Some more thoughts on Williams

Here’s an interesting tidbit that popped up online; it’s part of an interview with a prize-winning poet who talks about William Carlos Williams, at least briefly.


“… I remember someone saying that there are four jobs of the writer.
One is to say what happened, and one is to critique what happens in the world, and one is to imagine new things, and I think the fourth was, to make an interesting object. And, it's true, I think that probably that work of imagination is just as important as saying what is, though, there's a whole literature in the 20th Century -- especially the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and maybe William Carlos Williams, that argues that saying "what is," is itself an act of imagination.”


The article made me aware of a major assumption I’ve built into my reading of Williams’ poetry; I read Spring and All expecting that in responding to Eliot he would break from Eliot’s incomprehensible style. I read modern poetry just as anticipated by Williams’ in his introduction; I am part of the mob to whom the plagiarists of reality speak. I want poetry explained to me – there is enough confusion in the world and I am not yet so disillusioned that Williams and Eliot make sense to me.


Is that the crux of the problem? Is it that modern poetry arose into an era of disillusionment and its relevance or clarity has been marred by the intervening years? I feel like before I even pick up a poem I am being asked to assume it is good – because it has been read before and rated acceptable by other readers. How can this be justified? Poetry is supposed to speak to me, and yes, on the one hand perhaps I have not yet been taught how to listen, but it is also possible that maybe the poems are just not relevant anymore. How can poems built to be incomprehensible clarify my worldview? Isn’t it possible to be clear AND thought-provoking?


Maybe the problem is that I expect too much of modern poetry; there are four jobs for poets, according to the poet interviewed; they must “say what happened,” “critique what happens in the world,” “imagine new things,” and “make an interesting object.” Williams sweeps the third category, but he doesn’t really delve into the past or future, leaving those realms to reality, to the plagiarists. Are the four jobs mutually exclusive? Does a great poet necessarily have to optimize around all of them?


This idea that Williams’ has, that reality is a copy, and that new ideas come only from outside reality – it seems so arrogant to me. So many of the advances in bioengineering are founded on nature – on understanding a previously unknown signaling pathway, designed by natural, real processes, and the like. We cannot truly progress past reality until we understand the reality we are in; otherwise, where is our reference point for originality? I refer instead to the idea of imagination as simply tangent to reality – there can be a common point of intersection between a new idea and the copy-cat world of reality, but given a large enough interval of, say, time, we find that the new idea is no longer simply a copy of the copy; instead, it has diverged.


http://www.pbs.org/newshour/insider/entertainment/jan-june08/hass_05-05.html