Process & Perception: Moore & Williams

this is taken from a response written for a class focused on the work of Marianne Moore & Mina Loy

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Moore’s criticism presents another dimension to a very particular way of seeing that we encounter in her poems – a statement in prose on the ways in which a poetic self encounters its world. Of particular interest to me are Moore’s pieces on Williams, in which a tone of friendship and mutual admiration facilitate at once a generous and favorable reading of the doctor-poet and a remarkable projection of Moore’s own approach to poetry, both of which contribute to a deepened understanding of the perpendicularity of Moore’s own verse.

In her review of Kora in Hell, Moore notes the “life[…] in the ability to see resemblances in things which are dissimilar” that characterizes Williams’ work. One senses, thanks to Moore’s reading, the modified mimesis of Williams’ poetry, and it’s in her admiration of his ability to represent his world – a world of Place, of Thing – that we find not so much praise of the poetry but instead of a poetic method, a process through which Williams makes poetic his perceptions. In another piece on Williams, Moore positions him as “essentially not a ‘repeater of things second hand,’” rather a poet capable of “contemplating with new eyes, old things, shabby things, and other things.” It seems to me that this reading of Williams is easily applicable to Moore, whose own poetry manages just such a newness of vision. Williams himself, in his “Marianne Moore,” notes in Moore a coming-at-the-familiar from a “new angle as to throw out of fashion” the poetic conventions of their shared predecessors. Closing the essay in praise, he declares: “This is new! The quality is not new, but the freedom is new, the unbridled leap.” This mutual recognition of remarkable newness, of a clarity and precision of poetic seeing, speaks to a connection between the two poets – that of their shared approach to perception. What is liberating in Williams is equally liberating in Moore: that spark of the novel observation, that making-new of the old and already-seen.

We find the observation of newness also in Moore’s reviews of H.D. and Pound, an almost ecstatic praise of the appearance of a new way of seeing the ancient and the inherited facts of modern culture. With Pound, it’s a newness that comes through textual interpretation, revitalizing the history upon which his poetry is built; with H.D., a radical vision of the so-called natural world that eventually calls into question the gender binary used to define woman-poets in opposition to their male counterparts. It becomes clear, then, that Moore is chiefly concerned not with what is seen, but with how it’s seen, and the ways in which that seeing breathes life into the apparently stagnant, makes interesting the banal.

It’s not so much the emphasis on the new that strikes me as novel, but instead Moore’s particular way of reading the work of her contemporaries. Moore does not ask what or why in her criticism – she asks how. This is not to say that the objects and phenomena central to the work are forgotten or neglected – it’s in fact the opposite. In her criticism, Moore manages to engage in a process almost identical to that which occurs in her poetry: the enactment of a particular method of perception serves to emphasize process while simultaneously illuminating its object.

Wisdom of the Master

Charles Olson to Robert Creeley, 8 March 1951
(from C.O. & R.C. : The Complete Correspondence, Vol. 5)

Ez [Pound]'s epic solves problem by his ego: his single emotion breaks all down to his equals or inferiors (so far as I can see only two, possibly, are admitted, by him, to be his betters -- Confucius, & Dante. Which assumption, that there are intelligent men whom he can outtalk, is beautiful because it destroys historical time, and

thus creates the methodology of the Cantos, viz, a space-field where, by inversion, though the material is all time material, he has driven through it so sharply by the beak of his ego, that, he has turned time into what we must now have, space & its live air

((secondary contrast is Joyce [...] he tried to get at the problem by running one language into another so as to create a universal language of the unconscious [...] Joyce, the Commercial Traveler: [...] this internationalizing of language is more relevant to commerce, now, than it is to the aesthetic problem[...]

the primary contrast, for our purpose, is, BILL [Williams]: his Pat[erson] is exact opposite of Ez's, that is, Bill HAS an emotional system which is capable of extensions & comprehensions the ego-system (the Old Deal, Ez as Cento Man, here dates, is not. Yet

by making his substance historical of one city (the Joyce deal), Bill completely licks himself, lets time roll him under as Ez does not, and thus, so far as what is the more important, methodology, contributes nothing, in fact delays, deters, and hampers, by, not having busted through, the very problem which, Ez, has, so brilliantly faced, & beat

First, a moment to acknowledge the incredible brilliance of Olson's understanding of (I argue) three of the greatest practitioners of the project of the Modern Epic.

