and this work, Exit 43, cobbles choral texts together out of the most self-contradictory material—the voices of Victorian poetasters, the EPA/Superfund, corporations, Alices—so as to create jarring rhymes that one can "buy" sonically, yet which beg further attention as material falling short of sense. I've structurally sampled the "nonsense" logics of Lewis Carroll in the service of this effort.

I do believe, ultimately, perhaps naively, in the utility of such work with language, which is highly specific. I don't reckon that information unshaped can convey meaning as knowledge. And journalism, however critical, needs to form a narrative even when none has arisen, and also responds to a political climate with which it must nearly always compromise. Hence poetry, "unsponsored."

*It isn't necessary for every document of history to include every possible point of view in order to be responsible to the truth. Years later, I went to an exhibit called "Vital Forms: American Art and Design in the Atomic Age, 1940-1960," at the Brooklyn Museum. The fascination and dread surrounding the chemistry of biomorphic form in those years, a fundamental anxiety and ambivalence emerging from the United States, was represented with remarkable clarity by these curators.

The Poverty of the Image

The claims of imagism have always seemed to me hyperbolic. There is something more evocative in even the most cliched 19th-century sentence than in a clipped, retentive modernist line--which is sometimes only a self-caricature, more applicable in theory than in practice. But, my suspicion of some of the claims of imagism perhaps comes only when one conceives that the stripped-down poetic image gives more, not less of the reality to which it refers. I've been working through a lot of Bergson lately, and happened upon a good precis of his work, reminding me of the essential poverty of the image:

perception adds nothing new to the image; in fact, it subtracts from it. Representation is a diminution of the image; the transition from image to pure perception is “discernment in the etymological sense of the word,” a “slicing up” or a “selection” (Matter and Memory, p. 38). According to Bergson, selection occurs because of necessities or utility based in our bodies. In other words, conscious representation results from the suppression of what has no interest for bodily functions and the conservation only of what does interest bodily functions. The conscious perception of a living being therefore exhibits a “necessary poverty” (Matter and Memory, p. 38).

Williams' "things," then, as tied to ideas, can only be what Bergson calls "less than things," in that our relation to them subtracts an image of them (thus, they are virtual in the commonly defined way as the simulacrum, but not, for all that, are they purely subjective); subsequently, they return to the reservoir of accumulated images (thus, they become virtual in the more strictly Bergsonian sense of memory inaccessible to action). It is here where the third imagist principle--"as regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of the metronome"--comes into play. When the image is reduced to data, it can more freely engage in speed, dynamism, mobility--thus, just as the modern VJ can create more lively compositions with YouTube crap than with lyrical HD footage (no pun on HD intended), the modernist reduced the world to fragmented images, which in themselves had little power, but which, when entering into the durational play of the art form, opened up powers inherent in some truer nature of time. (cf. the Bergsonism of Stein.) Yet, our ability to choose those images effectively, pulling them from the virtual to make them commensurable with present action inserts the qualitative, creative impact of the temporal interval on what would otherwise be a moment of pure, unthinking action. (cf. the Theosophical background of Pollock; and to continue and contradict my VJ comparison, more thoughtfully captured images may, then, instigate a more complex experience.) This notion of data that is useful for our bodies is a very powerful way to conceive how Paterson was composed along side of Williams' duties as a doctor, as well as the themes he explores dealing with the usefulness of certain forms of knowledge in pursuit of a "radiant gist."

Duh?

Ok, I get it, "no ideas but in things," is not materialist, but Bergsonian.

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.)

Rolling Up the Sum

As Peggy Lee would say, "Is that all there is?" Poet Zack Pieper, who hopefully is still planning to record a Patersong for me, sent me this Williams poem of his, which seems to sum up the critical reception of the man in two concise tercets:

GRAFFITI:

No idea
BUT
in things i.e.

Dr. Williams
was a
"hornball"

Vast Ventriloquism

Wallace Stevens' rejoinder to Williams' "no ideas . . ." on PoemTalk #14.

