Juvenilia for Spring & All

An hour or so ago, I read Ron Silliman’s lament for the absence of a contemporary edition of Williams’s Spring & All. Now I find myself in the library with a copy of Poems of Clarence Mangan (Many Hitherto Uncollected). I run my hands over the page and feel where the print slammed into the paper. The pages are brittle with a rough tooth suitable for crayon or charcoal. And that sent me looking for this little thing I wrote years ago about Spring & All. It’s embarrassing now—too cocksure and smartassed. But those qualities still chime for me with Williams’s book, which is in its own way a very smartassed (and smart) volume. So, after much delay:

Springinol(tm)
“Truly men feel an enlargement before great or good work.”
(New Directions Imaginations, 107)

Williams on the cover, vein throbbing in his temple. Must be thinking of Eliot.

Improvisation is as American as the aircraft carrier. Or the New England Jeremiad. Or the fax machine. Or Williams’s poetics. All these have a pragmatic and urgent need to convey a message—often a message that could just as well be rendered in broad strokes on a billboard: Oil costs enough thank you, I’m god on earth, Buy my product, Take me seriously. No particular order, express or implied.

It’s an American need to get things done in a hurry—slaughter those Indians, chain those blacks, burn that forest, &c.—that Cornel West says is the root of American pragmatism. Or maybe it’s the bridges burnt when they chucked the yahoos out of Europe. At any rate, the only epistemological philosophies that are strictly American center around staying out of Hell. And that’s pragmatic too.

Meanwhile, Williams, who has been approaching for several paragraphs, is cobbling together a poetics between office visits.

This poetics carries elements of “The Waste Land” in that it most definitely wants to not be the waste land; here the plants are vital and muscular: “rooted they/ grip down and begin to awaken.” Do the line break and hear that G get serious. These plants are Alive. These are the same guys that came to the “new world naked” into the cold but familiar wind on the preceding page. I suppose they jumped to it when Dr. Bill smacked them on the ass. Or was that the nurse he smacked?

And the new world just isn’t The New World, but it’s also a new world Futurist-style: “we crush out the marrow of those about us with our heavy cars.” Sounds very much like the “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” by F. T. Marinetti. The destruction, the millenarianism, is important for Williams because the wholesale destruction leaves him an open ground to work in, a field (see the farmer in Poem III) absent of “the traditionalists of plagiarism” and all their mediating philosophies.

Because WCW wants to experience the real world unmediated—he wants to invoke the real as a correspondent between his poem and his reader? That’s what Hugh Kenner says, and I think it’s baloney. Well, okay, not completely baloney—but Freud was right, that sort of thing does feel good. Pardon me, now I have to gouge out my eyes.

Williams may have a “naive realism through which any philosopher would promptly drive a Mack truck” as Kenner would have it, but he’s not exactly trying to embody that kind of simple-minded materialism in Spring and All. Though I think his escape is narrow and, at times, despite himself (Kenner uses this quote to his advantage: “A world detached from the necessity of recording it, sufficient to itself....”). Rather, I think Williams enacts a linguistic landscape in the better parts of Spring and All (and I’d like to turn that quote to MY advantage, proposing that the world that bears no recording is the world of the poem itself, but I’m chasing my tail, or Kenner’s).

Poem II is a fine example. Where could you encounter flowers spilling “shaded flame/ darting it back/ into the lamp’s horn.” I mean, what is a “lamp’s horn”? How about “flamegreen throats” or “transpiercing light”? They are not symbols or abstractions, but—perhaps—attempts to evoke the sensuous qualities of material objects, to create a sensual material experience within the space of the poem. Still there is an otherness to these words; flamegreen, yes, I can conceive it, but there’s no 1:1 correspondence to any simple material reality. A terrific confusion has taken place. No man knows whither to turn. It’s easy to get defamiliarized in a pseudo-Cubist landscape made of words.

These words—lamp’s horn, et al.—are no “crude symbolism” rather WCW wants them to function as a part of a “cognizant whole.” And this whole is pointedly linguistic: “of the auxiliary/ verb/ to have.” And it’s textuality is pointed out by Mr. Williams’s metanarrative exploits, such as his “Meanwhile, SPRING,” his odd chapter numbering, his bouts of direct-address-itis, and so on.

But to say that Williams is trying to create a linguist object doesn’t seem to be quite enough; to say that he’s doing the Objectivist shuffle here doesn’t seem enough.

Perhaps the passages around 145 where he uses prose as a foil in defining poetry might help. He’s banging the drum against emotion-centered, Romantic verse; he even says that it’s the job of prose to confirm words in their emotional implications, that poetry should liberate words from emotion. That’s pretty sincere.

WCW on mimesis: “The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation.... Surely in isolation one becomes a god....” (111)

Derrida reading Kant on mimesis: “Genius imitates nothing, it identifies itself with the productive freedom of God who identifies himself in himself, at the origin of the origin, with the production of production.” (15)

Whoops, there it is! Epistemology all over the place, gumming up the bird of imagination. So much for pragmatism—so I said American epistemology is always about a get-out-of-hell-free card. In that case, is hell The Waste Land? Look at that throbbing temple; maybe it is.