A note: Olson goes on to examine the problem of approaching the Epic from a single perspective (ego, locality, emotion, history) & comes to the conclusion that all three of the Greats fail in that their progress is collectively tied up in a stagnant history. Olson's working toward an active history, post-Marxian, which is what sets him apart.

A professor, an Important Pound Scholar, told me that my choice to tackle Maximus before the Cantos was courageous & overly ambitious, as "Pound is much easier than Olson." I countered by pointing out that Olson, while dense, experimental & almost impenetrable in his referential poetics, gave us an epic in English (or more precisely, American). Call me lazy, but I much prefer the Maximus project, Butterick always at my side, than the monumental task of deciphering Chinese ideograms, ancient Greek & Italian. What I did not say, & would have sd had I the newly acquired vocabulary, is that Olson manages to leap out of that stagnant history, rooting his epic in a multi-lingual collage of voice, moving from a Patersonian locality in Gloucester to a global consideration of identity with fluidity & poetic grace, cementing the theories he laid out in ProVerse & Human Universe & wrestling, without apology or hesitation, with the problem of Ego that all poets inevitably confront. & that's why he's readable, because he admits his struggle.

Pound, Joyce & Williams are masters, & it's my contention that Olson dismisses Paterson somewhat unjustly, as Williams manages with his epic (in my reading) to create a poetics both in- and outside-of-time. The only thing rolling, to me, is the Passaic. But aside from that, Olson outdoes his predecessors as a cultural archaeologist. Where the Fathers scratch the surface, Olson goes strip-mining. He's learned the lessons hidden inside of Ulysses, the Cantos, Paterson, the lessons the Fathers were likely unaware they were teaching, & through experience (both on the page & on the ground) has formulated a new approach to the epic, an approach that allows, simultaneously, an examination of LANGUAGE, HISTORY, CULTURE, LAND, EGO, TIME, ECONOMICS, POLITICS

... all of which Pound, Joyce & Williams tackled, but which Olson approaches without privileging a single problem over another. This is where he steps outside, digs deeper, gives us something more comprehensive, less limiting. The Olsonian dogma, much like Mao's, was rooted in a fierce anti-dogmatism. And that's the key: the palpable paradox, the weight of history & inheritance informing each & every defiant, innovative choice. The ambivalence of the great revolutionary.

State/Meant of Purpose

As I approach the fateful moment of Stating My Purpose as a prospective Ph.D. candidate at various east coast institutions of so-called higher learning, I'm revisiting those texts that pushed me toward my current preoccupations, ones that manifest themselves poetically and politically, the ideas that will likely shape my research & work as a professional intellectual (whatever that means).

My last year at the (sometimes) illustrious Gallatin School was a period of independent research, guided at times by my two intellectual & personal heroes, Rebecca Karl & Antonio Lauria, both of whom offered a way into the dense & fascinating work of some very important dead Communists, who spent several hours on Monday afternoons and Tuesday evenings discussing the tensions and truths of Maoist and Gramscian dialectics with me, and who showed me that intellectual pursuits are not always masturbatory, that a close-reading of a single turn of phrase could break open a new world of thought never before considered. With RK, I learned how to Read the Revolution, so to speak -- to investigate the ways in which the theory and practice of national liberation, cultural re-formation, & consciousness-raising were reflected in the form and content of the work of Marx, Lenin, Mao & Brecht. With Antonio, there were conversations about the function of language as a living part of the Revolution itself, the process (always process) through which Gramsci constructed and de-constructed his (and the collective) understanding of People as readers, speakers and actors of the Revolution. RK offered a structured, faithful reading of Great (Revolutionary) Books; Antonio was a friend & comrade with whom I could work through my own difficulties, academic or otherwise, with the Revolution as an idea and a living thing.

Their influence affected my personal out-of-classroom readings of the so-called 1st- and 2nd Generation Modernists, & allowed me to draw connections between their theoretical and practical exercises in the development of an American Voice & the Revolutionary work of my Marxist-Leninist influences. Almost every week, Antonio would remind me of Gramsci's famous emphasis on "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will," the dialectical relation between criticism and hope, and I would excitedly paraphrase a line from Williams, a paragraph of Olson. When I crossed the stage at Lincoln Center, my fist thrown in the air in acceptance of my B.A. in Poetics and Revolution, I was thinking of Gramsci, of Mao, of Williams & Olson, of my comrades, alive & dead, in the always-changing & constant Struggle, unnamed & waiting for a new Voice.

