It’ll be William Carlos Williams‘ birthday tomorrow
We celebrate with a special two-part post, beginning today – (from the Robert Creeley tapes courtesy Pennsound) – a conversation, Allen and Robert, conducted in Buffalo on March 17, 1988. Robert Creeley interviews Allen about his memories of William Carlos Williams
For the full original audio listen here
AG: Well this is the visit (first visit) I was talking about.
RC: I hear you
AG: There was a bunch of radical Jewish lawyers and they had a thing called the Paterson Press, and I wanted to visit Williams, (and I didn’t know what he was doing, and I had difficulty reading him, and I didn’t understand his poetry, – just simple-minded missing-the- point…
RC: Right
AG: ..partly looking for rhyme. I didn’t know why it was broken up like that or.. but I noticed it was modern.
RC: Yes
AG: and I think read The Wedge, something that came out during the war..
RC: (19)44
AG: ..and… because that was in the browsing room at Columbia. So I ran into it there, (like a little library room that was, like, the poetry room)
RC: Was there anyone particularly at Columbia who was (teaching)…
AG: Nobody was teaching Williams. The only reason I know anything about him was I saw this little book, from, I guess, Cummington Press
RC: Yes Cummington..was (Wallace) Stevens being taught ?..
AG: Stevens was taught.
RC: Marianne Moore?
AG: Marianne Moore a little, Williams not just at all. The local feeling was that Williams was.. wasn’t really a poet, was kind of provincial, awkward, but mainly sort of naive, a local naive, who happened to be friends with the big time guys like (Ezra) Pound. Pound was respected but was not taught., in other words,. there was no text of Pound around, except what was in the Louis Untermeyer anthologies at that time.
RC: Was Mark Van Doren..(around)?
AG: Mark Van Doren was there but he never taught Pound. He taught a course in Kafka, Dostoevsky, Dante, something like that, a reading course of interesting great books that he would.. actually, Kafka, Don Quixote and…many many things
RC: Your father..
AG: My father was a poet in Paterson, New Jersey and disdained Pound and thought that he was an obscurantist but he also thought that T.S.Eliot was also an obscurantist. Pound was an obscurantist and did it purposefully to insult people! – Of course, he couldn’t understand what they wrote, he couldn’t know how to read them. So I inherited that from my father. See, my father’s judgment of taste was… Louis Untermeyer… the ultimate acme was A. E. Housman, and Emily Dickinson was considered great, she was…
It was a lineage that would be from Dickinson on (Whitman was also admirable and Poe, Vachel Lindsay and some Carl Sandburg (plus he visited East Side High School, Paterson
so, in fact that was a book) – but the lyric, the thing was lyric poetry. It was my father’s specialty – and the Untermeyer anthologies….does anybody know those? – Modern American and British Poetry – I grew up on those. It’s, really, like, ingrained. I know all that stuff – and some earlier anthologies my father had around for when he went to Rutgers in the ‘twenties.
So, because of that, I actually literally couldn’t figure out, what Williams was saying , or just the commonsense, the sense of what he was saying. ..
RC: Right.
AG: So I was looking for.. . I don’t know what? – a structure that wasn’t there. So, for some reason or other, I thought I would want to go talk to him, though I didn’t have a clear idea why, except that he was from my neighborhood. And I think I was just coming out of New York State Psychiatric Institute, from a few months, sitting around the house in Paterson.
I’d come back and retreated from New York, and in the house in Paterson.
So Hyman Zimball (sic), who ran The Paterson Press gave me permission to use the name of Paterson Press as an excuse to go visit and interview him. So I called up and made a date
My father drove me up and dropped me there .. but he was a little annoyed that I was interested in Williams and paying so much attention to him. My father had.. (he) was known, locally, as Paterson’s principal poet “Louis Ginsberg, Paterson’s Principle Poet”..
Maybe he thought that Williams was just one of those sort of phonies of some kind.I.. I didn’t have any opinion, but I knew he wasn’t a phony, but I was just really actually included in what was he actually doing? So I just went to see him. So… I don’t think I had shown him any poems yet, I was just this anonymous young man from the local newspaper, but Williams must’ve been totally knocked out that someone from the local paper, from a local paper, a young kid from a local paper, was coming to see him, (and, if I were in that situation, I’d be really eager, you know, propagandize in my own area). So he took me very seriously actually.
I think I waited for him in his living room (his wife answered the door) and then he took me to his doctor’ s office. I don’t remember the whole thing. He showed me around the house, upstairs where he wrote. I remember he had a big painting of the Brooklyn Bridge by Joseph Stella or someone, a big parallel Brooklyn Bridge thing by (Charles) Sheeler, (a painting in the house). He had quite a lot of…quite a few paintings in the main.. you remember that..
