Search Results

Breaking Glass to Save the Frame: William Carlos Williams and Company

Lisa Siraganian

in Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life

This chapter explores the polarity between spectator or readerly irrelevance on the one hand and bodily incorporation of the reader’s body on the other, to investigate writers and artists who ... More

This chapter explores the polarity between spectator or readerly irrelevance on the one hand and bodily incorporation of the reader’s body on the other, to investigate writers and artists who articulate positions negotiating between these two poles. In particular, this chapter examines the paradoxical figure of William Carlos Williams, who understands collage as a way to productively complicate the notion of readerly irrelevance. The autonomous art object of Stein and Lewis finds its most serious early challenge in the Dada aesthetics of Marcel Duchamp and Mina Loy, who contest both the frame’s integrity and art’s removal from politics by insisting on the inseparability of art and life. Responding to Duchamp’s and Loy’s notions of framing, Williams’s Spring and All (1923) negotiates a shifting compromise between art that rejects the incorporation of the spectator’s world and art that insists upon it, while his less-known work, The Great American Novel (1923), implies that this new theory of framing facilitates specific forms of social progress that he hopes could preempt the state’s progressive goals.Less

Rising from Nowhere: Self-Valorization in William Carlos Williams’s Poetry

Joel Nickels

in The Poetry of the Possible: Spontaneity, Modernism, and the Multitude

This chapter focuses on William Carlos Williams’s poetic method and concept of self-valorization. Self-valorization refers to a process of value creation that eludes monetary measure and whose object ... More

This chapter focuses on William Carlos Williams’s poetic method and concept of self-valorization. Self-valorization refers to a process of value creation that eludes monetary measure and whose object is not the production of commodities but rather the reproduction of the multitude’s own capacities. Williams presents the multitude’s self-valorization as no more than an aspect of capital valorization. He suggests that the talents, capacities, and organizational skill of the multitude cannot be dynamized and fulfilled through monetary compensation, since even a maximum of buying power will not restore the multitude to the decision-making processes, organizational initiatives, and technological infrastructures that shape their existence as producers of wealth. He asks whether the self-valorization of the multitude could be imagined as a large-scale force of social regulation.Less

“There is a kind of revival you would dig taking place”: William Carlos Williams and the “Beat” Issue of The Black Mountain Review

Paul Cappucci

in The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry

This chapter examines William Carlos Williams’s influence on several of the younger American poets included in the “Beat” issue of the Black Mountain Review. It focuses specific attention on ... More

This chapter examines William Carlos Williams’s influence on several of the younger American poets included in the “Beat” issue of the Black Mountain Review. It focuses specific attention on Williams’s personal connections to Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov. By examining their correspondence, this chapter documents the significant ways that Williams encouraged and influenced their different poetic pursuits. It also considers the ways that Creeley’s selections for this final BMR issue reflect Williams’s vital role in a “revival,” as Ginsberg called it, occurring on the West Coast during the 1950s.  Less

Introduction: Meaning’s Work

Lisa Siraganian

in Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life

This introduction defines key terms—air, framing, incorporation—to contextualize the debates about meaning, autonomy, and politics that structure the book, while also setting out a map of its ... More

This introduction defines key terms—air, framing, incorporation—to contextualize the debates about meaning, autonomy, and politics that structure the book, while also setting out a map of its chapters, complete with brief summaries. The chapter recounts how painterly discussions of collage enabled writers to think about the text’s frame as either excluding or including particulars of the reader’s world. Through pointed discussions of Wallace Stevens, Marcel Duchamp, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Michael Fried, we examine this new conception of aesthetic autonomy. The reader’s or viewer’s relation to the art object became a way to envision the political subject’s ideal relation to liberalism and the discourse of individual rights. In addition, this chapter incorporates discussions of theoretical texts by T. S. Eliot, Theodor Adorno, Peter Bürger, and others to distinguish the book’s account of modernism from canonical accounts that focus on post-structuralism and ideology critique.Less

The Spin Doctor

Mike Chasar

in Everyday Reading: Poetry and Popular Culture in Modern America

This chapter delves further into the idea that popular culture provides materials, resources, opportunities, and strategies for poets trying to conceptualize and write “modern” poetry by bringing ... More