Now, revisiting those ideas that shaped my concentration at Gallatin -- ideas that earned me a reputation as a shouting Maoist, a chain-smoking & rambling poet, an anachronism in an intellectual community emphasizing post-structural theorizations of prose & the unspoken & insurmountable coercion of a monolithic System -- I'm reassured that structure is necessary, and that we as Americans have a language with which to speak, a language that is our own, and that we must reclaim in the face of fragmentation & institutionalized decentralization of thought and identity. These are the lessons I learned as an undergraduate, lessons I'm beginning to recall at a crucial and necessary moment:

Language is ALIVE. It is not a mediator or a mirror. It is as much a participant in the construction of our cultural consciousness as the breath that manages to keep us living among each other and ourselves.

and BREATH, that is the key: the rhythm, the space, the silence that's full, always, of what's been said, what will be said, what IS said. (Curse the passive voice, inherited & emphasized)

INHERITANCE is not merely to be accepted, but must be considered critically. We must dig into the past to understand what shaped the things we've inherited. Capitalism. Formalism. The iamb, the trochee. (These rules of poetry extend -- the measured & constrained approach to consumption, the veil that covers the social relations of labor -- ask our President for an answer to rampant unemployment & you'll get a beautiful sonnet in response, an inherited answer to a question that seems to refuse to change.)

Change, which does not simply happen, but is instead MADE. By people. On the ground & on the page. We should not wait for a handsome senator from Chicago to deliver it, nor should we turn to the Mothers and Fathers of our form to offer it in the pages of the Paris Review. The longer we wait, the later it'll come.

I'm also reminded that there are, in fact, very real ties between such seemingly disparate characters as William Carlos Williams and Mao Tse-tung. Evidence:

The truth has to be redressed, re-examined, re-affirmed in a new mode. There has to be new poetry. But the thing is that the change, the greater material, the altered structure of the inevitable revolution must be in the poem, in it. Made of it. It must shine in the structural body of it. [WCW]

The supersession of the old by the new is a general, eternal and inviolable law of the universe... In each thing there is contradiction between its new and its old aspects, and this gives ruise to a series of struggles with many twists and turns. [Mao]

By repeating an early misconception it gains acceptance and may be found running through many, or even all, later work. It has to be rooted out at the site of its first occurrence. [WCW]

Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things, they regard general truths as emerging out of the void, they turn them into purely abstract unfathomable formulas, and thereby completely deny and reverse the normal sequence by which man comes to know truth. Nor do they understand the interconnection of the two processes in cognition -- from the particular to the general and then from the general to the particular. [Mao]

If I succeed in keeping myself objective enough, sensual enough, I can produce the factors, the concretions of materials by which others shall understand and so be led to use -- that they may the better see, touch, taste, enjoy -- their own world differing as it may from mine... That is what is meant by the universality of the local. [WCW]

It is precisely in the particularity of contradiction that the universality of contradiction resides. [Mao]

They lack that which must draw them together -- without destruction of their particular characteristics; the thing that will draw them together because in their disparateness it discovers an identity. [WCW]

So to state it. The purpose. Here it is:

TO DIG, to discover the contradictions that propel the motion of history In the American Grain, to unearth the parallels and intersections of individual experience that will give rise to a unified voice, to examine (closely) the victories and failures of the poetic Revolutionaries of the American 20th century, so that we, the inheritors of their language & culture, may move forward with our own contradictory experience and being with a more full & complex understanding of that which came before. Because before we can understand the present, before we can create the future, we must -- MUST -- understand what came before.

It's Sankofa. It's my favorite pome:

If we go back to where
we never were we'll
be there [REPEAT] But

The Bourgeois Blues

What great tragedy is the life of the petty-bourgeois intellectual! What a profound struggle he faces in descent from the ivory tower! To be the tallest among the small, a Man with Ideas among just-plain-men, is to be plagued with the contradictory consciousness that's driven so many to isolation & crisis. O desperate confusion! O woe! Pity the great & privileged thinking man!

In his Between Existentialism and Marxism Jean-Paul Sartre makes the astute observation that class consciousness may only be attained through direct experience of class conflict. That's to say, one cannot identify with the class struggle without first participating therein. This is a clear application of the dialectical method of analysis. Theory & practice are dialectically linked, so that one may not exist without the other. One cannot understand the proletarian circumstance until one experiences it, wholly & directly.

