Context
Last week’s column on the relations between Frost’s pedagogy and poetry was generously received by some readers, so I hope this entry will help us further explore the American tradition of active learning. It would be hard to find two poets that at first glance seem to contrast with each other more than Frost and Williams. Both look radically different on the page, both have different registers of voice and prosody, one seems more traditional, the other more avant-garde. But both are intimately concerned with the relation of American history to its poetics, with the relations between flux and form in language, and have fierce commitment to American democracy not just as a political system but as a way of living in the world. Both were suspicious of elites and academics, but both were profoundly philosophical despite surface simplicities. And both were consumed with the interplay of American poetry and American common speech.
We have seen Frost say that the fun is in saying things that suggest formulae but just won’t formulate. Williams Carlos Williams took this further by completely discarding old forms—the iambic line, sonnets, schoolrooms: “But my failure to work inside a pattern—a positive sin—is the cause of my virtues. I cannot work inside a pattern because I can’t find a pattern that will have me. My whole effort . . .is to find a pattern large enough, modern enough, flexible enough to include my desires. And if I should find it I’d wither and die.” But this difference in degree should not obscure the fact that he and Frost share a convergent vision, viewing the problems of creating an American poetry and education as parallel.
To the casual reader Williams is often no more than the poet of concrete images like red wheelbarrows and broken glass. His tag line “No ideas but in things” has often been misread as a kind of homespun primitivism, but only because the first two words are overemphasized at the expense of the last three. Indeed, his ideas about language and education form a seamless continuity with the transcendentalists, the pragmatists like James and Dewey, and 20th century forms of liberating education. A useful way to appreciate these ideas is through Williams’ writings on history, especially his volume of prose meditations, In the American Grain and his 1934 essay “The American Background,” the latter beginning with the following preface:
They saw birds with rusty breasts and called them robins. Thus, from the start, an America of which they could have had no inkling drove the first settlers upon their past. They retreated for warmth and reassurance to something previously familiar. But at a cost. For what they saw were not robins. They were thrushes only vaguely resembling the rosy, daintier English bird. Larger, stronger, and in the evening of a wilder, lovelier song, actually here was something the newcomers had never in their lives before encountered. Blur. Confusion. A bird that beats with his wings and slows himself with his tail in landing. [Italics Williams]
From this moment, at once origin and fall, Williams sees American culture as the battleground between two vectors, the new vs. the old, the “related” vs. the “unrelated,” the “primary” vs. the “secondary” (p. 10). The old language is needed for security and orientation, but can block out what is unique in the present. Williams does not see this situation as restricted to America, but rather the conditions of American history make more acute something that happens in every moment of our lives. For Williams, the discovery of America is only a metaphor for the discovery of the new: “Not that this direct drive toward the new is a phenomenon distinctively confined to America: it is the growing edge in every culture. . . . Thus the new and the real, hard to come at, are synonymous.”
This confusion of robins and thrushes is not something that happened once in American history but is a pivot point in every instance of our daily lives. The conflict defines the cutting edge at which Williams own writing will play itself out, as he suggests in his preface to In the American Grain: “In these studies I have sought to re-name the things seen, now lost in chaos of borrowed titles, many of them inappropriate, under which the true character lies hidden. . . . It has been my wish to draw from every source one thing, the strange phosphorus of life, nameless under an old misappellation,” Williams puts language itself at the center of his investigation of American culture, and becomes its archaeologist. Although our language has been distorted from the beginning, if we go back and examine it closely, we trace those distortions and detect something of the “thrush” before it is “lost,” obliterated by “robin,” to ferret out “the strange phosphorus of life,” still present ready to be struck into flame. Williams’ work is one of recuperation, sifting through the mistakes of the past to find what is still quickening and enabling.
Williams, for example, sees Columbus as mistaken in trying to impose his will on the new world. But he also sees in Columbus sensitivity to the freshness of the New World. Unlike the English settlers, Columbus relished the differences between the old and new, and registers them in the language of his journals:
Branches growing in different ways and all from one trunk; one twig is one form and another is a different shape and so unlike that it is the greatest wonder in the world to see the diversity; thus one branch has leaves like those of a cane, and others like those of a mastic tree; and on a single tree there are five different kinds. The fish so unlike ours that it is wonderful. Some are the shape of dories and of finest colors, so bright that there is not a man who would not be astounded, and would not take great delight in seeing them.