This chapter delves further into the idea that popular culture provides materials, resources, opportunities, and strategies for poets trying to conceptualize and write “modern” poetry by bringing together two discussions. One focuses on the relationships between popular literacy, technology, and the commercial landscape of twentieth-century America; the other seeks to understand poet William Carlos Williams' literary goal of capturing the commercial language of U.S. culture in his poetry. Williams' work leans towards the so-called “restless viewing;” he was pushed toward such viewpoint by the hours he spent driving, reading, and writing in his car while making house calls as a doctor. Engrossed in a landscape of competing billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising, Williams recognized the potential for linguistic interference at the heart of that “billboard discourse,” providing more evidence that modernism was rooted in popular culture.Less

Flesh over Granite: Walt Whitman’s Embodied Presence in William Carlos Williams’s “History”

Karen Guendel

in Affective Materialities: Reorienting the Body in Modernist Literature

Karen Guendel locates in William Carlos Williams’s poetry a slippage between body and text, catalyzed by the poem’s aesthetic preference for stone over flesh. Such poetry, Guendel’s essay suggests, ... More

Karen Guendel locates in William Carlos Williams’s poetry a slippage between body and text, catalyzed by the poem’s aesthetic preference for stone over flesh. Such poetry, Guendel’s essay suggests, is bound up in textual erotics wherein the text and reader perform a bodily encounter that gives life to one and pleasure to the other. Such material poetics foreground an embodiment of human life in environmental terms, through its material residues—in the reader’s lips, the book itself, and the stone memorial objects that clutter museum halls.Less

Under the Sign of Negation: William Carlos Williams and Surrealism

in Poetry and Language Writing: Objective and Surreal

This chapter examines American poet William Carlos Williams' engagement with surrealism. It explains that Williams is an important figure for many language writers but their reception of his work has ... More

This chapter examines American poet William Carlos Williams' engagement with surrealism. It explains that Williams is an important figure for many language writers but their reception of his work has often been at odds with the canonical representations of it. It compares Williams' The Great American Novel with André Breton's Soluble Fish, which is an example of a surrealist ‘false novel’. This chapter also suggests that the contributions of Williams, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler to the Blues magazine indicates that there is no clear boundary between the orthodox American followers of surrealism and its renegade dissidents.Less

In the American Grain: Contact (1920–3, 1932) and Pagany: A Native Quarterly (1930–3)

Eric White

in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines: Volume II: North America 1894-1960

This chapter discusses the histories of Contact and Pagany: A Native Quarterly. Contact was launched by William Carlos Williams in 1920 with the help of the Midwestern writer Robert McAlmon. Williams ... More

This chapter discusses the histories of Contact and Pagany: A Native Quarterly. Contact was launched by William Carlos Williams in 1920 with the help of the Midwestern writer Robert McAlmon. Williams sought to develop an avant-garde group within the United States that could express a distinctively ‘American’ aesthetic that was neither hostile to experiments conducted in other nations nor blinkered by crass literary nationalisms. He craved a textual place in which to debate this project, where he could cultivate intellectual and creative contact with other writers, in America and overseas. Despite the magazine's relatively short publishing life (spanning December 1920 to September 1921), it impact on American modernism endured into the following decade, largely due to its specialized field of influence and its editors' innovative policies. In Richard Johns's ‘Native Quarterly’ Pagany, which, inspired by Williams's example, began publishing in 1930, and the re-launched version of Contact (which appeared in 1932), the localist debate that Williams and McAlmon inaugurated in the first incarnation of Contact was reignited by a new generation.Less

Hemispheric Solidarities: Wartime Poetry and the Limits of the Good Neighbor

Harris Feinsod

in The Poetry of the Americas: From Good Neighbors to Countercultures

This chapter introduces the unlikely roles poets played at the center of hemispheric cultural diplomacy initiatives in 1938–1945, the years when Good Neighbor diplomacy was motivated by a broad ... More

This chapter introduces the unlikely roles poets played at the center of hemispheric cultural diplomacy initiatives in 1938–1945, the years when Good Neighbor diplomacy was motivated by a broad antifascist coalition. The chapter discusses major diplomat-poets like William Carlos Williams, Pablo Neruda, Archibald MacLeish, and Langston Hughes, and compares these writers to Puerto Rican poet Julia de Burgos, Ecuadorian Consul General Jorge Carrera Andrade, soldier-poet Lysander Kemp, and others who coalesced around the anthologies, translations, and congresses of Good Neighbor initiatives. Borrowing metaphors of bridging and broadcasting from new infrastructures of hemispheric modernization, and invoking strategies of apostrophic address to an impossibly large hemispheric public, Good Neighbor poetry promoted Popular Front antifascism, but also enabled advocates of decolonial politics, racial democracy, and international feminism.Less