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:

saxifrage

I swear, the last (and first) time I was at Mt. Rainer, the park signs had hieroglyphics for "saxifrage." I called the park ranger to confirm this memory, but all I got were dead answering machines (of course they are not at their phones, they are in the wild!) I usually take pictures of these things, so I feel addled having no evidence to back me up, but I'm not going to drive all the way back to the great mountain on the near horizon just for this one post. Believe me when I say that saxifrage is plentiful enough that even if a hieroglyphic for this flower were not to be found, it should be there in some imagined guide. Because the word has a hieroglyphic nature that Williams would have appreciated. From the Latin, "saxi" and "frage" combines two favorite Williams concepts: fragmentation and rock. That no flower appears in the etymology is perhaps also what drew Williams to it as he inspiration for "no ideas but in things." For the flower emerges, invisible as it were to the object pieces of language, but indebted to them nevertheless, in the same way that meaning breaks between elements of montage rather than in separate film cells. Both breaking (of the rock) and building (of the flower) are combined here in a single, slow geologic complex. Here is Williams' poem about saxifrage, the original locus for Paterson's "no ideas but in things." It is a deceptively simple poem, somewhat pastoral, but so much about writing itself that one is unsure where the metaphors stop and where things begin.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
-- through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.

When Williams says "let the snake wait under/his weed" it seems like he's saying: give that to the snake, it don't interest me none. Does that carry over to writing with words? Is Williams NOT writing with words (my interpretation above that the poetry happens BETWEEN the words might carry this out)? In this case, a metaphor that reconciles people to the stones would be the problem with metaphor. However, the "let" could also be a kind of laissez-faire attitude, a benediction even. This is what snake does. Amen. This is what words do. Amen. Yet, is this the natural order of things? "Let" could also announce the trope of hysteron proteron (since the snake is waiting and the words are striking: a distinct reversal). If all these are true, he's caught in a kind of disabling polysemy. So he returns to simple commands (to himself or to the reader). Compose. (but then he takes it a step further, and hits upon the mot juste.) Invent! He is not reconciled to writing and metaphor, but is split from it (even as it does the splitting, but in splitting it himself he (sort of) makes a song of it, or at least emerges as a kind of unified being, one, not two (although there is a two within the one.)

What's There?!: Herb Blau on Paterson

I asked theater legend, writer, and Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington, Herbert Blau if there was a quality of consciousness in Paterson that has analogies to what goes on in experimental drama. He took this question for a ride, uninterrupted, resulting in this hypnotic read of Book One, without me having to say much else. The interview took place on 8-8-08 in his Seattle home. I’ve known Herb for close to 15 years, but that is just a sliver of his career, which has included directing some of the first productions of Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter and Genet in the US. He was also co-founder of San Francisco’s Actor’s Studio; co-director of the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center in New York; one of the conceptual architects of CalArts; artistic director of the experimental theater group KRAKEN; and author of numerous books that, with a blooded prose that he considers theater in itself, take on theater’s impossible limits and the indelible impact of the image on thought. He is also an indefagitable teacher; while some fancy professors are phoning it in at 50, Blau continues to be a tireless and available resource for his students at 82.
Theater, Consciousness, Paterson, & Various Readings of Book I: (34:58)
Bonus Fragment: (2:35)

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.

Which the theorem/with accuracy, accurately misses . .

Al Filreis on Williams' things.

The Swerve of the Thing

I felt as if Ginsberg’s assertion in the last video clip that “‘no ideas but in things’ means that there's no God, basically” was a little glib, so I decided to take yet another dive into Williams’ materialist (but perhaps crypto-theological) apothegm, this time via Slavoj Zizek, who has been, since his appearance on the scene, the philosopher of the “Thing,” and who has recently taken up the project of “thinking the subversive deadlock of monotheism through to the end.” (71) I find a lot of chance points of intersection in Chapter 3 of The Puppet and the Dwarf with various readings of Paterson, especially Zizek’s reevaluation of Freud’s notion of psychic automata and traumatic blockage. What follows may be more my riffing than a close reading, as can be only possible in this constrained space.
Firstly, those “thousand automata” of Paterson “who neither know their sources nor sills of their/ disappointments,” may in the end, be better materialists than Williams is; the language fails them, but they operate fine, and are the body of the demos. They are Paterson. Williams, in contrast, posits himself as alienated demiurge of the things he sees—the things emerge from him and the Falls rather than just sitting there like the green bottle glass. Poet is trumped by the people, and like them may also be an epiphenomenon of the Falls, which are, in turn, a better, natural geist that animates all the automatons. Can Williams get from geist to mere gist, thus overcoming the oversoul that haunts his search for the thing (although becoming Christ in the end?), or will he always miss this encounter in his deadlock with the people of Paterson?
The Falls may be what Zizek (citing Jonathan Lear) calls an “enigmatic term”: a seductive, empty concept that keeps a traumatic inconsistency from true consciousness. They are not “false” per se, but are structurally important placeholders for opacity, blockage, and the impenetrability of the Other’s desire, to use his terms. What’s important is that, in this reading, the Falls are not a stand-in for the Real as the thing-in-itself beyond the grasp of language—the flow, the noise, the movement towards death, etc. Rather, they mark the blockage and inconsistencies of the Paterson-system: “this Real . . . is not the inaccessible Thing, but the gap that prevents our access to it.” (78) This gap may be the all important antagonism between the poet who individually sings the city and the multitude that does not hear the song, so Williams is hep when he sings the blockage, but not when he makes the Falls an allegory for the flow behind appearances. There is no flow, only these blockages. There is no crossing the gap of the structural antagonisms, and this realization—the materialism of Williams—is paradoxically when he is most Christian, according to Zizek: “It is the very radical separation of man from God that unites us with God, since, in the figure of Christ, God is thoroughly separated from himself—thus the point is not to ‘overcome’ the gap that separates us from God, but to take note of how this gap is internal to God Himself” (78) We could say that Williams’ separation is incomplete—perhaps because of his Unitarian shilly-shallying with the divine—and, to end with a Zizekian doosy, it is only, then, the Jewish poet Ginsberg who can then become the Christian God.
Zizek makes a rare reference to poetry (Plath’s “The Other”) at the end of this chapter, which makes me think it is an apt one for these meditations. Here’s another good quote from this chapter for the poetics grab-bag:

