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Cubism in Words: Broken Pieces in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wcw.2014.0017

1935-0244

Jason Menzin,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

AmidsT great variety within his poetry, William Carlos Williams returns repeatedly to fractured, fragmented, and discontinuous aspects of modern world. He faces in his art loss of coherence in twentieth century, absence of a centering and central sense of meaning. His response to challenge is to embrace broken pieces, unfalsified by sentimentality and naive nostalgia for illusion of artificial wholeness, to seek new meaning and consolation in a creative refiguring of real. Since fragmentary tends toward obscure, which when pushed to extreme becomes absurd or incoherent, Williams's poetic efforts are inherently difficult. This essay examines some of poetic ideas in prose of Williams's early Kora in Hell, briefly considers relationship between Williams's poetry and Cubist movement in visual arts, sketches several examples of Cubist patterns in Williams's poetry, and provides close readings of two poems- Between Walls and Cod Head-that capture in especially powerful ways possibilities of Cubism in words.Early in prologue to 1920 improvisational work Kora in Hell, Williams himself points to one of distinguishing features of his artistic approach, his poetic sense of difference:Although it is a quality of imagination that it seeks to place together those things which have a common relationship, yet coining of similes is a pastime of very low order, depending as it does upon a nearly vegetable coincidence. Much more keen is that power which discovers in things those particles of to all other things which are peculiar perfections of thing in (I 18)With soft, mocking wit, Williams presents himself as keen poet of difference instead of sameness, one who works to find and emphasize inimitable particles of [ . . . ] which are peculiar perfections of thing in question. He contributes with these words to upending of a long-dominant sensibility in poetics and history of ideas, one that goes back at least to Plato's preference for Parmenides's idea of being over Heraclitus's conception of change. It is in Timaeus that Plato conceives of great circle of Same and circle of Different, each rotating in opposite directions, as underpinning both structure of reality and possibility of understanding cosmos, both metaphysics and epistemology (Plato 49). In Plato's conception, circle of same dominates, serving always and everywhere as necessary and primary referent. In Kora, Williams announces a reversal of this priority, seeking to see difference as more essential in things and therefore poetry. The inimitable particles of dissimilarity point to Aristotle's idea of specific difference-that characteristic of a thing which makes it what it is and distinct from everything else. Williams's sensibility is a modern poetic version of ancient logical idea of specific difference.A letter quoted in prologue to Kora captures Wallace Stevens's critique of Williams's poetic interest in difference, negatively construed as endless perspectival variation:What strikes me most about poems themselves is their casual character [speaking about poetry of Williams's Al Que Quiere from 1917]. . . . Personally I have a distaste for miscellany. [ . . . ]. . . My idea is that in order to carry a thing to extreme necessity to convey it one has to stick to it; . . . Given a fixed point of view, realistic, imagistic or what you will, everything adjusts itself to that point of view; and process of adjustment is a world in flux, as it should be for a poet. But to fidget with points of view leads always to new beginnings and incessant new beginnings lead to sterility. (I 15)Williams, however, will have none of it, finding central importance in the fragmentary argument of his improvisations in Kora and his variety in Al Que Quiere (I 16). …