(to RC).. in the main stairway?
RC: No.. Yeah
AG: ..there was a big huge painting in the stairway, but otherwise it was very domestic, nice, (old documents, things that had been in his house, from the (19)30’s,(19)40s, with.. a.. china-closet, a glass-walled bookcase, small but standing up, and a desk, bookcase. Within the bookcase behind me, two locked doors were open showing pamphlets and copies of many of his own books, (which turned me on to how to keep your books, or that, you know, you keep your books, if you write books, you keep them – and maybe two copies)
RC: To reassure.
AG: Well you just keep them there. You have copies, It never occured to me! This was the first time I met anybody who had written a lot of books and had copies of them,, My father had written a book or two but that was all that he had put out. Williams had about fifty, you know, little pamphlets, big pamphlets, and books signed by his friends.
And we went into the doctor’s office and he showed me on a little prescription pad –
“I kick Y-U-H eye” – (“I kick yuh eye”) – he said he’d heard it that day. So I said, “What are you doing with that? How do you write? – So he showed me that – he said, “I heard that today”, ...(so that’s the way that people) talk around here – “I kick yuh eye” – I’m interested in the rhythm..” And you can’t.. What is it?, it doesn’t read as iambic pentameter, you can’t (read) it by stress exactly, it doesn’t fit into any particular patterns, so it’s a little specimen of local spoken idiom, locally spoken idiom, and he said that that’s was what he was looking for, so that was his explanation, really, of what his method of writing was, what his interests were
and also how he wrote (how he kept notes) that he didn’t ..
My question – (my memory is not great (but) on one of those visits – I’m not sure which, if it was that one) – the very first question (I asked was) “do you think of yourself as a doctor or a poet?”, and he said as a doctor. I was very surprised because I thought.. (because) I knew him as a poet..
RC: Yeah
AG: ..but he was more occupied (or, he wanted to say that anyway) – he was as much occupied, as a doctor, in his actual work
RC: Yeah
AG; So that was real interesting because he was a poet, obviously, but he was also, sort of like, common man, in the sense that he just thought of himself as another professional, another citizen, rather than an elite angel or something.
RC: I was thinking, in his writing, the last time we were talking, there’s a lot of emphasis upon, not an unhappy isolation, you know, the “happy genius of his household”, but a lot of.. a lot of sense of this alternative figure, this person other than Doctor Willams, a responsible resourceful, seemingly comfortable social man. If you talk to people like John Dollar, just to hear him talk about the clubs they had in Paterson, he sounded like a completely active local person without any.. not at all this shy or stand-offish person, very much one of the boys, one of the persons in that comfortable group. But again and again in the poetry there seems to be an attempt at imagining, a proposal more accurately, of an isolated figure, of someone they don’t know about. For example, think of the poems wherein he’s saying some secret life, some big,..some vulnerable secret, so his qualification in the Autobiography of poems are those “capsules” wherein you “wrap up “our punishable secrets”, or the.. in..
AG; What’s that one? that”s something like “those capsules”? . “as poetry is those capsules?.. as those capsules are.._?
RC: Poetry is..Poems are those defined as capsules wherein we “wrap up our punishable secrets”. – (“The poem is a capsule where we wrap up our punishable secrets.” )
Then in The Wedge, you have that poem “but the prize they made they will never discover”, that sense of both competition with the authority as writing but also that sense of a secret private place
AG: So I get, that’s what I found really interesting and effective about that answer,”I think of myself as a doctor”
RC: Yeah
AG: ..also, what turned me onto – what did he mean when he uses the word “Imagination”? – “only the Imagination is real”(“The only realism in art is of the imagination”)
RC: No, so much for being a doctor!
AG: Yeah and I thought, interpreted it as, he obviously had a secret internal life, a fantasy life, maybe a…
RC: Lifting the typewriter up like that, like. out of its cradle, zoom, almost like stepping into a closet Kama Sutra land, all of a sudden, zoom, you have this typewriter!
AG: But I was thinking, what split, what picture, what emotion did he have that went along with it? in that there’s one line that always struck me. – I think it’s the rain – “that unworldly love that has no hope of the world and that cannot change the world to its delight” – That really moved me. That’s something, when I first heard him read it, that seemed to be the key of what he meant by imagination – the sympathies which are boundless and infinite, (if anybody could feel, in every direction), which couldn’t be.. (could be indulged professionally by a doctor towards the babies he’s bringing in, or towards Polish patients or something, but.. – towards Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven also too, like fucking some local girl that he maybe met around the hospital, or going to New York and making out by himself (because, apparently, he had a lot of trouble with his wife that way, or gave his wife trouble) but it was…And also he wrote stories around that time that involve gay women (“The Knife of the Times”) – you know that, everybody know that story?