It is not that we need words to designate objects, to symbolize reality, and that then, in surplus, there is some excess of reality, a traumatic core that resists symbolization—this obscurantist theme of the unnameable Core of Higher Reality that eludes the grasp of language is to be thoroughly rejected; not because of a naïve belief that everything can be nominated, grasped by our reason, but because of the fact that the Unnamable is an effect of language. We have reality before our eyes well before language, and what language does, in its most fundamental gesture, is—as Lacan put it—the very opposite of designating reality: it digs a hole in it, it opens up the visible/present reality toward the dimension of the immaterial/unseen. When I simply see you, I simply see you—but it is only by naming you that I can indicate the abyss in you beyond what I see. (70)

Or if you are completely bored by all this, here’s his dirty joke about tennis.

Ginsberg Drift

As described by Al in the last entry, here is the clip of Allen Ginsberg taking documentarists through the defunct industrial groves of Paterson, and talking about "no ideas but in things." He starts with his reading of one of his letters to Williams (which we musicated earlier this spring for the blog) and somewhat reinforces my hunch that Williams did not expect Ginsberg to become famous, since Ginsberg describes Williams as wanting his letters for their "street" quality (the way Ginsberg mentions this, you get a sense that he might have felt honored by this inclusion but also condescended to.) This footage was shot 20 years ago, and from what little you can see, the landscape remains little changed. As one is apt, Al marvelously scrambled the elements of this footage in his memory. I'm still looking for the boot and the shopping cart!

It Goes Without Saying . . .

No Ideas but in Receipts

So now’s the time of year when my kitchen card table slash dining room table slash occasional desk takes on yet another role, piled with receipts and envelopes and tax forms for weeks on end. I now have the phone on speaker mode, waiting for an answer to a question about form 4562, as the IRS’ hold music ping-pongs between Waltz of the Flowers and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for over a half-hour. The receipts range from those that are tiny and abstract—something you’d get from a cash register at an old grocery store—to veritable scrolls containing ads, legal boilerplate, color logos, and the name of your clerk. There are also those pieces of paper that were once receipts, but it seems that they were printed with disappearing ink—perhaps in cahoots with the IRS. What does this have to do with Williams, you ask? As you can see in this June receipt from Pilot Travel Centers, LLC (Store 255, Milford, Connecticut), in addition to purchasing 1 Toast Peanut Butter crackers ($.30) and 1 Snyder Sourdough Nibs pretzels ($1.29), I purchased an alphabet of reflective truck decals to spell out a familiar Paterson aphorism.

Beyond the Symbol: Bob Perelman on Paterson

A couple weeks ago, I talked to Bob Perelman about Paterson, language poetry, and the "grade school pageant" aspect of Paterson's symbology. I thought that the author of the poem "China"--which Fredric Jameson posited as an exemplar of postmodernism, in league with the Westin Bonaventure Hotel and Body Heat--would have something to say about the referential gap between Paterson and Paterson. At the end, I ask Perelman to read some of his own "no ideas but in things" poems from his early collection The First World.
Approaching Paterson: (2 min. 32 sec.)
Paterson's mass of unarticulated sound: (3 min. 44 sec.)
The pitfalls of taking on the epic: (1 min. 33 sec.)
Perelman reads from Book I, part 3 and discusses: (10 min. 12 sec)
Perelman reads from his collection The First World: (3 min. 18 sec.)