So where, in the equation of class struggle & consciousness, does that place the Thinking Man of Privilege?

Let's consider a hypothetical situation. A young, petty-bourgeois intellectual is exposed, on paper, to the central tenets of Marxist philosophy. He reads excerpts from Capital, he analyses State & Revolution for a week or two. He has some conversations with other, more well-read students of Marxism-Leninism. He has a degree from a prestigious institution of higher education. There is money in his bank account & he has few material responsibilities. Most importantly, he does not have to work for a living. But, in search of experience & adventure, he decides to take a job as an unskilled laborer, a worker in an assembly line. There, he works among the People, whose lives depend upon the meager wages earned with their daily toil. These People among whom he exists are uneducated by comparison, but they are far more practically skilled than the intellectual. He earns, like his comrades, less than a living wage in this position, and he quickly grows frustrated with his circumstance. He believes that the practical skills he is learning are less valuable than the metaphysical lessons of experience learned by his cosmopolitan intellectual predecessors. Materiality, in other words, is subordinated to the pleasures of thought. "My time is worth more than this," he says, "because I have read thick books! I have written long analyses of the meaning of sexual penetration in the Modern bildungsroman! I will no longer exploit my body & waste my valuable time for an industry in which I do not believe!"

He quits his job. His fellow workers, however, cannot quit their own. They have bills to pay, and no other marketable skills. Principles are of secondary concern, because of the material urgency of survival. In short, they are locked into their situation. He is not. He is free, because of his padded bank account & bourgeois mindset, to walk away from the assembly line & devote his time to thought & introspection. He is a lucky man, he thinks, because he has learned the Truth of Class Consciousness, and he goes to sleep with a smile on his face & hope for the future, now armed with an understanding of the Plight of the Worker. He may think of the men who once worked alongside him, but only in passing, & in the context of their proletarian charm, the wisdom they've acquired in their noble savagery. They are footnotes in the novel of his life, anecdotal characters used to add color to the philosophical musings of his autobiographical narrative.

But he has worked, he tells himself, worked hard, for a week or a month, perhaps even a year, and has therefore paid his dues. He believes that he has earned the right to speak of class, when in fact, he knows little of the struggle to which he refers. Someday, when a revolutionary movement develops around him, he will sit at his desk & write long essays on the value of the worker in society. He will sign petitions & organize sit-ins. He will raise his fist at rallies & shout slogans with his fellow intellectuals, but he will not set foot in the trenches of the true struggle. He will not give up his privilege, because he believes he has already given up enough, by working for a moment among those he supports from afar, whose fingers are bleeding from overwork. And he will never sacrifice his luxury, because he cannot let go of his bourgeois intellectualism. His degree is always in the back of his mind, always a reminder of his arbitrary superiority, no matter how sure he is of its meaninglessness. He will never have to strike for shorter work-days or better health benefits. He will never have to look his children in the eye and tell them there will be no food on the table tonight, or any night this week. And because of this, he will never fully understand the struggle, and can never claim a knowledge of that struggle. He has no right to it. It is not his to claim.

And yet we petty-bourgeois intellectuals claim the struggle daily. We understand the ideas, the philosophies, the grand, sweeping generalizations of our thoughtful predecessors who classified & identified the masses to whom they had never spoken. And because of this understanding, we are somehow imbued with a right to speak of the Revolution, though the fight will never be our own. Our sympathy is not empathy. Our interest is not in shared experience, but in analysis & observation. At best, we are anthropologists in the field, taking notes. We live among the natives, always looking through the lenses we've learned to value as tools of comprehension, never stopping to think that dirty hands & callused fingers may actually be the key to understanding.

Those who have the choice to live without are different from those who live without choice itself. No matter how many pages of Marxist-Leninist theory I read, no matter how much research I perform on the experience of the CCP during the Long March, I will never know the truth of struggle until I am forced, without choice, to be exploited. To choose exploitation as a means of enriching one's experience of The World & its processes is to negate the struggle of those who are & will continue to be exploited ad infinitum. It is not noble to sacrifice one's privilege unless it is sacrificed completely, unless luxury and caution are thrown to the wind & the mind is wiped clean of its philosophical clutter.

I do not pretend to be strong enough to throw away the books & surrender completely to the circumstance with which I am chiefly concerned. And because of this fact, I have no right to speak of the essence of class consciousness, of great & explosive revelations of Truth. Because of this, I am not dangerous, because I am aware of my inexperience, & embrace it as a challenge that must be faced, a step in the process that leads toward the acquisition of Revolutionary Consciousness. The dangerous ones are those who claim consciousness that is not their own, who assert correctness without first having sought the validation of experience.