Poetry and the News

Jahan Ramazani

in Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres

Among poetry’s most powerful interlocutors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been journalism. As the pressure of news has become increasingly pervasive, from the world wars to JFK’s ... More

Among poetry’s most powerful interlocutors in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been journalism. As the pressure of news has become increasingly pervasive, from the world wars to JFK’s assassination, the Irish Troubles, and the September 11 attacks, poets such as W. B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, W. H. Auden, Louise Bennett, Louis MacNeice, Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Carolyn Forché, and Jorie Graham have refashioned poetry to absorb news stories, newspaper headlines, and news vocabulary. But poetry has defined itself against the news at the same time that it has ingested it. “It is difficult / to get the news from poems,” Williams famously wrote, implicitly characterizing poetry as an antigenre to the news: “yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Even as poets have drawn on the news, they have explored the differences between poetry and what Walter Benjamin saw as the commodified, transparent, and instantaneous discourse of journalism, foregrounding poetry’s long temporal horizons and deep memory, its obliquity and metaphoric density.Less

The Hero: Myth, Psyche, Soul, and the Search for Union

David Leeming

in Myth: A Biography of Belief

Heroes are those humans who, in the mythological traditions, are in varying degrees infused with divine or superhuman qualities. Heroes reflect our priorities as individuals and as cultures. As ... More

Heroes are those humans who, in the mythological traditions, are in varying degrees infused with divine or superhuman qualities. Heroes reflect our priorities as individuals and as cultures. As analyzed archetypally in Joseph Campbell's “monomyth,” the hero reflects our priorities as a species, priorities involving the body's, the psyche's, and the soul's search for union. Warlike cultures create warlike heroes who seek the union of hegemony; heroes such as Jesus and the Buddha reflect the search for spiritual union; the hero pattern as a whole reflects our life's psychological journey toward wholeness. Modern thinkers have recognized new mythologies that reflect new understandings of reality based on, e.g., psychology, mysticism, ecology, and physics. New hero values have emerged from this modernist process, values perhaps reflected in William Carlos Williams's little poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”Less

Introduction: ‘Original Response’

Michael O'Neill

in The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900

This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first draws upon an array of 20th-century poetry in support of the argument that Romantic poetry is a persistent presence in subsequent ... More

This introductory chapter is divided into two parts. The first draws upon an array of 20th-century poetry in support of the argument that Romantic poetry is a persistent presence in subsequent literature. This is the case even when later poets appear to differ greatly in their attitudes from Romantic poets. A case in point in Ted Hughes's ‘Skylarks’, which invites the reader to reconsider Shelley's ‘To a Skylark’ as both Neoplatonic and surprisingly realistic. It is argued that Hughes' poem enters its own poetic territory, yet it does so by virtue of its Romantic inheritance. More generally, it is suggested that post-Romantic responses to Romantic poetry allow us to understand how fraught and conflicted Romanticism is. Readings of poems by, among others, Donald Davie, Sidney Keyes, Denise Levertov, and Anthony Hecht conclude the first part of the introduction. The second part sets out in a more explicit way the book's purpose and method, including its stress on ‘aesthetic achievement’, its sense of the value of division, its sympathy with Albert Gelpi's reading of Modernism as post- rather than anti-Romantic, and its views of the work of previous critics who have written on legacies of Romanticism such as Harold Bloom. A brief chapter-by-chapter summary follows. Poems by such authors as Eliot, Yeats, Williams, Fisher, and Lowell are also mentioned.Less

Columbus the Haunted: The Diary of the First Voyage and William Carlos Williams's “The Discovery of the Indies”

Adam Lifshey

in Specters of Conquest: Indigenous Absence in Transatlantic Literatures

Since the nineteenth century the diary has been the most widely read and referenced account of the events of the 1492–93 crossing. It has been canonized despite the issues of unreliability that ... More

Since the nineteenth century the diary has been the most widely read and referenced account of the events of the 1492–93 crossing. It has been canonized despite the issues of unreliability that result in part from the changes introduced by its editor from early colonial times, the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas. The version by de las Casas, produced some four decades or more after Columbus wrote the original diary, is the basis of all modern editions. The manuscript by Columbus and a contemporary copy did not survive into posterity. The de las Casas document itself was lost until the end of the eighteenth century and remained unpublished until 1825. It alternates between Columbus's first-person narrative in allegedly verbatim citations and de las Casas's third- person paraphrasings of the explorer's entries.Less