Things!

“No ideas but in things”: that damn thing to which the poem is reduced. Its block and tackle, its phonograph needle: the means to it and through it. Things! We’ve said before that Williams is not as materialist as it would seem when he says this. But maybe, he is consummately materialist, albeit espousing the materialism of a Deleuzean, who understands the “‘wisdom of the rocks,’ a way of listening to a creative, expressive flow of matter” (DeLanda, "Nonorganic Life"). It seems more and more, as we’ve pointed out with the geological cross section, that the poem is a kind of stratigraphy that pays attention to possible flows and movements in a seemingly rigid and static layering. The song made out of the block. The fire that finds its fuel. The wind, the rocks and water.
This mind creates things rather than finds them: thus, instead of getting out of materiality, it uses materiality against itself. “Things are our way of dealing with a world in which we are enmeshed rather than over which we have dominion. The thing is the compromise between the world as it is . . . and the world as we need it to be or would like it to be. . . It is a compromise between mind and matter, the point of their crossing one into the other” (Grosz, "The Thing"). The thing represents reciprocal poeisis with the world, a “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.”

Morir Sonando

In the beginning of Book I of Paterson, Williams describes the Paterson as a dreamer: “Eternally asleep,/his dreams walk about the city where he persists/incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.” This Paterson is an ancient Paterson, not exactly the city, but the reason for the city as emanation. And the citizens are not exactly sleepwalking but they are the insubstantial substance of another’s dream. What I always end up pointing out to people, even though I admit it might be a referential stretch, is that the mention of butterflies brings to mind Lao Tzu’s taoist parable about dreaming one is a butterfly. When you awake from dreaming that you are a butterfly, how do you know you are not a butterfly dreaming you are a man? Williams is dealing with similar paradoxes when he sets out the premise that we are all but dreams of some old giant under the falls, even though we can imagine this giant (and so why isn’t he our dream?). Ultimately, Williams sides with the reality of the giant: our imaginations are dwarfed and we suddenly become things, “thoughts sitting and standing” in the bus, thoughts who only exist because they are “listed in the Telephone/ Directory.” The reference to the butterfly is soon followed by the famous line “no ideas but in things”—a more strictly materialist statement that I think Williams overturns again and again in Paterson, especially here with his description of dreams, and is not to be taken completely seriously or simply. After all, towards the end of Book I, he writes something that celebrates the power of immaterial thought to transform squalid thingness: “Things, things unmentionable,/the sink with the waste farina in it and/lumps of rancid meat, milk-bottle-tops: have/here a tranquility and loveliness/Have here (in his thoughts)/a complement tranquil and chaste” (38). These, however, could still be the thoughts of the giant, and not that of a doctor making a house call to the tenements.

There is a drink at a Dominican, Ecuadorian, Colombian restaurant on 21st Ave in Paterson called "Morir Sonando," which translates as “To Die Dreaming"--a drink with orange juice and heavy cream. I didn’t order it, but during a particularly orange dinner of paella, plantains, and mango juice, I wondered how it came to be that all over the world, the flavor of dreams is orange-vanilla. Is it is some transcultural unconscious association, or is some giant Dreamsicle dreaming us into existence? The abandoned steel structures of this city have a similar color. Is rust the dream of steel, steel attempting to understand itself through a figment of what it could be? Is orange the pigment of what could be, of lost dreams which the material world steals from us (and steels from us)? I go to the old factories, get some orange rust on my tee-shirt. It looks good. Maybe I should stage a Chris Burden-esque performance whereby I rub the orange of oxidized metal all over my tee-shirt, get completely smashed and walk around Paterson at 3 am with “We Are All Bridge and Tunnel People” written on it. With lipstick. In French. I am in that kind of mood. “To die dreaming” indeed. But it is still just an orange smudge, only a hint of catastrophe on a mostly white v-neck, and I cross the bridge to New York. I think I will go to the Richard Serra show, and decide not to change my shirt: the orange smudge here will be chic, although as soon as I get to MoMA I realize that it immediately puts me under suspicion with the security guards, as if I had been stealthily frottaging Torqued Ellipse IV. There is a lot of very expensive rust here. It is uniform and smooth on some of his structures, more aleatory and environmental looking on others. It’s a pixie dust that makes metal less metal, makes it dream of air. Perhaps here in his labyrinthine structures I can find some secret portal to the dreams of Paterson, which may be my own dreams. Or be escorted brutally back to my single line in the Telephone Directory.

