ATTENTION: 'COMPOSE. INVENT!'
Published: January 4, 1987
(Page 2 of 2)
How can one define that movement? Williams's accomplishment has sometimes been confused with a kind of verbal photography, as if the point were to depict physical realities or visual impressions in words. But his famous slogan ''(No ideas but in things)'' was not ''No ideas, but things.'' And in context, the phrase is not only bracketed by parentheses but surrounded by dynamic one-word sentences: ''Compose.'' ''Invent!'' The emphasis is on motion and energy, not depiction. He characteristically builds observation and ''concrete'' diction toward the attainment of an emotional process or idea, such as ''solace'' - the apparent ''abstraction'' or directly named feeling that flowers out of all the careful attention given words for what can be seen, smelled and touched. SWIFT movement between image and idea in the poems corresponds to the restless play among kinds of language - for example, between Latinate vocabulary and formal syntax (his careful subjunctives, or the occasional first-person ''shall'') on one side, and on the other plain American words and constructions. This movement, too, is both a formal principle and a thematic (even, in a way, a political) matter. The underlying conception of the United States as a source for the material, as well as the language, of poetry was no bland celebration of national life, nor was the Williams verbal style a mere wholesale, softening adaptation of colloquial language. His language is not the sentimental, static adaptation of American idiom of, say, Sandburg's ''Chicago,'' but an ever-shifting, eclectic experiment in daring blends and savage, unexpected harmonies. Similarly, Williams presents an America that is provisional, still unmade, even terrifying in its rawness. ''The pure products of America / go crazy,'' begins one of his most famous, and darkest, poems. Movement and speed, for good or ill, characterize both this vision of reality and the poet's stylistic response. He delighted in noting and discovering manners as a living flux, and around 1916 ended a poem (''The Young Housewife'') with the lines - The noiseless wheels of my car rush with a crackling sound over dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling. - observing the little nod we make with the steering wheel in our hands, the old European court gesture in its new vernacular setting: the car; the street; a thrill-Continued on page 20 ing, ruthless efficiency of motion; and the self-consciously libidinous doctor looking at a young housewife at the curb, with similes for her in his head as he passes over the leaves in his heedlessly rushing contraption.
But description falls short of Williams's poems because the language he wrote in was like his conception of the country - not only provisional, but alertly inventing itself as it went. Thus, any simple alternation would be too mechanical for the exuberant, testy energy that delighted in pitching formality and high language against, and into and around, their supposed opposites so resourcefully and with such cunning surface innocence that high and low, formal and informal, cannot be told apart: FINE WORK WITH PITCH AND COPPER Now they are resting in the fleckless light separately in unison like the sacks of sifted stone stacked regularly by twos about the flat roof ready after lunch to be opened and strewn The copper in eight foot strips has been beaten lengthwise down the center at right angles and lies ready to edge the coping One still chewing picks up a copper strip and runs his eye along it
This is entirely an account of the roofer's work and yet also of the work of the poet who runs his eye along the scene. The two stanzas about the beaten copper strips perform the trope of poetry delighting in its own difficulty of composition, like the lines in Yeats's ''Adam's Curse'' about how hard it is to write verse that sounds natural or Ben Jonson's lines about revision in his elegy on Shakespeare. Without mentioning poetry or himself or neglecting the roofers, Williams conveys all this by implication, partly through combining disparate kinds of word. ''Fleckless light'' is elevated and poetic, whereas ''separately in unison'' is obsessively precise, and while ''coping'' and ''eight foot strips'' are technical in another way, it is hard to say if ''strewn'' is archaic and high like ''fleckless'' - or the most technical term of all, a part of the sweet old jargon of the crafts and trades, and their techniques. THE gesture of picking up the stuff of work while still chewing, like the bow while driving the car, makes a spontaneous, graceful transition between formality and improvisation, necessity and pleasure. On their level, the gestures embody the fluid, inspired invention that was the poet's central esthetic principle, and a kind of ethical or political ideal as well. That ideal has something to do with the way works of art imply whom art belongs to, and the poetry in this volume conveys that its radically fresh art belongs somehow to us who live the actual American life Williams's poetry comes from, and calls to account. It is as if he urges us to be both at home with our materials and ''still chewing,'' impatient to transform them.
The early pages of this book trace the development of an indigenous American avant-garde style, a unique modernist accomplishment that embraces all of the poet's intelligence along with all of his American experience. That accomplishment should embody a standard for any living American poet who sets out to write, whether in elegant stanzas or jagged ones. From around 1914 on, Williams's work attained an implied critique of our culture that still penetrates in a special way because it comes from within, not from the more European or global perspective of Pound and Eliot. By bringing together his stringent idea of art and a transforming vision into the ordinary, Williams by 1939 had set a continuing, essential challenge for American readers and poets.
drawing of William Carlos Williams (David Johnson); photo of William Carlos Williams in 1926 (Page 20)