RC: It’s a beautiful story – (in) The Farmers’ Daughters
AG; What is it? Is that the name?- That first story , where there’s two women that knew each other very well in their youth
Student It’s called “The Knife of the Times”
AG: “The Knife of the Time”s It’ s a three-page story, the lead story to one of his books of short stories and – the two girls went to school together, they got married, their children are all grown-up, their husbands are now getting towards retiring. One of them lives in New York, one of them lives in Queens, or Detroit, or somewhere, but they get together, with their husbands, and they arrive at Penn Station.. they arrive, the couple from Detroit, at Penn Station, or Grand Central. And the woman who lives in New York who invited them to come visit again after many years, rushes up, kisses her old girlfriend and hustles her off into a ladies room and takes her into the toilet and is kissing her passionately, and saying “our children are all grown up, everything is all complete, you know, like, we don’t have any problems anymore, the husbands, they’re going to have a good time, why don’t we go and make love at long last after all these years”. And the woman, who is standing there passively being kissed …after all these years, thinks to herself, “well why not? ” The story is three pages long and it’s like this whole history between them.
So then Williams had another story about a… what looks like a Marlon Brando on a motorcycle picking up some kind of weakling, you know, the passive, passive pederast.in New Jersey, New York, driving, maybe New Jersey. It’s kind of a mysterious story that I haven’t read for many years, It’s obviously about a sort of almost S & M sort.. something like. Anyway – Marsden Hartley and a boyfriend or something – but it was written with one… with, like, a lot of sympathy and a lot of detail, so obviously (he was) much more than a hail-fellow-well-met around the local club and the tavern in Paterson or Rutherford and the other Lions or Masons, or whoever he was. He had this tremendous subtle sympathetic awareness of many loves, (like the title of his play), and was also carrying on himself quite extensively, So finally you get “unworldly”… the summary of it is “unworldly love that has no hope of the world and that cannot change the world to its delight”, meaning his own sympathies, and maybe emotional sympathies – the range (is) fantastic , so (a) fantastic spectrum that he could accommodate to in being sympathetic. Although he looked like just a square… (a) square husband and was quite square. ( – not that when I met him. actually – after one or two times, I said “Actually, I’m not gay” – ( I lied to him! )- actually tried to cover it up – he seemed so straight…
RC: I hear it
AG:… that I didn’t… I would be a little embarrassed to tell him I had, you know, a deep deviating fever or something
RC: There is that funny letter he writes after you and Jack Kerouac and Gregory and Peter had come to visit and that’s.. I think there’s a letter of your own, or something about you that’s very moving and your apparent support and what-not. It isn’t a hostile letter but it’s a classic middle-class letter
AG: So, but who is he writing to? See that’s the..
RC: Well, that’s, well, he’s immensely..
AG: See, he’s very very variable who he writes to.
RC: Exactly
AG: He changes like I do
RC: I do too, so..
AG: It’s sort of like, if he’s writing to someone who is very respectable and critical
RC: “These young people, what will they say”
AG: “These young people..”, well, no, “I met these young people, they seemed very interesting and talented tho’, you know, scruffy tho’ they are, but you mustn’t be too judgmental about it”. Sort of defensive. I always felt that when he was writing things like this he was being defensive to his own sympathies, he really was sympathetic but didn’t quite trust his sympathies, but that’s all he had. He really did trust it, but if he was explaining to somebody else he had to say, “well now, I know you wouldn’t like this,
but I think it’s ok”
RC: That’s curious about him and possible. But first, I think I’ll just make the exception. – although with (Charles) Sheeler. Kenneth Burke seems to have a long sustained..
AG: Burke was his equal and Burke was straight
RC: Yeah, Burke was straight
AG: Whereas, he did hang around with a lot of gay people..
RC: I hear you
AG: ..like Marsden Hartley…
RC: With whom he was very tight
AG: .,,and I don’t know, maybe some of the other painters he was involved with.
So he had this. So. I keep getting moved by this, that one line, not only on the emotional, personal, family level – “that unworldly love that has no hope of the world” – it seems, so slightly stated, a political statement, that, even if you.. even in the Reagan area, so to speak, or post (19)30’s disillusionment with the Communist era, he still had political, a political imagination from the (19)20’s, from the poem about Sacco and Vanzetti… that (was) were far out . He had a lot of far out sympathies, humanely, emotionally, politically, culturally, that were totally out of character for Rutherford and the straight world he was inhabiting. It was actually just a simple bourgeois neighborhood and he was able to deal with the bourgeois neighborhood perfectly well, he had this big range (that’s why I keep coming back to that “that has no hope of this world, and cannot change the world – to its delight”! – he’s got the delight – the world’s going through its sort of restrictive horrors and he’s got the delight of an expanded imagination, and he knows he’s got that expanded spaciousness – Yeah?
