Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

     The motor-barge is
     at the bridge the
     air lead
     the broken ice

     unmoving. A gull,
     the eternal
     gull, flies as
     always, eyes alert

     beak pointing
     to the life-giving
     water

                               ‘The Motor-barge’

     The U.S.A. is not light years away, but it is as light from a star no longer shining that the poetry of William Carlos Williams arrived in this country. It was only after his death in 1963 that the first collection of his poems to appear in an English edition was published. (Not that we should feel uncultured, for it was only posthumously that he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in his own country.)

     It is his practice and theory of speaking with a distinctively American voice that seems most to have retarded the spread of his poetry, its reputation and appreciation. Perhaps it has been opposition on principle and mainly to his theory that has stood the more in his way. The complicating factor as far as Williams’ poetry was concerned was the conflict in America between regionalists and cosmopolitans at the time his poetry was seeking acceptance. Williams is in the tradition of Whitman, who felt America could express itself only by breaking with English metre and idiom. Williams said: The inner spirit of the new language is original. Its difference from standard English is not merely a difference in vocabulary to be disposed of in an alphabetical list, it is above all a difference in pronunciation, in intonation, in conjugation, in metaphor and idiom, in the whole fashion of using words.’ By contrast, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ is written in at least six languages and none of them is American.

     The expatriates writing in English and Cosmopolitan - whether they were universal or not - won: it was to be the age of Eliot’. Eliot consolidated his victory; Charles Tomlinson says: ‘But how directly - that is, consciously - did Eliot impede Williams’s critical recognition? There is no easy answer to this.’ When eventually Eliot’s critical criteria disintegrated, Williams’ American and, later, his English reputation expanded, but now there were newcomers, especially Lowell, competing to fill the void. Even Williams’ imitators, the Black Mountain poets, were a liability to him, since they appeared, from their form, to speak in his place, whereas, lacking his matter, they were far from being able to do so.

     (What Williams believed, rightly or wrongly, that he could do for America, irrespective of whether it was worth doing, could presumably be done for other countries, in other languages. In fact, Hopkins had, without Williams patriotic fervour, already done it for English.)

     We might compare Williams’ independence from English models with Shakespeare’s independence from classical models. Williams, who accompanied his independence with critical declarations, as Shakespeare did not, said: ‘the reconstruction of the poem is one of the major occupations of the intelligence of our day’. The arrangement of his poems observes natural speech rhythms, making breaks for the sake of emphasis in what might otherwise have been the iambic pentameters of blank verse. This arrangement allows the characteristic rhythms of American speech, in whose poetic potency Williams has faith, to have full scope, unlimited by the distractions of cadence or rhyme. The breaks which indicate emphasis are usually unnatural from the point of view of grammar (which is why we notice them), but natural from the point of view of speech rhythms. Williams’ most celebrated poem:

     so much depends
     upon

     a red wheel
     barrow

     glazed with rain
     water

     beside the white
     chickens

might be put as two lines of blank verse and Williams’ notation shows what an actor could do with those two lines, indicates to the reader in fact what to do. ‘Much depends’ on what is said here, so naturally it would be said slowly and with conviction, probably emphasising ‘red’, ‘rain’ and ‘white’ - revolutionary red, idealistic white and the rain of intractable Nature, the ingredients of the pioneering situation. It is American: the heroes of Wild West
films always speak like this in moments of crisis.

     Gratuitously taxing subtleties are more likely to be found in Williams’ imitators, such as Creeley. than in Williams himself. Probably the most exacting - but a rewarding - passage in Williams to read is the first part of ‘To A Poor Old Woman’:

     munching a plum on
     the street a paper bag
     of them in her hand

     They taste good to her
     They taste good
     to her. They taste
     good to her

     Distinguish the three natural variants and you know exactly how she felt.

     The language of ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ is shorn of metaphor and if it is distinctively American is so in its use of a Basic English, the simple common language of many nations that the Statue of Liberty has admitted to the melting pot. I would think that the lack of imagery and allusion in Williams’ poetry generally gives it its American taste. Poetic richness builds up over centuries in the mother tongue. which immigrants will keep as an imaginative reserve. The poetic motive force in this poem is a pictorial symbolism that applies in any language.

     One finds the same American taste in Hemingway, whose ‘democratic’ use of ‘and’ contrasts with the elaborate structures, reminiscent of Samuel Richardson, of the Europhile Henry James.

     Williams tries to remove himself from his poems and though I do not think he achieved what in any case was impossible, he did reduce subjectivity to a minimum. His dictum was ‘no ideas but in things’, but his choice of thing and of detail within it was itself creative and poetic and his best poetry is instinctive symbolism. For example, in ‘The Term’ he notices a large piece of brown paper blowing along the street and that when it was run over by a car

                         Unlike
     a man it rose
     again

     He would claim to have written merely about a piece of brown paper, but he had noticed it only because it had ‘risen again’ - intimations of immortality. In any case Williams’ poems have an educated simplicity: they are not naively simple but simple on principle: on the principle of avant garde painting applied to writing. Williams’ friends, the painters Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler,
adapted the principles of Cubism to American realism - pictorially as Williams did poetically. Williams aims to achieve in words what Barbara Rose called ‘the self-referential reality’ of Cubist art, his natural bent clarified by it. Demuth’s ‘I saw the Figure 5 in Gold’ illustrates Williams’ poem; Williams’ ‘Classic Landscape’ describes Sheeler’s painting.

     The three men were hardly alone at that time in being avant garde and proletarian. Williams, who spent his life as a general practitioner in industrial New Jersey at Rutherford where he was born, has a distinctive humanity and determined - sometimes grim - optimism. His ‘Autobiography’ shows him living the attitudes of his poetry. His ‘Pastoral’ was to

     walk back streets
     admiring the houses
     of the very poor:
     roof out of line with sides
     the yards cluttered
     with old chicken wire, ashes,
     furniture gone wrong;
     the fences and outhouses
     built of barrel-staves
     and parts of boxes, all,
     if I am fortunate,
     smeared a bluish green
     that properly weathered
     pleases me best
     of all colors.

     All I have said of Williams’ poetry is with reference to his shorter poems, since I feel that in later, longer poems and especially in ‘Paterson’ he has abandoned objectivity and his immediacy is fading. It seems to me that the three-step line he uses continuously in ‘Journey to Love’ and other later poems is as stereotyping as heroic couplets and contrary to his own previous insistence that form should adopt to fact. As for ‘Paterson’, it seems to me that a poem of such length cannot manage without a formal structure and if its lack of one demonstrates that life is accident it also demonstrates that good art is not.

(To the best of my information, the only William Carlos Williams in print in England is the two-volume Collected from Carcanet. As these cost £18.95 and £25 respectively, while it is greatly to the credit of Carcanet to publish them, it looks as though the average consumer will need to save his book tokens for more than one Christmas.)