In closing, the wise words of two philosophers of experience, one a Chinese revolutionary, the other a doctor-poet from New Jersey.

No ideas but in things / There is no knowledge without practice

Modernists in Conversation

In 1922, Ulysses was published for the first time in its entirety by Sylvia Beach. Prior to that release, the novel had been serialized in the American journal The Little Review between 1918 and 1920. When the Nausicaa chapter was published, serialization ended because of an obscenity charge.

One year after the publication of Joyce's novel in Paris, William Carlos Williams released a novella titled The Great American Novel, a 125-page experiment in prose-writing outside the traditional conventions of the form. Also first published in Paris, Williams' piece is a gem: the plot is centered around a love affair between a female Ford car & a Mack truck. Novel was published the same year as Spring and All, which was, until Paterson, Williams' masterwork (it contained, among others, the iconic untitled poem now referred to as "The Red Wheelbarrow").

Williams and Joyce were literary contemporaries, linked by a shared relationship with Ezra Pound, whose clout in the publishing world aided in the dissemination of the work of both writers. It's arguable that without Pound, neither Williams nor Joyce would have ascended to the levels of fame that both men achieved. For a long time, I've been intrigued by the thematic parallels in Williams' and Joyce's work, specifically the centrality of the river, with its multiple metaphorical meanings. The possibility for a collaborative study of Finnegans Wake and Paterson has been raised between a friend and I, and its realization is an event I'm looking forward to.

Aside from that ambition, I've always been interested in drawing ties between Irish and American literature, both of which, in their most powerful incarnations, work along parallel tracks in their exploration of new forms & the philosophical problems of self & nation (which are major preoccupations of mine). The Irish/American aspect is especially interesting to me because of the decidedly post- (and sometimes anti-) British voice that is exhibited, particularly in the early to mid-20th century. (See, for explication, Williams' brilliant 1939 essay "Against the Weather: A Study of the Artist," which served as the core text in my undergraduate study.)

Despite their ties to Pound, it's my belief that Williams and Joyce managed to sever ties to the British voice in their respective contexts more successfully than their comrade. This may be due, in part, to their simultaneous dedication to cosmpolitanism and locality, while Pound's work was, in my reading, strictly cosmopolitan. The treatment of locality, in my opinion, is the key to the creation of a truly original and universal work. Before generalization comes specificity. More on that in another blog.

Today, my task is to explore a parallel drawn by none other than Pound in a 1928 essay called "Dr. Williams' Position," which is chiefly concerned with an analysis of Williams' novel A Voyage to Pagany, and the 'American' nature of the Williamsian voice. The most interesting aspect of the essay, however, is a brief comment made by Pound, drawing a direct connection between Novel and Ulysses:

In the genealogy of writing it [Pagany] stems from Ulysses, or rather we would say better: Williams' The Great American Novel...was [his] first and strongest derivation from Ulysses, an 'inner monologue' stronger and more gnarled, or stronger because more gnarled at least as I see it, than the Pagany.

The Great American Novel is simply the application of Joycean method to the American circumjacence... if one read it often enough, the element of form emerges in The Great American Novel, not probably governing the whole, but in the shaping of at least some of the chapters, notably chapter VII, the one beginning 'Nuevo Mundo'.

My first grievance with Pound is that he labels Williams' work as Joycean, rather than simply identifying parallels in the texts. Yes, Williams appreciated the work of Joyce, and was inspired (as many were) by his approach to prose. To imply, however, that Williams' prose is derivative of the Irish writer's, is to negate the originality of the American's product.

The "Joycean" label, in fact, appears to be assigned to any writer who explores an alternate form of prose writing that's even slightly rooted in stream of consciousness, that challenges the traditional conventions of form. Some writers are derivative of Joyce. Williams is not one of them. This becomes especially clear when we consider Spring and All, a long book of prose and verse which exhibits much of the experimental quality that appears in Novel. Pound's assertion implies that Williams read Ulysses & followed Joyce's lead. The fact was, however, that the two writers were writing & publishing extracts of these major works simultaneously. Aside from this, Williams' style is decidedly un-Joycean, and indicative of a very clear departure from any literary precedent. His work from the early 1920s shows the birth of a new American voice, somewhat rooted in Whitmanesque investments in the natural world, tied to European/American imagism & anomalously minimalistic. It's this short-lined, free-verse style that opens the door to Olsonian postmodernism, the experimentation of the Beats & the experiential experimentation of the New York School. I assert that Williams is responsible for the birth of American poetics as we know it, and Spring and All is the Mother-text. From its Chapter VI:

Now, in the imagination, all flesh, all human flesh has been dead upon the earth for ten million, billion years. The bird has turned into a stone within whose heart an egg, unlaid, remained hidden.