Columbus’s connoisseurship of the new becomes the central virtue of a long line of linguistic and epistemological heroes, such as the Jesuit priest, Père Sebastian Raslès: “Contrary to the English, Raslès recognized the New World. . . . It is a living flame compared to their dead ash.” Raslès responded to America with senses that were both receptive and actively assimilating, as this series of participles and then infinitives suggests: “For everything his fine sense, blossoming, thriving, opening, reviving—not shutting out—was tuned . . . to create, to hybridize, to crosspollenize—not to sterilize, to draw back, to fear, to dry up, to rot. It is the sun.”
Williams’ villains are those who merely want to harness this newness for their own utilitarian ends, figures like Benjamin Franklin who appropriated even lightning: “He didn’t dare let it go in at the top of his head and out at his toes, that’s it: he had to fool with it. He sensed the power and knew only enough to want to run an engine with it.”
Williams’s sense of redemption for America includes surrender to it, but that is only part of an entire paradigm that he sets out most explicitly in the chapter on Sam Huston called “Descent.” At fifteen Huston ran away from home to live with the Cherokees, and then “reascended to the settlements for school.” When Huston later ran into problems with his marriage, he resigned the governorship “and took the descent once more, to the ground. He rejoined the Cherokees. . . But his primitive ordeal, created by a peculiar condition of destiny (the implantation of an already partly cultured race on a wild continent) has a plant in its purpose, in its lusts’ eye, as gorgeous as Montezuma’s garden of birds. . . But he who will grow from that basis must sink first.” To make this “descent” requires a special range of capabilities—a willful courage yet also a willingness to abandon the structures that create not only culture but the self. At a basic level this movement of descent and ascent, of a journey to the frontier and back, corresponds to certain rhythms of consciousness that lie at the heart of the creative process and of learning. First, we must go into the world around us and into our own minds in all their naked confusion, leaving behind language and other cultural symbols. Then we must name what we have found, giving it a structure that in turn shapes and intensifies the experience itself.
Williams’ poetry frequently extols the qualities needed for the descent, as in “Smell”:
Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we are, you and I boney nose
always indiscriminate, always unashamed. . .
Williams plays havoc with the conventional, restricted notion of the self by the ludicrousness that results from addressing those “nosey” narcissistically exuberant aspects of himself as a separate entity. The fun is not at the expense of the nose but of the fellow trying to curb this stinker who persists in his less than gentlemanly activities. Similarly, he addresses “K. McB.” as “you exquisite chunk of mud”: “Do they expect the ground to be/always solid?/Give them the slip then; /let them sit in you;/soil their pants;/teach them a dignity/ that is dignity, the dignity/of mud!” just as he praises Thomas Jefferson for walking to his inauguration in the mud “out of principle.” The poem uses what Henri Bergson views as the basic stuff of laughter, the confrontation of the stiff, the formal with a protean, intrusive reality, always curling up around it: “when they try to step on you,/ spoil the polish.” By contrast, the ascent is embodied in every poem by its shape as language, as poetic form; it is not as compelling as the descent, but it too requires its heroisms: “She loves you/ She says. Believe it/—tomorrow./But today/the particulars/of poetry/that difficult art/require/ your whole attention.”