Fosse on My Left and Jehovah on My Right

My copy of Paterson disappeared in the vortex of my apartment. That's not an excuse for no recent posts. But I was thinking that, perhaps, the book became invisible through frequent handling; that, like the purloined letter, it was so unavoidably and continuously present as to render itself invisible. However, instead what happened was more interesting. It had been on the piano stand, having fully evolved into music. I had been trying to figure out how to score the Ginsberg letters, which I thought could either be done--in the hands of a capable avant-folk strummer (not me)--a la Incredible String Band (imagine the line "When I come back . . . I'll have W. C. Fields on my left and Jehovah on my right. Why not?" done with the Scottish psychedelic crooners' twang) or with a typical boho jazz accompaniment, of which I am more capable, but would still be lacking someone with Ginsberg's voice to drive it home.
If I had actually lost my copy, I would have lost these notes (below) which are written in the backcover. I could say I wrote them there as the dance-grammar for a possible work entitled Paterson: The Musical! but they are really there just because I had the copy of Paterson on hand when I came upon the following while buying tap-sneakers in a dance store in Asheville, NC: a list of the names of Bob Fosse dance moves, "The Language of Fosse." I'll list this lost language in case I misplace it again . . . a particular type of "idea-in-things":
parallel attitude
hieroglyphic
Calypso run
hat trick
hinge layback
front attitude swipe
4th position turn
chasse changement
shoulder knee pop
monkey down
meltdown
Italian changement
foot drag, puppy dog hands
crescent jump
backbend layout
matador
spender pose

Rigor of Beauty

Book I of Paterson starts with what seems like an epigraph:
“Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance” (3). But who is speaking this? As Lexi pointed out earlier, Paterson is a multivocal text. Yet Williams signals different voices with quotations only rarely. Strangely, the note to the text tells us that this is Williams himself speaking: “WCW’s own prose. On the 1945 KS galleys WCW cut two additional sentences that were also contained within the quotation marks: ‘It is not in the things nearest us unless transposed there by our employment? Make it free, then, by the art you have, to enter these starved and broken pieces’” (253). So, it is perhaps not an epigraph as much as it is an invitation, but it is still unclear why Williams would want to set it off like he does, since he does not use quotes normally in this way; is it merely to create a physical, graphic separation, to literally signify the “locked in the mind past all remonstrance”?
I’m hesitant to buy the explanation of pure graphism here. I still wonder about the way in which these quotes elicit the voice, especially in such a crucial place, the place of beginnings (however much a readerly desire for a beginning is thwarted by Williams), the place of “arma virumque cano” [“of arms and a man I sing”: Vergil]. A reply to the Greek and Latin with the bare hands would get rid of the arma (maybe replacing it with the silk factory or writing itself), but to a certain extent Williams gets rid of the virum and the cano too. What’s left? Que? I think there is definitely some singing left in the midst of the play of things, in the mist of the Passaic falls. After all, the famous line “no ideas but in things” is actually “say it: no ideas but in things.” Not that saying is singing, but saying might be enough of a song in the face of the brute materiality of Paterson (he mentions in his 1951 statement about the poem that it will only be with Book III that the poem will attain language; ironically, this is the book with the mute geological cross-section.)
So is it Williams that suppresses sound in his text or, as Garrett Stewart claims, is it the critics who have suppressed the phonotext of modernist poetry? Perhaps both. For Williams, the white noise of the falls overcomes sound and song, even as they emerge from its cosmogonic chaos. Whatever the song of Paterson is, it is not as easy to hear as in the other modernist epics, where “sounds cut in, rise, then fade away as other sounds intrude, as if we were tapping into a party line on a municipal phone exchange, spinning down a radio dial, or sampling a stack of records.” (Adelaide Morris)
If anything, the quotes here—as citations go—imply the already-said of past and memory. Whatever is said or sung of the “starved and broken pieces” to come is a function of the present-tense activity of reading (or singing, if you wish to interpret his concretisms lyrically.) The rest lacks citation as if—and this goes even for the archival passages—it hasn’t even been said yet.