It is spring! but miracle of miracles a miraculous miracle has gradually taken place during these seemingly wasted eons. Through the orderly sequences of unmentionable time EVOLUTION HAS REPEATED ITSELF FROM THE BEGINNING.

Good God!

and from the first poem in the sequence:

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind--

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined --
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

[see, for 2nd-generation echoes & expansions upon this sentiment, George Oppen's Of Being Numerous]


What Joyce managed with Ulysses was the revolutionization of the long novel as a form, the creation of the Modern Epic. Not until Paterson did Williams attempt the epic, and his work from the early 20th century was entirely unconcerned with that sort of large-scale production. In fact, Novel and Spring and All are both texts of precise locality. Williamsian prose is direct & meticulous in its execution, focused closely upon the minutiae of human experience. While Ulysses masterfully employs the exploration of such minutiae to create a broad & expansive narrative of experience, Williams creates a mosaic of specificity that illuminates a broader world as a whole made up of pieces. Ulysses is a text that looks out & away from itself. Williams' work is unflinchingly introspective.

My other problem with Pound's assertion is his reluctance to acknowledge Novel as a text that's governed by form. The point to The Great American Novel was (1) to make a satirical comment on the eponymous idea (2) to violate the conventions of traditional prose-writing (3) explore the idea of American "Greatness" in a short, unorthodox textual format, thereby formally contradicting the very idea with which the novella was concerned.

If, in his assertion, Pound meant to say that Williams is not guided by the form of his outdated predecessors, then, by all means, hats off to Ezra. I doubt this is the case, however, because Pound harbored barely-secret resentments toward Williams after the latter's admission of a partially-Jewish lineage. An earlier section of the essay makes reference to the impurity of Williams' voice, as though distant Jewishness somehow undercuts Americanness:

Dr Williams has laid claim to a somewhat remote Hebrew connexion, possibly a rabbi in Saragossa, at the time of the siege. He claims American birth, but I strongly suspect that he emerged on shipboard just off Bedloe's Island and that his dark and serious eyes gazed up in their first sober contemplation at the Statue and its brazen and monstrous nightshirt

At any rate he has not in his ancestral endocrines the arid curse of our nation.

Because Pound is reluctant to celebrate Williams as truly American, because he actually goes so far as to claim the American identity is a cursèd one, any praise given to the Dr's work is necessarily backhanded. (Let us not forget Williams' lifelong dedication to the establishment of a voice that is American, rooted in American experience, & dependent upon the rhythmic curiosities of American speech.) This is classic Pound, the same bigoted pettiness that pushed Olson away some twenty years later. There's also an arrogance in Pound's critical essays that leaves a funny taste in my mouth. While I have admitted biases toward Williams and against Pound, my most objective self tells me that Pound's assertions about Williams as a formal writer are entirely unfounded. Like it or not, Williams was a writer of form. As early as 1923, formal changes occur in Williams' writing that signal a movement toward the American voice that takes precedence throughout the second half of his career. From The Great American Novel:

O America! Turn your head a little to the left please. So. Now are you ready? Watch my hand.

... And this is romance: to believe that which is unbelievable. This is faith: to desire that which is never to be obtained, to ride like a swallow on the wind -- apparently for the pleasure of flight.

Leave it to the good Doctor from Rutherford to do these things with language. We receive nothing but clarity from Williams, a philosophical directness & formal containment that will go on to define several decades of American poetics & influence American voices emerging at this very moment.

To close, my favorite poem from Spring and All:

No that is not it
nothing that I have done
nothing
I have done

is made up of
nothing
and the diphthong

ae

together with
the first person
singular
indicative

of the auxiliary
verb
to have

everything
I have done
is the same

if to do
is capable
of an
infinity of
combinations

involving the
moral
physical
and religious

codes

for everyting
and nothing
are synonymous
when

energy in vacuo
has the power
of confusion

which only to
have done nothing
can make
perfect