As a doctor Williams was able to alternate a daily emergence into the world and its people and capture some of this descent in the words he formed on his prescription pads between patients and at night. Aside from his poems he wrote novels, short stories, plays and essays, but of most relevance to our own exploration is a book of essays centered on education, written between 1928 and 1930, but published only after his death with the title he chose, The Embodiment of Knowledge. The book, appropriately enough, is dedicated to his two sons, schoolboys at the time, and one of its keynotes is contained in what he wrote on the first page: “I’d like this to be printed as it is, faults and all. But don’t waste too much time on it, if you feel inclined to spend any time on it at all. It is intended to go along with a life and to be in no sense its objective.” Williams makes Emerson’s skeptical qualifying of books in the “American Scholar” address immediate by reflectively pointing out that he himself is now speaking from a book, one that should have only a limited value to his sons’ present lives. Indeed few writers have so forcefully articulated the dangers of misusing writing of the past as Williams, particularly in an essay at the center of the book beginning “Afraid lest he be caught in a net of words, tripped up, bewildered and so defeated—thrown aside—a man hesitates to write down his innermost convictions.” Williams describes the classics in vivid terms:
The classics, the sayings, the elucidations, are dead as shells, as fossils of plants. . . prehistoric plant cells still visible so that species can be determined and varieties named. These things represent men who. . . wrote fresh from the whole body and who went on living after. . . . To live cannot be learned from the writings of others. It is the life of writing that comes from inside.
Or, as he writes in his long poem Paterson: “We read: not the flames/but the ruin left/by the conflagration.” We cannot, though, simply turn away from the books of the past. They have too great a hold on our minds already and must be actively questioned, probed, and deconstructed: “Language is the key to the mind’s escape from bondage to the past. There are no “truths” that can be fixed in language. It is by the breakup of the language that the truth can be seen to exist and thus it becomes operative again.” Williams creates smaller, more temporary, more flagrantly fictive forms to replace and subvert the larger, totalizing forms constructed by philosophers, economists, and other big thinkers. For Williams, to write creatively is to use language in a defiantly revolutionary way: “Now life is above all things else at any moment subversive of life as it was the moment before—always new, always irregular. Verse to be alive must have infused into it something of the same order, some tincture of disestablishment, something in the nature of an impalpable revolution, an ethereal reversal.”
The antidote to reading, both for creative artists and for students, is to write, and particularly to write poetry. One can demystify the words, the sentences, the structures on the page only by writing one’s own, by realizing where they come from, how long they are good for (not long at all), and when, to use Frost’s notion, a metaphor works and when it breaks down. Williams says: “To say what must be said; to say it once that it may blossom once like a holly-hock or a bird—then let it begin to die—even while he himself is alive he will see his own writing grow older and die.” Writing poetry, then, becomes both a central method for the educator and a metaphor for every other kind of learning: “Data should be present in activities which, in particular, have newly organized their material, such as, let us say, in poetry. How better than in poetry, that has undergone a revolution in its conception within twenty-five years. . . To words and their significance—which is the special field of the poet—the educationalist must turn willy-nilly in the end.” As with Dewey and William James and Frost, Williams feels we must start with the immediate, with things, which in turn we build into larger structures, but only and always realizing how selective and fictive these are. As Williams begins his own epic: “To make a start,/out of particulars/and make them general, rolling/ up the sum, by defective means. . . . In ignorance/a certain knowledge and knowledge,/undispersed, its own undoing.”
In my experience, it’s rare to encounter an undergraduate student who will admit to liking poetry. Often, students will say, outright, “I don’t like poetry.” When I ask what they mean by “poetry,” they are hard pressed to answer. Generally, they seem to mean the kind of poetry taught in English classes, and by that they seem to mean what they take to be the hidebound, the overly familiar, and /or the boring—a reaction that seems to stem from how poetry has generally been presented to them. These same students will readily admit to liking, even loving, say, hip-hop; and all of them have their favorite popular songs. But they don’t think of these things as “poetry,” which of course they are. (How much is “good” poetry is, of course, another question.) In any case, I find that reading William Carlos Williams with them—both his poetry and his revolutionary comments on ‘form”—can widen their horizons considerably, as Williams does with mine every time I come back to him. Sometimes in discussing him with students I relate both his poetry and his theory to the Russian Formalists’ concept of ostraneniye or “making [it] strange,” as articulated in particular by Viktor Shklovsy: “art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony”—in other words, to cut through habitual, reflexive ways of seeing and see things newly and in all their strangeness. This to me is what Williams means by “[drawing] from every source one thing, the strange phosphorus of life.” What an arresting thought! And how astonishingly phrased. With that phosphorous image he enacts what he recommends. (I read “phosphorous” here in its etymological sense--that which brings light--and conclude that if it truly is light, and therefore truly enlightening, it has to be strange, strange.)