Student: (I seem to remember that) you and he (were) walking along the railroad tracks and he pointed out something and you were amazed at what he could see, what he was looking at is that accurate?
AG: No, I don’t remember that. We walked, not on the railroad tracks but by the Passaic river. We went up to the Falls in Paterson and went along the bank of the Passaic river down below River Street. There was one empty lot that bordered on the river and I used to play there so I showed him where I played as a kid, which I didn’t realize later.. I asked him if there’s anyone else doing freezers and he suggested Marsden Hartley but there’s a line in Marsden Hartley – “The empty lot which would be ..” (a poem about Lewiston) – “The empty lot which was the Asia and Africa of our childhood imagination”. So I was showing him “the Asia and Africa” of my childhood play imagination. And we went down to the Passaic and stood on the bank and I scooped up a handful of detritus, muck – there was, like. old bottle caps, toothpaste tubes, tin can and a bottle. So this was the poem of the riverbank. So I got… that seemed to be the one thing that we both dug, the sort of like garbage ruin college archeological.. humor! – the things we pick up for the riverbank, things that were thrown away, and that was our life, you know, that was what.. Also, that was what they had done to the river, what Paterson had done to the river. It’s part of his scene, there is a realization of how the river is polluted. An early poem, “The Wanderer”, where he evokes the goddess of the river as muse – ” And (so) the filthy Passaic consented” – you know that line? – I dug that.
So, what that arose from, I think was that conversation. (to Student) Was that what you were thinking or referring to?
Student (Something about his perception, that he could see something you couldn’t see, but I may have been mistaken…
AG: No, no, I mean, I’m sure he did see a lot of things like that. He wouldn’t.. he didn’t display that uncanny sort of Zen master shot, he was just very ordinary and he had a very funny ordinary face, a kind of weak chin (by the time I knew him) and almost a..(RC shows photo)..but not there
RC: Not there
AG: That’s much earlier, much later
RC: (RC shows second picture) Here’s another picture
AG: A bit more like that, a little bit more like that, you know, and kind of, occasionally a high.. high tones, like some old schoolteacher, or something like that – (mimics tone) “I don’t know about that, it’s a shame, I don’t know about those people”. So he had almost a feminine furor or something, some kind of.. As he said “the female principle of the world/is my appeal/in the extremity.to which I have come”. He had a kind of Tiresias-like softness, a delicacy and a quite questioning querulousness about him that was often in that high woodwind voice that some folks have, you know older folks have, old school-teaching ladies and old school-teaching men. I don’t know you might describe it as something audible.
RC: Here he is 1928- ” ( reads from “The Descent of Winter) – “What is he saying? That love was never made for man and woman to crack between them and so he loves and loves his sons and loves as he pleases. But there is a great law over him which — is as it is. The wind blowing, the mud spots on the polished surface, the face reflected in the glass which as you advance the features disappear leaving only the hat and as you draw back the features return, the tip of the nose, the projection over the eyebrows, the cheek bones and the bulge of the lips the chin last.”
AG: You see he was playing tricks with his mind all the time
RC: Yeah
AG: Tricks on perception
RC: Endlessly
AG: So that would be a tremendous depth. Whereas everybody else is walking around in a world already solid, he’s dissolving it with all his kind of perceptual subtleties, and then trying to write them down.
RC: Yeah, I’ll make a big serious book in my time. That was what he was doing, yeah
AG: So, to continue the anecdotal aspect of this. See, I had.. I did an interview, wrote the interview up. The only things I remember were I think the eyes, and the “are you a doctor?” (and he answered my question, he was simply a doctor and a poet), and the fact that he wrote any time – in-between patients – if he had a thought, he’d write it in-between patients and so the waiting room...and he was always ready. Then I wrote it up and the guys from the Paterson Press edited it and chopped it up. so it was really insulting (because I wrote something up that was flattering, I thought, and they cut it and rewrote it. and so I was ashamed to send it. But it was a full page long (I’ll have to find it again, I haven’t seeing in many years). But I still didn’t quite understand what he was up to, because they didn’t get it. And then that same year he gave a reading at the Museum of Modern Art,1948..
RC: That was when Cummington’s Paterson was published. (Paterson II)
AG: Yes, So I went to see him at the Museum and he read..I think he read “The pure products of America go crazy..” and I understood that immediately, but then that really got me, I guess unlocked it all was “The Clouds”, you know?, and the end line, at the end of.. let me have that here.. the last verse and the last page (AG rifles through book, but frustrated, is not able to find it)
to be continued (tomorrow)