Hope

Jeffrey Bilbro

in Virtues of Renewal: Wendell Berry's Sustainable Forms

Climate change discourse trades in complex statistical models that, in general, offer gloomy prognostications of inevitable disaster. The problems appear so complicated that our only hope seems to ... More

Climate change discourse trades in complex statistical models that, in general, offer gloomy prognostications of inevitable disaster. The problems appear so complicated that our only hope seems to lie in massive engineering solutions that might alter global weather patterns or extract tons of garbage from our oceans. This discourse of statistics and big data either makes it seem as though individuals cannot do anything to affect the problems and hence leads to pessimism, or it optimistically implies that we don’t need to do anything because technocrats can fix the problems for us. Berry’s essays, however, sharply distinguish between optimism—which is an industrial trait founded on the belief that technological progress will continue to make our lives better—and hope—which is a virtue founded on specific examples of good work and good lives. He offers particular examples of locally adapted good work that can support authentic hope: the artist Harlan Hubbard, the poet William Carlos Williams, the farming communities of the Amish. While individual examples may seem inadequate to the scale of global problems, Michel de Certeau argues that the everyday practices these people and communities model have the power to subvert unjust systems.Less

A Dream We Dreamed Each Separately

Peter Campion

in Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry

This chapter considers four Modernist poets (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, and George Oppen), with particular attention paid to their adaptation and combination of lyric and ... More

This chapter considers four Modernist poets (Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, and George Oppen), with particular attention paid to their adaptation and combination of lyric and epic, and in light of Hannah Arendt's writing on poetry and history.Less

Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson: Poetry, Place, and Cinematic Form

Jack Ryan

in Next Generation Adaptation: Spectatorship and Process

Jarmusch's film is not a strict adaptation of the 1946 William Carlos Williams epic poem by the same name. One might more appropriately bill it as a cinematic homage to observational poetry, as essay ... More

Jarmusch's film is not a strict adaptation of the 1946 William Carlos Williams epic poem by the same name. One might more appropriately bill it as a cinematic homage to observational poetry, as essay contributor Jack Ryan does. Jarmusch does, after all, shape his films around the tenets of such poetry. Jarmusch structures the film around what is taken to be a typical work week of its hero, Paterson (Adam Driver). That hero builds a deep sense of place into the poems he writes. The chapter offers that these qualities form the center of Jarmusch’s adaptation, which finds a way to allow a daily routine to protect the creative consciousness from the crush of modernity. The film ultimately favors the process of poetry over the content of any singular poem, a point the chapter claims that Jarmusch returns to each time Paterson meets another poet.Less

Modernist Experiments: Gertrude Stein and Others

in Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Cinema on the American Novel up to World War II

The simultaneous emergence of modernism and the cinema may explain why writers found in the new medium possibilities of representing and recording experience. Recent studies of modernism have all ... More

The simultaneous emergence of modernism and the cinema may explain why writers found in the new medium possibilities of representing and recording experience. Recent studies of modernism have all linked literary experimentation with the new technology of visual representation. This chapter focuses on three American writers – Gertrude Stein, E. E. Cummings, and William Carlos Williams – who responded directly to the cinema as part of their broader experiments across visual and verbal media.Less

The Poetic Universe: Mapping Interrelations between Modern American Poetry and the Sciences

Peter Middleton

in Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After

Postwar New American poets and their successors, the Language Writers, insisted that their poetry was capable of intellectual inquiry. After giving examples of their claims for poetry, the chapter ... More

Postwar New American poets and their successors, the Language Writers, insisted that their poetry was capable of intellectual inquiry. After giving examples of their claims for poetry, the chapter sets out the book’s methodological assumptions. Literary theory has struggled to represent adequately the interrelations between science and poetry because it has not engaged with the epistemological claims of the sciences. Yet science is part of the DNA of modern literary theory. One major theme of the book is how poets attempted to develop new poetic epistemologies. Science envy has been attributed to the early-twentieth-century modernist poets, but the book argues that the picture is more complex in the postwar era. Many disciplines employed methods and concepts from physics, seeing this not as physics envy but as intellectual opportunity. The book then maps out schematically the different kinds of responses made by postwar American poets of all kinds to the sciences. It goes on to show how some of these responses had antecedents among modernist predecessors. Archibald MacLeish’s poem “Einstein” is discussed in detail because of its representative character. The importance of William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound for later poets is discussed.Less